Mr. Speaker, I listened with intent to the speech from my colleague from the Bloc. He is not my colleague in the same party, but he is a parliamentary colleague.
I noted he said in one place that Alberta and Ontario did not like equalization. I would like to correct that because I think we do like it. It is in our Constitution. My party at least has a policy that states it approves of and supports the principle of equalization. It is not only in our country's interest, it is in the interest of each province, not only those who receive equalization payments but also those who contribute to them.
I am from Alberta. Under the equalization formula, it receives zero, but I am not unhappy with that because I think that it is good for Canadians to live in the province of their choice. I was born in Saskatchewan and I had to move to Alberta to pursue my career. People should be free to move from province to province, but most of us like to stay in the province in which we were born and live there.
If we did not have equalization, we would either have excessive taxes in some provinces and lower taxes in others or we would have a wide disparity between the level of services provided to the people by their governments.
I would like to correct that. I think he said it just in passing. We do support the principle of equalization, but we want to make it more fair.
The other thing that I want to point out is with respect to the numbers the Bloc members keep using, and the previous speaker drew attention to this as well. They have said that per capita Quebec does not get as much. The math just does not add up.
The latest numbers I have on my computer, and unfortunately I did not update them, are from 1998. At that time Quebec had around 24% of the country's population, but that same year it got 45% of the equalization payments. Therefore, per capita I believe it is somewhat ahead of the game.
I wish members would look accurately at the numbers. I pulled mine right off the public accounts. These are the actual numbers. I wish Bloc members would be a little more precise in the way they use mathematics and statistics, because it is my honest belief, based on what I have read and studied, that they have been net beneficiaries of the equalization program. We welcome them to it, but I wish they would perhaps be a little more accurate in their evaluation of it.
I am not begging them to say thanks a lot. I am saying that we should be realistic in what it means to be part of the family of Canadian provinces.