Madam Speaker, it is with pleasure today that I rise to speak to Bill C-71, second reading of the Budget Implementation Act.
The recent budget failed to address many of the fundamental issues facing Canadians. The government says that the fundamentals are strong. Those fundamentals include an unemployment rate that is twice that of the U.S., personal disposal income that has dropped 7% in recent years during the same period that the U.S. has enjoyed an 11% growth in personal disposable income, and a productivity growth rate that the OECD warns Canada that if we do not improve our productivity growth rate there will be a substantial decline in our standard of living in the next 20 years. Personal debt rates are at an unprecedented high in Canada. The rate of personal bankruptcies is at an unprecedented high and there is a negative savings rate. These are the fundamentals of the Canadian economy.
When the government says the fundamentals are strong Canadians should be suspicious of the government's confidence in its policies. It reminds me of what John Kenneth Galbraith, the expatriate Canadian economist, once said. He said that one should be suspicious of governments that claim the fundamentals are strong.
I will speak specifically to some of the issues addressed in Bill C-71 relative to the CHST, the Canada health and social transfer. The government will increase funding, much of which will go to health care, by $11.5 billion over the next five years. This will mean that by the year 2005 we will have reached the same level of federal health care investment that we had in 1995. Although the government promotes that it is reinvesting in health care, the fact is that it will take until 2005 to reach the same level which health care investment by the federal government reached in 1995.
The federal government increased spending on health care and increased transfers to the provinces for that but has not provided a comprehensive and coherent long term strategy for health care despite the fact that health care costs in Canada will continue to grow by about $3 billion per year due to changing demographics. Again this is an indication of a government that by most accounts has a budget surplus but continues to have a bit of a leadership deficit.
Many Canadians were appalled when the government spent $3 million of Canadian taxpayers money promoting that it was reinvesting in health care. Many Canadians are wondering why they did not hear ads at the time when the government was taking up to $19 billion out of health care since 1993.
The fact is there were no such ads and the government is engaging in a propaganda machine to try to gloss over the fact that the same government which slashed health care and decimated the Canadian health care system, is now putting a band-aid on the health care system and has yet to deal with the systemic issues of the Canadian health care system.
The Budget Implementation Act addresses the issue of the reinvestment in social transfers. Money is being paid into a trust fund. Some $3.5 billion of this money is being paid into a trust fund. This is more part of the government's Mother Hubbard approach to fiscal policy. Instead of investing the money now into Canadian health care when Canadians need it, when the lines to receive health care have never been longer, the government is putting it into a trust fund from which the provinces will draw over the next three years.
The reason the government set up this trust fund was to skirt around the issues that the auditor general raised over the past several budgets relative to the government's taking money out of one year's budget to spend in the future.
While this may address in some circuitous way the auditor general's concerns, the auditor general is not the only Canadian who is concerned about the government's bookkeeping practices. Not only does the government's fiscal policies offend good bookkeeping practices. It also offends good economics. Canadians need economic stimulus now. Canadians need a better health care system now. This is when we need the money to be invested, not in two years or three years.
Last year the government had a vague whiff of a surplus. What did it do? It took $2.5 billion from that surplus and spent it on a millennium scholarship fund. It put the money into a pot that will not be drawn from for about three years. Not one Canadian in the year following that budget benefited from that $2.5 billion. Not one Canadian will benefit for another three years, until those funds start to go out into the Canadian public. Even at that point about 5% of students seeking higher education will be receiving any benefit from that.
While the government claims to be trying to behave fiscally responsibly, in fact due to its short term partisan goals and in particular the leadership goals of the current Minister of Finance, the government is actually betraying its trust to the Canadian people by taking money from Canadians today when they need it and not spending it until the future, not providing the type of wide broad based tax relief that Canadians need, for instance the type of investment Canadians need in health care.
The fact is the government continues to tinker with the Canadian economy. This was referred to over the weekend at the Canadian Tax Foundation conference, a non-partisan gathering of tax experts from across the country. At that conference Robin MacKnight, director of the Canadian Tax Foundation, said that in his view there had been too much tinkering of late and that the tinkering had introduced far too much complexity into the tax code.
Of course the government tinkers with everything. The government does not have any broad based long term strategy relative to any issue, whether we look at its policies or non-policies on the environment or at the government's strategies on the economy.
This is not the type of government that would have the courage and vision to introduce a free trade agreement. This is not the type of government that would recognize the importance of eliminating a manufacturers' sales tax that punished Canadian exporters, replacing it with a consumption tax. This is a government that ducks the hard issues. It continues to tinker around the margins of the real issues, as opposed to dealing with the important problems facing the Canadian economy or any of the wide range of issues.
Bill C-71 also addresses issues of human resource management. It suspends the use of binding arbitration for another two years, to the year 2001.
Recently we had an all night debate on the back to work legislation for PSAC. During that debate I was as disillusioned as most Canadians when I saw the government withhold information from members of the House until after the vote on closure. Government members as well as opposition members, including members of the Reform Party, were successfully manipulated by the government to support closure when a tentative agreement had been reached with PSAC. It did not tell members of the House about the agreement because it wanted to force back to work legislation, to rub the noses of PSAC employees and its members a little farther into the ground.
This is not good human resource management. At a time when the Government of Canada has the responsibility to play a leadership role in human resource management we are finding that the government again is not managing the issue appropriately. The morale in our public service has never been lower than it is now under this government and that is because of the government's continued disrespect for the public service and its continued efforts to emasculate the public service.
Binding arbitration has a role to play in labour management. It is time for the government to return to using binding arbitration prior to using back to work legislation. Binding arbitration is meant to be an ameliorative step to deal with problems before using the incredibly powerful tool of back to work legislation.
The government continues to try to circumvent legitimate labour management practices. It will not use binding arbitration. In fact it will be another two years before it even addresses binding arbitration.
This bill does not address effectively the issue of single income families that are punished by the government and face a discriminatory tax policy.
The Canadian Tax Foundation had its annual meeting this weekend. Bob Brown, who is currently on contract with the Department of Finance, is a leading tax expert and a member of that foundation. He spoke to the conference and presented a paper. He said that Canada at this moment has a tax system which provides less recognition for the children of middle and upper income taxpayers than any of the G-7 countries.
We are not keeping up with our G-7 partners, not only in taxes, and Canadians face the highest income taxes of the G-7, but in terms of social policy. Canadian single income families are treated worse in this country than in any other G-7 country. That is clearly inappropriate.
Madam Speaker, I am splitting my time with the hon. member for Markham.