Madam Speaker, I am also glad to participate in the prebudget debate. The Minister of Finance will be bringing down a budget in a few short weeks. We will find out what the news is and this time we expect it will be a fair amount of good news. We can somewhat predict what the minister will say.
We anticipate a surplus for the year ending March 31, 1999. For the first time in many years we will see the cumulative debt Canadians have hanging around their necks, courtesy of the Liberal and Tory governments over the past 30 years, being reduced albeit by a small amount.
We can anticipate some new and long overdue investment into health care, something the Reform Party has called for on many occasions. We can also anticipate some tax cuts by the Minister of Finance when he introduces the budget in a couple of weeks.
These three things all sound great, but let us look at the history of how we got here. We will enjoy the rhetoric of the Minister of Finance on budget day and the great plaudits and accolades he will receive for these great announcements.
The debt currently stands at $580 billion that we have accumulated over the last 30-odd years. It may come down by $10 billion or $15 billion for the year ending March 31, 1999, a small amount. While the debt is coming down, and fortunately interest rates are now low, one-third of the taxes we as Canadians pay the federal government go to pay the interest on the debt. In many ways that is why we feel we are overtaxed. For every dollar we pay the federal government, we are only getting 67 cents back in services. We are being short-changed. We feel we are being ripped off because we are not getting value for our money.
How many people go into a store, for example, and voluntarily pay $10 for something that is only worth $6.67? They would say “That is too expensive. I do not want that. It is a rip-off”. So it is with federal taxation. For every $10 that we pay in taxes we only get $6.67 back. That is why we feel overtaxed and ripped off.
I know we have accumulated this debt, but it was accumulated through mismanagement and promises that governments were prepared to deliver services to Canadians without raising taxes at the appropriate time. I remember the famous words of former Prime Minister Trudeau who said “Don't worry about the debt. We owe it to ourselves”. We owe $580 billion and the interest cost is $40 billion or more a year. That is just to pay the interest. That is over $1,000 per year in federal taxes for every man, woman and child to pay the interest on the debt. That is why we feel we are not getting value for our money.
Let us bear that in mind when the Minister of Finance stands to take great credit for paying down the debt that started back in a previous Liberal administration when the prime minister said “Don't worry. We owe it to ourselves”.
The minister will take great pride in the fact that he will start putting some new investment into health care. We say it is long overdue. Not only is it long overdue. Let us remember that this government consistently cut its commitment to health care in the years since it was elected in 1993. It has hung on to the five principles it keeps ranting and raving about including public administration of health care but at the same time has refused to put in the investment required to sustain the health care Canadians want and Canadians demand.
When health care was first introduced the federal government said it would pay 50% of health care costs. This was laudable. Everybody thought the government would live up to its commitment. Then we found that the 50% became 40% and the 40% became 30% and the 30% became 20%. Some 20% of health care costs are now being paid by the federal government.
Now that the tide is likely to turn the Minister of Finance will make a new contribution to health care. Then everybody will sing his praise about what a wonderful job he is doing. Surely let us recognize that he is only undoing the damage he has done over the last number of years by cutting health care.
Waiting lines are getting longer. Research is underfunded. The list goes on and on. Let us also remember that when the Minister of Health says more money for health care it is not more money. He is putting back a small fraction of what he took out in the past.
Then of course we will see tax cuts too. Tax cuts are laudable. Everybody thinks tax cuts are great. I would just ask the Minister of Finance to think about the relationship of the debt to the GDP. It is much like a mortgage to a person's income. If the mortgage comes down and the payments come down accordingly, one feels a bit better off. If one's salary and income go up and the mortgage stays the same, one also feel a bit better off. As far as the federal government is concerned the mortgage is our total federal accumulated debt and our income is the gross domestic product of the nation. If we can raise the gross domestic product of the nation and keep the debt the same, we will feel a bit better off.
I would ask the minister of finance to think about that when he is talking about tax cuts. The tax cuts focus on improving the productivity of this nation. The productivity of our workers is falling behind the rest of the OECD countries. If we can raise the productivity of our nation we as individuals will then feel more affluent and better off and our standard of living will improve.
Therefore I would hope the minister of finance when he is thinking tax cuts focuses on productivity growth. While that gives tax relief to Canadians it also gives us more affluence and the opportunity to earn a higher income. Surely that is what we want as Canadians.
We also want to think about job creation. While the government talks about the great achievement of bringing unemployment down to 8%, we think of our neighbours to the south where it is 5%. Surely if we are talking tax cuts we should be talking job creation. Job creation is not just a simple number of 11%, 8% or 5%. We are talking about people's lives. We are talking about people's futures. We are talking about their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations to buy a house and pay the mortgage, their aspirations to start a family and to take their place in society. We are talking about our young people who find they have Mcjobs rather than real jobs and give them the opportunity for a real career for prosperity and for something that they can look forward to and say “it is great to be a Canadian because I have a future”. Many young people today do not have that.
I would hope the minister of finance would think about that when he is talking about tax cuts. The tax hikes that we have had over the last number of years have strangled that opportunity for our young people. They have destroyed their opportunity.
When I advertised for people to work for me in my parliamentary offices I was shocked to find that many people with one and two university degrees who have been in the workforce for a number of years have restaurant jobs, low paying jobs, not career jobs because they cannot get a start. When they cannot get a start they suffer, their families suffer, Canada suffers, our economy suffers, our tax revenues suffer and the whole cycle gets into a negative spin.
Surely the minister of finance knows that tax hikes over the past years have killed the future for many people and I would hope he would start to undo that in some small way.
The debt has to remain the same and if we can grow the GDP by giving opportunity and hope for our young people in real jobs, then we will feel more in control and the ratio of the debt to our income will start to drop and things will start to improve.
These are the types of things that we are going to see in the speech, but it is not just all good news. As I pointed out, the mess we are in has to be undone slowly.
There is one other thing that we will not find in the budget. It is unfortunate that we will not find it in the budget, but it is also the waste and the mismanagement of government that soaks millions of dollars out of taxpayer pockets for zero return.
Recently in the public accounts committee which I chair we dealt with social insurance numbers. Social insurance numbers are a small thing. Everybody has one. The vast majority use it to file their tax return and give it to their bank so they can report their T-5. But the auditor general pointed out that millions of dollars of fraudulent activity is being done through the use of the social insurance numbers because no one has bothered to update the security of social insurances for 35 years.
The auditor general pointed out that one person who had 72 social insurance numbers was collecting child tax credits by the hundred, all because the government did not think that social insurance numbers are no longer a way to identify who you are when you pay taxes but now a methodology of identifying who you are so you can collect all kinds of benefits from the government. It is a ripoff in the millions of dollars, waste, mismanagement and unaccountability.
We heard a speaker talk about the military and how underfunded it is. We had the chief of defence staff before our committee again because the auditor general pointed out that the military was buying helicopters that did not meet the simple specifications of what it wanted. They had to lift a certain amount of weight such as artillery and move it to the front in the case of a battle and they were not capable of lifting what they were designed to lift. They could not get off the ground, yet we were spending millions of dollars buying helicopters that could not do the job they would be required to do. Bad decision making by the bureaucrats and by the government is no excuse for wasting taxpayer money.
National defence is involved in technology in a big way. The assistant auditor general said a couple of years ago that it was not at the leading edge of technology but at the bleeding edge of technology. We were paying hundreds of millions of dollars to fill up this highly sophisticated equipment. Now we find that the military is at the bottom of the heap when it comes to Y2K preparedness. No doubt we have been spending all this money developing all these systems and forgetting the Y2K computer problem and the year 2000 is approaching, so let us make sure that it is Y2K compliant. These types of things are inexcusable.
With regard to Indian and northern affairs, a consultant said it would take $26,000 to fix the problem that a reserve had with its water supply. This is not a large amount of money as far as the government coffers are concerned but we have now spent $2.3 million, not $26,000, and we still have not provided a new water supply rather than fixing the old one which is perfectly capable of being fixed. For $2.3 million we still do not have enough water and we do not have the quality of what it was when we started to fix the problem. It may cost a few more million rather than getting the consultant to fix it for $26,000.
I shake my head at that kind of waste, mismanagement and unaccountability. Unfortunately we will not hear that in the budget speech. We will not hear the minister talk about it, yet the public accounts committee finds that waste, mismanagement and unaccountability are endemic through the government. Millions or perhaps billions could be saved. Taxpayers could be better off if we had good management in the federal government. The answer lies there and I would hope the Minister of Finance would take these issues seriously and deliver not just lower taxes but good government to Canadians because they deserve no less.