Mr. Speaker, I am terribly sorry. I seem to have lost the hang of it, because I have not been around for six months now. I was trying to refer to the member who cannot be referred to as a backbench member, because he is in the front row, the hon. member for LaSalle—Émard. Everyone knows who I am talking about: the former Minister of Finance in the government of the hon. member for Saint-Maurice. There you go, I got it all right this time, Mr. Speaker. Thankfully, no one ever died from embarrassment.
The member in question said that there was a fiscal imbalance when one level of government has more revenues than another, and when one has less spending.
Clearly, when one government has the revenues, and the other level of government has to do the spending, you do not have to be Einstein—and I know for a fact that there are no members here with that name, so I am safe— to understand that this means that there is a fiscal imbalance.
When the hon. member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville says that there is no fiscal imbalance, it seems to me that he should redo his economics 101 course in order to understand; this is a very basic concept.
There is a consensus in Quebec on this issue. This consensus is now spreading to all the provinces. There is a huge fiscal imbalance between the federal government and the provincial and territorial governments. The federal government is collecting too much money in taxes, considering its expenditures and responsibilities. It arbitrarily made cuts and now it is reluctant to go back to the levels that existed before these cuts were made, in 1994 and 1995. This is a serious mistake.
This government is also making another big mistake, but it may be able to correct things. I am referring to the infamous parental leave. While the government is providing a child tax benefit to help poor children, if there are poor children, it means that there are poor families. If we do not help poor families, we will never achieve our objectives, even if we have measures that specifically target poor children.
Yesterday evening, I read an article saying that the United Nations recognized that, in a way, the lack of concern of rich governments was the reason why we were losing the battle against poverty. Poverty is on the rise, and there is an increasing number of poor children and families. The government came up with a parental leave that is tied to the employment insurance program, as if working women were the only ones with children.
What about all the women who do not qualify for employment insurance and who also have babies, take leave and get poorer because they do not qualify for the parental leave designed by the federal government? I wonder when the minister will understand. I wonder when the government will understand.
I have here a clipping from yesterday's paper, which reads “After the budget deficit...”. I cannot quote the article verbatim, because it refers to the Prime Minister by name. The article says that the Prime Minister “wants to eliminate social deficits”.
One way to eliminate one of the social deficits in Quebec is to change his policy on parental leave. This is parental leave that is all wrong. Nobody—well, not many people take it. I should not say nobody, because some people do. However, everyone I met who was eligible told me “Mrs. Tremblay, I cannot afford to take parental leave. I simply cannot afford to receive only 55% of my salary for a year. We would probably lose our home”.
Some people might not be able to keep up with the mortgage payments on their house because their income has dropped. This government has to get it into its head that this parental leave is not good enough. If the Prime Minister really wants to do something, he should look at parental leave.
Another thing he should look at is employment insurance for seasonal workers. It is not the workers who are seasonal, but the jobs. It is the work that is seasonal. If the minister could also understand this—I do not think it is a difficult thing to understand—that it is our work which is seasonal, appropriate measures will be taken and there will be an end to the discrimination against so-called seasonal workers.
There is another consensus in Quebec which the government is doing absolutely nothing about, and when we hear the answers from the Minister for International Trade, we could die laughing, if something this terrible were funny. I am talking about softwood lumber. How many times have we won our case before the WTO tribunal? How many times have our businesses been cheated?
Before my leave, I myself rose in the House to ask the minister to do something about the problem, to tell him that it was urgent, that the agreement was about to expire. The problem is still not sorted out. The deal he cut is even worse than what we had before.
I see that my time is up. I had much more to say and I hope that we will have a chance to come back to this in other debates.