Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in today's debate. It will not come as a surprise that we stand against the budget implementation bill. I have already expressed my concerns about the budget, just like the Bloc Quebecois has. We rejected the budget the very night it was tabled. Now that we have the budget implementation bill before us, we have to be consistent with our initial position and reject it, probably for the same reasons I mentioned when we were dealing with the budget.
I could raise a lot of issues, but we only have 10 minutes at this stage of the debate. Therefore, I will focus on four major issues, beginning with health care.
Health is a big concern for Quebeckers and Canadians alike. With everything that is going on, Quebec feels stifled. Everybody recognizes and acknowledges that health care is a provincial jurisdiction. At first, the government told us, “We will help you because we feel we have a role to play”. At the time, the federal government was providing the provinces with 50% of the cost of health care services, which means that 50¢ on every dollar invested was compensated by Ottawa through transfers. The government of Quebec could very well manage with that, as the rest of the provinces.
Unfortunately, as time went by, the federal government withdrew from health care, but started interfering more and more with the established conditions the provinces have to meet to get the money.
No later than last year we were at 16%, which means that the federal share of health care spending went from 50¢ to 16¢ on every dollar. The Romanow commission did a very good study of health care. We agree with it on some things, and less on others. However, regarding the federal participation, it recommended that it be increased from 16¢ to 25¢. I do not have to tell you that Roy Romanow is not a sovereignist, but a great federalist. The fact that he says there are problems is very significant.
Unfortunately, what happened with this budget is that we have gone from 16¢ to 14.5¢. The Romanow commission said that we were at 16¢ and that that had to be increased to 25¢. However, the finance minister came forward with a budget bringing it down to 14.5¢. For every dollar invested in health care only 14.5¢ will come from the federal government. We are heading in the wrong direction, and the provinces and Quebec are being strangled.
There is another point I want to stress, namely employment insurance. Employment insurance concerns people who are vulnerable. People who find themselves unemployed, who are told they no longer have a job, have a safety net they can rely on, namely the employment insurance plan. Unfortunately since the Liberals came to power in 1993 there have been several reforms and every single one of them has tightened up eligibility to employment insurance for those who lose their job.
Not only did they tighten up eligibility, but conditions as a whole have been restricted, reduced and rolled back. There was a time when unemployed workers were entitled to 60% of their salary. Now, it is only 55%. They were entitled to a certain number of weeks of benefits, but that number has now been lowered.
The federal government has accumulated a $45 billion slush fund since it introduced all these reforms. That money has not been used to help people or as a safety net. In fact, due to this tightening up of eligibility criteria, only four persons out of ten are now eligible to employment insurance whereas in the past seven or even eight were.
Thus, the government found itself with a $45 billion pot of money and paid its debt with this amount. Consequently, employers and employees are paying for the government's debt. This is a little unfair, because the government used to put 25% of the money into the employment insurance fund. It has withdrawn and no longer pays one cent. The only thing it does is legislate reforms that ensure there are more and more restrictions for people.
There is also another aspect relating to this issue. The CTC has conducted a study in each riding. In the riding of Saint-Jean, we have been losing $33 million a year since 1993.
It goes without saying that, when people receive their EI benefits, cash this money, get a little money from the EI fund, they do not invest it in Barbados, as the Prime Minister is doing. They buy food to feed their children and their families. They pay for housing and clothing. These are not rich people; these are middle class people who do not have any income.
Some have contributed to the EI plan their whole life, but when they go to the EI office, they are told, “We are sorry, but you do not have enough hours. You do not qualify, so you cannot have any benefits”. This causes losses in a region such as mine. It causes losses in all the regions of Canada, and the federal government is giving up to some extent, when it comes to supporting local economies.
We may say what we want, but $33 million is a lot of money in a riding such as Saint-Jean. It is too bad that these people have to rely on a service provided by the provinces, that is social welfare, where conditions are even more restrictive.
Thus, there is a major problem with the EI fund. It is the same for the guaranteed income supplement.
Six months ago, I launched a campaign to try to locate 1,100 people in Saint-Jean who were entitled to the guaranteed income supplement and whom the government kept in the dark for so many years. Through contacts and newspaper ads, we managed to find 400. Another 700 are still out there. We have just launched another campaign to find these people, because seniors are an extremely vulnerable group. They no longer have an income. They depend solely on a safety net called the old age pension. However, it is not enough for most of them. If they earn less than the amounts set out in the legislation on the guaranteed income supplement, they should be entitled to it.
The problem is that the government is not telling them they are entitled to it. It would be so easy to tell them. The government could take their income tax return from the previous year and tell them, “Oh! You did not earn sufficient income, so you automatically get the guaranteed income supplement”. But, that is not what the government is doing. People have to realize they are entitled and apply to the government for it.
This causes certain problems, because not everyone in that generation went to university. Probably 1% or 2% of that generation was able to attend university, not because they did not want to go, but because they did not have the means and their families often made them work in the family business. That is how they spent their lives.
Since the government has kept silent and ensured that these people did not receive this money, it saved $3.2 billion over eleven years. I received calls from people we located. They cried into the phone saying, “For the first time, Mr. Bachand, I will be able to give my grandchildren presents on their birthday this year”. These people built our society, and the only thanks they get today is a meagre old age pension, when they could probably earn twice as much and have a better life.
Consequently, the same thing goes for the guaranteed income supplement. There is nothing in the budget. There is nothing about the possibility of retroactivity. On the contrary, there is total silence, the Silence of the Lambs .
The fiscal imbalance issue is another matter. It is estimated that Quebec is being shortchanged to the tune of $50 million a week because of the fiscal imbalance. Studies have been commissioned on this, and they have been done by none other than Mr. Séguin, who is now Quebec's finance minister. What does the concept of fiscal imbalance mean? It means that the provinces are receiving less money. In Quebec's case, the shortfall is $2.5 billion, and that amount goes right into the federal coffers.
If only the federal government ran its business properly. But no. We have just had the sponsorship scandal, where hundreds of millions of dollars were handed over to friends of the governing party. The government has just realized that money went missing in the EI fund at one point in time, as you will recall, Mr. Speaker, and no one knew where one billion dollars had gone. I was talking about that a minute ago.
We also have a gun registry program. Initially, it was supposed to cost $2 million a year, but we are now at $2 billion, and counting. There are plenty of examples of mismanagement by this government. It is often because the government has too much money.
The focus in this budget should have been to help the middle class. Tax reductions should have been targeted to these taxpayers. They are the ones in need of help right now. But there were no tax cuts. Government members keep talking about $100 billion in tax cuts over five years. Nobody has seen the colour of that money yet.
I will conclude the same way I started, by telling you this: it should comse as no surprise that the Bloc Quebecois opposes the content of this budget. Obviously, we will oppose the implementation bill as well.