Mr. Speaker, April 1 is April Fool's Day, but it is also the fifth anniversary of one of the cruelest jokes ever perpetrated on the Canadian people. It is somehow fitting that five years ago the government chose April Fool's Day to introduce the Canada health and social transfer.
In 1995 the NDP tried to warn Canadians that the CHST would lead to the erosion of federal transfers and social spending. We cautioned Canadians that the CHST was the enabling legislation for the federal government to withdraw from its obligations and duties as a strong central government.
First there was the end of the EPF, the established program funding, then we had the Canada assistance plan, then the cap on CAP, and now the CHST, the act that the National Council of Welfare calls “the most disastrous social policy initiative since the war”.
Every one of these changes has taken us one step further from having a strong central government, one step further from having strong national standards in health care, post-secondary education and social spending, and one step closer to the balkanization of Canada.