Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased today to have an opportunity to participate in the debate on Bill C-24, an act to amend the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts that are impacted by the changes in the fiscal arrangements act.
All members of the House are aware that this is a bill that received first reading in late November. It essentially reflects the new equalization and territorial funding formula framework that was agreed to by the first ministers in late October.
I have been listening to the debate so far and there is no question that there is a certain amount of acrimony and a certain amount of frustration being expressed on behalf of a great many Canadians, not because of the provisions of the bill before the House but because of the context in which this bill is being introduced.
A tremendously acrimonious environment has been created by the tremendous hardship that was imposed by the massive unilateral measures, the massive cuts that were introduced by the Martin budgets of 1996 as well as those that followed.
Everyone knows it was a big job to get us back on a more constructive course. It is important, as we get into this debate, that we remind ourselves that equalization payments are not a handout from one province to another. Often that is the sense that is created. There is a sense that it is the wealthy provinces that give money to the have not provinces, either cheerfully or reluctantly and sometimes it is expressed as reluctant.
That is not what is meant by equalization payments. It is important for us to remind ourselves of that. Equalization payments are from taxes that are paid by people in all parts of Canada, not a payment from richer to poorer provinces. We are committed to the important concept that we should have equality of access to the important programs and services that make up the quality of life. It is to ensure that we have a floor below which Canadians cannot fall, given the immense resources of this nation as a whole. It is important that we think of it in those terms.
It is truly what creates a situation in this country where we do not have, or we have no excuse for having, the kind of growing gaps between haves and have nots that we have seen in recent years as a result of the massive unilateral cuts that were imposed in transfer payments and then the arbitrary cap that was set on equalization payments.
I had the privilege in the early nineties of being at the Constitution table. Some would say it was a questionable privilege because it was a very dragged out process, to say the least. However, at that table, one of the things that was established was that the equalization formula should in fact become part of our constitutional framework. It is extremely important that it now exists.
It would be easy to spend the short time available to go on at great length about the immense damage done as a result of the massive unilateral cuts at the federal level, the damage done to our health care system and education system. The cost of that is being borne more and more and being heaped onto the shoulders of our post-secondary education students.
It would be easy to dwell on what a setback this was for environmental remediation and environmental protection measures for public transit, in particular, the advancement of the cities agenda. The federal government turned its back on promising a national child care program and then said that it could not be afforded for now, even though Canada reached a level of 3% growth within a couple of years of the Liberal government taking office and it could indeed have been afforded.
I want to take a few minutes this afternoon to focus on a couple of positive developments that I see across the country and in particular in my own riding, which I think is typical of many of the areas that have been so hard hit by the federal arbitrariness in the cuts and constraints applied to our equalization payments and transfer payments.
I speak directly about a community consultation this weekend. Basically a chamber of commerce exercise has been conducted over the last couple of years addressing the whole question of the economic potential, in this case focused on what is called HRM. I have to say honestly, I am delighted to be the member of Parliament for Halifax, but to live in a city which now calls itself HRM and not Halifax I think raises the question of how a city called HRM can actually have a soul, because it is just such a nebulous, meaningless notion.
Looking at the greater Halifax-Dartmouth area and all that includes, there has been a wide consultation process conducted to look at the future potential for growth and, one hopes, meaningful development and genuine economic progress. It is not just growth for growth's sake, because growth can be positive or negative depending on how the benefits of that growth are redistributed and how the growth is achieved. On another day we will have more opportunities to talk about that.
The engagement in the community and the leadership shown by the chamber of commerce in bringing many different elements of the community together around these issues helps to focus on not just how much damage has been done as a result of the massive unilateral cuts of the federal government starting in the mid-1990s, but also to focus now on some of the solutions.
It is extremely instructive and I welcome this. We needed to turn the corner on this. I welcome the recognition that some of the greatest impediments to genuine economic progress in many parts of the country and in this instance on my community of Halifax have been the major erosion of funding to things as critically important as education.
It was highlighted over the weekend that we need to be very careful not to lose sight of the fact that the tremendous burden of debt heaped on our post-secondary education students sadly has also been mirrored and paralleled by a serious erosion, at least in the Nova Scotia context, of the quality of our public education system from primary through to grade 12. We have a repair job to do here. We know how incredibly important education is to the future economic growth of our communities and the future genuine progress of our communities.
In supporting the bill that is before the House, we acknowledge that this is a step forward from what we have experienced, the harsh effects of the inadequacy of the formulas. It is not perfect, but it is an improvement. It has been arrived at through the agreement reached with all provincial premiers.
What is now important is that we make sure the lessons of the past are acted upon, with the government turning the corner on its treatment of equalization and transfer payments. We need to make sure that we repair the damage done to the education and health care systems.
We are getting there. Important steps have been taken in that direction. The same kind of pan-Canadian context provided by the Canada Health Act is what is needed with respect to education as well, something that has standards and enforceability mechanisms. That work remains to be done. The bill before us with respect to fiscal arrangements does not get us to where we need to be in that regard.
It was very encouraging over the weekend at the economic potential consultation wrap-up held in Halifax when it was acknowledged that there is a critical central role for arts and culture. There is an economic impact of arts and culture on community. We must recognize that it is the kind of creativity which is stimulated by having a very solid commitment to funding of arts and culture that will allow us to make the kind of judgments that are needed and come up with creative solutions that are desperately needed in this very complex challenging world in which we live.
There are similar considerations with respect to the erosion of our public transportation system, and that applies especially to public transit in the urban context, but also more regionally. Tremendous damage has been done by the massive cuts and frankly, in many cases the blind embracing of purely market driven solutions with respect to an area such as transportation. It clearly does not work for the less prosperous areas and the less populous areas in the country. That certainly is the case for the Atlantic region in general and certainly for my own province of Nova Scotia.
It is important for us to recognize that a lot of damage has been done. Even in instances where it was clear that the government's cutting and slashing was going to heap burdens on the most vulnerable citizens, the government was not prepared to back off, even after it began to introduce surplus after surplus. After seven straight years of surplus budgets the government continued to resist repairing the damage and making the changes needed in the fiscal framework that would enable us to get on to a path of rebuilding.
One cannot speak about this subject without recognizing the massive gutting of employment insurance benefits to create a false impression about the size of the surplus. This has yet to be repaired. It seems so easy for the Liberal members to beat on their chests and talk about the great job they have done in generating this surplus. They conveniently ignore the fact that the surpluses have been achieved by heaping the burden on those who should least likely have been asked to bear the costs of the mismanagement of the Liberal government over the last decade.
The government has conveniently ignored the fact that a big chunk of that surplus has actually been generated by taking money directly out of--and I am going to say--the mouths of children in a lot of cases. This has happened in families where members of the workforce have found themselves without employment through no fault of their own. They have contributed in good faith to the employment insurance fund over the years and have built up that surplus. Then they have found that such restrictive eligibility measures have been introduced that they simply have never been able to draw from the employment insurance fund.