The hon. member says to be Canadian is to pay taxes. That is the Liberal definition.
Finally, if we put all this together and look at the total tax revenue of the federal government, as expected, we get the same story. Canadians paying more.
At the end of 1993-94 when this government took office, total federal revenue was $107.3 billion. At the end of 1999-2000 the total of federal revenues collected will be $149.4 billion, an increase of $42 billion or 39%. In other words, there is an increase in federal revenues collected per taxpayer, and this is the budget that was going to alleviate the taxpayers from the great burden of federal taxation, of $2,020 or 24%.
This government has become the richest government in Canada's history. The economy can grow by 3%, which ought to be good news for Canadians. But when the federal government's revenues grow by 8% what that tells us is that when there is economic growth, a disproportionate amount of that growth is not going to the people who produce it, not to the companies that produce it, not to the individuals who produce it, but to the ever present government and its taxation department.
The great record of Liberalism is going to be this for the 20th century: a well to do finance minister and a well to do prime minister running the richest government in the history of Canada, one that is collecting $409 million per day from the taxpayers of Canada.
I think I have made the case. I could go on, but the case is that Canadians pay more.
If Canadians were paying more but getting more in terms of better government or better services, perhaps the government would have a leg to stand on or at least be able to explain or defend its record. But the other half of the equation, the other part of the bottom line, is that under this government Canadians are not only paying more but are getting less. In particular, Canadians are getting less in the one area they care about most these days, health care.
Time does not permit me to deal with all areas of government activity in which Canadians are getting less value for their money, the areas in which the productivity of the federal government itself is declining. No one should have any illusions that part of the productivity problem in this country is the declining productivity of government itself, getting less for the taxes that are paid and the cost of government being tacked on to everything we produce and sell in the world market.
I will touch on five areas in which Canadians are getting less. The first is employment insurance, a big bill. According to the chief auditor for this program, the government has been overtaxing Canadians for employment insurance on average by 37% for at least five years and it continues to do so. Yet during the same time benefits have decreased and the government has proposed to return only a fraction of the accumulated surpluses to the employers and the employees who put it up in the first place. In other words, with regard to employment insurance people are paying more and getting less. They are getting less employment insurance. They are not getting the premium refunds they should be getting.
The second area is the Canada pension plan. Under the government's proposals for this plan, a huge area of expenditure and investment, CPP premiums will increase by 41% over the next four years. Notice there is not a word about the CPP in the budget. Yet at the end of the day the most Canadians can expect from this plan even after these increases is a measly $9,000 a year pension which is less than half the pension a young worker would get if those same funds were placed in an RRSP. With regard to CPP under this government people will pay 41% more and they will get less.
Third is military spending. Since 1993-94 the government has cut national defence spending. This is the department Liberals love to hate. The defence department is the one they do not mind cutting. They have cut it by over $2.4 billion per year in absolute terms but the cumulative effect of the cuts is about $7.8 billion. This has set in motion the downsizing of Canada's military and a deterioration in morale which has significantly reduced our military capability. Now the government is preparing to put about $175 million per year for three years back into the military but it is not implementing the other reforms necessary to render Canada's military more effective. With respect to defence spending Canadians will still pay more but they will get less.
The fourth area is Indian affairs. According to this budget the government is putting half a billion dollars into Indian affairs but the government has done nothing to ensure that much of the $4.4 billion it is already putting in is not siphoned off by lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians and consultants in activities that benefit everybody else except the rank and file aboriginal, particularly on reserve. While Canadians pay more we would argue that the rank and file aboriginal on reserve sees less and less of these funds. Canadians pay more but the ones who really need the help get less.
With respect to getting less, let us take a look at the area of health care. This is an area in which Canadians are most conscious of getting less while paying more. This is an area where there has been more spin doctoring, shell gaming and rhetoric than any other, but that cannot hide the ugly truth. When this government took office transfers to other levels of government, the CHST, the Canada assistance plan, the EPF and equalization, amounted to $27 billion per year. In 1997-98 under this government transfers had decreased to a cumulative total of $21 billion, a decrease of $6 billion per year or 22%. The negative effects of this cut in health care transfers are well known to all members of the House. They include the hospital closures, the thousands of doctors, nurses and health care workers leaving the country, the 200,000 Canadians on waiting lists and all the pain, anxiety and anger these figures represent.
Canadians were beginning to refer to the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister as the Dr. Kevorkians of Canadian medicare. The government finally felt impelled to do something. So it decided to put $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year back into health care.
However, the spin doctors said that was not a very big number, $2 billion to $2.5 billion. They said you will not get a headline for a health care budget if you are talking about $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year. So they asked if it could be made bigger. Everyone knows what the spin doctors do when they get into something like this, they multiply it by something. So somebody said multiply it by three. Then some genius said no, multiply it by five. When we multiply it by five we would get a big number, up to $11.5 billion. This is the kind of math that goes on behind the budget.
Lo and behold we have an announcement by the finance minister that the government is going to put $11.5 billion back into health care. They say over five years very quickly so it does not get divided by five.
If you are to use cumulative numbers for spending increases on health care, you had better use cumulative numbers for the spending cuts on health care and social services to let people know what you are doing. Those numbers do not appear in the budget at all. I am sure the minister had them on a piece of paper and it fell out of the envelope on the way into the department. I am sure he was going to tell us all about them but they were not there.
So we have to do the math. We found that the government's cumulative cuts in the transfers for health and social programs are $21.4 billion by the end of 1999. Even if we put $11.5 billion back in there is a spending deficit. Canadians pay more and get less in health care, about $1,500 less per taxpayer than was spent in 1993-94.
Some hon. members are shaking their heads. They are looking around and talking to each other, saying this is confusing. Let me follow their train of thought. I can read their minds. The hon. members are saying that sometimes we are talking about the Canada health and social transfers and sometimes we are talking about the health transfers. If we say there is confusion, we say who is to blame for that. The government cynically and deliberately created confusion on that point.
When the government was cutting health care transfers it wanted to lump them in with the other social transfers so the health care cuts would be less visible to the public and the government would not get the blame. So when it cuts it mixes it in with something else. All of a sudden, now that it wants to increase it, it wants to make it explicit and visible again so the federal government can get the credit.
The auditor general is not going to be fooled by this kind of shell game and neither are Canadians. As I said earlier, I hope he devotes an entire volume in his next report to the shell game reporting that goes on with respect to the federal budget.
The bottom line of all of this, the unadulterated bottom line, the government's financial management since 1993-94, is Canadians pay $42 billion more taxes since the government took office, or $2,020 per taxpayers, and Canadians will get less, in particular $1,500 less per taxpayer, for health and other services. Pay more, get less is the legacy of the Liberal government in the dying days of the 20th century.
I got into this yesterday but the minister had spoken for an hour and 20 minutes and I could not get into this in any great detail to close off the debate. I want to elaborate on the point that Canada is becoming like old England. When the real king, King Richard the Lionhearted, was away on a crusade, a relative, Prince John, was put in charge. We quoted the little rhyme, “He wanted to be known as John the First but he ended up being known as John the Worst”. Why? Because with the aid of his henchman, the sheriff of Nottingham, he taxed his people to death. Under his regency the government got richer and richer—this is historically accurate—and the people got poorer services and poorer, period. In other words, it was a prototype of the Liberal government. Pay more and you get less.
They paid more and got less until a green clad reformer named Robin Hood assembled a group together, sort of a united alternative of Sherwood Forest, and Prince John's evil ways were restrained. However, that is another story I will save for another day.
Perhaps a little more seriously, it is worth noting that a little later Prince John actually did become king and the major landowners, taxpayers and business leaders, the barons and so-called magnates of the realm, staged a taxpayers revolt and made King John, the king of taxers, sign a humiliating document called the Magna Carta in which he promised not to overtax and abuse his subjects.
Finance ministers should take note of what can happen when taxpayers are pushed too far.
This weekend a group of Canadians will be meeting in this city to explore new ways and means of uniting Canadians to reduce the flood of Liberal taxation and the deterioration of health care under this administration. My hope is that convention will eventually result in a Magna Carta for Canadians that will free Canada from the pay more, get less policies of the Liberal government.
To complement that effort, my colleagues in the House will also use this budget debate to propose remedies to the current situation. They will propose ways and means of ending the shell game by making the government's financial accounting more accountable and more believable and transparent. They will propose reforms in health care financing and federal-provincial relations because the two are connected. They were not connected in the budget. They should be connected. The proposed reforms would put health and social service finances on a firmer foundation.
They will propose broad based tax relief greater in scope than anything this government has ever conceived so that in the end Canadians will pay less and get more.
In closing, I move:
That the motion be amended by replacing all the words after the word “that” with the following:
This House rejects the budget statement of the government because it is a continuation of the government's pay more get less policy which has savaged health care and burdened Canadians with high taxes thus undermining the productivity of the Canadian economy; and because this ever increasing high tax policy has significantly reduced the standard of living of Canadians and left the health care system in tatters.