The hon. member points out that he had an extra child as well. I may have to alter the story.
The social democratic point of view, the way Jesse Jackson would have recommended to deal with the problem, is to challenge the whole concept that there are only three pork chops. In the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world, neither I nor he can be convinced that we cannot afford to provide for the basic needs of Canadians to enjoy decent national standards. It just simply is not on. It is a myth. It is an illusion. It is a cruel hoax. It has been foisted upon the Canadian people for far too many years now.
We know the wealth is there. We have just seen how the Liberal government chose to deal with $100 billion worth of surplus. It chose to squander the money on tax cuts, in my opinion. People are always trying to accuse the NDP of seeking to squander things on social programs, of squandering money on poor children, of squandering money on better health care and education. I put it to the House that the Liberal government has just squandered $100 billion of our surplus on tax cuts to people who probably need it the least.
When we look at the 1% drop in corporate tax cuts, from 17% to 16%, what has corporate Canada really done lately to deserve a reward like that? Just that one seemingly innocuous percentage point amounts to $75 million to $100 million a year. Whether it makes Canada more competitive, as our right wing colleagues would have us believe, I do not really know, but I can tell the House that the money could have been better spent.
When we are dealing with an era of record surpluses, it is galling that we are dealing with an era of record low transfer payments to the provinces. I come from a province that has benefited from and still enjoys the relationship that we have in terms of being able to use the money transferred to us in these federal-provincial financial relationships. Coming from the province of Manitoba, I can speak from personal experience as to how worrisome it has been to witness what seems to be a deliberate policy shift, a going away from any real commitment to a strong central government, a strong national presence and a strong influence in national standards across the country.
There is a graphic representation of what I believe is that unwillingness or inability to get involved with national standards, and that is watching the government's financial commitment diminish from year to year. It is withdrawing, pulling out, abrogating itself from any responsibility for what happens in the regions now.
Perhaps a federal government without vision finds the problems just far too tough in some of the regions. It just cannot cope with the reality of Cape Breton or inner city Winnipeg. It is simply turning its back on those areas and saying “You guys have a real serious problem, and if you are ever in Ottawa, look us up and we will buy you lunch”. That is certainly how a lot of people out in the regions feel about what appears to be—and I do not think it is paranoid to assume this—a lack of willingness to really try to thread the country together and keep the country together with a strong fiscal interprovincial relationship.
There was a time when fiercely proud Canadian nationalists occupied those benches over there. They were people who had a real vision for their country. I can name some senior Liberals in the old days who I think had a real commitment to keeping Canada together and to using the constitutional relationship as an instrument for building a strong Canada.
Now one would think they are trying to dismantle the country piece by piece if what they are doing from a financial point of view can be taken as an indication of what their true intentions and wishes are. There are people over there who are dismantling the country brick by brick and dismantling the faith, hope and optimism that Canadians have in a strong central government. Sometimes it worries me. Maybe they are just too busy, but I do not think the people across the way give any thought to how fragile the federation of Canada is as we speak and at this point in our history.
If we love this country and care about keeping it together, one would think we would be pulling out all the stops, more than ever in our history, to make the federation work. It is a federation that I feel strongly about. We in the provinces will work for it. God knows we sacrifice and compromise on a day to day basis to try to make the federation work. We are not seeing the same commitment from the federal government, at least as it translates into a fiscal strategy, in a period of time when it has record surpluses, the largest ever, and also has the lowest ever ceiling of transfer payments. What kind of commitment is that?
I am sure that the next speaker on the Liberal side will stand up and say that the government does not give as much money any more, but it gives all the tax points. It is off-loading the burden of taxation onto the provinces and cutting, hacking and slashing the flow of real dollars, the real hard cash that we actually need for programs.
Speaking on behalf of the people of the riding of Winnipeg Centre and the people of Manitoba, let me say that we have serious reservations about the state of the current fiscal relationship with the federal government. We draw the Canadian people's attention to the fact that it is an era of record surpluses and that those surpluses came from cuts to program funding, by and large, and from surpluses in the EI system after that. They also came from gouging the surplus out of the public sector workers pension plan. That is where those surpluses came from, so when tiny bits are incrementally released into the provinces again I do not think the Canadian public should be fooled into thinking that it is some grand largesse on behalf of the ruling Liberal Party.
Canadians should be going into this with their eyes open and should be very aware that we are not getting all we could from the federal government. If the federal government had a stronger vision of how to build Canada into a truly strong national state again, it would pay more attention to the regional frustrations that stem from the inadequate commitment to funding the CHST and the fiscal relationship.
When the CHST first came along, the national council on welfare called it the most devastating thing to happen since the 1930s. It could predict the beginning of the end as we moved from established program funding to CAP, to the cap on CAP and to the CHST. It could sense in the wind what was happening there, which was that the feds were pulling out of funding these types of programs. Some would say it was so they could give tax cuts to their friends. Others would say that the feds simply did not want the burden of responsibility any more. That is when we started to see this downward trend in terms of the overall relationship.
I have read some of the figures. The most telling figure and the best example to use is the fact that in funding our health care the feds now pay for approximately 13.5% and the provinces struggle to pay the other 87%. It is a growing challenge and has gone beyond being a fiscal problem. It is now a problem for the health and well-being of Canadians.
I could probably go on about this particular issue as it is a topic close to my heart, but I will close with these remarks.