Mr. Speaker, yesterday was a great disappointment for me. The heart on my lapel is not a delayed celebration of Valentine's Day; it is for the community groups, the people working on behalf of welfare recipients, people without proper housing and others who are getting a dirty deal. A dirty deal particularly because the Minister of Finance has neglected them year after year, for seven years now, in his budget.
For some time, particularly in the last two and one-half years, the Minister of Finance has had surplus money coming out of his ears, but there has been not one measure to meet the needs of the least advantaged members of our society. Every year, an alarm is raised about the increase in poverty, in Quebec and in Canada, a cry from the heart coming particularly from community groups and the Front des assistés sociaux in particular. There is absolutely nothing in the budget to help them. There is no great source of pride to be found in discussing the budget of the Minister of Finance this morning.
From the social point of view, this budget is a total disappointment, with the possible exception of the Canadian social transfer, which is intended to fund health, post-secondary education and welfare, and which will be $2.5 billion over the next five years. That averages out at $600 million a year.
In order to re-establish the Canadian social transfer, which has been cut systematically every year since 1995, what he would have needed to announce, starting this year, is a reinvestment of $4.2 billion in the social transfer to the provinces. This would make it possible to meet the needs of those left lying on stretchers thanks to the Minister of Finance.
Instead of that, the Minister of Finance preferred using his surpluses for other purposes by ignoring the needs of Quebecers and Canadians, sick people and students, and by ignoring the broad consensus achieved at two consecutive premiers' meetings. On these occasions, the premiers asked that the Canada social transfer be restored to its original level, that is before the Minister of Finance began making deep, drastic cuts and gaining popularity, thanks to the surpluses coming out of his ears.
In that regard, the budget is a big disappointment. It is also disappointing to hear the Minister of Finance and his officials telling us, as usual, that, compared to 1993, there is more money in the social transfer for health care, post-secondary education and social assistance, and that they are taking into consideration the tax points given to the provinces, and Quebec in particular, at the end of the sixties, to correct a situation that was persisting.
That situation was the following. In response to the war effort, the federal government had borrowed the provinces' fiscal capacities, including income tax. The provinces, including Quebec, were given back through tax points the tax field borrowed from them in support of the war effort.
Tax points have been in use for a long time. They do not take anything away from Ottawa and they are not even recorded as a type of expenditure or revenue for the federal government. It is like asking the former owner of a house sold thirty years ago to fix the roof. In other words, it is no longer any of the Minister of Finance's business. It is not federal money but old tax points given away over thirty years ago. It is none of his business.
What should grab our attention is the government's cuts to cash transfers. By 2003 it will have cut around $31 billion in transfers to the provinces for health, post-secondary education and social assistance.
These are not small amounts of money. This year alone, the Government of Quebec is out $1.7 billion. This money could be used to hire 3,500 additional doctors and 4,500 nurses this year, as well as to invest $350 million in the education sector and over $350 million, close to $400 million, in income security. This is an extra $40 a month in the pockets of recipients, which they are not getting.
We have people coming into our riding offices who are short $40 at the end of the month to make ends meet, to be able to feed themselves and their children. The Minister of Finance has decided to turn a deaf ear to the pleas from those on social assistance and the least well off members of society.
My second big disappointment concerned employment insurance. We thought, or we would have thought, that the Minister of Finance had his heart in the right place. But it is now clear that the Minister of Finance is heartless because six out of ten unemployed individuals do not qualify for EI and are left on the sidelines.
The Minister of Finance announced yesterday that even over five years and despite the fantastic surpluses in the employment insurance fund, which the government has not contributed to for a number of years, there will be no improvement in the employment insurance fund.
Yesterday, I heard the messengers of the Minister of Finance playing the “there will be parental leave, a great improvement” tape again. They said the parental leave provided by the government from the employment insurance fund will be twice as long as what the Government of Quebec planned to offer pregnant women.
Yesterday, the Minister of Finance had management, unions and communities in Quebec saying unanimously that the measure proposed was so much showing off, for appearance purposes, an improvement on an empty measure.
In fact, half of the pregnant women will not benefit from this plan, because they will not be employment insurance claimants. Some will be unable to take advantage of this, because the plan covers only 55% of these women's salary. Drawing only 55% of one's salary over a year makes no sense. Even though the length of the program proposed by the Government of Quebec was shorter, the benefits were greater, as was the coverage. In fact, the Government of Quebec intended to provide coverage for self-employed women as well.
Everyone knows that this government is in its pre-election mode, that it is trying to win people over, trying to present people with window dressing. On the surface, that is all very well, but when thinking people scratch beneath that surface—and I think that the intelligence of Quebecers must not be underestimated—they find there is nothing underneath.
The government's treatment of social housing is a real scandal. That sector has had an injection of $58 million. Everyone in Quebec and in the rest of Canada has said that, right now, the minimum investment required Canada-wide to create a minimum of new social housing in order to partially meet the requirements of the most disadvantaged in our communities, who are paying more than 50% of their income for accommodation, would be $1.7 billion, not $58 million. That would not be enough to build even half an entranceway. This is truly scandalous. The Minister of Finance has not heeded the heartfelt cries of those in need.
I turn now to the tax cuts. The Minister of Finance is a great showman, and it is not the first time he puts on a show for us but closer scrutiny reveals it is all smoke and mirrors.
We do, however, have the honesty to applaud the full indexation of the tax tables and the tax structure in general. Why? Because we have been pestering the government, pressuring it, for seven years—