Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to add my thoughts on the federal budget that was tabled a couple of weeks ago in the House.
A budget sometimes seems like a boring document, but it is really a statement of how much of our earnings the government intends to take. It touches each one of us, the work we do and the money we have in our pockets. It is a statement of how much money the government intends to spend, remembering that the government does not have money of its own. It only has our money. It is also a statement of what the government is to spend our money on.
We have some very strong criticisms of the government in all those three areas in terms of how much it intends to take from our earnings, the way it is managing the spending of our earnings, and what it is spending our earnings on.
We could have reversed the enormous tax hit and the slashing of dollars from medical care, which we were told when the government was elected was necessary to eliminate having to borrow to meet government obligations. We did not want to live on borrowed money. The government said it would have to tax us more and cut support for health care.
We took that, some of us perhaps more willingly than others. Some of us were astonished that it was the Liberals, who had always stood up with their hands on their hearts saying that they would protect the Canada Health Act against the fires of hell if they had to. However, when push came to shove, their words meant nothing as so often happens with Liberals.
Here we are today with no deficit. In fact we have a healthy and growing surplus. Yet there is still extra taxation and there are still cuts to the former support that we had for our health care services. Why do these continue?
Federal revenues are an astonishing $42 billion between March 31, 1994 and March 31, 2000. On average each taxpayer is paying over $2,000 more a year in taxes than they did when these Liberals came to power. The government is taking $2,000 more from each taxpayer's pocket. That is a lot of money to most Canadians.
The Globe and Mail on February 23 made this cogent statement: “A real tax cut doesn't just slow the growth in government's revenue. It leaves the government with less revenue”. We have not really had a tax cut if government is still taking in more this year than it did last year, which the government is doing. There has not been a tax cut at all. There is less of an increase than there might have been. When the Liberals talk about tax cuts they are simply not being accurate with their words.
Since the government is confiscating billions more of the income we worked so hard to earn, what wonderful things is the Liberal government doing for us with our own money? I might add that $1 billion would be like winning a million dollar lottery three times every day for an entire year. That is how much $1 billion is. The government is taking $42 billion out of the economy, out of the pockets of the hardworking people of the country.
In the most critical area of meeting our medical and health care needs, especially as we get older and we know that the population is getting older as the baby boomers retire, very little is being done by the government to meet our health care needs.
For the 10 year period from the time the Liberals were elected in 1993 to 2003, they will have slashed $33.3 billion from support for health care and education. During the same period of time, 1993 to 2003, they will put back $11.5 billion into health care. They slashed over $33 billion in this 10 year period. There was an outcry, which there might well have been, and they grudgingly put one-third of it back.
In other words, the Liberals only made two-thirds of the raid on health care that they intended to make. We are supposed to thank them and feel that they are a wonderful, wonderful governing party because they only raided our health care funds by two-thirds of what they really would like to have done.
In fact each and every Canadian will have nearly $500 less available to care for their medical needs this year than when the government took office, and that is not all.
In addition to the enormous and punishing tax grab Canadians have staggered under with the government, the government uses a sneaky device to ratchet up its tax take year by year called bracket creep. According to the Caledon Institute, this device has pushed 1.9 million taxpayers from the lowest to the middle tax bracket and 600,000 taxpayers from the middle to the top bracket. It has also added more than a million low income people to the tax rolls in the last 10 years.
When the government brags about the few people that its little tax cuts pushed off the tax rolls, hon. members might want to just balance that with all the people who are pushed on to the tax rolls and pushed into paying more taxes because of these sneaky stealth taxes which the Liberals have had over five years and six budgets to fix and have done absolutely nothing about.
In 1980 a single wage earner would be able to keep $10,500 before paying tax. Guess what it is now under the Liberal government. Last year taxes were due after only $7,000 of income. The Liberals in their generosity will now let that taxpayer keep an extra $175 before the tax man comes knocking. Think of the generosity of allowing a single taxpayer to keep $175 more before starting to pay tax. Even that paltry sum will quickly be eroded by the stealth tax that I spoke of before.
Let us look at the child tax benefit. The Liberals make a great deal of this so I think we should spend a minute talking about it. The child tax benefit system is a program which the official opposition supports. It represents the best of co-operation between federal and provincial agreements. It is targeted to those families that have modest incomes from work. It is designed to encourage families and allow families to stay in the workforce. Regrettably it is not as generous as it first appears. The child tax benefit system was subject to this stealth tax, this partial deindexing in 1985, and 14 years later, six of them under a Liberal government, this regressive measure is still in place.
Each year the value of the child tax benefit declines at the rate of inflation and the value of the threshold at which the benefit is clawed back declines by the rate of inflation. A family with an income of between $20,000 and $30,000 a year faces a clawback of up to 27% of the benefit on any additional earnings under the Liberal government. What a nasty and insidious tax burden. It is heaviest on those with low incomes.
Secondly, the government announced increases in this child tax benefit in the 1997 budget. These measures were announced again in the 1998 budget. Some adjustments have been announced in the 1999 budget. However, the full benefits of the program will not be in place until 2000, a delay of over three years. Too many announcements; too little action. It is so typical of this government. Could the government not speed up this program and put money in the hands of families sooner?
The Liberal government would have Canadians believe it is using our tax contributions to ease the load on low income parents to help them. This is simply not the case.
Contrary to the purple prose of the finance minister and other Liberal misrepresentations, we in the Reform Party, the official opposition, support the national child benefit and have repeatedly offered and called for measures to make it a real benefit, not just Liberal lip service.
In addition, although Canada is a wealthy and prosperous country, an increasing number of our citizens appear not to have an opportunity to share in this wealth and prosperity. I refer to the many homeless people, as well as those families on very low incomes for whatever reason. We know much more about the problem of homelessness in our large cities following a major study released by the city of Toronto in January.
Homelessness has many causes and governments at all levels have responsibilities to take action. Homelessness is not a partisan issue, but one on which politicians of all stripes and at all levels must work to solve.
The Reform Party believes and one of our principles is that Canadians have a personal and collective responsibility to care and provide for the basic needs of people who are unable to care and provide for themselves.
I would submit that in this budget the government has failed. Not only is it taking far more from the pockets of hard-working Canadians than is necessary, but it is also putting too much of a burden on those least able to afford it and giving too little and too poorly managed programs in return.
For that reason I will vote against this budget. I urge members of this House to get the government to clean up its act before they support this budget.
