Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your kindness and understanding. As I was saying, this is not the first time a budget contains figures that are cautious and fail to reflect the reality of changes in public finances.
Barely a few months ago, I was in Vancouver with the Minister of Finance, who was giving us information on the economy and the financial situation. It was then he announced the good news that the 1996-97 deficit for fiscal year ending March 31, 1997 would be somewhere around $8.9 billion.
Six months earlier, we were telling him in this House that the deficit would be below $10 billion. He said the members of the Bloc Quebecois, the opposition, was bandying figures about. Six months later, he said the forecast was out by 63%. If he were working for a firm of economic consultants, he would be out on the street now for having made an error of 63% in six months.
I was rather disappointed to see the Minister of Finance hiding things. Over the next three years, he says, the budget surplus will be zero, zero, zero. Do you know what the real figures are? I will give them out.
We have become forecasting specialists. We decided that, if, in the past four years, the Minister of Finance has been incapable of putting the right figures in the budget, we would tell him the right ones. He says there will be no surplus in 1998-99 and marked a zero on page 12 of his budget plan. The real surplus amounts to at least $7 billion and starts this budget year.
For 1999-2000 the figure given is 0.0. That is tantamount to laughing in people's faces. It is an affront to the public, which expects the right information from their elected representatives. A surplus of $14 billion is what we expect, and he writes zero in the budget.
I went further, up to 2000-01. I say there will be a surplus of at least $19 billion. He does not want to go that far in his forecasts. I can understand that. If I were out by 63% over six months, I would not even make a two week prediction.
On the millennium fund, I said earlier that, in his budget plan of 1995, the Minister of Finance was sly, rather sneaky. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but as far as I am concerned, it can also be a fault. In this case, it is a major failing.
In 1995, he said there would be a plan for budget cuts in order to fund social assistance given out by the provinces to the most disadvantaged, university education—under provincial jurisdiction—and health.
He said “I am going to cut and cut, until 2003, in order to attain my objective of a balanced budget” and so on. Cut so much that, if all of the cuts until 2003 are added together, the Minister of Finance will have cut $42 billion, a good part of that $42 billion in university education. Another $30 billion is to be cut before 2003, and the minister announced nothing about this yesterday.
Oh, he did announce one thing: the cuts initially forecast at $48 billion will be reduced to $42 billion, and he would have to be applauded for continuing to cut at the $30 billion level until 2003. Now he is telling us “I have put our fiscal house in order”, and he gloats over it. He toots his own horn. We will be coming back to that later.
He toots his own horn, and then he says “Now that I have this surplus, I am announcing that I am going to put $2.5 billion into education”. He cuts education, health and social assistance to the tune of $42 billion and now he is telling us: “We are going to put $2.5 billion into education. Look, we have some extraordinary initiatives in the area of education”. The provinces meanwhile continue to cut. But it is he who is cutting.
The public must know this. And as for getting into an area of jurisdiction as exclusive as education, so what if this has been a prerogative jealously guarded for the past 50 years by any and all Quebec premiers, whether federalist or sovereignist. Quebec will never accept the federal government's encroachment on this sector.
The Prime Minister said: “We are not getting into education, we are simply helping students with debts”. First of all, it is they who caused those debts by making savage cuts in recent years and, second, the Minister of Finance pronounced the word “education” in connection with the millennium fund no less than 12 times during his budget speech. That is a rather serious problem.
On top of that, they claim that they have an interest in student debt loads. Give me a break. What the government is really interested in is its visibility. In the scrum yesterday, the Minister of Human Resources Development made no bones about it. He said in English—he did not dare repeat it in French, because I think he realized he had made a blunder—that this was the best way of increasing the federal government's visibility.
So much for the federal government's wonderful philosophy of student assistance: relieve them of their money by annually reducing the amounts available for university education, a job foisted off on the provincial governments, and then turn up to put a partial band-aid on the wound they themselves inflicted by interfering in an area reserved for the provinces. This move may well provoke an unprecedented confrontation between the federal government and the Government of Quebec.
The federal government, through its finance minister, also kept us from seeing the real extent of its leeway. Why? Because, in his wisdom, in his concern for his image, in his desire to make a dramatic gesture as well and to break records never before broken in the history of Canadian taxation, the Minister of Finance decided that what he valued most was not a balanced budget, not visionary policies, not improved conditions for the most disadvantaged in society, not the elimination of child poverty.
Furthermore, in this regard, the forecast increases in the child tax benefit have been put off for two years. That is the priority they give to the fight against poverty. That is not what motivates this government. That is not what motivates the Minister of Finance. Nor is he motivated by the fate of the unemployed. Once again, by not using the government's overall gains to create an independent EI fund, he has just given us the message that, in the years ahead, all surpluses from employers' and employees' premiums will go into his pocket.
So he is not interested in helping unemployed workers either. Since January 1997, the benefits available for those unfortunate enough to lose their jobs have steadily decreased. They now receive almost half of their most recent wages.
They are thus denied EI by restrictive measures. The unemployed and what becomes of them are not what motivates the government.
Furthermore, this was the unanimous view of analysts, people from the private sector, and representatives of the business community. Yesterday, I listened to the executive director of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, who had this to say: “This budget did not contain any significant measure and no strategic plan for creating employment in any consistent and lasting way”. That was what Mr. Cléroux had to say outside the House.
So, jobs and unemployment are not what concern the Minister of Finance. What concerns him is going down in history as the one who not only put the country's fiscal house in order but who broke the record for surpluses. His concern is making it into the Guinness Book of Records. That is what is on his mind.
The proof lies in the fact that he is not letting us in on the real surpluses. The proof is that, if the present trend continues, if the federal government continues with its initiatives and continues to aim at very conservative economic growth—we have done the math—the surplus will perhaps top $30 billion by 2003.
This is not a sign of good public management. It is a sign that somewhere people are paying too much in taxes and the Minister of Finance could care less. People are paying too much in taxes, while the Minister of Finance is breaking surplus records and calling himself a good manager. He calls himself a great manager.
Surpluses that go up year after year—the Minister of Finance is so ashamed that he does not even give the figures in his budget; he puts zeros everywhere—point to bad management. This is someone who is more interested in popularity, because of some agenda, perhaps that of becoming the next prime minister, you never know, but it is not necessarily someone interested in efficiency and the general well-being of the public. If he were, he would have tried to achieve a balance.
A reserve of $2 to $3 billion is fine, but we would not accumulate large surpluses, which are a sign that the tax burden of average taxpayers, which is not significantly reduced in this budget, is too high, that people are paying too much in taxes, and that other people are also contributing too much as well. I am thinking of the unemployed, those on welfare, the ill, and students, who are still suffering from the cuts in the 1995 budget.
What I found yesterday in the budget is that the Minister of Finance was in far less of a hurry to remedy misery and to lighten the burden of taxpayers who have been crushed by $30 billion in additional taxes of all kinds he himself has imposed over the past four years, and also by the non-indexation of tax tables.
He was in far less of a hurry to help the sick, to help students, except with one program aimed solely at raising the federal profile, at getting that maple leaf out in a prominent place. The Minister of Finance was much more interested in drafting custom-made bills serving the interests of his foreign shipping holdings than in looking after the general well-being of the people of Quebec and Canada and in being a good manager.
People will understand that, while this Minister of Finance has not made significant reductions in their tax burden, he is continuing to take money from the most disadvantaged and to make it more difficult for the provinces, particularly Quebec, to balance their budgets. The people sitting down to do their federal tax returns are well aware that while the minister is taking money from their pockets, he is also getting bills passed that are tailor-made to save him tax money in the coming years. They know he is in apparent conflict of interest, that this government is refusing to cast any light on that apparent conflict of interest, and that the integrity of the Minister of Finance is open to question.
That is hard to take. We have sounded people out. All of my Bloc Quebecois colleagues have asked the people in their ridings what they think of this budget, and of this nebulous business.
I can tell you that people remember Bill C-28. People want an accounting because they see that the Minister of Finance is not only unconcerned about their welfare, but appears concerned only about his own and that of his buddies.
I would like to table an amendment to the amendment to the budget proposed by the Reform Party. I move:
That the amendment be amended by striking all words following the words “Minister of Finance” and replacing them with the following:
“because he has, by creating the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, broken his promise to respect provincial jurisdiction over education, he has provided nothing to stimulate job creation, he has not provided for adequate income-tax reductions for middle-class families, he has continued to appropriate the huge employment insurance fund surplus, he has obstinately refused to table anti-deficit legislation and he has not returned to the provinces the money he cut from their transfer payments, while pursuing his planned cuts up to the year 2003.”
I table this subamendment in this House and thank you for your attention in the hope that taxpayers will now know they have to keep an eye on him.