Madam Speaker, I appreciate the co-operation from members. I was so exorcised and frankly dismayed at the hypocrisy reflected by some of the previous comments that I was distracted from making that point at the outset. I do appreciate their co-operation.
I want to say at the outset that a fair formula for equalization is critically important to the constituents I represent, the people of Halifax. More than that it is critically important to citizens who live in and throughout the four Atlantic provinces, as well as citizens in the provinces of Quebec, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
I will go further than that. I do not believe it is only the people who are on the punishing end of the measures taken by the federal government to artificially have equalization payments who care about this issue. I think what it means to be Canadian is to subscribe to a fair equalization formula capable of establishing not just the words to express it but the reality of Canadians, regardless of where they live, being eligible for a roughly comparable level of services.
Equalization is about ensuring that we do not experience a growing gap between those who have and those who have not, as it relates to individual citizens and regions. That growing gap is very alarming and is causing real strains in the lives of people, their families, their communities and inter-regionally, as a result of the government turning its back on a fundamentally important principle.
Let me say very clearly at the outset the position of the New Democratic Party. It has been championed by a succession of New Democrats in the House, but none more effectively than my colleague, the finance critic from Regina—Qu'Appelle. He has been a faithful, inveterate champion of the importance of a fair equalization formula throughout the 30 years he has served the constituents of his own community and all Canadians who believe in the fairness a proper equalization formula represents.
At the very heart of our concerns about the bill before us and the inadequacy of the amendments is the fact that there is an artificial limit on equalization payments that will be reinstated in the year that is now upon us. As far as we and fair minded Canadians are concerned the cap on equalization must be removed.
I guess the government needs to be reminded at every opportunity that Canada has a constitutional obligation to ensure that provincial transfers are set high enough so that all provinces have the capacity to serve the public interest and to ensure that the basic needs of the residents of all provinces are met. For historical, legal and moral reasons this must be the principal goal of the equalization plan.
The plan as it stands fails to achieve the goal. I listened to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance say what the bill is about. It would ensure that the objective of roughly comparable levels and quality of services is achieved for all Canadians. If the cap on equalization payments is reimposed then it is absolutely clear the objective he stated in the House this morning simply cannot be met. Not only can it not be met. It will not be met. The government has turned a deaf ear to the pleadings that the cap not happen.
One cannot possibly imagine that the parliamentary secretary, the finance minister and the Prime Minister do not understand that objective cannot be met. One has to go further and say that they do not intend that constitutional obligation and that important principle to be met by the provisions in the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act amendments before us.
We know the Liberal government has absolutely decimated fiscal transfers to the provinces, undermining the national interest and in the process destroying the very moral authority needed by a federal government that professes to believe in the concept of roughly comparable services being available to all citizens of Canada regardless of where they happen to live and regardless of the state of finances of their respective provinces.
Then the federal government shows great surprise and is actually puffed up with indignation when a province like Alberta introduces bill 11, when a province like Ontario is as bold as we saw the premier being this week when he talked about going further into privatization and turning our health care system into a commercialized operation, one based on the notion that profits will be extracted from people's illnesses and misfortunes.
We cannot repeat too often the fundamental flaw in the fiscal arrangements act that is now before us. Bill C-18 seeks to remove from the fiscal year starting April 1, 1999, the ceiling that would otherwise apply to equalization payments, but the bill then reimposes that ceiling for the year 2000-01.
Surely it is worthy of note that all 10 Canadian provinces are in agreement. They want the federal government to remove the cap on equalization. Even the provinces that are in the have category, that are the net contributors to equalization payments, agree that it does damage to the fabric of the nation and that it erodes the quality and comparability of services to people in the have not provinces to artificially impose and maintain that limit on equalization payments.
The Atlantic provinces and Manitoba asked the government very effectively before the finance committee last week that if it will not make a commitment to remove the cap, to remove it permanently, it should at the very least rebase the ceiling on equalization to the higher level of $10.79 billion.
Finance ministers from all five of those provinces made their case this week before the finance committee and did so very effectively. However the government, the Minister of Finance and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance have turned a deaf ear to the concerns of those finance ministers and the people whom their governments represent.
The minister of finance for Manitoba stated it very well. He said that the equalization program should be allowed to do its job by lifting the ceiling as a preferred point. As an accommodation it should be rebased to the level to which it grew in the year the ceiling was lifted, 1999-2000. That would offer much needed support to the provinces that are still reeling from massive unilateral cuts to transfer payments by the government.
The government must use a 10 province standard to ensure a truly equalized equalization formula and, more important, the concrete outcome the equalization formula is intended to achieve. The federal government has so drastically cut CHST transfers to the provinces, strangling their ability to adequately fund health care and post-secondary education, that when Harris and Klein started down their privatization track the federal government was not in a very strong position to defend the Canada Health Act or did not seem to want to.
One does not have to be very insightful, and I do not think it is cynical, to suggest that in the process of weakening the commitment to comparable services across the country and of engaging in massive cuts to transfer payments that enable provinces to deliver health care, education and fundamentally important social welfare services the people need, the federal government knew it was destroying public confidence, absolutely eroding public confidence in the important public services Canadians depend upon.
Further, the federal government must immediately restore funding to CHST transfers to the provinces. It has invested a pittance into infrastructure and transportation, causing delays of much needed essential repairs to transportation infrastructure in every part of the country.
The government has abandoned its federal constitutional responsibilities for far too long. It should recommit on every front to ensuring that provincial governments achieve the goal enshrined in the constitution that goes to the very heart of the kind of country we say we want to be, the kind of country that with considerable success we were becoming. That was recognized by others around the world.
If we fail to do that we are not only letting down the people who need and depend upon those services, but we are striking a blow to the very concept of Canada which means so much to people in this country and people around the world.
The government's actions speak to an attitude of indifference toward the real needs of Canadians. It is not too unduly harsh to say that the government is arrogant and out of touch with the real needs of Canadians, particularly in the less advantaged provinces.
When the government introduced its throne speech it completely failed to address the fundamental issue of ensuring some semblance of comparability of services to every citizen in Canada. At the time I raised a question on recognition and commitment from the government to deal with the problem posed by an unfair equalization formula, one that makes it virtually impossible for governments in have not provinces to make progress because of the excessive clawback of resources from offshore development, for example, that may now give an opportunity to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to move out of the have not status.
On every front it seems that the government, not the people of Canada, has given up on the Canadian dream. When a government stops dreaming, when a government abandons something as fundamentally important and changes an equalization formula to artificially restrict the capability of provincial governments to deliver on that dream, it should examine what it is all about.
There are many elements to the battle to try to get the Canadian government once again to believe in that fundamentally important dream. I can speak from a Halifax perspective of what it means to the citizens of my community to have the federal government quite cynically make a decision to remove the cap for one year and then turn around and reimpose it.
I can speak about it from the point of view of what it means for citizens not to be able to get the health care they require, from the point of view of students unable to afford an education, or from the point of view of what it does to the lives of students if they go into debt to the level necessary to gain a post-secondary education these days. In a very real way it becomes a double jeopardy situation for the government to artificially cap equalization payments and to pull back on transfer payments. It becomes an out migration policy in effect of people going to the wealthier parts of Canada from the have not regions.
That is not the kind of Canada we believe in and not the kind of Canada we as parliamentarians are supposed to be here building together.
In conclusion, I implore the government to consider that what is a very small matter in terms of the text of this fiscal arrangements bill is a very fundamental matter that will have massive consequences if equalization payments are to be artificially constrained by the continuation of the cap in the year 2001. I ask the government to reverse itself and agree that the artificial cap should be removed.