Yvan Loubier

[Council For Canadian Unity, June 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we will not change our name, we will change our country. This is what is important to us.

The Council for Canadian Unity, which spends millions of dollars without being accountable to anyone, now has an Internet site where the tone is very clear. The CCU continues to spread despicable propaganda.

Is the tone used on the anonymous site of the Council for Canadian Unity, a tone that promotes confrontation between the federalist friends and the sovereignist enemies, not strangely similar to the federal government's secret communication strategy that was exposed by the Bloc Quebecois last Friday?

[Free Trade Area Of The Americas, June 6th, 2001]

Braggart.

[Federal-Provincial Relations, June 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons is missing the point as well.

Under the pretext of section 14 of the Access to Information Act, we were refused the full Operation Unity document. Under the pretext of that law, of compliance with that law, we were denied access to it, yet it was provided to the Liberal Party of Quebec. Thus, they broke the federal law.

Could some light be cast on this and could the documents be tabled, along with the others that have also been distributed solely to the Liberal Party of Quebec, all the documents relating to Operation Unity during the referendum campaign?

[Federal-Provincial Relations, June 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the minister responsible for the Privy Council missed the point in the question asked earlier.

The government of Quebec cannot be asked to distribute Operation Unity documents when only the Liberal Party of Quebec has obtained a copy. Even the Bloc Quebecois MPs have been refused the entire document, under the pretext of section 14 of the Access to Information Act.

Why has the minister made the decision to restrict distribution of the full Operation Unity document to the Liberal Party of Quebec and to no one else, thus violating his own legislation?

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard many inaccuracies in what the hon. member opposite and his colleagues have said since this morning.

First, in terms of tax points transferred during the 1960s and late 1970s, the principle is the following.

The federal government, mainly during the second world war, had asked the provinces to give up their jurisdiction over personal income tax. The provinces, including Quebec, agreed as their contribution to the war effort.

Under the constitution, which our colleague opposite says he respects, the federal government should never have had this jurisdiction. The federal government stole it from the provinces, because it refused to give it back to them after the war.

As a matter of fact, it was during the 1964 constitutional conference in Quebec City, between Mr. Pearson and Mr. Lesage, and the 1977 conference, which was held with all provinces, that the federal government decided to give back a part of what it had stolen from provinces, as their contribution to the war effort, in the area of personal income tax, inheritance tax and corporate tax. These areas were not under federal jurisdiction.

The hon. member says that constitutional jurisdictions must be respected, but how does he explain, apart from that, another undeniable fact? During the last four years, namely since the federal government has been raking in huge surpluses with other people's money, it has exponentially multiplied its encroachments on jurisdictions that are exclusively provincial, like education, health, early childhood and the family.

Why is it that this member, a federal member, a government member, cannot understand the facts? He has just talked about principles that go against the practice of the past four years. The transfer of tax points during the 1960s and the 1970s was done as a matter of justice for the provinces, which had generously accepted to lend a jurisdiction which was exclusively theirs under the constitution. Will the hon. member, a superior member of a supposedly superior Canada, understand that?

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, so many outrageous claims have been made that it is hard to know where to begin and what questions to ask.

I have about 25 questions I could ask my colleague, but first I want to make a comment. We are not looking for handouts. When the member says: “The federal government would be transferring tax points at its own expense”, he has to understand that the federal government does not exist for its own purposes.

Will the members opposite finally understand that the federal government does not exist for its own purposes; it is there to stand up for the people who have elected it and who have agreed to have it speak on their behalf in this House.

Will the government realize that there are people in Quebec and in Canada who need health, education or income support services, but that these services are provided by the provinces under the constitution itself?

Will it recognize that in the next four years, even with all the various federal programs mentioned earlier, like the pensions and also equalization, the federal government will still have accumulated surpluses of $70 billion to $90 billion?

If the government thinks that there are no problems, it is the one with a problem. There is a major imbalance. The provinces have huge responsibilities, particularly in the area of health. My colleague was saying a little earlier that in eight years health care needs in Quebec will have doubled and the situation is the same in other provinces. We do not have the resources to face that. The resources are here.

If the government does not understand that the federation does not work that way, with a superior government, with members who consider themselves superior to others, above everything, above provinces and above the needs of the population, I think it is mistaken. Will it understand my point?

All we are asking by this motion is a conference between the provincial premiers and the Prime Minister of Canada in order to see what the situation is and where we are heading. The Minister of Finance has acted in such a hypocritical way in the last seven years that we have never seen in what state the public finances really are. Every year it is a surprise. There are incredible surpluses and everything is going toward the debt.

We are all for reducing the debt, but there is quite a difference between allocating to the debt part of the surplus and all of it when the needs of the population are so important.

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal member for Beauharnois—Salaberry said that we were in a recession and that this is why the federal government had been forced to rob the provinces and the employment insurance fund.

Could my colleague tell us when the last recession ended? Could he also tell us whether, since then, the surpluses from the employment insurance fund have been used to eliminate the deficit or to increase the surpluses of the Minister of Finance?

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, to listen to the member for Markham, a former chief economist of the Royal Bank, people would think that he would make a much better novelist than an economist, especially with such wild imaginings.

On the matter of sovereignty alone, I say this to him: no motion of the House of Commons will bring it about. If he thinks it is a step in this direction, he is mistaken. We will decide on sovereignty at home in Quebec with a referendum the issue of which will be decided by the people of Quebec. He will have nothing to say on the matter. That is the first thing.

Second, if the single currency is linked to separatism, is Thomas Courchene, North America's top macroeconomist—at least considerably better than he is—, who supports a single currency, a separatist?

Is David Dodge, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, who sees the single currency as unavoidable in the three Americas within the next 10 years, another separatist?

I think the member for Markham has a problem somewhere.

There is another problem with what he has just said. He talks of economists' forecasts. He is looking out for himself. He was one of the small group of four or five economists that gravitated around the Minister of Finance until last year. Not all of them predicted such ridiculous surpluses as this gang, the buddies of the Minister of Finance.

When the real non partisan economists—and here we can see he is partisan, he became the federal Liberal member for Markham—were consulted, they thought the forecasts of the Minister of Finance were laughable and forecast surpluses of about the same amount as we had.

If he is here today, I put the question to him, is it because he lacked the ability to forecast at the Royal Bank, in fact?

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my colleague a question in connection with an intervention by a former parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance.

He said we were in an advantageous position as far as R and D investments are concerned, spending on laboratories. What is he thinking of? We hear on all sides that this is not the case, that Quebec is disadvantaged. The government side always turns up with miraculous figures and proportions. I do not know where they get them. I do not know what mental gymnastics they use to come up with them.

Would the hon. member be able to give us the truth?

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

His mistakes in estimates.