Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part this morning in the Bloc Quebecois opposition day on health care.
It is truly distressing to see that we, the Bloc Quebecois, we in the opposition, are being forced to introduce a motion calling upon the federal government to respect its own Constitution. To have come to this is totally abnormal.
I believe, however, that this reflects the state of the Canadian federation, the state in which the Prime Minister of Canada, the Liberal party of Canada, has plunged us, particularly in the last four years.
It is especially sad to hear the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and the Prime Minister tell us to stop our constitutional squabbling, that there is no point in getting into constitutional discussions again when there are people waiting for federal transfer payments, that there is no point messing up the system as we, the evil separatists, do.
One has to be unbelievably hypocritical to make such a statement. Any debate or friction with respect to jurisdiction originates with the Prime Minister of Canada and member for Shawinigan or with the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. Under the Constitution, health is undeniably an exclusive provincial jurisdiction.
They are now telling us that, in the future, the federal government will not only have a say in the matter but will actually manage transfer payments to the provinces for health. It will also monitor results. Such departure from the Canadian Constitution is pure heresy. They are not even complying with their own Constitution. It also makes for great theatrics.
The federal government is passing itself off as this great saviour of the health system, when in fact it is largely responsible for all the problems currently faced from coast to coast. The crowded emergency rooms and closed hospitals are the doing of the finance minister and the Prime Minister.
Since the 1995 budget, one of the most hypocritical budgets in the history of Canadian taxation, the Minister of Finance has decided that, every year until 2003, systematic cuts would be made in federal transfers for the funding of health care, post-secondary education and social assistance. But these cuts hit health care, which accounts for about half the transfers, the hardest.
By the year 2003, federal transfers to provinces for the funding of health care will have been cut by $40 billion.
This is today's reality. But the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs constantly distort reality in order to have us believe—and at the same time to increase their visibility—that the federal government is the great saviour. The federal government is the great destroyer of the health system in Canada. Every year, the provinces have $6.3 billion less in their coffers, almost half of that amount for health care in Canada.
Negotiations are now ongoing, and I hope they will be successful. But if it were not for the action taken in the 1995 budget and the disarray of people who are waiting in hospital emergency wards, which are in bad shape because of the federal government, this conference would not have been necessary. The federal transfers for health care would have increased automatically because, since last year, the federal government has managed to create a surplus thanks to its horrible cuts, a surplus that, normally, should have been given back automatically to the people those who really paid for putting our fiscal house in order.
This year, the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister should have said that, because of the surpluses resulting from the fact that some $6 billion have been cut each year from transfers to the provinces, in particular for health care, they would give back this year's surplus to the provinces, unconditionally and in accordance with the Canadian Constitution.
But that is not what was done. With great fanfare, the federal government wanted to ensure its visibility and show that it is the saviour of the health care system. This is a monumental farce. It is sad that the provinces should be forced, with a knife at their throats because they are struggling and suffering from yearly shortfalls, to take part in last minute federal-provincial conferences to agree to certain transfer arrangements. Six billion dollars every year, this is not peanuts. I think it is sad and tragic that we have come to this.
I will explain to you how we have come to this. The Prime Minister did not make any bones of it. When he was in France, he said that everything was fine in Canada, that the federal government made the cuts and that the provinces did the dirty work. The Prime Minister made no bones of it. The president of the Treasury Board did not either when he said: “When the provinces make cuts, after our own cuts, we will appear as saviours”. He said it just two years ago, and that is what was brewing.
Coming back to the 1995 budget, the finance minister said to himself: “It is not a very popular thing to make cuts in social programs and health care, I will do it only once, I will announce it only once, and it will continue until 2003”. That is what he did. That is why I underlined earlier the hypocritical aspect of the budget, because it will cause a disaster—