Mr. Speaker, the member's intervention is peppered with questions. Unfortunately, I can only respond to a few of them.
First, I must say one thing. Barbados is the only tax haven with which Canada has an agreement. It is not for nothing. It is because some people close to the government have interests there.
Liberia is no longer considered a jurisdiction with which business should be done. There are a whole series of tax havens with which Canada has not signed a tax treaty. How is it that Canada has done so only with Barbados? It is a tax haven, since it meets all the conditions for it to be a tax haven: negligible taxation, standard bank secrecy and a total lack of cooperation with international financial institutions.
If the government in power and the Liberal Party were consistent, Canada would repeal its tax treaty with this tax haven, for the same reasons that it never signed any with any other tax havens.
As for the fiscal imbalance and Quebec sovereignty, I must first admit that the government has in fact improved its finances beyond belief. However, it has done so at the expense of the provinces and Quebec. It cut transfer payments, which has had a terrible impact on health and education, and continues to do so.
Who else was affected by cuts the federal government made in order to improve its finances? The unemployed. In order to avoid using unparliamentary language, I will say that $46 billion was pinched from the employment insurance fund, and used to inflate the surplus and pay down the debt. We can now boast that we have the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio. But, in terms of education, students are striking in Quebec. Why? Because the federal government cut its transfer payments and the Quebec government can no longer sustain the loans and bursaries program.
The same goes for health. The difficulties we are experiencing do not originate with Quebec or the provinces, where numerous reforms have been undertaken. They are the result of federal underfunding. Ours is the only government in the western world that has managed to solve its financial problems on the backs of others, and has never shouldered its responsibilities. The proof: there has never been as much spending here in Ottawa as there has been in recent years.
The committee we set up with Jacques Léonard, former president of the Quebec treasury board, has discovered that, in the five years from 1997 to 2002, the federal government had increased its operating expenses—that is its bureaucracy: its pens, pencils, papers and desks—by 40%. That averages out to 8% annually. The explanation for this is certainly not the population increase, nor the inflation rate, nor increased federal services to the taxpayers. They have quite simply inflated the bureaucracy artificially in order to avoid giving the money to the provinces and to Quebec to enable them to remedy their situation.
This is tantamount to a policy aimed at strangling the provinces and Quebec and imposing federal government standards and vision on all provinces. That is a far cry from the spirit of Confederation in 1867.
Given this context, Quebec sovereignty remains the only path for Quebeckers.