Mr. Speaker, I apologize to the member who I missed. He must not have been in his seat when I was speaking because there was not a person to be seen on the Liberal benches.
This is a Liberal government bill. We are talking about a proposition put forward by the Minister of Finance and not a single Liberal is in the House to talk about it, to hear our concerns and to address the matter.
This is a very important issue for all Canadians. We resent the fact that the government once again thinks it can toy with Canadians, that it can play with them in terms of their concerns about the future. We resent the fact that it has put forward another gimmick to deal with the surplus as opposed to a meaningful constructive suggestion that gets money into the hands of Canadians who need it most.
Let us be clear. As I said when I began my remarks, we are talking about a gimmick on the eve of an election. Just as the leaves turn colour in the fall, we hear another Liberal surplus promises an imminent election. That we find absolutely abysmal and appalling.
Every time there is an election we hear from the Liberals about some miraculous cure to deal with the problems vis-à-vis their ability to be fiscal managers. They compensate for the fact that they cannot run the store. Every year they keep disappointing Canadians with their inability to forecast and budget properly and, by consequence, to ensure that the priorities of Canadians are met. They do this every year.
That is the essence of the debate today. It is about some newfangled structure or model that someone on the Liberal benches thought up as a way to appease the concerns of opposition members or Canadians in an attempt to redirect attention away from the fundamental issues. This is about a Liberal attempt to obfuscate and deny Canadians the right to have a say in this place about where budget dollars should be allocated.
For years we have been raising this issue. We have been calling upon the government to come clean with Canadians about the dollars it is sitting on, all of which end up going to the debt because there has been no open discussion in this place.
If we listen, we will have heard members from all sides of the House say clearly that we want a balanced approach to fiscal forecasting and budgeting. No Liberal can stand in this place, as they are, and ask what is so wrong with having a surplus, as if anyone ever said there is something wrong with having a surplus. We have heard this in committee and we have heard it in the House. It is a deliberate attempt to distort the debate and to minimize the concerns of the opposition and Canadians, whose concerns are very legitimate and must be addressed by the government.
Time and time again we have come to the House to ask the government to stop its practice of deliberately low-balling the surplus. We have asked it to come clean with the numbers, to be transparent and upfront in its fiscal approaches so this place can have a serious debate about the economic and fiscal priorities of the country and represent the views of Canadians as we were elected to do.
The government has denied us that opportunity for all these years through a practice of manipulating the numbers to suit its political agenda. The government has very carefully stashed away $85 billion over the last decade without allowing for parliamentary debate and input by Canadian in terms of the allocation of $85 billion. Through that deliberate approach of low-balling and manipulating the numbers, it has allowed itself to decide on its own, in the most undemocratic way possible, where that money should go.
In this case it has come in handy when the government has needed to deal with a few projects. Most important, it has allowed it to cave once again to the corporate agenda of putting all of our eggs in one basket without concern for the needs of Canadians and their responsibilities.
Of that $85 billion, close to $65 billion has automatically gone to the debt. Nobody on this side of the House in the NDP, and I am sure any other political party, objects to some money going against the debt and meeting our obligations on that front. We know it is important to present a balanced approach to Canadians and to ensure that we pay down the debt and at the same time invest in the needs of Canadians. That would in effect grow the economy and thereby bring down the debt.
Members will recall that statisticians and economists, those who the government and others use, have shown that if the government took the surplus money and invested it in Canadians, invested in the deplorable housing, in the inadequate education arrangements, in poverty, in the deplorable situation of aboriginals on reserves, in the environment and in health care, it would create jobs, the economy would grow and we would pay down the debt in the same period of time as if the government took this money and put it directly into the debt which has been its practice and its habit.
This debate is about priorities, balance and addressing the reality of Canadians.
We have a bill that would allow the government to take the surplus money and automatically set aside $3 billion supposedly for contingencies. There is no debate on what is an appropriate contingency and prudence fund. That is part of the Liberal scheme to deceive Canadians. Here is the rest of it. First, it sets aside $3 billion. Then the government takes the leftover surplus and divides one-third, one-third and one-third. One-third goes against the debt, one-third is for tax cuts and one-third is for spending.
That arrangement tilts the balance automatically. It means $3 billion in contingency that goes against the debt, plus another third of the surplus. If there were something like a $10 billion surplus, as is forecast to be the case for this coming fiscal year, we end up with about $5 billion or $6 billion that would go against the debt and the rest would divided between spending and taxation.
Is that balanced? Does that address the needs of Canadians? Does that deal with the imbalance in the system created by the Liberals ever since they took office in 1993? Does that deal with the fact that the government, rather than have a balanced approach, decided to cut the heck out of health, education and social programs in the country? This created the most devastating consequences for people everywhere in our community. Is this what the Liberals mean by balance, keeping the burden on Canadians, telling them to tighten their belts because all that matters is its priorities and not the priorities of Canadians?
Today the government comes to us and says that it will work on this commitment to Canadians for a balanced approach by heaping more misery on misery, by making it more difficult yet again for Canadians to make ends meet?
Goodness gracious, all we have to do is look around us today to see what this 10-year legacy of the Liberals has meant for Canadians, this 10 years of investing in strictly tax cuts for corporations and debt reduction without investing in those things that build a country. We would not have a Kashechewan today. We would not have this kind of absolutely deplorable situation that is worse than Third World country conditions in the wealthiest country in the world. We would not have people with sores all over their bodies, or rashes or poisoning by E. coli if the government had done what it was asked to do back in 1993 and 1994.
The government was asked to start investing in aboriginal communities, on reserves, to help them deal with fundamental issues. This is about access to decent drinking water, decent housing, food, clothing and education, the basics that so many Canadians at the upper end of the income scale take for granted.
We should not have this situation today in Manitoba. Using pre-tax low income cutoffs, Statistics Canada shows that in 2003, 22.1% of Manitoba children lived in low income families. It remains virtually unchanged from the 22.5% in 1989 when the House passed a motion by my colleague from Ottawa Centre to eradicate poverty by the year 2000.
How many times do we have to recap that for the sake of the Liberals? How many times do we have to remind them of their obligations and of their cooperation with that 1989 goal, that vision of trying to eliminate child poverty in a country as rich as Canada? How is it possible that we are still talking about this? We are not talking about the situation simply remaining static. We are actually seeing poverty increase. The situation is becoming worse.
I would like the government to talk about Bill C-67 and its little magical formula of making surpluses appear and disappear, and having these one-third, one-third, one-third divisions. I would like it to take that to the family of Kathleen Beardy in my constituency, the young 11-year-old girl who committed suicide just a few weeks ago.
I would like the Liberals to talk to Kathleen Beardy's parents who have six children and are struggling to make ends meet. They are trying to find work. They are trying to be good parents with so many odds stacked against them. They would desperately like to be able to share in a bit of that vision of Canada, to live in decent housing without mould growing around them, without the plumbing backing up, without having to put three kids in one little bedroom, without water coming through the ceiling and without the foundation crumbling around them.
I would like the Liberals just for one minute to put themselves in the moccasins of the family of Kathleen Beardy, not to judge them or make generalizations, but to simply understand the realities of that life and decide that it is important to start addressing the real people in this country, the people who built this country and the people who want to make a difference in this country. The government must start to address their priorities.
I would like the Liberals to talk to Brian MacKinnon in my constituency, a teacher at R.B. Russell school. He has been trying desperately to gather some funds, to grab the interest and attention of the government for a program as simple as helping teenagers in the inner city and the north end go to the downtown Y so that they can benefit from some sort of a recreation program. In fact under the Liberals' legacy of cutbacks, the Y in the north end is gone. All of the recreation opportunities have been basically cut back to nothing. There is no opportunity for young people to be themselves, to stay away from gangs, to be part of a loving environment and to feel that they are part of a community.
Ten years ago Winnipeg's north end community was struggling, but it had all kinds of hopes and ambitions. Community groups were working to turn things around. However, the Liberal government dealt our community a blow the likes of which we have yet been able to recover from. That blow set us back a good couple of decades.
The housing stock was already old but people wanted to renovate, to build, to construct, to clean it up. They wanted to have beautiful neighbourhoods, but the government came along and killed the national housing program. It took away any opportunity for people to get the much needed funds. It took away the opportunity to actually beautify neighbourhoods, to stop the erosion.
The government is complicit in allowing the degradation to continue, which people in communities like the inner city and north end of Winnipeg are still struggling to overcome, and they will do it. We will do it, but not with the help of the Liberals. It is too late for them, just like it is too late for the banks which have all left our community. We will do it on our own. We will fight for a better day. We will fight for a time when government takes the needs of ordinary people seriously. Our day will come.
The bill seems to be nothing more than a gimmick. I have outlined the reasons. It is not a genuine balanced approach. We have seen the past behaviour of the Liberals when it comes to the surplus. When it is convenient for them to pile up the surplus without reporting to Parliament, they do so and they let it go to the debt. When the political heat gets too much, then they say, “Oh, we had better do some quick spending, make sure that the surplus disappears”. They wave the magic wand, as they did just this past month, and suddenly the $8 billion surplus that was there and which was acknowledged by all independent forecasters, becomes $1.6 billion.
The Liberals were able to find some programs that had been sitting around for a while but suddenly this year they needed attention. Suddenly they decided that there were a number of five year funded projects that had to be collapsed into one year. Suddenly they found a way to take an $8 billion surplus and make it $1.6 billion. It is interesting that it is much lower than the $3 billion they feel is necessary to keep on a contingency basis.
Let us go back one more step to a previous attempt by the Liberals to address the surplus issue. Let us go back to the 1997 election campaign when the Liberals suggested that they would be operating on a fifty-fifty formula, not a one-third, one-third, one-third formula. Fifty per cent would go to program spending and 50% would go the debt and to tax cuts.
Did anyone here see that fifty-fifty formula take place? It did not happen by all accounts. Guess what? It was a 90:10 split. There was 10% for Canadians and meeting their needs, like the reserves, the Kashechewan First Nation and the aboriginal people in the north end of Winnipeg. There was 10% for all those folks and 90% for the government's corporate allies, for its buddies in the banking world and the corporate world to give them $100 billion in tax cuts over five years and to put the rest against the debt.
That is anything but a balanced approach. This proposal is not a balanced approach. We will look at the bill more carefully and study it. We look forward to the bill going to committee. I will not comment on our final disposition pertaining to the bill at this moment. I am anxious to see how much willingness the Minister of Finance and his parliamentary secretary have in terms of making this a proper, balanced fiscal framework for future surplus situations. I am anxious to hear how the government is prepared to address the real needs of Canadians to ensure that everyone in this country is able to live with decency, dignity and with some semblance of justice and fairness.