Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to stand in the House to represent the people of the Elk Island constituency which I would venture to say is the best constituency in the whole country. I also say I have the best woman in the world as a wife. I hope that everybody else would say “no, it's my wife”. I really love my constituency and the people in it. They are very good.
I also represent the province of Alberta which has been a net payer into the system except for one occasion approximately 30 years ago when it received a very small equalization payment in one year. In the broader sense I represent the people of Elk Island but also the people of Alberta who have a very great interest in how their money is spent. This money is taken from them through the coercion of taxation and they have every reason in the world to demand accountability on how that money is spent. I am here to represent not only my riding but the province of Alberta.
I really am sorry that the member from the Progressive Conservative Party who answered my question totally misread it. I asked what I thought was a decent question that could have addressed the question of the mathematics and the formula used and whether equality is really equality. The member debased himself into an answer with political rhetoric. The NDP member joined in on it. Somehow they think by oft repeating this message Canadian people will believe it. That is just not true.
People in my riding want to keep this country together. I suppose one of the reasons the support for me and our party out west is so strong is that we are the only party that has ever come up with a decent plan for keeping this country together, reaching out to Quebec in a tangible way, trying to meet its needs and aspirations which this Liberal government and the Conservatives before it rode over roughshod. We are reaching out to it.
These people criticize us because we occasionally have dialogue with members from the Bloc. I think it is about time we dialogued with all people of Quebec. A fairly good number, 50%, have been sending separatists to the House of Commons and to the provincial legislature in Quebec.
That sends a very strong message. There is trouble in Ottawa. It is time to address it honestly and try to find a solution to it. Instead, what we get is this attempt by the Liberals, and now the Conservatives who have joined in, to crawl over each other and put each other down. They do not want us to work together. They want power.
I do not know whether this is going to be misunderstood, but I do not want power at all. I have no need for it. My ego does not require this kind of a cheap ego trip. I want to serve the people of Elk Island, the people of Alberta and the people of Canada. Unless we are going to write off Quebec like these other parties are doing, that includes an honest and open dialogue with the people of Quebec.
My question to the member was very clear and explicit. Does he have a hope that Quebec, with its vigorous population, its strengthened natural resources and all of its other amenities and strengths, will ever become independent in the sense that it will be able to row its own canoe and be financially independent? I would hope so. That would be my desire for every province in this country, and it is certainly true for the province of Quebec as well.
I reach out to them because I believe that we need to do what we are proposing in the new Canada act. We need to make sure that we listen to and obey the Constitution of the country which puts a lot more responsibility with the provinces and gives them the freedom to run their programs. That is what the original Constitution envisioned.
Successive Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments have chewed away at that, primarily by the use of spending power. They tax all Canadian citizens individually. They tax individual businesses. They do not tax the provinces. They tax the taxpayers. They then turn around and with all of this money that they have in their pockets jingling away, they take it and put it into wherever they think it should go.
We have no objection to the principle of equalization. In fact if I were to get this debate right on stream, I think it is appropriate for us to once again read the principle of equalization that was adopted in the Constitution Act, 1982. This is something I believe we could support wholeheartedly, provided it is done properly. Section 36(2) of the Constitution Act reads:
Parliament and the Government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.
I doubt if there are very many Canadians across the country who would disagree with that as a principle. There may be some, but I am not one of them. I am one who believes in lending a hand of help to people who are truly in need. Later on I will address how we actually determine this equitability or equality.
The principle of every citizen in this country having access to education and to be not denied the right to extend their education beyond high school because of financial restrictions is a principle that I would endorse most wholeheartedly along with 99.99% of Canadians.
It is unconscionable that we have in this country a two tier education system, thanks to Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments, where the people who come from rich families can march right out of high school into post-secondary institutions. Because they are rich they have the money to pay the big tuition fees, the big cost for books and all of the other expenses that are involved. For many Canadians it involves living away from home while they are going to school. If they are rich they can afford it. But what happens if they are poor?
Over the years governments have deteriorated the transfer of funds to the provinces, which they should not have been into in the first place, but they got into it by use of the spending power. When they did that originally it was for a good cause and it was done well. The principle was that no one in the country should be denied the right to post-secondary education because they could not afford it.
The federal government taxed the money from all of the people and from all of the businesses. Then it paid the money back to the provinces so they could provide educational facilities at reasonable cost.
In the mid-fifties and early sixties I was a university student, a recipient of that largesse. I am grateful to this day. It was a wonderful privilege. I was the first member of my family—and I have mentioned before that I am a first generation Canadian—to go on to university. What a privilege it was to be educated and then later on get into the business of education so that I could pass on the knowledge which I had gathered. I believe in that principle.
What do we have now with this Liberal government? The government has a fancy scheme of putting students into interminable debt. When these students graduate from school they will have a debt as big as half a mortgage on a house.
Shortly after I graduated my wife and I got married and started a household. In today's world, if a young couple were to do that, together their debt load for their education on average is equal to the debt of buying a house. How are they going to also finance a house? How are they going to finance the starting of their business, be it a law practice, a dentistry practice or whatever it is? They cannot because they have so much debt. They are in debt federally because their share of the federal debt is $20,000. They are in debt provincially because all of the provinces have been going into debt. They are in debt personally because they have encountered all of these wonderful student loans.
I really believe that we ought to look at that again. I do not believe that we are investing properly in our young people. I believe that if equalization payments are to be made from the federal government to the provinces it should be done in such a way that it helps those who are in need.
I think about health care. Every once in a while we hear of people, in fact too frequently, who because they are rich can afford to go to the United States to get superb health care.
I know of a family who lives in my community. It is actually a very sad story. This young married man, who has a couple of children, was feeling tired. His mother was also not feeling well. But they could not get any proper diagnosis in our health care system. First, they wait six months to get in line. When they do get into the health care system there is inadequate equipment. Many of the really skilful medical practitioners have gone off to the United States where there is more money available for their research and for them to be able to practise their profession.
These people, because they had the means, went to the Mayo Clinic. Unfortunately my friend was diagnosed with MS, which is a very serious disease. They could not even figure out what it was here in Canada. Fortunately he had enough money to go there. He also took his mother along. Unfortunately they diagnosed a terminal disease and she has now since passed away.
We often hear the hue and cry “We don't want a two tier health care system”. The fact of the matter is, we have it.
This government started out with a good principle. The principle was to make equalization payments so that people in the different provinces could have an equal level of services without undue taxation.
When the federal government originally brought this in it funded 50% of health care costs. It did that quite consistently for a few years. Then payments started to decrease. I do not know if my number is accurate, but a number which I heard recently put it as low as 13%.
In other words, we are still being taxed. Nobody in the country feels that their tax rates have gone down, notwithstanding what the Minister of Finance says. If we look at our bottom line at the end of the year we realize that the average family has, as the statistics from Statistics Canada show, a take home income of $3,000 a year less.
We are still being taxed to the hilt, but health care is no longer being funded adequately. What the government has done in the present budget is woefully inadequate in terms of restoring what it should be doing relative to the original purpose of equalization.
There are two issues. One is to provide comparable levels of services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.
What does the equalization plan do?
I do not know whether people who are watching on CPAC or even members of the House are aware of this, but one of the strange things is that both the provincial and federal governments tax individuals and businesses and then the federal government pays some of the money back to the provincial governments directly.
Originally that was to be done without strings attached, recognizing the legislative and the constitutional right of the provinces to manage these affairs.
I found a really interesting quotation in the report of the auditor general. One of the recommendations in that report came from the Rowell-Sirois commission which was formed in 1937. That is interesting because it happens to be two years before I was born. It was a dominion provincial relations commission. One of its recommendations was that the dominion government should make annual national adjustment grants to the needy provinces. The report went on to describe that.
Then the commission wrote that the grants would be unconditional and the provinces would be free to decide how to spend them or whether to use them to reduce provincial tax rates. In other words, the principle of equalization was embodied in the report of 1937.
Have we lived up to that? No. Now we have a top-down, heavy-handed federal government saying to the provinces “We will give you the money”. But are there strings attached? Big time.
My province of Alberta, which as I said in my introduction I am here to represent as well as all of Canada, has been dinged several times. Even though this was its own jurisdiction according to our Constitution, the federal government, utilizing its arbitrary and heavy-handed ability to spend the money it taxes, simply withheld funding from the Alberta government's portion of health care. That is unfair. It is wrong. It is illegal, but no one stands up to the government.
Then we have the separatists. Liberal members cannot figure out why they are here. They shake their heads. Instead of trying to ask the question “Why are they here?” they continually accuse them. I will not do that. I will not accuse the separatist members for being here. Their people back home sent them here. As far as we know the elections were fair and square and the ballots were properly counted. There are enough people out there who say “We are so fed up with Ottawa that we want out of this thing”. That is terrible.
I know of several families whose children have left on very, very bad terms. It is painful. Those parents hurt when that happens. We as Canadians all hurt when somebody leaves or threatens to leave.
We do not end up criticizing them, bawling them out and yelling at them. We sit down with them. We want to talk to them. We want to find out what are their true legitimate grievances and to solve them.
What has happened with the Liberals? Over and over all they have done is added more grievances to their list. That has to come to an end. It has to be communicated to the people of Quebec so that they will send people here who want to work with the federal government.
Notwithstanding some of the political rhetoric we get around here, and I say this as humbly as I possibly can, I believe that the Reform Party and the principles we espouse contain the seed of the grand reconciliation we need so desperately in the country. Then we can say to the people of Quebec and to all other provinces that we will respect the Constitution and make sure they have the right to manage their affairs properly.
When I speak to the equalization bill I believe we need to get back to the principle which says that we tried to reach an agreement with the provinces so that their people could have the same level of services in education and particularly in health. When we think of welfare, public services like national highways and roads and so on, there are huge costs of running provincial governments. There is absolutely no problem on the part of the Reform to say that those who are truly in need should be able to have those needs met.
In the last minute I would like to say something about the formula. Given that we are admitting we will do that, how do we determine what is equitable? That is the problem. The legislation requires that the act be renewed every five years. We have known since 1994 that this would expire in 1999. What did the government do? Two or three working days before it was introduced in the House we were given notice of it. Then the government almost immediately invoked closure. It had to push it through because it had to be done by the end of the month. I agree with that.
I disagree with the amendment we are speaking to which says we will basically hoist it. I do not think we want to put the provincial governments into such a disaster as the Progressive Conservatives would propose with their amendment that would not give them these payments. We need to have a longer process.
I propose that we ought to do that. The next process should start as soon as this one is renewed. Let us hear from some academics. We heard some very excellent witnesses in committee. Let us have some academics to answer these—