Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak to the budget implementation Bill C-30.
What the hon. member on the other side just said is, shall we say, questionable. He has indicated that we on this side are always against everything the government does. As a matter of fact, we have pressed very hard over the years for balanced budgets. We were the ones who first made it politically correct to even talk about stopping the endless borrowing.
Shall we say that we should praise the government for something. I will give the Liberals a reluctant nod of approval for the fact that they actually followed our advice and stopped borrowing money in order to top up the money that they collected from taxpayers in order to provide services to Canadians. We are glad the budget is balanced, absolutely. When the member says that we always criticize everything unequivocally, that just is not accurate.
Bill C-30 would implement some of the provisions of the budget that was handed down in the House in March. Some of the provisions are worth supporting and of course some we would somewhat criticize.
One of the things the bill would do is renew the equalization plan and make a few changes to it. I am sure we cannot persuade the Liberals to do this, but I would like to urge Canadians to write, phone or e-mail their members of Parliament and ask them for a copy of Bill C-30, the beginning pages that deal with equalization. If after having read these technical changes that are being made they can make heads or tails out of it, then we should recommend them for a Governor General's award, because it is a tremendously complicated and convoluted formula.
I will not waste my limited time talking about it but it talks about formulas: .016 times X1, times Y1, where X1 is the sum of two-thirds of the national per capita equalization. It goes on and on like that for about 10 pages. It makes fascinating reading.
I remember when I was on the finance committee we asked some officials from the Department of Finance to explain how the equalization worked, whereby the government collects money from all the provinces and then some of the provinces, currently every province except Ontario and Alberta, those provinces actually get money paid to them out of this equalization formula and it comes to the billions. Quebec, for example, typically receives around $10 billion a year out of equalization.
I am in favour of the principle of equalization. It is in our Constitution and I believe it is to the benefit of every Canadian and every province that the governments in the different provinces are able to deliver to their citizens comparable levels of services at comparable levels of taxation. If that were not done, then we would see a massive migration based totally on taxes and services. In other words, if a province were not able to deliver the services of health care and education, then clearly families would migrate to the provinces that could deliver them. So it is in our best interest to make sure that those services are delivered in every province.
Furthermore, if the provinces could only do this by massively increasing their rate of taxation, then again Canadians would react by migrating. It is just a natural human thing to move to areas or jurisdictions where the tax rates are lower, especially if people could not balance their household budget because the tax bite was so large.
We have learned this directly from our Prime Minister who, instead of paying the 40% to 50% that all Canadians pay in taxes in Canada, has arranged for his businesses to pay I think around 3% in Barbados and other countries. He obviously knows what it means to move to a better jurisdiction when tax rates are too high. Unfortunately, our farmers, business people and families cannot simply move their business interests and incomes to other countries and still manage to live here and enjoy the benefits of this country.
I would like to refer also to the fact that the bill deals with a number of other issues. One that is high on my personal agenda is EI. The bill once again gives to cabinet the sole right to set EI premiums. You have no idea, Mr. Speaker, how upset I am about this.
Just about all Canadian workers, because some are not covered, including our students who work in the summer, pay into the EI fund. Every dollar that is put in is matched by $1.40 by the employer. Can the students get their money back when they go back to school in the fall? No, they cannot. They are forced to buy this insurance from which they cannot possibly benefit. It is like forcing my mother to pay car insurance when she does not have a car. She can never collect that car insurance because she does not have a car. The same thing is true for students and many other people who pay into this, but because of their circumstances are unable to collect any money.
Bill C-30 gives to cabinet the right to once again set the premium rate. We know that it has been very high compared to the actual needs. As I recall, I believe with this budget and with the anticipated rates that the government will set, that fund probably will reach about $47 billion accumulated surplus over the last six or seven years. That was never the intent of the employment insurance fund. It was to be an insurance program to help people who had a temporary loss of employment, so they would have income while they looked for another job or while they were retrained. There are so many anomalies in this.
We hear many members, especially from this side of the House, draw to the attention of the government the shortcomings of EI in actually meeting the needs of people who become unemployed. They are either ineligible, the waiting periods are too long or the amount they receive is inadequate. Yet still people have to pay.
What does the government do? It rolls that money into general revenue. As a matter if fact, one could say that all of the surpluses that the government has enjoyed have come totally and solely on the backs of the employers and employees who blatantly are being overcharged on a program that is supposed to be self-sustaining.
The chief actuary of the EI fund has consistently recommended lower rates. The government has consistently overshot that target by a large amount in order to generate this money. Then the former parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance can gloat that it has balanced budgets. It is solely and totally on the backs of the members of the working public. I believe we need to correct that anomaly and we need to correct it very quickly.
Finally, there is this issue of the municipal GST rebate. Yes, indeed, all governments are cheering this. If one stops to think about it, it is only consistent with the principle that in Canada different levels of government are not to tax each other. The federal government has been taxing municipal governments through the nose for how many years and now finally it is going to stop doing it. Will I cheer that? Yes, indeed. Do I remind the Liberals about their promise on the GST in 1993? I cannot help but do it. They said that it would be gone for everybody, but it is still here.
My time has elapsed. I appreciate the privilege of being able to address this issue.