Madam Speaker, when we hit on something they start to yelp. We have hit on something that is a continuing contradiction within the Canadian Alliance Party. Its real policy is that it wants to get rid of cash transfers altogether. It is right in the policy that the member read into the House. It wants to transfer the tax points and return to basically a kind of pre-World War II confederation.
The Leader of the Opposition spoke about the kind of Canada we had before World War II and that it was only because of the war the provinces transferred these tax points to the federal government. It was a very clear indication that the policy of the Alliance Party is to return to that pre-war situation. Sometimes we get the feeling that it wants to return to pre-war social policies as well, but that is another matter I will not get into.
I want to say to the hon. member, who is somewhat unhappy with me at the moment, that I was actually intending to get up and agree with something he said in his speech before he read that policy into the record which so contradicted his own leader. He made a good point about national standards and the fact that we do not have a way of enforcing national standards that is not open to the charge of being a political process or a political judgment.
At the time of the debate around the social union, the NDP was open, and said so in a public document, to the idea of establishing national standards by mutual agreement between the federal government and the provinces. We wanted some kind of impartial mechanism for determining whether national standards had been violated, somewhat along the lines of what the member just spoke about. The difference is that we think the cash transfers must be maintained and enhanced, and that the federal government must bring them back to where they were and beyond. In that way the government would not only have the mechanism for enforcing it, which is to say withdrawing the cash transfers, but it would have the moral authority to do so because it would be playing its full role in the partnership that was established earlier on with respect to various social programs.
The problem is not that the provinces do not have the tax points. The problem is that the federal government is not living up to its part of the bargain. If the federal government were living up to its part of the bargain and maintaining the partnership, there would be no cry on the part of the provinces for tax points because they would be getting the kind of cash that they should be getting. Instead, we do not have that situation. In spite of all the hoopla last August about the health accord, the federal government is still not putting into health care and education what they were putting in prior to the 1995 budget. This is a fact that cannot be truthfully denied by anyone.
If the federal government were willing to do that then we would have a much different situation. I think we would still have the Bloc and the Alliance calling for the conversion of cash grants to tax points because that is their vision of Confederation. In the case of the Alliance, it wants a more decentralized Confederation. I am not sure whether the Bloc Quebecois is thinking about Confederation or about Quebec, but it does want more powers for Quebec and less ability on the part of the federal government to enforce national standards because it rejects the very notion of national standards.
Having said that, I think all members can see that the NDP cannot support the Bloc motion, though we think a first ministers' meeting to discuss this would be a good idea. It is not the idea of the meeting that we are against. There is probably good reason for having a meeting. First ministers would probably like an opportunity and should have an opportunity to make the case for the federal government to more fully live up to the commitments it made years ago when it brought in medicare. At that time medicare was to be a 50:50 partnership. Canadians certainly do not have that today.
A good point was made by the Leader of the Opposition. He said that the provinces have all these responsibilities while the federal government has the tax points and is able to raise the money. The federal government should be transferring that money to the provinces to the extent that they need it to implement programs brought in by the federal government. The solution in our mind is for the federal government to do its job and do it well. It must adequately fund medicare, post-secondary education and social assistance through equalization. That is where the solution lies from the point of view of the NDP. The solution does not lie in giving up on the Canadian project, on national standards and on national social programs. The solution is not to allow the provinces to take over these programs as the Alliance and the Bloc would like to see happen.
That is the NDP view. We agree with the portion of the motion that calls for a meeting but because the motion prejudges the outcome of the meeting we cannot agree with it nor support it. If the motion proposed a meeting to discuss the problems with an open mind as to how they might be solved, that would be a different matter, but that is not the motion we have before us.
The Leader of the Opposition said that the problem was lack of trust in the federal government. I agree. Canadians, by and large, although we could not tell from the way they voted, have a lack of trust in the federal government. Regardless of the political choices they make, they know when something is wrong. They know the federal government is not putting the kind of money into health care that it used to or there would not be these problems.
I disagree with the Leader of the Opposition and his colleague when they implied that Canadians have reason to trust their provincial governments. The problem for a lot of Canadians is that they are caught between a federal government that will not adequately fund a one tier health care system and certain provincial governments that are interested in introducing a two tier health care system and a more privatized health care system. They want to introduce the private sector into the health care system even more than it is now.
Canadians face a dilemma. They must choose between a federal government that wants to starve the one tier system to death and provincial governments that want a two tier system. It is not a happy choice for Canadians. A real choice would be to have a federal government that wanted to properly fund the one tier system so that there would be no pressure for a two tier system and no province could complain that the federal government had unilaterally withdrawn from the commitments it made in the past. That would be the solution. I urge the Liberals to consider whether someday they might live up to that ideal.