Mr. Speaker, I remind colleagues what the legislation is about. It is intended to renew the current five year equalization agreement which expires on March 31 of this year. It is a typical example of the government trying to rush things through at the last minute.
Specifically the bill makes technical amendments to the formula that determines equalization payments. It also maintains provincial income tax revenue guarantee payments for provinces that have tax collection agreements with the federal government. The legislation will allow those payments to be continued beyond the end of this month until March 31, 2004.
There would not be any need for equalization payments if the government took a position of encouraging the free market principle, that people will go where the work is, and started to enact policies which reorganized how people function within the country to build a secure future.
I have had people in my own riding say to me it probably would be doing the country a major benefit as a whole if we worked through the House to try to entirely remove the need for equalization payments over a decade or so. The present system that has been in place for 40 years has done absolutely nothing to solve the problems of inequality. It just keeps topping up the money and perpetuates a cycle of dependency, never, ever making things better.
Common sense tells us that if the money were left in the pockets of workers and companies in the provinces of Ontario, Alberta and B.C., which are the have provinces that contribute to everybody else, they would produce much greater economic benefits offering even more jobs and needing even more support services from the have not provinces that presently provide things like dairy products from Quebec and telephone centre services from the maritimes.
This is the same principle as the one which says that a dollar in the hands of an entrepreneur, a parent or somebody who gets to spend it in the private sector will be much more productive for the economy than the same dollar given to government.
Governments unfortunately always waste a portion of the money. They simply shuffle it around in the paperwork and it gets lost. It is quite obvious that maybe they collect a dollar in taxes but that dollar never reaches the recipient it is supposed to get to.
It must be obvious even to the most cerebrally challenged Liberal that some of the money collected in the taxes for the purpose of equalization will be lost. I do not know how much that is, but I would be surprised if it were less than 15%.
Wasting money is the government's special skill. I have an example that was sent to me by one of my constituents, a Mr. Jim Galozo, last week. He came to my office and gave me copies of advertisements that were placed by the federal government in the North Shore News on February 19, 24 and 26. They were full page advertisements that must have cost $10,000 to $12,000 each. There were only a few words on the page: “$11.5 billion more is a real shot in the arm for our health care system” and then “the Government of Canada”. This is a terrible waste of money as identified by my constituent. It is the type of waste of money that we see throughout the government. It is certainly there in the transfer of payments.
I know my constituent, Mr. Galozo, and all my other constituents do not really believe that the waiting lists a year from now will be any shorter than they are today. The problems will still be there.
No wonder B.C. voters get angry over these programs of equalization. All they see is waste and more waste. Frankly it perturbs them and puzzles them how we can be sending money to provinces when they have travelled there and do not see them as have not provinces.
My colleague mentioned Saskatchewan and the richness of what it can do for the economy. B.C. farmers are very disturbed by the fact that they are forced to take butter, cheese and dairy products from Quebec. The B.C. dairy farmers are not allowed to make butter or cheese. There is something wrong with that scenario. Nobody really believes that Quebec is a have not province. These are real problems that need to be addressed.
I see the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration sitting here on one of those rare occasions. She comes in for a lot of criticism in B.C. as well. She shows so little concern for the criminal refugee problem in the province that most people think she might as well be a cardboard cut-out.
The member from Coquitlam has said he has the ear of the Prime Minister, although I wonder when he has it whether it is attached to the Prime Minister. That seems to be a problem as well. While the minister of immigration is here, I hope she will take a serious look at the problems in B.C. which she could address if she really put her mind to it. I can see by the expression on her face that she does not have the slightest intention of doing so. Since we will get absolutely nowhere with the cardboard cut-out, I will continue with the bill that is in hand.
As I mentioned the have not provinces are listed as Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Manitoba. Manitoba will loose about $37 million by the end of the five year term. Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia do not qualify at all as have not provinces, so we are picking up the bill.
Does the government really understand how the people in B.C. feel? I am a member from B.C. and I know that there are other concerns from the other have provinces. Speaking for B.C., does the government really understand how B.C. voters feel when they have to pay enormous amounts of money, billions of dollars to the federal government, only to see it transfer to these other provinces that do not appear to be have not provinces?
British Columbians do not have any problem with assisting provinces that obviously need help to get out of a depressed economic situation. Reform has proposed in the past that the way to correct these economic problems is not to throw money at it the way the Liberals do and have done for 40 years under the equalization program, but to do things that actually stimulate the economy.
For example, in the last parliament the Reform Party proposed that one way this money should be spent is on developing meaningful infrastructure, not on the boondoggle giveaway patronage laden infrastructure the government runs. It would be the type of infrastructure that would, for example, build a freeway from the eastern part of Canada down to Boston. This would start to assist north-south trade.
Last week on one of my flights here I was sitting beside a lady from Halifax. She was telling me how important the amount of tourism from the United States is to her small craft store. I asked her if it would be helpful if there was a decent highway system that ran north-south to encourage tourism. She thought that it would be a great idea to put in a major freeway running through to Boston to get more tourism.
I mentioned earlier about how B.C. farmers are forced to take cheese and butter from Quebec when they are quite capable of making it in their province.
During the last provincial election in Quebec, the leader of the PDQ was on a radio show in Vancouver. The talk show host, Rafe Mair, asked him about his knowledge of transfers to Quebec. That leader of a political party in Quebec, the PDQ, said that Quebec did not get transfers. He had no knowledge of it at all. He did not even know there were equalization payments that came from B.C. and were transferred to Quebec. He seemed to be quite muddled.
In terms of basing equalization payments on the ability of a province to tax, Alberta should get a transfer payment if that is the logic. I wonder what would happen if Alberta tried to introduce a provincial sales tax. Since there is no chance of Alberta ever managing to introduce a provincial sales tax its ability to tax is reduced. Maybe it should be a have not province. The government should add the ability to add a PST to the other criteria on the list for equalization payments.
I would like to repeat that instead of constantly renewing these arrangements where we transfer huge amounts of money from one part of the country to another, we should be looking at ways of breaking the welfare dependency cycle that gets created by these payments. We should look at ways of tough love.
Maybe there should be a 10 year phase-out period where the provinces get their full transfer payments for 10 years but they have to be working on programs that get them off equalization payments. The federal government should do its best to assist them in making that happen.