Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to be able to stand in Canada's parliament this afternoon to debate the issue of the budget.
If I go by the things that people in my riding talk to me about, then the budget, taxes and the way the government spends our money are the biggest issues.
I had the privilege of standing at a couple of trade fairs a few weeks ago. One was held in Sherwood Park in my riding, which is probably the largest trade fair in the province. Around 25,000 or 30,000 people came through in the two and a half days we were there. In Fort Saskatchewan there was another very large sample of people. Almost all of them brought up the question: When will we ever get a tax break?
To speak to Bill C-71, which is a budget implementation bill, is indeed an honour and I think a high responsibility. I will do my best to represent the wishes of the people in my riding as I speak.
In a prologue to my speech I would like to comment on some of the things that have been said here. Until today I have said to many people that one thing about the Bloc members is that they are very focused. Their issue is one issue. They want to take their province out of our wonderful country and every speech which they give, every time they rise to speak, is focused on their goal of separating from Canada. I profoundly disagree with that goal. We know that the majority of people in Quebec do not want to leave Canada. Bloc members are really riding a dead horse. They are flogging it to try to make it run, but it will not go anywhere. However, today they have switched horses. Today they are not talking about separation. Today they are talking about wanting more from Canada.
Unfortunately, the whole program of transfer payments to the provinces is very convoluted. I have done a little study of it and the more I study it the more convoluted it seems to become and the more difficult to understand. However, the public accounts indicate that in proportion to the population Quebec has had above average transfers, that is, averaged over the population of the whole country. If we take the total number of contributions and divide that number by the population of the country, we get a smaller number than the contributions that are given to Quebec divided by its population. Quebec is above average. I do not think Quebecers would generally want to acknowledge that, but it is the truth.
Today we hear them talking about being against this one part of Bill C-71. In fact, what we are debating at report stage is their amendment to remove that part where the federal government transfers money to the provinces for health care, for the CHST. The reason they are giving, and it has been quite clear in their speeches, I do not think they have tried to obfuscate it, is because the amount of money they will be getting will be going down and they are against that.
I have a lot of respect, not only for the people of Quebec, but for the members of the Bloc party who were sent here by their ridings to represent their ridings. I have a lot of respect for them individually. I believe they are doing well to speak this way and to put this amendment forward because they are doing it to protect their constituents, which is a legitimate role in debate in parliament.
However, if we look at the larger picture for all of the country, and of course this is where they are sort of out of the picture, it seems to me eminently responsible and eminently fair that the amount of money that is transferred by the federal government to fund programs, which in some cases are administered by the provincial governments, should be equal with respect to a per capita contribution.
I regret that in the House we cannot use props. I taught for 31 years and I would have been lost without the use of a blackboard in the old days, or the whiteboard with all the colours nowadays and the overhead projector and the computer generated image on the screen. I wish I could show a chart of some of these things because I think we would communicate much better. It is unfortunate that we cannot do that in the House, as they do, for example, in the Congress of the United States.
If I had the ability to communicate in that way I would draw a picture of a huge barrel. All of the taxpayers of the country would contribute money which would be put into that barrel. Some time ago I computed at what rate we were putting money into that barrel. Actually it is not a difficult thing to do. I think we have around $150 billion a year in government expenditures. Clearly money goes into the barrel if we are going to spend it, either by borrowing or from another source. We have in the neighbourhood of 15 million taxpayers, so it works out very easily to about $10,000 per person that we put into this barrel.
My question to the members of the Bloc party and to all members of the House is, what is an equitable way of distributing that money with respect to the support of education, health care and social services in the different provinces?
When it comes to health care and education, I really think an equal per capita grant for all of the provinces would be pretty fair. The cost of educating a student, whether in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick or any one of the other provinces, would be reasonably close. It would not be exact. We know there are different costs of living. There are different costs of getting an education in different parts of the country, but it would be really close.
The same is true for health care. There are some variances. If there is an area with a dense population it is more economical to provide health care to that population. If there is a larger area with the same population it costs a little a more. There could be a small adjustment for a sparse population.
If we talk about a sparse population, I do not think that Quebec is more sparsely populated than any other province in the country. We have more densely populated areas in the south of my province and in all provinces. When we get away from the south there are sparsely populated areas where we have the costs of medical helicopters and so on.
Speaking specifically to this amendment, I think the House of Commons should be against it. If I may be so bold, I am going to appeal to the members of the Bloc who represent their ridings and constituents to consider voting against this amendment, in the interest of fairness, in the interest of getting along with each other in our country. Rather, let us look at budget implementation which gives fairness on a per capita basis.
I would also like to say that while they want to amend this bill because their actual contributions are going down, that is a tacit recognition that their per capita contribution from the federal government is higher. If we move to an equal per capita rate and theirs goes down, logically they have admitted that theirs is too high in comparison to other Canadians.
I would also point out that in the same budget, but in a different bill, we implemented the matters of the transfers to the provinces through the transfer payments. In that particular instance Quebec is getting a great deal more money, while the transfers to provinces like Manitoba are being reduced, and we did not see those members proposing amendments to change that.