Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to speak to Bill C-36 and the Reform amendment. It was great to see the budget finally balanced. It is what Reformers have been calling for, for years.
We want to make it perfectly clear that we have reservations with respect to the budget. One of the first and most important is the provision of the millennium scholarship fund. We have been advocating for years that there needs to be greater funding for post-secondary education. We were advocating putting money back into the CHST during the 1993 election.
The big problem is that the auditor general has found the government to be distorting the financial statements to make itself look good in this House and elsewhere. The auditor general gave an interview in which he said “You cannot record something just because you announce the intention of doing something. There is a difference between an expenditure and a future commitment”.
We have in this country families who intend to have children, but an intention expressed does not mean they qualify for the child tax benefit. The day the government is willing to hand out a benefit based on an intention will be the day when it would be within its purview to announce an intention and have it show up in a budget as if it had been an expenditure. We just do not accept that at all.
We also find that while the budget is balanced it has been balanced by increasing expenditures. It is no secret that interest rates in Canada came down not as a result of government actions but as a result of a worldwide phenomenon. The government has certainly garnered the benefit from that. However, it is not as a result of its doings. The government's reductions in direct program spending amount to 5.3% and it has increased the amount it has taken from taxpayers by 71%. We are not giving the government any kudos for that.
We also find that the government is refusing to reindex to inflation the personal income tax system. It had an opportunity to do that in this budget, but it did not.
As well, Canada pension plan payments will be increasing year in and year out. From our research it appears that by the year 2000-2001 there will be roughly $9,000 more in net tax burden for Canadians. I do not think there is anybody in this House or anybody in this country who thinks they will be that much better off in 2000-2001 to be able to carry that extra tax load.
I would like to leave this House with a couple of word pictures because they say a picture is worth a thousand words.
During the cold war there was a policy called MAD. It was an acronym for mutually assured destruction. It was an assurance that no one would survive in the event of a nuclear war. Everybody would lose and nobody would win. I would like to propose a new meaning for that acronym, which is that Canada has the mother of all debt in this country at this time. Our debt is $576 billion. It has been said a lot of times in this House and it has been said a lot of times across Canada, but not everybody knows it yet, so it certainly is not lost on Canadians to say it one more time.
We feel that Canadians have not been completely apprised of the debt they have. I just spoke in a high school in my riding and unfortunately some of the young people there did not know it. When they heard how much it was and how much they personally are inheriting from previous as well as present governments they were not one bit happy. MAD describes their state of mind as well.
We are definitely opposed to the continuation of spending and taxing and the maintenance of a debt which we do not have to have in this country. There would have been a balance left over this year if it had not been spent. We would like to see that go back to the people.
Taking that nuclear bomb illustration a little further, what is the fallout from a debt bomb? We have the highest taxes in the G-7. Bracket creep erodes every person's income in this country. The danger of overspending is that there will be a slight rise in interest rates and all of a sudden we will be back into deficit spending. Nobody wants that, particularly the young people of this country.
We have high unemployment and low wages. Wages can only get lower as the cost of doing business goes up with the taxes that are locked in by this budget.
Canadians are mad. They wanted tax relief, they expected tax relief, but they did not get tax relief. They are upset that the debt will not decrease this year. They did not want a millennium fund to polish the Prime Minister's image. What they wanted was real tax relief.
This is another illustration from the cold war. There was a movie called “Dr. Strangelove”. I cannot quite recall its subtitle, but it went something along these lines: “How I overcame my fear and learned to love the bomb”.
We have a debt bomb in this country. We have a Prime Minister and a finance minister who have overcome their fear of the debt bomb. They have learned to love it. They want to pass it on to Canadians.
At the end of that movie the mad scientist, sitting astride his bomb, was having the ride of his life. I believe that is an accurate description of our government today. It is astride the debt bomb, it loves it and it wishes everyone could be aboard.
Canadians want off. They do not want to ride this to its obvious conclusion. At the end of the movie we did not see what happened to Dr. Strangelove, but we know what the end will be if we do not get our debt under control.
We do not want debt in this country. We do not want higher spending. We do not want taxes. What we want and what the Reform Party is calling for is responsible government. We oppose Bill C-36. I oppose it on behalf of my constituents.