Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst for his particularly relevant question and remarks.
The government has grown wealthy on the backs of the most disadvantaged. It has always been so. We are talking about the employment insurance fund. For six years the fund has had significant surpluses contributed by workers and employers. The federal government does not contribute a cent to it any more.
Yet it has the gall, on page 101 of its budget document, through its Minister of Finance, to liken cuts to employment insurance contributions to tax cuts. It does not contribute one red cent to the employment insurance fund and it considers cuts to employer and employee contributions to be the equivalent of cuts in income tax. How twisted can one get?
The member is right. By creaming off $38 billion in surpluses since 1994 the Minister of Finance has funded most of his surpluses from the surplus in the employment insurance fund.
Moreover, savage cuts were made in funding for health care, education and social assistance to the provinces. It took a first ministers meeting and the realization that the government could no longer reasonably say that it had no surplus when surpluses were arriving by the shovel full to get the government to react and repair the damage.
From one end of the country to the other, Canada's health care system was cracking while the Minister of Finance was cracking under the weight of the surpluses. Is it not shameful to wait until a few weeks before an election may be called to announce he was putting money back into health? People have been waiting for that for years. The system was cracking.
We expected an employment insurance reform because, as my colleague accurately pointed out, only 43% of unemployed workers qualify for EI benefits. Some people are on the street because of the Minister of Finance. Since a surplus of between five and seven billion dollars was generated each year for the past five years, we expected the Minister of Finance to allocate more to improving the program than the $250 million announced a few days ago by the Minister of Human Resources Development. We expected that the unemployed, the poor and the families on the street would benefit from the minister's generosity, not the millionaires. But we were wrong.
Even though the Liberals are electoral opportunists when they make people believe that there are tax reductions and so on, they cannot even manage to do so in a way that will benefit them. This budget is clearly a budget for the wealthy. It is not a budget for the middle class, the poor, the unemployed, or for young people striving to get an education. There is not any additional money for education.
This is not a budget for the poor, who are faced with the oil crisis. It is not a budget for the elderly or for the women who marched in the streets to call for special measures for them. This is unbelievable. The hon. member is right and his comments are to the point.