Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech by my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance.
There were some things I found surprising. First he said: “My government accomplished this; my government accomplished that. We took priorities into account; we did a good job, and so forth”. He should perhaps quit reading the notes the Department of Finance gives him, just as he should perhaps quit taking his orders from the finance minister in committee.
He should perhaps actually take a look at the budget documents and do a little evaluation of what has gone on for the last four years and will continue to go on until 2003.
In 1995, his Minister of Finance introduced a plan of major cuts. Only once did he speak about it. Every year, another $6 billion is cut from social programs, university education and health care.
For the information of my colleague, who does not seem to be informed at all, or who tells us only half of what he knows, there are still $30 billion in cuts to be made by 2003, and they will be in those very sectors of university education, health and welfare.
If they are really concerned about education, as one of the keys to the future, the first thing the finance minister should have done, and did not do, was to give back what he cut in the university education sector. But no. They take this year's surplus, around $3 billion, put down $2.5 billion this year for the millennium fund scholarships, when these scholarships will not actually be given out for another two years, and the public is given to understand that they are concerned about student indebtedness.
All they are concerned about is their visibility as a federal government. During Oral Question Period, the Prime Minister made it clear. So did the Minister of Human Resources Development in the scrum.
The millennium fund, he said, was not about arguing, but about the future. How is it that the constitutional issue of Quebeckers' freedom of choice, a constitutional fact of Canadian life, has been referred to the supreme court, and our right to exercise this freedom under the Constitution is being questioned?
Does he think the Constitution need not be applied in the educational sector? They claim to be defending this Constitution and to be betrayed by our democratic right to choose our own future as Quebeckers. It is no big deal, but they refer it to the supreme court. That is my first question.
My second is as follows. Does he realize, on quick calculation, that, in the past four years, 52% of the cuts imposed by the Minister of Finance were absorbed by the provinces? They are the champions and the artisans of improved public finances. The taxpayers' contribution was 47%, through taxes, through the non indexing of tax tables, through the Minister of Finance's systematic robbery of the surplus in the unemployment insurance fund of between $6 billion and $7 billion a year.
In the end, his Minister of Finance, the good manager, cut 11% from federal government operations. Some manager. He should stop parroting the words and political lines of his minister and take his duty as a member of Parliament to heart.