Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again and debate the issue of the prebudget report of the Standing Committee on Finance.
Yesterday I stood and delivered a speech which I thought was my response to this issue but as it turned out, it was not. Nevertheless I am happy to be here again today to address some of the issues that my friend has raised and which are contained in the report.
The first point I want to make is the same one I made yesterday. The basis of the entire report is a faulty one. It is so glaring a contradiction it is almost surprising that my friend across the way and other Liberal members of parliament are able to stand in this place and make a spirited case for what they believe in. It is that bold.
The essence of the contradiction is that on the one hand the government is calling for a $46 billion in tax relief, which of course is laudable and the Reform Party completely and unequivocally supports that. In fact we have championed tax relief for 12 years, ever since we came into being. I am proud of that fact and I would like to think we have helped influence the government to start to think about these things. The contradiction is that on the one hand the government calls for tax relief of that scale, and on the other hand it says it will maintain its 50:50 spending promise, which means that 50% of any future surplus would go to new program spending.
The government cannot have it both ways. It cannot have its cake and eat it too. Government members cannot speak out of both sides of their mouths, but that is what they are trying valiantly to do. We cannot let them get away with that. It is double-talk. That is all there is to it. It is just an attempt to win over all the various constituencies at once, even though they are recommending things that are completely contradictory. They cannot get away with that.
This is a pattern from the government. We have seen it over and over again. I would categorize it as Liberal rhetoric versus the Liberal record. We see completely different things when we compare the record to the rhetoric. The Liberals speak on one level that is completely disconnected from the reality the rest of the country has to live with. It is as though they are in court somewhere completely cut off from the rest of the population. I would suggest that is exactly the case. I think it was reflected in the statement the member for Vaughan—King—Aurora just delivered in the House.
I want to run through the Liberal record to underline what I have just said. When we run through the bare facts, people will see very clearly that what my friend has just delivered here in the House was a lot of rhetoric. He can say all he wants about how he feels it is important to cut taxes, to be more productive as a country, to deal with the debt as an important issue and to re-allocate spending because we do not want to see money wasted on projects that are not important. He can say those things, but if he never does anything about them, they are empty words. They are hollow husks. I submit that is exactly the case here.
I want to run through some of the facts so that members in this place and people watching can draw their own conclusions.
My friend said that he wants to see tax relief and he has made an argument for that. I remind members that the government has been in power for six years, that we have had a balanced budget for two and a half years going on to three years now, but still we have had no tax relief. I know my friends across the way will say that we have had tax relief. It is simply not so. Here are the facts.
The OECD in its reports that came out in June and September said that Canada must cut taxes, that taxes in Canada are growing with every passing day. Three or four days before the finance minister delivered his fiscal and economic update in November, the economics branch of the Toronto Dominion Bank delivered a report. It showed that the federal government today takes more money out of people's pockets than any federal government has ever taken in the history of Canada. It showed an upward trend too. In fact that will be realized on January 1 when the government helps Canadians celebrate the new millennium with a tax hike.
We will see the Canada pension plan taxes go up on January 1. We will also see income taxes go up because of bracket creep. Canadians will be poorer. The federal coffers will be enriched. Unfortunately that is bad news for Canadians.
It puts the lie to what we have heard in this place, which is that the government is somehow committed to lowering taxes. It is completely the contrary. What we are seeing are taxes ever ramping upward. That is a shameful fact, but it is a fact.
In Canada today the average family spends more on taxes than it does on food, shelter and clothing. That is the Liberal record versus the Liberal rhetoric. It is a fact that in Canada today disposable income languishes. It has barely grown since the recession of the 1990s and it is barely above where it stood in 1980.
Canadians are paying a dear price for the high tax record of the government. When it says that it wants to cut taxes, we know by its actions that tax cutting is very low on its priority list.
I want to talk about the government's record on the debt. In Canada today we have a debt of $577 billion. That is a staggering amount of money, 64% of GDP, which is one of the highest levels of debt to GDP in the industrialized world, only behind Italy in the G-7.
We also point out that in Canada today the finance minister cuts a cheque for $40 billion a year to pay the interest on the debt. That $40 billion is by far the largest payment that the government makes of any kind. Old age security is about $23 billion or $24 billion a year. That is our most expensive social program. Of course, the transfers to the provinces for health care and education are much lower than that, certainly a lot lower after the government cut transfers dramatically. They are around $15 billion a year, much lower than what we pay in interest on the debt.
The impact of that is that Canadians have to pay a big chunk of their taxes toward the interest on the debt. One would think that if the government truly was concerned about helping Canadians and ensuring the long term fiscal stability of the country that it would have some kind of plan to pay down the debt. What is its plan?
The plan is that if there is any money left over after it has gone on its spending sprees, then it will pay down some debt. We have the situation now where, after having run on paper what should have been big surpluses, the government has paid down $3 billion one year and $3 billion another year toward the debt.
At that rate it will take approximately 190 years to deal with the problem of the debt. I do not think Canadians want to wait that long. I think they want to deal with this issue now.
The federal government should take a look at what happened in Alberta, where the government poured billions upon billions of dollars into beating down a huge debt, the result being that it has one of the healthiest economies in Canada and in North America. In Alberta we are seeing jobs created with every passing day. People are coming from across the country to enjoy the fruits of the Alberta advantage. It truly is a spectacular and amazing success story. My friends across the way should pay attention because they would learn a tremendous amount.
My friends mentioned health care in Alberta. I point out that even despite the big cuts of the federal government, which shut down hospitals across the country and forced people to recuperate in hallways, the Government of Alberta has actually raised its health care spending to record heights. Alberta has never spent more money on health care than it spends today. That is because of the dramatic improvement in the fiscal situation in the province of Alberta, due to the actions of the provincial government, not the actions of this government.
I want to talk about the spending record of the government. Today in Canada, and this may surprise some people, according to the national accounts, all levels of government are spending more money per person than has ever been spent before. That is a very important point to make because when we have the debate about what to do with the surplus that is coming our way, many people, including members of the Liberal government, say that we have to increase spending dramatically. The government has the 50:50 promise which, if enacted, and let us hope it does not keep this promise either, would mean $47 billion in new spending.
We saw the headlines in the National Post . Amazingly, that was the same number that the 50:50 formula would lead us to if it were ever enacted.
Forty-seven billion dollars in spending is a tremendous amount, but according to the national accounts for all levels of government, we have never spent more per person in Canada on program spending than we are spending today. I would argue that Canada does not need more spending because we have never spent more.
We know that relative to other countries in the world we spend a tremendous amount on programs of various kinds. I would argue that if we have a big surplus coming our way and we have a tremendous debt burden and extraordinarily high taxes, then it makes sense to devote that money to lowering our debt and our tax burden. To me that makes sense. I do not see why we would need to go beyond the record high levels of spending in which we are already engaging. Just because we are spending all that money does not mean we could not spend it a lot better.
When I look at how this government spends, one of the things that concerns me the most is its willingness to sacrifice necessary things to unnecessary things, or high priority things to low priority things.
Why does the government insist upon spending billions of dollars in grants and subsidies for its political friends, while farmers, for instance, in the prairies are left wanting? It makes no sense. Why do my friends across the way insist on spending billions of dollars on empire building for huge bureaucracies that do not deliver any kind of service to the public, but which burn up all that money, when those funds could be used for good things like health care, education and restoring funding to defence?
It is a shame that on the one hand the government stands at every opportunity to take a bow for the work of our peacekeeping troops around the world, while on the other hand it punishes them by putting them into perilous situations without proper equipment. That has to be the most hypocritical thing I have ever seen, but the government does it day after day.
It is profoundly wrong that the government cloaks itself in the proud heritage of the RCMP on the one hand, while on the other hand it deprives it of the basic tools it needs to do the job. We see more and more that investigations are being called off because of cost. There is not enough money to finish the investigations.
My colleague from Kootenay—Columbia is constantly pointing these things out in the House of Commons, but sadly the government does not get the message. It burns up billions of dollars in wasteful areas and at the same time deprives necessary programs of proper funding, which is fundamentally wrong.
As someone once said, those things that matter most should never be at the mercy of those things that matter least. We should engrave that over the doorways of the offices of many federal departments because sadly that happens all too often.
Here is more on Liberal rhetoric versus the Liberal record. I want to talk about productivity. My friend, the chair of the finance committee, gave an impassioned speech in this place about why we need to be more productive. He said that the government is doing all kinds of things. But consider this. If the government is so concerned about productivity, why did the finance minister in his 1995 budget speech announce that he would be hiring all kinds of auditors to audit businesses across the country in order to scrape every nickel out of them, when they were trying desperately to simply make a go of it?
My friend from Lakeland has raised the following issue in the past, and he knows it is a fact because he has constituents coming to him about it, as do I. They tell us that they are being harassed by Revenue Canada. People who have never had a problem with any kind of late payment are suddenly subject to incredible, ridiculous scrutiny by people from Revenue Canada, and they are tied up for days and days and weeks and weeks.
We know about the chiropractor in Winnipeg who faced a negative judgment by the tax courts. Revenue Canada's people swooped down on his home, even taking the cereal out of the cupboard. They took his 12 year old son's award for heroism, which was given to him by the governor general. That is the real record of the government.