This is unacceptable. First they go after education and now it is health.
After cutting billions of dollars in transfer payments, after hamstringing the provinces, which were already cleaning up their finances and did not need this additional burden, and after causing an unprecedented crisis in the health care system, the Minister of Finance and his colleague, the Minister of Health, are stooping to a new low in arrogance and getting ready to impose their views on the health sector.
This strategy has been around for quite a while and is quite deliberate. The intrusions announced in the budget put into effect a long-standing plan to deliberately smother the provinces that do not generate enough revenue from taxes to take on their full responsibilities under the Constitution.
So there is a hidden agenda here. The President of the Treasury Board put it best in an interview to Le Soleil , on March 8, 1996, and we know that he makes numerous statements to the press. He said “When Bouchard has to make cuts, we in Ottawa will be able to show that we have the means to preserve the future of our social programs”. This is the real intention behind this government's long-standing strategy. This kind of reasoning speaks volumes about the Liberal government's agenda and priorities.
Federal cuts contributed to create a crisis in the health systems of provinces that had already been affected by the freeze on transfers imposed by the Conservative government. This government is taking advantage of the difficult situation in which it has put the provinces to impose all sorts of new encroachments.
In education, the latest encroachment by the Liberal government, with the millennium scholarships, certainly is a case in point.
Treating patients with red tape and statistics is strong medicine. Who is bearing the brunt of the finance minister's generosity? Who is being made to pay for this strategy by the Liberals? The unemployed.
The Minister of Human Resources Development should not be laughing today, because we know. We have toured the regions and we know how the unemployed have been ignored in this budget. The provinces have had to come to terms with this offloading of the federal deficit. It has not been a laughing matter.