Mr. Speaker, there are days when it is a pleasure to rise in the House to say some positive things about what is happening but, unfortunately, Bill C-28, the implementation of the budget, is not one of those times. In fact this budget is an HEC budget. It is hypocritical, embarrassing and confiscatory.
Why do I use those descriptors? First, I believe the budget denies the principle of being proud to be a Canadian. It is hypocritical because it pretends to do something which it really fails to do. I believe the Minister of Finance said that Canada needs to become a country that is competitive, that will compete successfully with other nations in the world.
Not long ago the executive director of the Business Council on National Issues published a book together with a fellow by the name of Stewart-Paterson. They did some very interesting things in the book. They showed very clearly that Canadians were not competitive in the global economy and that if we were to be competitive in the future, that we had better have a good look at that.
Let me give the House one particular illustration that I found most dramatic. It compares the competitive advantage of a Canadian earning $65,000 and an American earning $65,000. I will give some numbers and those people who are listening will find those numbers interesting. A Canadian earns $65,000 and we will assume he or she has a dividend income of $2,000. On $65,000 and a $2,000 dividend income the Canadian would pay a tax of $498 on the dividend. On a salary of $65,000 the Canadian would pay $15,160, leaving a discretionary income of $51,342 out of $65,000 plus $2,000 dividend income.
Let us compare that to the American. This is based on the recently proposed budget of President Bush. A U.S. taxpayer earning an income of $65,000 plus a $2,000 dividend income would pay zero dollars on the dividend income and on the $65,000 salary would pay $3,795, leaving a discretionary income of $63,200.
Let us compare those numbers now. The comparison of discretionary income with $65,000 and a $2,000 dividend income would be $51,342 for the Canadian. The American's income would be $63,205, so the American taxpayer would have $11,863 more than the Canadian. Even if we were to double the tax for the American taxpayer, which would then bring it up to $7,590, it would still not be comparable with the $15,000 the Canadian is taxed.
To say that we are making Canadian workers more competitive is simply false. It is hypocritical to make a statement that we are helping people in Canada to become competitive. Is it any wonder that some of our best educated, best trained and most skilled people are leaving Canada for the United States? We can give lots of examples of this.
The point here is that the finance minister said that he would do one thing but in fact he created a budget that does the opposite. Not only is it bad, it is also embarrassing.
My hon. colleague recently talked about how little money there was in the budget for the Department of National Defence, which is $800 million. The Auditor General said that what was needed was $2 billion. That is almost three times as much as what is in the budget. The Prime Minister built on this and said that we were not in the war. Yesterday, however, the Minister of National Defence admitted that we have soldiers at the front and ships in the gulf. This creates the ironic situation of having our armed personnel participating in a war that the government is not supporting. This is embarrassing.
I found out something last weekend that hit very close to home and it involved Canadians who were visiting Florida. On their way down to Florida they stopped at a service station to buy some gas. The service station attendant noticed their Canadian licence plate and told them they had better move on. He said that there was no gas for sale to Canadians at his station. I am sure that is not a common occurrence but it did happen, and that is embarrassing. What do we do in situations like that? How can we support a budget that does those kinds of things to Canadians?
I want to add a third description to the budget. It is a confiscatory budget. It confiscates money. We have already compared a U.S. taxpayer with a Canadian taxpayer. However the far more serious issue, because the government does not have a plan to repay the debt in this budget, is that it is not only confiscating our income, it is confiscating the potential income of our children and our grandchildren. That is where I draw the line.
What is happening here is that there are some expenditures included in the budget for which we are not prepared to pay. Somebody might say that the budget is balanced right now and that there is even a bit of a surplus. Yes, that is true, but that is because the government listened to what we had to say. The point is that the present debt is cutting into our current revenues in a major way. Service costs on the budget run around $40 billion to $42 billion a year. Imagine what would happen to the health care budget if we did not have to pay out the $42 billion in service charges. That would be a great advantage. The government is taking money that it should not take and it has no plan to pay the debt.
Some people might say that this is a prudent budget; $3 billion worth of prudence, and it is in the budget for emergencies. If there is an emergency, the money will go toward it. If there is no emergency, the money will be used to pay down the debt. Is that the way a prudent house manages its mortgage payments? Is that the way a prudent business manages its loan payments? No. They carefully analyze the situation and make sure money is available to pay down their debt on a systematic and regular basis.
The budget is called a prudence factor but it is not a prudence factor at all. It does not protect future citizens from paying the services charges on the debt. It bothers me a lot that there is no plan to pay down the debt.
I would now like to speak to the budget in a broader sense. The budget was supposed to be a budget that would help us to be more responsible in expending funds. What has the government done? It has increased spending by some $17.4 billion. It tells us that we will receive great tax breaks. It tells us that we will receive $2.3 billion worth of tax cuts. That is a net increase of $15 billion. Is that telling the truth about what is happening?
We also need to talk about health care. This is an example of another hypocritical position taken by the government. The government has said “Look at all the money we are putting into health care”. It is true, it is putting a lot more money into health care. In fact, it brought it up to the point of where it was at in 1993-94 when it took all the money out. However there is no accounting for the inflationary increase during that time. The government has misled Canadians into thinking it did a great and wonderful thing. It has done nothing of the kind. It simply brought the figure back to where it was and even shortchanged it by the inflation that is involved.
The time has come for us to be very clear and to recognize that this budget is hypocritical, it is an embarrassment to Canadians and it confiscates the income of future generations.