Mr. Speaker, we applauded the full indexation of tax tables, and we continue to do so, because the Bloc Quebecois has been fighting for seven years to convince this government to end this tax injustice whereby, for 14 years now, taxpayers have been paying an extra $3 billion in taxes every year. Indeed, without any announcement from the Minister of Finance about tax rate increases, the minister was collecting at least $3 billion per year.
We condemned this injustice. In 1995 we even tabled a report proposing a reform of the personal income tax system. In that report, our first recommendation to the government was the full indexation of tax tables to end this systematic robbing of taxpayers.
Seven years and $17 billion later—because the federal government's inaction has cost taxpayers $17 billion—the government finally decided to index tax tables. Let us render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Had it not been for the Bloc Quebecois, no one here would have talked about full indexation.
This year the Minister of Finance would probably have announced a $2 billion tax reduction without changing anything to the tax structure. In the end, he would have given $2 billion to taxpayers while at the same time taking back between $3 and $5 billion through the back door.
It is thanks to the Bloc Quebecois, the only party in this House to raise the issue, if this long term adjustment has been made and if, over the coming years, we will be seeing real tax reductions, not disguised ones.
Where are the tax cuts that everyone is calling for this year? There are none, or almost none. The most that the government has done is to freeze people's taxes at the same level as last year. That is it.
Next year there will be minimal tax cuts. I will give a few examples.
There will be no tax savings at all for a family of two adults and two children with an income of $20,000.
For a single income family of two adults and two children earning $35,000, the real tax saving this year will be zero.
For a single income family of two adults and two children earning $65,000, the tax saving this year will be $700—less than $60 a month.
But the lucky friends of the Minister of Finance and of all his colleagues, the folks who earn $250,000 and up, are the real winners this year. Their savings will be $4,796.43.
So much for tax relief. As usual, the Minister of Finance makes sure that these tax cuts are for those whose income is $250,000 or more this year. Next year it will not be all that different.
With full indexing, the tax cuts will happen, but mainly four or five years from now. In my opinion, those tax cuts need looking into more closely.
The Minister of Finance gave us an interesting show yesterday, but if we scratch the surface, we can see that the Minister of Finance is an expert at making things look good. However, when the time comes to take really effective measures, he will certainly not be the one to do so.
Now for agriculture. This is a particularly important sector and one which has in recent years been hit with considerable cuts in the successive budgets of the Minister of Finance, particularly the cuts to subsidies and the measures aimed at the farmers of Quebec.
After six budgets in which there have been more than proportional cuts in the federal agriculture and agri-food budget, it seems to me that it would have been a good idea for there to have been a little help this year for Quebec farmers in the form of subsidies.
This is all the more important, crucial even, because of the impasse in the WTO, where there are no longer any discussions about subsidy levels in the United States and Europe, and our international competitors receive two or three times what the agricultural producers of Quebec do.
How can there be competition against people who are being subsidized up to three times as much as we are? He ought to have restored some of the agricultural subsidies so as to enable that sector to be a front-runner on the international level, despite this inequity on the international level. He did not.
Everyone deplores this now, particularly the president of the Union des producteurs agricoles, who said that agriculture had been completely ignored in the budget. When agriculture was mentioned in the past six years, it was always to announce bad news, such as the elimination of certain benefits that had been in place until then.
I also want to mention infrastructures. There is unanimity against the minister. Again, in today's newspapers, we can see that all those who fought for a real infrastructure program to construct roads, and for other types of infrastructures, particularly municipal infrastructures, will be very disappointed. Some of them already are this morning, but those who were expecting more from the federal government will be even more disappointed.
Some claim that the opposition can say anything, that its members are not taking into account the need to achieve fiscal balance, etc. This is not true. Whenever the Bloc Quebecois has made proposals, it has always kept in mind the need for fiscal balance and sound management of public finances. The same cannot be said of the government opposite, given what is going on at the Department of Human Resources Development, including the scandal about the lost billion, the possibility of bribes here and there and the largesse toward friends.
We redid the forecasts by taking into account the evolution of the economy over the past three months and the most recent major criteria for economic forecasts.
We recalculated the Minister of Finance's surplus forecasts for the next five years and discovered that there will be not $95.5 billion in surplus, but more nearly $140 billion.
With the Minister of Finance we are used to errors in forecasting verging on 100%. Three months ago, he presented his economic statement. He forecast a surplus for 1999-00, that is, the fiscal year ending March 31, of $5 billion. Yesterday, in the budget, the surplus had reached $7.5 billion. In two months and a half, he erred by 21%.
There is worse to come. Yesterday, at the time of the budget, I took out his own department's latest financial review. In the first nine months of the current fiscal year, the surplus was already over $10.9 billion.
The Minister of Finance has a real problem. Either he does not know how to count or he does not know how to estimate or he does not know how to manage or he does not know what is happening in his own department, since the figures he gave yesterday, those of two and a half months ago and those of the same day in the financial review vary between 21% and 50%.
The problem is that the Minister of Finance manipulates figures. He is a great manipulator. I will not use any unparliamentary language, but we need only look at page 20, first column, table 1.2 of his budget plan 2000. It provides for spending in 2000-01 of $4.4 billion he committed in 1999-00. Already we have $4.4 billion that will be spent later on showing up in this year's figures.
Why does he do this? To mislead everyone. He talked about a $5 billion surplus. He realizes that the actual figure will be in excess of $12 billion. He adds $4.4 billion to this year's figures that will be spent the following year. He reduces this fiscal's real surplus of $12 billion by a corresponding amount. At the end of the year, he will crow that he was right on the mark.
It is really too bad that we are treated to this sort of sleight of hand.
He also could have brought in tax reform. That is what he did for individual taxpayers, but we encouraged him to do so for corporations. He did not follow our advice. Large corporations are carrying forward far too much in unpaid taxes. The amounts involved are not small. Year after year, profitable corporations carry forward over $45 billion in taxes they owe Revenue Canada.
I will mention just one, Bell Canada Entreprises, which has been in the news in recent days, which will acquire CTV at a cost of $2.3 billion. This is approximately what BCE owes the federal government in unpaid taxes carried forward. Another example is Bell Canada, which owes $2.1 billion. Seagram owes over $2 billion.
Seagram and BCE taken together represent enough in unpaid taxes to restore the Canada social transfer, to be able to invest in health and postsecondary education and help the poorest members of society. But the Minister of Finance does nothing.
We are keeping our eye on him for the rest of this government's term of office in order to see that he introduces this reform, that he stops arranging things to suit his little millionaire friends, that he gives a thought to the most disadvantaged and listens to people's pleas.
I move:
That the amendment be amended by adding after the words “real tax relief” the following:
“and real and immediate adjustments in the employment insurance system as well as in transfers to the provinces to fund health care, education and social assistance.”