Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the Liberal Party's opposition motion, to which the Bloc Québécois objects for several reasons, as I will explain in this brief presentation.
I will begin with the reference to income trusts. This was a field day of irresponsibility. For years the Liberals refused to act on this issue and allowed income trusts to go tax free. They created an unfair advantage for this type of organization or enterprise. In addition, there was an increasing impetus for large corporations to adopt this economic model. It is a particularly pernicious model because it practically forces the company to spend all its money every year and to return surpluses to shareholders rather than investing them in research and development and spurring the growth of the company.
Thus, it is a very short-term vision that is destabilizing our economy. The Bloc Québécois had been asking for some time that these trusts be taxed as corporations, but the Liberal government did nothing. It acted irresponsibly.
The Conservatives were even more irresponsible during the 2005-2006 election campaign when they promised not to tax income trusts. That was an irresponsible promise, especially since many investors believed it and invested their money in this savings vehicle. When the Conservative government announced last year that income trusts would henceforth be taxed, trust stock prices plummeted, causing losses in the billions of dollars in market capitalization all because of this field day of irresponsibility: the irresponsibility of the Liberals, who never did anything about income trusts and are still today calling for this tax shelter to be maintained; and the irresponsibility of the Conservatives, who did in fact do something about it, but promised they would not, thereby giving investors false confidence.
Beyond this issue, this Liberal motion poses a major problem. I am talking about the same old centralist attitude of a domineering federalism that defines the Liberals, as well as the New Democrats and the Conservatives. We saw this today during question period on the issue of the securities commission.
There is quite the unanimity within the federalist parties in this House. They are unanimous on the fact that there should always be interference in Quebec's jurisdictions. They also share the attitude of Ottawa knows best. This is where it is decided what is best for the nation of Quebec, which was unanimously recognized in this House. However, that recognition was nothing more than lip service.
There is a lot of meddling in this motion. It talks about infrastructure, research and development, post-secondary education, assistance to immigrants, recognition of credentials, and labour force training, all in just two or three paragraphs; that is quite the feat.
This same old attitude harms Quebec because programs centralized in Ottawa are not adapted to Quebec realities. We see this quite often. Just look at the percentage of spending by the various departments in Quebec: we are almost systematically below our weight in terms of tax contributions and we are especially below our demographic weight. These programs are not adapted. Just look at Fisheries and Oceans. Quebeckers contribute 25%, but 25% of the budget certainly does not get spent in Quebec.
Taxation is another area where we see this. Ottawa puts in place centralized programs that do not reflect the reality in Quebec, and Quebeckers are punished and disadvantaged because they are part of the Canadian federation. I will give two examples. Taxation is not always exciting, but it represents hundreds of millions of dollars for Quebeckers.
The first example concerns tuition credits. We can claim tuition on our federal tax return and deduct up to $10,000 in tuition from our taxes.
In the rest of Canada, tuition averages $14,665 for a typical three-year university course worth 45 credits, but in Quebec it costs only $5,700. Students in Quebec therefore can claim only $5,700 of the $10,000 tax credit or 57%, while students in the rest of the country can claim the full amount.
If we take a typical tax rate of 22%, which applies to people earning $50,000 or more—this is often true in the case of university students—that comes to $946 per student. If we multiply that by 111,000 students, we get roughly $105 million in savings for Canada, because Quebeckers decided to adopt a different system.
Some might say—and I have heard this said in this House—that it does not matter, all the better for Quebeckers. Since the students pay less tuition, it is only right that they should have fewer tax credits than other Canadians. This is wrong. What Quebeckers do not pay in tuition, they pay in tax. Quebeckers decided to collectively pay students' tuition rather than expect students to pay a larger share themselves. Consequently, we are penalized because of the choices we have made. What is more, every year, Canada reaps huge savings. This is a gift from Quebeckers to Canada, and the federal government is still refusing to wake up to that reality and give us back our money.
Another similar example is the credit for child care. In Quebec, we decided to establish community tools such as very low-cost child care, at $7 a day, instead of the much higher average of $35 and up in the other provinces. This means that again the government saves hundreds of millions of dollars every year because Quebeckers decided to do things differently. When we ask the federal government to give the money back to provincial governments, it systematically refuses. We are not asking for a handout; we are asking that the savings be returned to Quebeckers, who chose to use a different model.
Unfortunately, I am running out of time, but I could go on about all these examples. Obviously, Quebeckers are realizing more and more that the federal framework does not allow them to build a nation, a society in their own image, and that in the medium term, the solution is for Quebec to become a sovereign country that fully controls all its taxes and can make its own budgetary decisions based on the type of society it wants to build.
Until then, the Bloc Québécois will at the every least continue to demand that the Constitution be respected, and to call for the decentralization of the federation and a solution to the fiscal imbalance.
The latest budget contained a monetary correction for the fiscal imbalance. The government gave several billion dollars that will help the Government of Quebec. However, in order to correct the fiscal imbalance, we are asking for a fiscal solution. Otherwise, the fiscal imbalance issue will not be resolved. The minister himself appeared before the committee and told us that there was no fiscal solution in the latest budget. Once tax or GST points have been transferred, Quebeckers will be able to decide how that money is to be managed, without having always to ask Ottawa for permission, and without having to beg for their own money.
It is important to establish another measure to avoid the centralization of the federation, which we are seeing at this time and which the three parties have been constantly supporting for several decades in Canada, specifically, to really limit use of the federal spending power in areas of Quebec jurisdiction. A rather inane sentence about this appears in the Speech from the Throne.
I would like to issue a challenge to the Conservative members, who could perhaps use the questions and comments period at the end of my speech to give me a list of the projects that, over the past 10 or 15 years, have met the criteria set out in the throne speech.
According to these criteria, they have to be new cost-shared programs that fall under Quebec's jurisdiction. Given all of these criteria, there are simply no programs left. There have been almost no new cost-shared programs that fall exclusively under Quebec's jurisdiction in decades. The last ones were about health insurance.
This is a real con. The federal government is giving us a totally meaningless gift.
Earlier, I asked the Conservative members of the House what programs they were talking about. I asked them to name one single program that the federal government has implemented in the past five to 10 years that meets the criteria mentioned in the Speech from the Throne, that is, a new shared-cost program that falls exclusively under provincial jurisdiction. I myself have not yet found a single one. I challenge the Conservative members to provide us with a list to prove that what they are giving us is worth something. If they cannot, then they are promising something we already have.
It looks as if the Conservative government is simply encroaching on provincial jurisdiction without even sharing the costs with the provinces. Even if the Conservatives came up with a bill to deliver on their throne speech promise, we would get nothing new. There is no substance to what the Conservative government is offering. I hope that the Conservative members will be able to give me a list.