Mr. Speaker, the essence of the motion is that non-renewable resource revenues be removed from the calculations for equalization. I was wondering, as I was thinking about this debate, what Premier McGuinty might say about this particular motion before the House today.
Premier McGuinty has been arguing for the last month or six weeks that Ontario does not get its fair share out of equalization. The number that he has been throwing around lately has been $23 billion. He takes his charts from the national accounts, et cetera. It is a pretty substantial sum of money. While I have some serious difficulties with the premier's analysis given that Ontario is the linchpin of Confederation and it is the expectation that Ontario will, in many instances, support Confederation, I do have some difficulty arguing vigorously with the premier of Ontario when the premier of Saskatchewan says “Me too. Look at us, how badly we are treated”.
For instance, the premier of Saskatchewan presently enjoys a debt to GDP ratio of something in the order of 25% on the way down to about 21%, which is a pretty good number. The Government of Canada is somewhere around 38% or 39% debt to GDP ratio. The Government of Ontario is around 28%, some three points higher than Saskatchewan. The Government of Newfoundland, from my recollection of the numbers, is something in the order of 62% debt to GDP ratio.
I wonder what Premier McGuinty would say about the Saskatchewan premier's claim to a fair share when the debt to GDP of Saskatchewan is actually lower than the province of Ontario and is actually lower than the Government of Canada. I wonder what he might say about that.
I wonder what he might say about Saskatchewan's unemployment rate, which at this point is around about 5% from what I understand the numbers to be.