Yvan Loubier

[The Budget, February 26th, 1998]

Exactly.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech by my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance.

There were some things I found surprising. First he said: “My government accomplished this; my government accomplished that. We took priorities into account; we did a good job, and so forth”. He should perhaps quit reading the notes the Department of Finance gives him, just as he should perhaps quit taking his orders from the finance minister in committee.

He should perhaps actually take a look at the budget documents and do a little evaluation of what has gone on for the last four years and will continue to go on until 2003.

In 1995, his Minister of Finance introduced a plan of major cuts. Only once did he speak about it. Every year, another $6 billion is cut from social programs, university education and health care.

For the information of my colleague, who does not seem to be informed at all, or who tells us only half of what he knows, there are still $30 billion in cuts to be made by 2003, and they will be in those very sectors of university education, health and welfare.

If they are really concerned about education, as one of the keys to the future, the first thing the finance minister should have done, and did not do, was to give back what he cut in the university education sector. But no. They take this year's surplus, around $3 billion, put down $2.5 billion this year for the millennium fund scholarships, when these scholarships will not actually be given out for another two years, and the public is given to understand that they are concerned about student indebtedness.

All they are concerned about is their visibility as a federal government. During Oral Question Period, the Prime Minister made it clear. So did the Minister of Human Resources Development in the scrum.

The millennium fund, he said, was not about arguing, but about the future. How is it that the constitutional issue of Quebeckers' freedom of choice, a constitutional fact of Canadian life, has been referred to the supreme court, and our right to exercise this freedom under the Constitution is being questioned?

Does he think the Constitution need not be applied in the educational sector? They claim to be defending this Constitution and to be betrayed by our democratic right to choose our own future as Quebeckers. It is no big deal, but they refer it to the supreme court. That is my first question.

My second is as follows. Does he realize, on quick calculation, that, in the past four years, 52% of the cuts imposed by the Minister of Finance were absorbed by the provinces? They are the champions and the artisans of improved public finances. The taxpayers' contribution was 47%, through taxes, through the non indexing of tax tables, through the Minister of Finance's systematic robbery of the surplus in the unemployment insurance fund of between $6 billion and $7 billion a year.

In the end, his Minister of Finance, the good manager, cut 11% from federal government operations. Some manager. He should stop parroting the words and political lines of his minister and take his duty as a member of Parliament to heart.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, you had not recognized me, but I am glad you did. Better late than never, as they say.

I was very moved by the words of the hon. leader of the NDP, especially when mentioned the young woman in New Brunswick. What her story tells us is that hope has to take root somewhere. People must be given hope that jobs will be created and poverty will be fought.

I congratulate the NDP on its decades old tradition of fighting for social justice, as was mentioned by my colleague from Kamloops regarding David Lewis.

I would like my colleague to elaborate on two of the interesting ideas she put forward, although there were many. She mentioned targets and setting targets in the fight against poverty and unemployment. I wonder if she would expand a bit on these ideas, which are extremely valuable in my opinion, and could become a real policy on job creation and the fight against poverty.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Mr. Romanow, not Galganov. Let us forget him; he is history. Nobody mentions him any more.

Mr. Romanow, who even claimed to be speaking for the premiers of all Canadian provinces, said they felt they had been taken for a ride, because they were the ones who did the work, who made the cuts, by order of the federal finance minister, and who are seeing the finance minister pocket the dividends rather than distribute them to the provinces. It is hard to take.

When someone asks others to do his dirty work, when manages to make a profit somewhere and the dividends do not even show up in the budget out of a concern for non-transparency, when there are the surpluses, and not a moment's thought is even given to redistributing them to those who actually made them possible, that is hard to take, even for one's friends.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

No, he will not, but I would love to give him my own answers.

It is obvious that many people have been overlooked in this budget. Particularly overlooked were those whose sacrifices were responsible for this result, which is a good result, but this was not the way to go about it. What I really cannot sit still for is the Minister of Finance parading around telling anyone who will listen that it was his doing. And none of my colleagues in the Bloc Quebecois will sit still for it either.

He overlooked the most disadvantaged members of society, who are already affected by the scourge of poverty and unemployment. These are the people whose doing it was. There are the provinces too. They have also been overlooked. There was unanimity on that yesterday. All Canadian provinces, particularly the finance minister, and Mr. Galganov—

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, if I understood my colleague's comments correctly, he was talking to the Liberal members.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I was beginning to despair at the length of the question, its preamble in particular.

I will never apologize, because what I said was the truth, accurate and verifiable. Over the past four years, the Minister of Finance has cut everywhere except there. Fifty-two per cent of the cuts he imposed have been made by the provinces in such areas as social assistance, post-secondary education, and health.

If he is capable of doing the math—and I have my doubts—let him look at the budgets since 1995 and he will realize these are the right figures.

The other source for getting public finances back onto an even keel: tax increases, and the employment insurance surplus made up of employer and employee contributions, 37% of the sacrifices and efforts to get our fiscal house in order. Now we are up to nearly 90%; 90% of the recovery has been from the most disadvantaged provinces, the poorest provinces, the average taxpayer. The percentage that is really connected to the Minister of Finance's cleaning up his own act is 10%. Ten per cent! And I should apologize for saying that he is not the one responsible?

Another point: I will never apologize to the Minister of Finance, because I am not the one who introduced Bill C-28. He is the one who did. Out of 464 pages, two paragraphs dealt with, deal with, a change to the Income Tax Act affecting international shipping companies and international shipping holding companies, like his. I should apologize?

I should apologize for having discovered that loophole in Bill C-28, an omnibus bill? Two paragraphs out of 464 pages, and I should apologize for the fact that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have been rising in this House for the past month to tell us that there is perhaps a doubt, an apparent conflict of interest. Mr. Wilson, the ethics counsellor, has said so. But there will be no light cast on this matter. They will even refuse requests from the four opposition parties calling for a special subcommittee of the Finance Committee to get to the bottom of this. And I should apologize for the lack of transparency? No way.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your kindness and understanding. As I was saying, this is not the first time a budget contains figures that are cautious and fail to reflect the reality of changes in public finances.

Barely a few months ago, I was in Vancouver with the Minister of Finance, who was giving us information on the economy and the financial situation. It was then he announced the good news that the 1996-97 deficit for fiscal year ending March 31, 1997 would be somewhere around $8.9 billion.

Six months earlier, we were telling him in this House that the deficit would be below $10 billion. He said the members of the Bloc Quebecois, the opposition, was bandying figures about. Six months later, he said the forecast was out by 63%. If he were working for a firm of economic consultants, he would be out on the street now for having made an error of 63% in six months.

I was rather disappointed to see the Minister of Finance hiding things. Over the next three years, he says, the budget surplus will be zero, zero, zero. Do you know what the real figures are? I will give them out.

We have become forecasting specialists. We decided that, if, in the past four years, the Minister of Finance has been incapable of putting the right figures in the budget, we would tell him the right ones. He says there will be no surplus in 1998-99 and marked a zero on page 12 of his budget plan. The real surplus amounts to at least $7 billion and starts this budget year.

For 1999-2000 the figure given is 0.0. That is tantamount to laughing in people's faces. It is an affront to the public, which expects the right information from their elected representatives. A surplus of $14 billion is what we expect, and he writes zero in the budget.

I went further, up to 2000-01. I say there will be a surplus of at least $19 billion. He does not want to go that far in his forecasts. I can understand that. If I were out by 63% over six months, I would not even make a two week prediction.

On the millennium fund, I said earlier that, in his budget plan of 1995, the Minister of Finance was sly, rather sneaky. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but as far as I am concerned, it can also be a fault. In this case, it is a major failing.

In 1995, he said there would be a plan for budget cuts in order to fund social assistance given out by the provinces to the most disadvantaged, university education—under provincial jurisdiction—and health.

He said “I am going to cut and cut, until 2003, in order to attain my objective of a balanced budget” and so on. Cut so much that, if all of the cuts until 2003 are added together, the Minister of Finance will have cut $42 billion, a good part of that $42 billion in university education. Another $30 billion is to be cut before 2003, and the minister announced nothing about this yesterday.

Oh, he did announce one thing: the cuts initially forecast at $48 billion will be reduced to $42 billion, and he would have to be applauded for continuing to cut at the $30 billion level until 2003. Now he is telling us “I have put our fiscal house in order”, and he gloats over it. He toots his own horn. We will be coming back to that later.

He toots his own horn, and then he says “Now that I have this surplus, I am announcing that I am going to put $2.5 billion into education”. He cuts education, health and social assistance to the tune of $42 billion and now he is telling us: “We are going to put $2.5 billion into education. Look, we have some extraordinary initiatives in the area of education”. The provinces meanwhile continue to cut. But it is he who is cutting.

The public must know this. And as for getting into an area of jurisdiction as exclusive as education, so what if this has been a prerogative jealously guarded for the past 50 years by any and all Quebec premiers, whether federalist or sovereignist. Quebec will never accept the federal government's encroachment on this sector.

The Prime Minister said: “We are not getting into education, we are simply helping students with debts”. First of all, it is they who caused those debts by making savage cuts in recent years and, second, the Minister of Finance pronounced the word “education” in connection with the millennium fund no less than 12 times during his budget speech. That is a rather serious problem.

On top of that, they claim that they have an interest in student debt loads. Give me a break. What the government is really interested in is its visibility. In the scrum yesterday, the Minister of Human Resources Development made no bones about it. He said in English—he did not dare repeat it in French, because I think he realized he had made a blunder—that this was the best way of increasing the federal government's visibility.

So much for the federal government's wonderful philosophy of student assistance: relieve them of their money by annually reducing the amounts available for university education, a job foisted off on the provincial governments, and then turn up to put a partial band-aid on the wound they themselves inflicted by interfering in an area reserved for the provinces. This move may well provoke an unprecedented confrontation between the federal government and the Government of Quebec.

The federal government, through its finance minister, also kept us from seeing the real extent of its leeway. Why? Because, in his wisdom, in his concern for his image, in his desire to make a dramatic gesture as well and to break records never before broken in the history of Canadian taxation, the Minister of Finance decided that what he valued most was not a balanced budget, not visionary policies, not improved conditions for the most disadvantaged in society, not the elimination of child poverty.

Furthermore, in this regard, the forecast increases in the child tax benefit have been put off for two years. That is the priority they give to the fight against poverty. That is not what motivates this government. That is not what motivates the Minister of Finance. Nor is he motivated by the fate of the unemployed. Once again, by not using the government's overall gains to create an independent EI fund, he has just given us the message that, in the years ahead, all surpluses from employers' and employees' premiums will go into his pocket.

So he is not interested in helping unemployed workers either. Since January 1997, the benefits available for those unfortunate enough to lose their jobs have steadily decreased. They now receive almost half of their most recent wages.

They are thus denied EI by restrictive measures. The unemployed and what becomes of them are not what motivates the government.

Furthermore, this was the unanimous view of analysts, people from the private sector, and representatives of the business community. Yesterday, I listened to the executive director of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, who had this to say: “This budget did not contain any significant measure and no strategic plan for creating employment in any consistent and lasting way”. That was what Mr. Cléroux had to say outside the House.

So, jobs and unemployment are not what concern the Minister of Finance. What concerns him is going down in history as the one who not only put the country's fiscal house in order but who broke the record for surpluses. His concern is making it into the Guinness Book of Records. That is what is on his mind.

The proof lies in the fact that he is not letting us in on the real surpluses. The proof is that, if the present trend continues, if the federal government continues with its initiatives and continues to aim at very conservative economic growth—we have done the math—the surplus will perhaps top $30 billion by 2003.

This is not a sign of good public management. It is a sign that somewhere people are paying too much in taxes and the Minister of Finance could care less. People are paying too much in taxes, while the Minister of Finance is breaking surplus records and calling himself a good manager. He calls himself a great manager.

Surpluses that go up year after year—the Minister of Finance is so ashamed that he does not even give the figures in his budget; he puts zeros everywhere—point to bad management. This is someone who is more interested in popularity, because of some agenda, perhaps that of becoming the next prime minister, you never know, but it is not necessarily someone interested in efficiency and the general well-being of the public. If he were, he would have tried to achieve a balance.

A reserve of $2 to $3 billion is fine, but we would not accumulate large surpluses, which are a sign that the tax burden of average taxpayers, which is not significantly reduced in this budget, is too high, that people are paying too much in taxes, and that other people are also contributing too much as well. I am thinking of the unemployed, those on welfare, the ill, and students, who are still suffering from the cuts in the 1995 budget.

What I found yesterday in the budget is that the Minister of Finance was in far less of a hurry to remedy misery and to lighten the burden of taxpayers who have been crushed by $30 billion in additional taxes of all kinds he himself has imposed over the past four years, and also by the non-indexation of tax tables.

He was in far less of a hurry to help the sick, to help students, except with one program aimed solely at raising the federal profile, at getting that maple leaf out in a prominent place. The Minister of Finance was much more interested in drafting custom-made bills serving the interests of his foreign shipping holdings than in looking after the general well-being of the people of Quebec and Canada and in being a good manager.

People will understand that, while this Minister of Finance has not made significant reductions in their tax burden, he is continuing to take money from the most disadvantaged and to make it more difficult for the provinces, particularly Quebec, to balance their budgets. The people sitting down to do their federal tax returns are well aware that while the minister is taking money from their pockets, he is also getting bills passed that are tailor-made to save him tax money in the coming years. They know he is in apparent conflict of interest, that this government is refusing to cast any light on that apparent conflict of interest, and that the integrity of the Minister of Finance is open to question.

That is hard to take. We have sounded people out. All of my Bloc Quebecois colleagues have asked the people in their ridings what they think of this budget, and of this nebulous business.

I can tell you that people remember Bill C-28. People want an accounting because they see that the Minister of Finance is not only unconcerned about their welfare, but appears concerned only about his own and that of his buddies.

I would like to table an amendment to the amendment to the budget proposed by the Reform Party. I move:

That the amendment be amended by striking all words following the words “Minister of Finance” and replacing them with the following:

“because he has, by creating the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, broken his promise to respect provincial jurisdiction over education, he has provided nothing to stimulate job creation, he has not provided for adequate income-tax reductions for middle-class families, he has continued to appropriate the huge employment insurance fund surplus, he has obstinately refused to table anti-deficit legislation and he has not returned to the provinces the money he cut from their transfer payments, while pursuing his planned cuts up to the year 2003.”

I table this subamendment in this House and thank you for your attention in the hope that taxpayers will now know they have to keep an eye on him.

[The Budget, February 25th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the finance minister's fifth budget, but I am not too pleased with it.

First of all, I would like to congratulate the real architects of the battle against the deficit reduction, of the initiative to put public finances in order. I would like to congratulate Lucien Bouchard and his finance minister, Bernard Landry; Ontario finance minister Ernie Eves; New Brunswick finance minister Edmond Blanchard and the other finance ministers in the maritimes. I would like to congratulate Alberta finance minister Day Strockwell; Manitoba finance minister Eric Stefanson; British Columbia finance minister MacPhail and the finance minister of Saskatchewan too. Together, they had to withstand 52% of the spending cuts made by the Minister of Finance.

My congratulations to the unemployed, and to employers and employees. In the past three years, the Minister of Finance has taken between $6 billion and $7 billion from annual surpluses that belonged to them to put his fiscal house in order.

I would like to congratulate the taxpayers in Quebec and Canada because they too were instrumental in restoring the health of public finances.

During the four years he has been Minister of Finance and the Liberal government has run the country, the taxpayers of Quebec and Canada have been hit with $30 billion in new taxes by the Minister of Finance.

Therefore, the benefits to be found in this budget are few and far between. This is why the congratulations stop here.

The Minister of Finance definitely does not deserve to be congratulated for putting our fiscal house in order. Let us just make a quick calculation; it is easy to do with the successive budgets of the minister.

The minister's own efforts only account for 12% of the money, which really comes from the provinces, the employment insurance fund and the taxpayers' pockets. We have no congratulations for the minister, who said this morning that our fiscal house has been put in order, a zero deficit has been achieved, and a surplus now exists. The minister was right in using the impersonal form instead of “we”, because he is not the one who did all this.

I am also very disappointed by the way the minister is going about putting our fiscal house in order; he is keeping practically all the resulting dividends, even though he deserves no credit at all.

The minister is keeping over 50% of these dividends. What is he doing with that money? He is taking all sorts of initiatives, even in areas where he asked the provinces, the unemployed, the welfare recipients and the sick to make sacrifices. He is taking all sorts of initiatives for students, in the area of education.

After cutting $12 billion in social assistance, post-secondary education and health care, after having already cut billions in the past three years, not to mention that he is about to cut another $30 billion—as part of the budget cuts included in his 1995 budget—the Minister of Finance is taking all sorts of initiatives, such as the $2.5 billion millennium fund.

Before getting to the issue of provincial jurisdiction, let me say something about the somewhat secretive nature of the minister's initiatives.

As we know, the millennium scholarship fund will start giving out scholarships only in two years. However, in his budget, the Minister of Finance eliminated any sign of a real surplus for this year, by including the whole amount of $2.5 billion, even though he will start giving out that money to students only in five years.

This resulted in almost unanimous agreement—all analysts zeroed in on this ploy—that the Minister of Finance was overstepping the bounds, that he was not behaving in the most transparent manner in showing where public finances were headed, and that he was sometimes using somewhat dubious methods, such as concealing the real surplus for this year and for the next two years, by including in the 1998-99 budget an amount of $2.5 billion that will actually be spent two years from now.

This is not the first time the Minister of Finance has done this sort of thing. I cannot recall a single time in the first four budgets where the Minister of Finance gave us figures that made sense, that corresponded to the reality of public finances. It is very important in democracy to show things as they really are, and it is even more important to do so when it comes to putting one's fiscal house in order, even if we were not talking about the Minister of Finance, who is asking the most disadvantaged Quebeckers and Canadians in particular to make tremendous sacrifices. These people are entitled to transparency.

[Points Of Order, February 25th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would not want to stir up controversy. We have better things to do. I withdraw these words. I could have replaced them by “Mr. Dubuc said—”