Mr. Speaker, not only am I pleased to speak to this bill, but I was really anxious to do so. For the benefit of those who are listening, this is the budget implementation bill. It therefore contains a number of technicalities. I will not address technicalities, but the substance of this bill, which brings into being the finance minister's budget.
In Quebec and among Bloc Quebecois members, this budget was received with anger because, without any warning, the Minister of Finance changed something that had been agreed between the federal government and the provinces. I am referring to social transfers.
The Minister of Finances has decided that the Canada social transfer, which used to be proportional, would now be calculated on a per capita basis. As a result, the Quebec government—whose health care system had been seriously affected by the federal deficit reduction efforts and cuts in transfer payments—is now shortchanged to the tune of $350 million over 5 years. That it angered the Bloc Quebecois, the Parti Quebecois government and Quebecers at large was to be expected.
I suspect that, so far, nobody has understood where I am coming from. I will try to explain in a straightforward manner what the finance minister has been doing since he came to power. I will start with a history lesson.
In the late 1960s, the federal government came up with the Canada Assistance Plan to help the provinces assume the costs of poverty. In fact, through the CAP, the federal government was covering 50% of the provinces' expenditures to provide help to people in need over and above benefits. This had been going on since 1969.
When the Liberals took office in 1993, the first thing they did, in their first budget, was to cut social spending. They had just announced a major reform of social policies. They had asked a committee to travel across Canada to listen to what Canadians and Quebecers had to say about social programs.
This great desire for reform, from which no specific proposals were really expected, led in 1995 to the announcement of radical changes by the Minister of Finance, who decided to group social transfers for education and health into one single transfer. Up to that point, the large amounts of taxpayers' money spent by the federal government on health and education and called social transfers were made on a per capita basis. In other words, until the Minister of Finance decided to make changes in 1995, federal transfers for health and education were based on the population.
As I said earlier, there was also a specific plan called the Canada assistance plan, which was based on poverty. It took poverty into account. What did the Minister of Finance do as he was getting ready to make drastic cuts? He grouped all transfers for education, health and poverty into one single transfer.
Therefore, population could no longer be the sole criterion, nor could poverty in each province apply completely either.
So the government announced that it would establish an average, with the result that Quebec, which had a little more than 25% of the Canadian population, received approximately 28% of the total. Why? Because when we had the Canada assistance plan, Quebec received 34%. This means there is a real poverty problem. It does not mean that Quebec does not have a great future as a state, but that there is a serious historical problem of poverty.
It was announced that we would very gradually go from 28% to 50% only of the population criterion. What did the Minister of Finance do in his budget? He decided that in three years poverty would no longer be taken into account. The federal government does not take poverty into account in the equalization formula and we know that the poverty level is different from one province to another. The federal government will no longer take that into account. This is what we wanted to condemn in all possible ways.
I must say that the federal government used a trick to slip Quebec a lump of coal. The government took advantage of the fact that the equalization formula would allow Quebec to receive, because of good economic performance, in Ontario among others, an amount of $1.4 billion. Was this a novelty, a reform, a gift? No, it was the result of prior commitments and agreements.
The federal government, taking advantage of what was Quebec's due on the one hand, took advantage on the other hand by doing away with something that had been in place since the late 1960s, and had been planned as something quite different: the recognition of the weight of poverty and assistance to the provinces with the heaviest burden of poverty.
Under such circumstances, Quebec could not do otherwise than to react sharply, particularly since it had been hit especially hard by the employment insurance reform. This reform was also a desire to do away with inter-regional subsidies, to use technocratic jargon. This meant that, where employment insurance was concerned, Quebec got it in the neck, if I may put it that way.
In other words, in both social program reform and employment insurance reform, Quebec got more than its fair share of cuts. But it did not get its fair share on another level: productive spending. We must keep repeating this. The reason we want sovereignty is to have control over everything we produce, all of our taxes, to use as we see fit, in order to develop.
Many people see sovereignty as a means of seriously addressing the phenomenon of poverty, which unfortunately—it must be said, shouted from the rooftops even, given the way the federal government has decided to fight the deficit—has increased.
The Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs recently tried to tell us that Quebec was getting its share of federal productive spending. He used science and technology spending as his example, saying that Quebec got 28.3%.
What was extraordinary was that he proposed that the Hull-Ottawa area be excluded. What people need to know is that in the Hull-Ottawa area, 87% of expenditures are in Ontario, and 13% in Quebec. So not taking it into account was how the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs could conclude that Quebec was getting its share of productive spending.