Mr. Speaker, the Bloc Quebecois has been saying for a long time that this fiscal imbalance is hurting the provinces because of the reduction in transfers to the provinces. It stems from there.
The first thing the government did in 1994-95 was to cut drastically the Canada health and social transfer. We know this transfer allows the provinces to provide services, since they are responsible for managing the services that are offered to the public. In Quebec, it is the national assembly that manages health care and education, as well as social services.
The federal government has slashed the Canada nealth and social transfer since 1993-94. And it is no joke: it has gone down from 20¢ to 14¢. It does not make any sense.
There is a lot of talk these days about the aging population, about expensive new technologies and expensive drugs. The needs are increasing in the provinces. The federal government has the responsibility to support the provinces through the Canada social transfer. Now is not the time to slash transfers, especially in light of the fact that the federal government has been closing its books at the end of each fiscal year with billions of dollars in surplus that come from personal income tax, the GST and other taxes. The new airport security tax that has just been introduced will come into effect on April 1. Not only will it pay for the measures that will be put in place, but it will generate more revenues.
The federal government takes all that in and ends up with a $17 billion surplus, while the provinces are struggling to maintain existing social programs. The federal government, whose mandate is to reapportion the tax base, does not care about that. It even laughs in the face of the provinces and, to have a foot in the door, it offers them little goodies.
That is why it established the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. It is a way for this centralizing government to get what it wants, which is to take away the provinces' jurisdictions. That is what it wants even though it plays us for fools and thinks that we do not know what it is up to. It wants to have control over everything and uses all possible means to get it; it is starving the provinces. This is also what is behind the social union. It is a good thing that Quebec did not ratify it. We can see today what the government is doing with that.
We heard that the provinces were selling their birthright for a dime. This government has forced the provinces to sell their jurisdictions. That is what is meant by fiscal imbalance.