Precisely. This is unacceptable. This is an outrageous approach. The public expects some openness on the part of the Minister of Finance, who should present the true figures, the true situation, the true expenditures for this year, for next year and for three years down the road. The minister should not include in the 1998 budget expenditures that the government will only make in the year 2000, and make it look as if the money was going to be spent this year. These figures make no sense.
People are tired of the government's treating them like idiots who cannot understand balanced budgets and realistic estimates, as opposed to unrealistic, cooked up estimates such as those presented by the Minister of Finance.
Just six months after the Bloc Quebecois presented its deficit forecast for the year ending in April 1997, we anticipated the deficit would be approximately $10 million. With the meagre means available to us as an opposition party, we were nonetheless able take a pencil and paper—we also used a computer, which helped—to forecast what the deficit would be for the next six months. We also looked at the deficit forecasts for the previous year.
We asked the Minister of Finance whether it was true that, far from reaching about $19 billion or $20 billion, as mentioned in the last budget, the deficit for 1997-98 would actually be approximately $10 billion. The minister stood up angrily and almost threw his budget papers at us as he replied that this was nonsense and that we were just throwing out figures.
Six months later, in Vancouver, he confirmed that our figures were right. Six months later, he admitted his forecast was off by 63%.
If we were able to make calculations with a pencil and a computer, it seems to me that, with the help of the hundreds of officials and experts at Finance Canada and Revenue Canada, he could have come up with figures that more accurately matched reality, but he never did. From the very first budget the minister brought down in 1994, we have been presented with nothing but hogwash, making it impossible to see where we are at.
Now the Minister of Finance is making himself look good because all that matters to him, the champion of surpluses, of jack-in-the-box budget surpluses, is the Guinness Book of Records . But that is not what the people want. What they want is honesty and openness from their Minister of Finance. They want to be given the straight goods, not the sort of nonsense we are being dished up, especially in the last budget.
In 1996, the Minister of Finance pulled the same trick he is pulling now with the millennium fund. He included in the 1996 budget the $1 billion in compensation unfairly paid to the maritimes, when this compensation should have appeared after the maritime provinces harmonized their PST and GST, in other words this year, in 1998. He put down $1 billion under fiscal 1996-97, two years in advance, when the actual expenditure came two years later.
What he is doing is not right, and he should look out, because we are getting a little tired of the way he presents things and takes us for something we are not.
The Minister of Finance should look out, because of these examples and because of many others it would take too long to go into here. For instance, why does the finance minister not create an independent EI fund? The answer is that he likes to hide the truth. He knows that he can easily help himself to $6 billion annually from the EI fund. This does not show up anywhere because there is no specific entry showing that the Minister of Finance is going to help himself to $6 billion from the EI fund. He puts it under general revenue. The Minister of Finance's refusal to create an independent fund strengthens our feeling that he has things to hide, that he is not telling us the truth.
The Minister of Finance is really starting to get on our nerves. We began to doubt his integrity, especially when he introduced Bill C-28, which is 464 pages long and which contains two paragraphs on his international shipping companies, and did so without warning, on the sly. When the opposition discovered these two paragraphs, which could mean tax benefits for him, he turned to his ethics counsellor, Howard Wilson, who is paid by the Prime Minister's office to save his neck.
People will realize one day, and I hope they will come to understand it from our arguments, that they have been had, that the Minister of Finance is playing tricks on them, that he did not tell them the truth, that he presented incorrect figures and that he asked them, in recent years, to make unprecedented sacrifices in terms of the excess taxes they have paid. Thirty billion dollars in four years ain't peanuts. He also asked them to make unwarranted sacrifices in the area of social assistance.
He asked the provinces, in particular, and the poor as well, to make unwarranted sacrifices. He also asked students to make extraordinary sacrifices and he is now asking the sick to make extraordinary sacrifices.
Injecting $1.5 billion a year over the next three years is not going to change anything. People have to know that, in addition to cooking the figures, the Minister of Finance is cooking the facts.
In 1995, he brought down a budget that had a domino effect. He announced once in it—he did not dare say it a second time, because he was ashamed—that the social transfers to the provinces to help fund social assistance, higher education and health would be cut annually.
Instead of cancelling the cuts, he announces millennium scholarships for some students, in the amount of $2.5 billion but only starting in the year 2000, as well as $1.5 billion more for the health care system for the next three years. Although the Minister of Finance does not put it that way—the way it is presented is very hypocritical—he is cutting $6 billion per year until the year 2003 from transfers to the provinces. There are $30 billion in cuts still to come.
On the government side, they are bursting with pride over this. Either out of ignorance or ill will, I do not know which, they are telling us “The government has heeded the people's cry of alarm, and will put $1.5 billion per year into health”. My foot they will! They will cut $6 billion per year from health and social programs. That is the reality. They will take $30 billion dollars away from it between now and the year 2003. That figure is a very long way from the $1.5 billion they are putting back into health. They have just made $30 billion in cuts, mostly from health.
The bottom line, then, is that in his 1995 plan the Minister of Finance forecast cuts of $48 billion in health, transfer payments to the provinces to fund health care, higher education and welfare. Now, he is all proud to announce that he will not be cutting $48 billion, but only $42 billion. There is nothing in this government's measures, or the implementation of part of what was forecast in the latest budget via Bill C-36, to be proud of.
This budget—and my hon. colleagues will have the opportunity to return to this point—contains other unacceptable measures which do not reflect what people wanted. For the most part, it contains some general measures which will not provide all those who have done the Minister of Finance's work for him, in other words getting public finances back on an even keel, with any reward for all their efforts over the past four years to achieve that result.
The very day of the budget speech, the public's reaction of those really responsible was obvious. People were angry with the Minister of Finance. They felt it was ungrateful of him to make them do the work and then to boast about his wonderful accomplishments over the past four years. Those who are really responsible, and who received nothing in return, will not forget this.
When the Minister of Finance asks them to co-operate on federal-provincial programs, I doubt he will be successful, and I am not only referring to Quebec—because our province will not forget the millennium scholarship fund—but to the other provinces as well. When Mr. Romanow said he was speaking on behalf of the other premiers in Canada and felt like going after the Minister of Finance to get what he is owed, his statement may have signalled the beginning of more strained relations between the federal and provincial governments.
It seems to me the Minister of Finance had always told the provinces, directly or indirectly, that some day, when our fiscal house was in better shape, he would compensate them for some of the sacrifices they had made. That time has now come, with the last budget and with the next three years.
The Minister of Finance never had a kind word for his provincial counterparts and for all those poor people who had to put up with his savage and drastic cuts. The minister will pay for this.
His integrity will also take a beating, because he has been hiding the real budget figures for the past four years. The result of hiding the real figures, of fixing them, of almost falsifying them—to the point where editorialist Alain Dubuc wrote in La Presse that the budget was almost misleading—is that the finance minister's integrity appears to be vulnerable. Moreover, the minister is sponsoring bills to benefit his own foreign shipping businesses in Liberia, Barbados, the Bahamas and elsewhere. That takes the cake, as far as I am concerned.
Throughout the second reading of this bill, we will point out certain aspects of Bill C-36 relating to the budget, including those that I just mentioned. We are going to repeat them over and over again, and that is not all. Outside the House, we are going to launch a real public information campaign so that people know what sort of government, what sort of finance minister, they are up against, who is really responsible for the problems in the health sector. The guilty party is not Mr. Rochon in Quebec City, but the Minister of Finance here in the House of Commons in Ottawa. These are things we are going to say and keep on saying.
We have not done with the business of the finance minister's ships. If members opposite think we are going to work ourselves into a state over Bill C-28 and the finance minister's apparent conflict of interest while they look all innocent, they are mistaken. We are not about to give up. At the least, the minister appears to be in conflict of interest. He could be in total conflict of interest. I am convinced that he made a mistake in introducing this bill and that he made a mistake in approving a bill that will favour his offshore shipping holding company and shelter it completely from Revenue Canada's reach.
That having been said, I turn the floor over to my other colleagues. They will examine other very important aspects of the finance minister's last budget as they relate to Bill C-36.