Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to stand in this House at any time but I am particularly pleased today to participate in the debate on Bill C-36, the budget implementation act.
In his budget speech last month the finance minister congratulated himself and the government for balancing the budget after almost 30 years. Bill C-36 which is before us today puts in place the mechanisms to carry out certain provisions outlined in that budget.
My adopted province is Saskatchewan. Our party, which is now the New Democratic Party and before that the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party, has been in government for most of the last 45 years in the province of Saskatchewan. We have had some financial messes to clean up.
Of our previous premiers, I think of Tommy Douglas who inherited an atrocious mess from the provincial Liberals back in 1944. As premier of the CCF and later the NDP government of the province he proceeded to balance the books for a full 20 years.
In the 1970s the NDP government under Allan Blakeney, for whom I had the privilege to work for a time, guided the province of Saskatchewan for 11 years. In every one of those years the Blakeney government delivered at least a balanced budget and in many of those years modest surpluses.
The Conservatives came to power in 1982. They virtually bankrupted the province of Saskatchewan. They managed to run up huge deficits, basically $1 billion each and every year for the nine years. It was clearly the worst government in the history of the province of Saskatchewan. It probably can be fairly said it was the worst provincial or territorial government in the history of Canada.
The Devine government was succeeded in 1991 by the Romanow administration which inherited this enormous mess. Over the past seven years in the best traditions of social democratic fashion, the Romanow government has gone back to work and the results have been stunning. The Saskatchewan budget for 1998-99 was tabled last week. For the fifth year in a row the Saskatchewan budget is balanced.
The point I am trying to make is that there are great differences in how Saskatchewan and Ottawa have achieved the goal of balanced budgets.
This year Saskatchewan was again able to balance its books as I have said, but at the same time it has increased spending on health care, education and on getting more children out of poverty. There is more money for agriculture and highways. The provincial budget also includes increased investment in jobs and economic growth. This is after totally eliminating the deficit. Saskatchewan continues to pay down the debt inherited from the Devine administration by an additional $500 million in this fiscal year.
As I said yesterday when we were debating Bill C-28, it is backfilling every dime the federal government has taken out of medicare as a result of slashing transfer payments to the provinces in 1995 and the years thereafter. To preserve and protect this country's health care system particularly in the province of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan has put back in every dollar that the federal government has taken out.
This is a stunning achievement. As Saskatchewan finance minister Eric Cline indicated last week, the credit belongs to the people of that province. As the minister said, those people are now seeing the benefits which flow from the sacrifices they had to endure in the past several years.
The Saskatchewan budget is one thing. The federal Liberal budget is quite another. In my humble opinion it is a cynical budget, a testament to the black art of accounting.
The finance department always hires slick, highly paid media professionals to put a positive spin on the budgets. In 1995 the government did its polling. There were focus groups in advance of the tabling of the budget and it was found that Canadians would stomach no more tax increases. Therefore the finance department packaged a budget that contained few new tax increases.
All the television news programs began that budget evening with the Peter Mansbridges and the Lloyd Robertsons saying “Budget '95, no new taxes”. Of course that was not the case. What the 1995 federal budget did contain was an unprecedented attack on health, education and social programs, on unemployment insurance and billions of dollars in cutbacks in transfers to the provinces as I indicated a moment ago.
Those same or similar spin doctors are at work once again. This time they are patting themselves on the back by saying that they balanced the budget. Don't worry, be happy. Happy days are here again.
The Minister of Finance in the federal Chamber has to hope that Canadians have short memories about these billions of dollars that have been slashed from spending on education, health care, unemployment insurance and agriculture.
The minister now announces that he will not proceed with further cuts scheduled for this year on health care for example and then he portrays this somehow as new spending and new money. Having mugged Canadians for five years, he now gives them 35 cents and urges them to go and purchase some coffee.
Let us look for a moment at what is missing from the budget, and therefore from Bill C-36. There is nothing to put right the damage done by the minister's earlier budgets to medicare. Not so very long ago, we heard on the news that Edmonton hospitals were having to send patients to Saskatoon because no beds were available. This is what the Liberals have done for health care.
What else is missing from this budget, and therefore from Bill C-36? There is no new investment in jobs for young people, no objectives for reducing overall unemployment, no objectives for reducing child poverty, no drug plan, no home care. The government may not have a deficit in 1998, but ordinary Canadians do.
We have a social deficit. Who is paying for this deficit? It is children living in poverty, the unemployed, students abandoning their studies because they are too deep in debt.
Take the case of the really nice young man who worked in our office recently. After finishing two years of university, he had to quit because he owed too much money. The minister announces that Canada no longer has a deficit, but things are very different for this young man.
What else is not in the budget? The budget speech was entirely silent on agriculture. The minister spoke in this House for almost 90 minutes and the word agriculture never passed his lips.
Furthermore, in a 275 page document which was tabled relating to the budget there were a mere 16 lines about rural Canada. Most of that space was devoted to reminding us that the minister provided additional money to the Farm Credit Corporation last year.
The only current spending mentioned for agriculture is $20 million spread over five years and throughout several government departments.
Federal government spending in support of agriculture and the agri-food sector has declined drastically throughout this decade. Spending has tumbled from $6 billion in 1991 to less than $2 billion in 1997. This year's budget confirms even further cuts.
We submit that the Liberals are dismantling rural Canada piece by piece. They are closing post offices and allowing the railways to double freight rates on grain and tear up branchlines. They have totally forgotten rural Canadians.
One might well ask where the agriculture minister is in all of this. Where is the Minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board or the Minister of Transport? What are they doing to represent the interests of rural Canadians at the cabinet table? The answer clearly is not much.
Farmers and other rural dwellers have sacrificed enormously in the fight against the federal deficit. The finance minister now says that the battle has been won, but these same people could be well forgiven for asking if we are any better off than we were when the Liberals were re-elected five years ago.
I want to turn to post-secondary education and the millennium fund.
I said that this is a cynical budget and nowhere is that more clear than in its centrepiece, the millennium fund which has been much touted by Liberal members opposite. Part I of Bill C-36 deals with the fund's foundation and its board of directors. This scholarship fund is a clear example of the budget being used as a tool of ideology, as the speaker before me so well indicated and documented. The Liberals have used the fight against the deficit as an excuse to pursue privatization throughout the economy. Now they will use new spending to privatize education.
Here is how it will work. In 1995 and the years following, the federal government withheld billions of dollars in transfers to the provinces for education. Universities and technical institutes have been starved for funds. Their roofs leak and buildings threaten to collapse onto students. The universities were desperate for money and raised tuition fees to the point where university graduates with a debt of only $25,000 should consider themselves fortunate. After years of starving students the finance minister has announced this wonderful new scholarship fund which he says will be worth $2.5 billion.
Let us deconstruct this for a moment. The millennium fund is announced with great fanfare in February 1998, although it does not actually begin until the year 2000. Coincidentally, that will be when the Liberals begin their run-up for the next federal election, but I digress. Tens of thousands of students will face another $10,000 of debt each before the scholarship fund ever kicks in. All the analyses indicate that at best the fund will help only about 7%, perhaps less, of Canada's post-secondary students.
The minister tells us that this fund will be established by a private foundation, and Bill C-36 provides for its establishment. This foundation will determine which students are worthy of receiving these scholarships. The foundation then has an amazing amount of power to decide who is and who is not worthy of receiving a scholarship. Indirectly the foundation's board, appointed by this government, will have great power to decide which educational programs are worthy of support. Is there any chance, for example, that the foundation will reward those students enrolling in university courses which focus on programs that business has been demanding all along?
As I have said before, we believe that this is the Liberal's first step in privatizing education, just as they have privatized so many other things. Having starved our public system of education, they now establish a fund for those individuals whom someone else will decide are worthy enough to attend.
What about those who do not qualify for millennium fund scholarships? As of this budget their parents are told that they can cash in their RRSPs to help pay for their children's tuition fees.
People in Canada are more insecure than ever. Study after study shows that real wages and family incomes have been static or declining for years. People are selling the family silver or, in this case, the family RRSPs to help pay for the education of their daughters and sons.
This is the brave new world of the Liberals. The deficit and now the surplus is being used to support a growing gap between those who are wealthy in our society and those who are poor or of modest means. This growing inequality is continuing and I would like to elaborate on it by quoting a prominent citizen.
What kind of society do we have, when we see these gigantic salaries up there and these huge amounts of poverty down here? I think that we are reaching the point of absurdity, in terms of inequalities. There is third world poverty in this country. It is beyond belief.
Any guesses as to who might have said this? Would it have been the leader of our party, the member of Parliament for Halifax, or perhaps the head of the National Anti-Poverty Organization? The answer is no. This is a quote from the federal Minister of Finance in an interview with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen . Did he really mean it? What was he up to? Perhaps he was casting himself for a part as a left Liberal, but he quickly decided that he did not want to be in that play after all. It has been reported in the news media that finance department officials told their minister not to make that kind of statement again. He certainly has not.
Surely the Minister of Finance knows, however, that the chief executive officers of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank have take-home pay in excess of $10 million a year when stock options are considered. This is hundreds, even thousands of times what the average bank employee earns. Matthew Barrett might make an argument for a salary which is 10 to 20 times higher than that of a bank teller, but it is simply unjust for him to take $10 million a year. I very much like the suggestion made recently by the United Church of Canada that we do not only need a minimum wage in this country, we need a maximum wage as well.
In the meantime, these millionaire CEOs want their banks to merge even though Canada already has the most concentrated banking sector in the G-7 group of countries. Even the CEOs admit that the merger would result in the shredding of 10% of their workforce which amounts to about 10,000 people. We believe that the job loss would be much higher than that, probably in the magnitude of 25% of the staff or more than 20,000 jobs in the banking industry overall. The NDP is going to fight this merger every step of the way. I believe that we will be the only party to do that.
What is the finance minister's answer to this proposed merger and to the massive job losses that would occur? We are waiting for it. He has certainly looked uncomfortable when attempting to answer questions in question period on the topic.
The minister and the Liberals remain the champions of big business. We see this in spades in their unqualified support for the MAI, which has been called a bill of rights for corporations and the NAFTA on steroids.
I listened with interest an hour or so ago when the member for Medicine Hat was talking about the number of Canadians who have to flee Canada or leave Canada. Perhaps flee is too strong a word, but they choose to leave Canada because there are greater opportunities elsewhere.
But there is another side to the story the member did not talk about, which deserves to be talked about, and that is the flight of capital from this country. Successful entrepreneurs are making the decision that, having earned large sums of money here, they will now take their business and move it offshore where they can avoid paying taxes of any kind, or very modest taxes.
I guess for me there is no greater example of that than the New Brunswick multi-billionaire, Mr. K.C. Irving, who left a will a few years ago for his sons, turning over all of the assets of his very successful business to the children on the condition that they could not live in Canada. In other words, they had to go to a tax haven offshore, the Cayman Islands or perhaps the Bahamas, where they would pay no taxes.
Those are the kinds of things that all freely elected governments will have to deal with in the years to come. I would suggest that it is far more important that countries like those in the OECD deal with these kinds of issues rather than the multilateral agreement on investment.
For too long the Conservative, Reform and Liberal parties have had it their way. They have convinced many people that there was no alternative to the attacks on our communities, our public institutions and our families. I submit that is changing. I think, for example, of the broadly based coalition working for fair trade and against the MAI. I think of our party's work in the alternative budget coalition with other social movements.
Together we believe we can provide economic alternatives that once again will put people first.