Madam Speaker, I will start by indicating to those listening that the Bloc Québécois will be voting in favour of this motion to extend this sitting of the Parliament, provided of course that all stages of Bill C-38 are on the parliamentary agenda before the House adjourns.
We are engaged today in voting on an motion to extend the sitting of the House because this parliamentary session we have just been through has given rise to the worst possible abuses. In recent months there has been an incredible amount of time wasted here in this House.
For the first time in my parliamentary experience, I have seen a government boycotting its own parliamentary agenda. That happened on five separate occasions. For five days of this last session, the government itself has made use of stalling tactics to prevent this House from addressing legislative items submitted by itself. What a curious situation!
The session about to end has been improvised by the government. We would have had the time to pass many more legislative measures if there had been just a minimum of planning. We could have adopted all the legislative measures we wanted, but this very government, whether to save its own skin or out of fear that it was not in line with the thinking of the majority of members of this House, has attempted to distract us from the agenda, and that has created a precedent.
In short, despite our full cooperation, particularly in the final weeks of this session, we are obliged to extend the sitting. We will do so, because I want people to know that we were firmly resolved to support the government and to ensure that the legislative record is not too thin. We are going to accept an extension because of a major bill which the Bloc Québécois members wholeheartedly support. This is a bill to regularize the situation for parties to same sex marriage.
It is a matter of rights. I must say that we have respect for everyone who thinks differently. We understand that some people have difficulty with this reality because of their religious beliefs or certain social situations. But in this House of Commons, we have a responsibility not to let problems in society drag on but to deal with them. Even in difficult situations, we have a duty to say our piece, study the situation, analyze the arguments for and against, weigh everything, and finally draw our own conclusions.
There is a free vote on this bill and people can vote as their conscience dictates. I would remind the House, though, that refusing to pass Bill C-38 means refusing to recognize the decisions handed down by seven courts of law. They have ruled that, by virtue of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is in effect here in Canada, all citizens regardless of their sexual orientation have a right to choose and cannot be discriminated against on this basis. Seven courts have ruled in this way. Today, the House of Commons must make the Civil Marriage Act consistent with these decisions.
A refusal to pass Bill C-38 would mean that the rights and freedoms of a large number of people here in Canada would have to be suspended.
Rights and freedoms would be suspended. These people would be told, “We know the Charter gives you the right to marry but you cannot do so because we are taking away your freedoms”. Most of my colleagues in the Bloc and I do not want to be numbered among those who would suspend the rights and freedoms of a group of people in our society. There is no chance that we would do that.
That is why we not only hope but are eager to ensure that Bill C-38 passes by the end of the extended session. To this end, I asked for written guarantees from the government House leader. Not that our word is not enough, but in this case, in view of the importance of this matter, I simply had to obtain these guarantees in order to be absolutely certain that we would do our work to the end, that we were going to assume our responsibilities right to the end.
This is worth extending the session of Parliament a few days to do justice to our fellow citizens and end this debate that is pitting people in our society against one other. This debate is a matter of conscience for everyone.
I am saying it again: we respect the values, conscience and religious beliefs of all individuals. We have to draw the line somewhere. My colleagues and I will not be able, when the time comes, to suspend rights and freedoms and prevent people having access to a union to which they are currently entitled in most Canadian provinces.
That said, our requirements have been clear. This is our duty, and we will extend this sitting of the House.
There is also Bill C-48, which has a much worse image than Bill C-38. The government wants the House to consider and adopt Bill C-48 during the extended sitting. This bill is an addendum to the government's budget. There is $4.5 billion in what is being called the NDP budget. However, I think that $4.5 billion should be called the NDP's price for abandoning Canada's unemployed.
We were in the midst of negotiations. With the NDP, the Bloc and the Conservative Party combined, we were in a position to obtain a major concession for a major overhaul of EI from the Prime Minister—if he wanted to remain Prime Minister. In the Bloc's view, it was a sine qua non, an essential condition. Some $47 billion has been stolen from the unemployed in Canada over the past seven or eight years. The raiding of the fund continues more slowly, but just as blatantly, to the tune of several billion dollars per year.
These billions of dollars should be going to people who lose their jobs, people with families and who go three, four, sometimes even seven months without working. Today, as a result of successive cuts to EI, these people have been left high and dry and therefore unable to feed their families or survive as individuals.
We had the requisite condition, the sine qua non. With the NDP we had the necessary strength to force the government to yield on employment insurance. Unfortunately, the NDP members chose to attach an addendum to the budget, on housing and public transportation. Those are good things. We are not saying that this is not money well spent. However, we understand today that it cost the Prime Minister $4.5 billion to tell the unemployed in Canada that they would not get their EI reform, they would not get their due, they would not get the $47 billion and they would have to continue living in poverty, because the deal had been made with the NDP. That, the Bloc Québécois cannot accept. For these reasons we will vote against Bill C-48.
We owe this to the unemployed. The Bloc will never trade its demands on behalf of the unemployed for a mess of pottage.
We had in fact insisted on one point. We wanted at least some indication from the government that it intended to resolve the fiscal imbalance. It is costing the governments of the provinces and Quebec very dearly.
All the premiers, the ministers of finance, the political parties in the legislatures and the National Assembly in Quebec, all the parties in this House, except the Liberals, admit it. The experts, Liberal firms and academics admit it: there is a huge fiscal imbalance in Canada.
This imbalance means that the federal government occupies a tax field it does not need. When we tax more than we need, we create surpluses. When we free up a tax field, there are no more surpluses. The provinces, the Government of Quebec and the provincial governments can occupy this field and finally provide their people with the services they deserve.
We are in a difficult situation. As citizens of Quebec and Canada—this is true as well for the other provinces—we are forced to give more than half of our taxes to the federal government and a little less than half to the Government of Quebec. We require services from the Government of Quebec and some as well from the federal government, but fewer direct services such as health and education, which are two major budgetary items.
We want services from the Government of Quebec. It tells us that it cannot tax us any more because we are already taxed enough. However, we are already paying a lot of taxes because we send them to Ottawa. In the meanwhile, Ottawa accumulates surpluses, spending and injecting money into this and that. All is well. Life is beautiful. They announce a $2 billion surplus but end up with $10 billion at the end of the year, as if billions just grew on trees. They collect a billion dollars. Well, a billion dollars, those are the taxes of thousands of Canadian families. There are people who are killing themselves with work every day. They earn $7 or $8 an hour and pay a dollar a litre for gasoline. They pay a dollar for their gas to be able to drive their car to work because they are giving so much in taxes to the federal government.
A billion dollars represents the taxes, the sweat and sacrifices of thousands of people in Canada. Here, in the federal government, they think that a billion dollars is good thing. They took in eight more than they forecast. So the government says, “Well, we will put it into the debt” or, “Maybe we will use a few to buy the NDP; maybe we will invest a little bit to help with public transit; maybe we will invest in housing”.
When they are spending money that comes from the sweat of working people, who struggle day after day to support governments, they should have the decency to say, “If I am collecting too much, I will quickly withdraw from the tax field. In so doing, I will only take from people what I need for the services I provide them”.
If another government that provides health or education services needs to go after the product of the sweat and the labour of all these working people, let it. If it does not need to do so, the people will benefit from lower taxes. That is the fiscal imbalance--when the government that needs the least taxes the most, and the government that needs the most does not have enough. This is what we have under this federal system.
We are sovereignists. Our solution is totally the opposite of the one being discussed here, but for the moment it strikes us as appropriate for the government to correct this fiscal imbalance.
When people are expressing their pleasure with the few billion dollars included in Bill C-48, they need to realize that what the federal government owes them is tens of billions, not just a few billion.
It is far more than the few hundred million they would get for public transit. If fiscal imbalance were remedied for good, this would simultaneously solve the problems of the governments that have to deliver services.
Bill C-48 is rather like the biblical story of trading away one's birthright for a mess of pottage. People are lulled into security with gifts, with a bit of money here, a little subsidy there, and then nothing is done about the real problems of the unemployed. Money is handed out left and right, but nothing is done about the real problem of the fiscal imbalance, despite the fact that every politician in Canada, with the exception of the Liberal Party of Canada, acknowledges its existence.
That is the reason we will be voting against Bill C-48. We will be voting against a bill that ought to have included a complete reform of employment insurance, in order to do justice to the poorest members of our society, those who have to bear the burden of job loss.
There should have also been some steps toward beginning to resolve the fiscal imbalance, which penalizes our friends and constituents who send money to government out of their own pockets every day; thousands of dollars more than the government needs to cover the services it must offer. This is what guarantees the government such huge surpluses and allows it then to blackmail the governments of Quebec and the provinces by imposing conditions, holding discussions and giving itself more powers than its own constitution allows. And we are supposed to like this system. We should get down on our knees and thank the federal government for giving back a small portion of the taxes we paid in excess. The government is too greedy because it did not want to cut taxes and did not want to limit itself to the only tax field it needs. Such is the reality.
We will support the motion to extend the sitting, but we will fight against Bill C-48 until the end. However, we will fight in favour of Bill C-38 to settle, once and for all, the terrible debate on same sex marriage that is tearing our society apart.
We will vote in favour of extending the sitting of the House. Since we do not want to waste the time of the House or the taxpayers' money, we hope to resolve these two matters in the next few days, possibly by Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Then we can take a well-deserved vacation.
