Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the finance minister's fifth budget, but I am not too pleased with it.
First of all, I would like to congratulate the real architects of the battle against the deficit reduction, of the initiative to put public finances in order. I would like to congratulate Lucien Bouchard and his finance minister, Bernard Landry; Ontario finance minister Ernie Eves; New Brunswick finance minister Edmond Blanchard and the other finance ministers in the maritimes. I would like to congratulate Alberta finance minister Day Strockwell; Manitoba finance minister Eric Stefanson; British Columbia finance minister MacPhail and the finance minister of Saskatchewan too. Together, they had to withstand 52% of the spending cuts made by the Minister of Finance.
My congratulations to the unemployed, and to employers and employees. In the past three years, the Minister of Finance has taken between $6 billion and $7 billion from annual surpluses that belonged to them to put his fiscal house in order.
I would like to congratulate the taxpayers in Quebec and Canada because they too were instrumental in restoring the health of public finances.
During the four years he has been Minister of Finance and the Liberal government has run the country, the taxpayers of Quebec and Canada have been hit with $30 billion in new taxes by the Minister of Finance.
Therefore, the benefits to be found in this budget are few and far between. This is why the congratulations stop here.
The Minister of Finance definitely does not deserve to be congratulated for putting our fiscal house in order. Let us just make a quick calculation; it is easy to do with the successive budgets of the minister.
The minister's own efforts only account for 12% of the money, which really comes from the provinces, the employment insurance fund and the taxpayers' pockets. We have no congratulations for the minister, who said this morning that our fiscal house has been put in order, a zero deficit has been achieved, and a surplus now exists. The minister was right in using the impersonal form instead of “we”, because he is not the one who did all this.
I am also very disappointed by the way the minister is going about putting our fiscal house in order; he is keeping practically all the resulting dividends, even though he deserves no credit at all.
The minister is keeping over 50% of these dividends. What is he doing with that money? He is taking all sorts of initiatives, even in areas where he asked the provinces, the unemployed, the welfare recipients and the sick to make sacrifices. He is taking all sorts of initiatives for students, in the area of education.
After cutting $12 billion in social assistance, post-secondary education and health care, after having already cut billions in the past three years, not to mention that he is about to cut another $30 billion—as part of the budget cuts included in his 1995 budget—the Minister of Finance is taking all sorts of initiatives, such as the $2.5 billion millennium fund.
Before getting to the issue of provincial jurisdiction, let me say something about the somewhat secretive nature of the minister's initiatives.
As we know, the millennium scholarship fund will start giving out scholarships only in two years. However, in his budget, the Minister of Finance eliminated any sign of a real surplus for this year, by including the whole amount of $2.5 billion, even though he will start giving out that money to students only in five years.
This resulted in almost unanimous agreement—all analysts zeroed in on this ploy—that the Minister of Finance was overstepping the bounds, that he was not behaving in the most transparent manner in showing where public finances were headed, and that he was sometimes using somewhat dubious methods, such as concealing the real surplus for this year and for the next two years, by including in the 1998-99 budget an amount of $2.5 billion that will actually be spent two years from now.
This is not the first time the Minister of Finance has done this sort of thing. I cannot recall a single time in the first four budgets where the Minister of Finance gave us figures that made sense, that corresponded to the reality of public finances. It is very important in democracy to show things as they really are, and it is even more important to do so when it comes to putting one's fiscal house in order, even if we were not talking about the Minister of Finance, who is asking the most disadvantaged Quebeckers and Canadians in particular to make tremendous sacrifices. These people are entitled to transparency.