Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-13, the budget implementation act.
I am going to tell my colleagues about a number of flaws in this bill. We have been talking about this for several days now. We talked about it during the debate on the budget itself and we will debate it today and for the rest of the time the budget implementation act is debated. It concerns various subjects, for example agriculture, the environment, post-secondary education for aboriginal people, which we have just heard about in this House, housing for homeless people and the arts. I have talked about these quite often. There is huge disappointment, when it comes to the arts, as compared to what was proposed. We were expecting that this government would honour its own commitments and the commitments made by the previous government.
There is also the child care issue. As members will recall I have spoken in the past of the problems that the government’s decision to cancel all the agreements that the previous government made with all the provinces will cause for the official language communities. The scheme proposed in the budget is not going to ensure that quality child care centres are created for the minority communities of Canada.
I mention all that before taking another direction. That is, a more philosophical approach that a country should take in a budget. I will try to move to a more macro level, a more national level, with regard to the direction a budget takes. I will begin by looking at the early 1970s.
Members will recall that in the early 1970s, Canada started to run up deficits and accumulate debt, both during that period and up to the early 1980s. In 1983, before the change in government, it had accumulated a debt of about $198 billion.
The new government of Mr. Mulroney was in power from 1984 to 1993. I will talk about the debt. I will not talk about the annual deficit. During all those years, annual deficits continued to be accumulated, year after year. By late 1993, we had reached an accumulated debt of nearly $500 billion: $498 billion. Then we started to get worried, quite rightly. The government led by Mr. Chrétien, with the member for LaSalle—Émard who was the Minister of Finance at that time, tackled that question.
For 30 years, Canada essentially had a fiscal imbalance, running up a debt year after year. After three years of major effort—it was a very difficult time, and everyone had to tighten their belts—we managed to eliminate the annual deficit in 1997-98.
After 30 years, we had finally achieved a balanced budget, although it was a fragile one. At that point, as a nation, we had an opportunity to try to redirect public funds and balance revenues and expenses. Any country naturally has to encourage some spending on social programs, the environment, defence and other programs.
The government balanced revenues and expenses, in order to manage the debt. This is always difficult. We were able to start paying down the debt, something many of us had long dreamed of doing. Canadians who have a mortgage dream of reducing it and eventually paying it off. Alberta succeeded in paying off its debt under Premier Ralph Klein. And we have to say that getting rid of its debt has been good for that province. It eliminated not only its deficits, but also its debt.
After 1997-98, the government struck a balance between paying down the debt using the surplus and reducing taxes using government revenues. The government knew that Canadians wanted a gradual reduction in tax rates and increased spending in certain essential areas such as health, post-secondary education and research. That is the direction it took.
The current government seems to be deviating from this course, and may even have abandoned it entirely. I find this a bit worrisome.
According to the government's proposal, they will reduce the debt by a maximum of $3 billion per year, except for this year, because the budget surplus is about $8 billion. Starting next year, they will reduce the debt by only $3 billion per year.
If I may, I would like to tell a little story. I am honoured and pleased to be a grandfather. My granddaughter was born the year Canada stopped accumulating debt, that is, the year we balanced the budget and stopped running a deficit.
Since then, the Government of Canada has paid back $60 billion of its debt. If I understand correctly, we will pay back another $8 billion this year. All told, we will have paid back $68 billion of our debt since she was born.
However, at $3 billion per year, she will have to live to be more than 150 before her country becomes debt-free.
I believe it is not right that we who have benefited from this enormous debt all our lives should bequeath it to our children and grandchildren. We must deal with our debt more aggressively.
All in all, I find that the government's decision to reduce the debt by only $3 billion per year could one day place us in a very unstable situation. That is why I am urging the government to reconsider.
The situation Canada is enjoying now, vis-à-vis our neighbours to the south, is quite telling in terms of the way we have managed to successfully reduce our debt burden. According to the graph provided to us by the government in the budget, between 1995 and 2005 only two countries in the G-7 have actually decreased the debt burden as a percentage of their GDP, Canada and the U.S. They are the two best performing countries right now.
However, over the last two years, in particular, Canada reduced its debt, not by a lot, but last year by $1.6 billion and the year before substantially more. This year we reduced it by $8 billion. Whereas in the United States, which are the numbers presented to us in the budget, the debt last year increased in the neighbourhood of $500 billion or 4% of GDP. If we do not account for the social security numbers, this year it is in the neighbourhood of $600 billion or 4.6% of GDP.
In comparison to Canada's situation, the United States' fiscal situation is deteriorating and at some point that will come home to roost in the United States. What the Americans do then may seriously affect us and our standard of living. In anticipation of the day that the United States of America cannot carry on accumulating debt at the rate it is doing, we had better prepare ourselves by continuing to reduce our own debt at a faster clip than what is proposed in the current budget.
That is in essence the approach that I would encourage the government to seriously consider. To let the debt remain as it is and only pay off $3 billion would lead to a very interesting situation, which the Minister of Finance confirmed in his projections that, for the first time in a long time, our debt service and costs will increase. They were $34.1 billion last year. They are projected to be $33.7 billion this year but they will go back up next year to $34.8 billion.
This is the impact that the non-reduction of our debt at a faster clip engenders. This is where we are making a collective mistake in that while we can afford to reduce our debt at a faster clip we should. Instead of taking the $4 billion buffer that we have and reducing it to $3 billion, we should go back to a $4 billion or even a $5 billion annual increment so we can reduce the debt and be more responsible toward our future generations.