Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to the motion. The Reform Party believes very strongly it is time that Canada endorsed the social union put forward by the provinces and territories. We are urging the government to do exactly that.
I have listened to some of the pabulum coming from across the way. My colleague from Surrey asked a very straightforward question of the hon. member about the government's commitment to health care. When the Canada Health Act first came into place the federal government made a commitment to fund health care to the tune of 50%.
What did the government do? Now it funds it at 11%. She asked a very straight question of the member and we got back this pabulum about the government believes in fairness, that it wants to build up and not tear down. That does not mean anything. That is not a commitment. It is just rhetoric from the government.
Mr. Speaker, excuse me if I accuse the members of the government of being disingenuous with respect to the answers I have heard from them today regarding their commitment to signing and enacting the social union. We think it is extraordinarily important to do this. It is important for the well-being of Canadians who depend on these social programs, but it is just as important for the unity of the country.
Every time we raise specific questions we get empty answers. It is unbelievable that in the House of Commons when we are debating something that is incredibly important to Canadians, that is all we get from the government.
The member for Mississauga West said that the government believes in the social union. That is great. Then why does the government not sign it? This has been before governments for a long time. Many of these proposals have been before Liberal governments for a long, long time.
I think the answer is that the government does not want to give up its powers. It does not believe in national standards. It believes in federal standards. It believes in standards that it alone sets even though all these areas that we are talking about fall under provincial jurisdiction in the Constitution. The gentleman who just spoke said that we must respect the Constitution. The very fact that the federal government is using its spending power to intrude in areas of provincial jurisdiction shows that its commitment to the Constitution is at best tenuous.
The provinces and the official opposition recognize that the federal government can and should have a role to play in some of these services, but let us enter into them on a co-operative basis. Unfortunately, the government often is not prepared to do that.
We have a situation where the provinces and the territories, many of which are represented by Liberal premiers, are calling on the government to take this initiative seriously. The government has had a chance to regard it since August and it has still done absolutely nothing. We say that the real test of whether or not a government is committed to these things is not whether it says it believes in the principles of them in some debate, but it is whether it is prepared to sign onto them.
There was an election in Quebec yesterday. We know that people in Quebec do want Canada to work. They made that very clear in the way they voted yesterday. We know that the premier of Quebec has signed onto this social union. He wants to make this work.
My question is which party is it that is standing in the way of Canadian unity? It is the federal government that is standing in the way. The Prime Minister indicated before the election how much he was going to stand in the way of this by saying that we are not going to have the flexibility that is necessary to make Canada work as a confederation, as a co-operative movement, a movement that recognizes that not all the ideas have to come from the federal government. Some of them can come from provincial governments or from the private sector.
In Canada most of the time the good things that we do are done through co-operative means. Every day in the private sector people get together co-operatively and exchange goods and services, money and all kinds of things. They do it on a co-operative basis. It creates all kinds of good. It creates prosperity, wealth and a lot of good will.
We also know in this case that the provinces and the territories got together and said “We are going to work co-operatively. We are going to try to get together because this is in the best interests of all of our respective constituents”. That is what they did. They got together and brought forward this social union.
We recently saw securities regulators across the country get together and co-operatively work out a new system whereby they would establish standards that would apply across the country. I point out that the finance minister tried to do this awhile ago and completely and utterly failed. We know that a previous Conservative government tried to do the same thing and completely and utterly failed.
We now know that the securities regulators, driven by the interests of private individuals who need to have economic organization in order to make it easier to invest across the country, got together and said that they could do it co-operatively. In other words, they established national standards without being bound by federal standards.
That seems to be the whole problem here. We have a government that is so stubborn, which is really characterized by the Prime Minister, that it simply refuses to sign onto anything that it did not create even though it is operating in areas of provincial jurisdiction.
It is time for the government to set aside that pride, that vanity and to come to the realization that good ideas which benefit all Canadians do come from lower levels of government. That is exactly what we are talking about here.
I do not know anybody who thinks that the social union is a bad idea, except for the federal government. If it does not think it is a bad idea—and I know it will protest when I say that—then why does it not sign onto it? The government has had months and months to do it. There was the prospect of a Quebec election in front of it and the government still did nothing. In fact, in the face of it, it seemed as if the Prime Minister was trying to derail the whole thing.
Instead of suggesting that somehow this motion is not helpful when obviously it is and is bringing before the House of Commons one of the most important initiatives in the country today, why do members across the way not start thinking about ways to endorse it? Why not look for ways to get behind this instead of fighting it at every step? Unfortunately that is not the way the government operates.
One thing strikes me when we talk about issues like health care. The hon. member who spoke just a minute ago talked about how the government wants to build. That is very laudable and those are nice words. However, I want to review what has happened in the last five years in Canada with respect to health care. I think this really does put the lie to some of the words we have heard from across the way where the government was saying that it believed that we need to work together.
Health care is an area of provincial jurisdiction. Did the provinces have the benefit of being consulted by the federal government when the federal government decided to essentially eviscerate health care in Canada, when it cut $7 billion from health care, when it drove 188,000 people onto waiting lists in Canada? Is that the government's co-operative approach? I do not think so. That is not co-operative.
Here is an area of provincial jurisdiction and what did the government do? It marched in and said it was not going to cut the size of government or pare down its own departments. It was going to cut health care by 35%. I would argue that is much of the reason the provinces finally said they had to get together, irrespective of their own differences, to fight the federal government because it was standing in the way of giving Canadians proper health care.
The government goes ahead and guts health care because it thinks it is more important to find savings gutting health care than to gut for instance subsidies to big business.
Although the words we have heard from the other side sound very nice and warm, they are completely insincere. We do not buy it for a minute. We think the real test of the government's commitment to a social union is action, not more warm words, not more discussions.
We urge members across the way to join with the Reform Party and with other opposition parties today and to vote in favour of what is being proposed so that we can truly unite Canada.