Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today in reply to budget 2000. I start by taking issue with some of the things my hon. friend across the way has just said. It really goes to the point of what I wanted to say.
I simply have to point out that this budget is remarkable but not for good reasons. It is remarkable in two ways: one for what it says which simply is not true and in another sense for what it does not say but is critical to maintaining or increasing public confidence in government.
Just a minute ago we were having a discussion about the $58 billion tax cut. We all saw the headlines. The government deserves top marks for the PR it has generated in anticipation of the budget. It has been very good for it.
What will happen, and this is really where I want to go with this, is that in a year's time when Canadians sit down to take a look at their paystubs and figure out what the impact of these big tax cuts are on them, they will be very disappointed. One of the reasons they will be so disappointed is because of answers like the one we just got from my colleague across the way.
It was an empty answer. I asked him very clearly what would be the impact on people's disposable income when they have to pay out the CPP taxes against the alleged tax relief the government would deliver. He then went into a long dissertation about CPP being off budget, being different, and all that sort of thing. The people do not care. They are not interested in all those technical arguments, I say to my friend. They are interested in what will be the impact on their bottom line.
When we take a look at the $58 billion and start to break it down some interesting things happen. All of a sudden we find out that the $58 billion tax cut people are so eagerly anticipating is a chimera. It is not really there. It is a mirage. When we pull it apart, this is what we find. First, the $58 billion tax cut, all of a sudden, because of the increase in CPP premiums over the next five years, is reduced by about $30 billion. What was $58 billion is now down to about $28 billion. That is where we are now. The $58 billion in tax relief which the government promised really becomes $28 billion over five years when we factor in the $30 billion that we will have to pay in increased CPP taxes. We should remember that this is spread over five years.
Second, about $7.5 billion of that amount is not really a tax cut at all, it is a social program called the child tax benefit. The child tax benefit works the same way as all social programs. The government taxes everyone in the country, and it does that very effectively, and then it gives the money back to some people who have children. If that constitutes a tax cut, then I guess old age security is a tax cut. I guess the guaranteed income supplement is a tax cut. The fact is, it is not a tax cut. It was put in by the government to pad its numbers and to make its tax relief look a lot bigger than it really is. The definition of a real tax cut is when money is left in people's pockets.
The third point I want to make has to do with the issue of bracket creep. I applaud the government for following the lead of this party and other parties in this place which have urged that the government quit taxing people for inflation. That is something for which we have been arguing for a long time. Bracket creep is insidious. It has hurt people. It has hammered low income Canadians. There is no question of that. We know that is the case and we are glad it is gone.
It is important that the government be completely honest with people about the impact on the government's finances, and more to the point, the finances of individuals. Bracket creep is really a scheduled tax increase for the upcoming year. If the government cancels the scheduled tax increases through bracket creep over the next five years, is that really a tax cut? Do people have more money in their pockets? Of course not. It is a bit like the bully shaking down the grade 4 kid for his lunch money. When the teacher catches the kid and says he cannot do it any more, the bully turns around and says that he is responsible for putting even more money into the kid's pocket.
Canadians will not have more money because the government has ended bracket creep, they will just not face yearly tax increases because of it. If we take that out, that is $13.5 billion. When we look at the real tax relief that is being delivered, it is about $7.5 billion over a five-year period, or about $1.5 billion a year. It works out to $107 per taxpayer. That is not exactly a lot of money. It works out to about $2 per week. We might be able to buy ourselves a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but that is about all.
We must remember that this comes on top of massive tax increases which the government has brought forward over the last six and a half years since it has been in power. At the end of the day Canadians will be paying more in taxes than when the Liberals took power.
We would never know that from reading the headline “$58 billion in tax relief”. What is the net impact? Canadians will still be paying a lot more in taxes than when the government came to power, about $700 more per family. That is shameful. Congratulations to the government. It pulled the wool over a lot of people's eyes, including some of my friends in the media, I am sad to say.
The truth is that Canadians will still be paying taxes that are far too high. I think that many Canadians will see that in their paystubs as the year progresses and some of these changes are implemented.
We cannot put groceries on the table with headlines. We cannot put more money into people's jeans with headlines, and that is what Canadians really want. They want more money. They want more groceries. They might even want to buy a pair of jeans, but they will not be able to do that with this budget because it just does not leave them nearly enough money.
We argue that instead of giving Canadians a fake break we should give them a real break. I will say a little more about that later on when I explain solution 17, the Reform Party's proposal to dramatically lower taxes for all Canadians and to ensure that middle class Canadians, whom this government is targeting, end up with real disposable income in their pockets and not just a headline which does nothing for them.
I want to touch on something which I mentioned at the outset of my remarks. There is something glaring which the government absolutely forgot to mention in this budget. My leader mentioned it earlier today, but I would like to say a few more words about it.
I want to point out something that the finance minister said in his 1995 budget speech. He said that subsidies to business impede growth. I agree with that. I just do not understand why he, as the finance minister, continues to rubber stamp all kinds of subsidies to business.
Three weeks ago the finance minister gave an interview in Ottawa and he said that government cannot pick winners but losers can pick government. Truer words were never spoken. There have been many losers who have not only picked the pockets of this government, but, by extension, those of the taxpayers of Canada. Yet the finance minister sits in his place every year and rubber stamps more cheques. They go to the human resources minister, to the Indian affairs minister, to the industry minister and to the Canadian heritage minister. Too often they are used for things which are, frankly, political slush or things which are of such low priority that they are laughable. In some cases they go to some of the wealthiest companies in the world. It makes no sense.
I want to touch on briefly, for people who have been on another planet, what has been going on in the Department of Human Resources Development. Back in January the Reform Party brought to light an audit which revealed all kinds of terrible mismanagement. We found that there was absolutely no monitoring of files on over $1 billion worth of grants and subsidies. We found that there were many cases where applications were not even submitted but grant money was given to people. We found all kinds of unbelievable things.
The interesting thing is, instead of acknowledging right away that this was a scandal and saying “We are going to bring an end to these grants and subsidies”, because of, frankly, the political corruption that follows, they said “We are going to implement a six-point plan and we will do better”.
What has happened over the last little while is that the more we have dug the worse it gets. It is spreading like a stain. Now we find that the Indian affairs minister has all kinds of intrigues going on in his riding and the police have been called in to conduct investigations in the Prime Minister's riding. There is all kinds of stuff going on. This happens at a time when the finance minister brings down a budget.
What does the finance minister do? He continues to rubber stamp the cheques. We find that there is even more money in this budget going to the human resources minister. That is unbelievable, after that record. There is no question that she should be fired.
The $1 billion is only part of it. The government spends $13.5 billion a year on grants and contributions. We were talking about health care a minute ago. The entire time that the government was cutting the heart out of health care it maintained spending for grants and contributions. It could not let down its political friends or stop funding its pet projects. No way. It would rather cut hospital beds across the country so that it could fund hotel beds in Shawinigan. It is disgraceful, but that is exactly what happened.
I want to say a word about the Liberals' assertions that this billion dollar boondoggle created 30,000 jobs. Of course when they are challenged on the numbers they cannot actually produce any evidence that it produced even one job because they did not really keep any records. It is only a billion. After all, how could they be expected to keep records.
If that is true, if they really did create 30,000 jobs, and we know they have this big surplus, then why in the world would they not clean up all of the unemployment in the country? There are 1.1 million Canadians unemployed today. Why not spend $70 billion or $100 billion? We would not have any unemployed in Canada any more. Imagine the revenues that would pour in. It would be unbelievable.
The reason they do not want to do that is because they do not believe their own arguments. They know this did not really create jobs. All it did was take money from one group of people, the taxpayers, and give it to another group of people who happened to be their friends, or in some cases wealthy corporations. Why would they do that except to curry favour and buy votes? The fact is, they do not even believe their own arguments. Otherwise they would be arguing that the amount of money should be increased dramatically.
I want to say a word about something that was left almost unmentioned in the budget. It is important and it should be addressed. A moment ago my friend, the parliamentary secretary, blew off a question from a Bloc member about the debt. Is the debt not an issue in Canada any more? We have $577 billion of debt in this country and the government has absolutely no plan.