Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today to speak on Bill C-28 which is described as an omnibus bill dealing with certain technical amendments covering a wide variety of acts relating to income tax.
Most of the amendments are housekeeping and we will not be focusing our remarks on them. We intend to confine our remarks to the significant reductions in the Canada health and social transfer that we have seen over recent years.
An earlier speaker noted that the bill is very technical and wondered how many people had read it and who had picked up a copy. I think it is fair to say that none of the members currently sitting in the Liberal benches have looked at the bill. I might also say that a member might need two hands to pick up the bill because it runs to over 400 pages. We believe it is absolutely ridiculous that parliament or Canadians should be expected to deal with such a complex bill which uses language that even highly paid tax experts would have difficulty deciphering.
We believe that Bill C-28 is anti-democratic in its format, its language and its content. It is wrong for a government to present legislation steeped in such isolated language and expect Canadians to be informed or to have any idea of what their government is doing.
There is a story making the rounds that a justice department official was removed from the working committee on Bill C-28 because he raised concerns about introducing such complex legislation. He was most upset with the complexity and the incredible volume of amendments contained therein.
It is fair to say that one would need to be a highly paid tax lawyer to even begin to tackle Bill C-28 in its present format. Needless to say, the lawyer's protests were not well received by the finance department and he was removed from working on this particular file.
To turn to the CHST, we noted with some interest that Tom Kent, who was recognized as the godfather of Liberal social policy in the 1960s and 1970s, delivered a lump of coal to the government on December 24 last when he lashed out at the cutbacks that the government imposed on our medicare system in particular.
There are other aspects of the CHST that I will get into in a moment.
Writing for the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, Mr. Kent accused the government of putting the 30 year old social program at a critical crossroads by simply neglecting to fund it properly. He wrote “Medicare has been sustained by the public will”, and “For this medicare, we owe no thanks to the present generation of federal politicians. It survives despite them”. Note the words, “It survives despite them. Though they pose, because of its popularity, as the defenders of medicare, in fact, they have destroyed the financial basis on which their predecessors created it”. That is where we are coming from on this.
There has been a lot of talk this morning from folks to my right, literally and figuratively, about the financial debt and deficit that we face. There is also a social deficit in this country. It is not only health care which is at risk, we have not made much progress in the fight against poverty.
I am referring to another article from the Caledon Institute of Social Policy that was issued in February 1998. The writer notes that the progress against poverty that Canada managed to achieve in the 1960s, the period that Tom Kent talked about, and in the early 1970s has stalled over the last 20 years. Poverty has increased since then. It was at 17.9% in 1996 compared to 14.2% in 1975. That is an increase approaching 3%.
In the past Canada could count on economic growth and healthy labour markets to fight poverty. Rising real gross domestic production reduced the number and percentage of people with low incomes while the faltering economy had the opposite effect.
Poverty is a result not only of the changing labour market which we have witnessed over the past couple of decades in this country. It is also linked to household structure and demographics. Gender is a critical demographic factor in the poverty story of this country.
Women typically have higher poverty rates than men and families led by women are more likely to be poor than those headed by men. The persisting inequality between the sexes is due basically to women's unpaid social and economic roles as homemakers and caregivers to children and aging parents. It is a major factor that women have lower incomes and risk higher poverty.
In addition to gender, marital status is a key factor. Single parent families, most of which are led by women, face a high risk of poverty.
Governments traditionally have played a major role in combating poverty in this country. Income security programs, also known as transfer payments, have supplemented or reduced employment earnings. Major programs such as old age security, the guaranteed income supplement, the spousal allowance and the Canada and Quebec pension plans have been crucial sources of retirement income for most Canadians.
Employment insurance and workers' compensation replace employment earnings lost due to unemployment, illness and accident. We know as well what has happened there. I think especially about employment insurance and the fact that prior to the changes 85% to 95% of people who applied for unemployment insurance, as it was previously known, received benefits. Today those figures hover around 40%. That is the reason there is a growing gap in this country between the very rich and the people at the bottom 20%.
Child poverty as well remains a grave problem in this country, as has been noted by our party in particular. One in five children now live in low income families. Just under 1.5 million children, or 21.1% of all children who live in what members opposite often refer to as the greatest country in the world, are living in poverty. That risk of course goes up if they are in a single parent family, especially one led by a woman.
Still other demographic factors are linked to poverty. Aboriginal Canadians are significantly more likely to be poor than the rest of the population. Canadians with disabilities, as other speakers noted earlier today, are another group at risk of poverty.
The Canada health and social transfer that replaced the Canada assistance plan in 1996 has retained only the non-resident requirement of the Canada Health Act, and the loss of the in-need criteria under CAP has opened the door to a very different welfare system today than the one we have known over the past couple of years.
In conclusion, this caucus is opposed to Bill C-28. We reject the Canada health and social transfer which has resulted in steep reductions in funding to health and education. There has been a 40% reduction in funding to post-secondary. We are advised that when the millennium fund kicks in in the year 2000 this government will be spending a full $3 billion per year less on post-secondary education.
The provinces are struggling to provide social services. They too have seen their budget allocations slashed from $18.7 billion in 1993-94, the last year of CAP, to the projection of just under $12.5 billion in 1998-99, the current fiscal year that we are debating. Therefore, this caucus will be opposing Bill C-28.