Yvan Loubier

[The Budget, February 29th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Lotbinière. What he has just said is quite right. I will simply take one cut to show that Quebec is doing more than its share in absorbing cuts and is therefore poorer than the other provinces in Canada as the result of the actions by the Minister of Finance. Let us consider the cuts decreed in the 1995 budget in the Canada social transfer, with which, it must be remembered, Quebec was to fund health care, post-secondary education and social assistance.

The plan for the cuts, which began in 1995 and will conclude in 2003, will mean that Quebec alone will suffer of some $16 billion of the $31 billion in cuts decreed by the Minister of Finance. This is over 50% of the cuts.

Quebec is going to suffer 50% of the cuts to the social transfer, while it represents only 24.5% of the Canadian population. Is this fair? Is this equitable? Absolutely not.

Looking at R and D expenditures—this should be heeded by those subservient Liberals from Quebec across the way, because we have been saying this for 20 years over and over, and they still haven't got it—we have not received our fair share of federal government goods and services expenditures and structuring expenditures. We are $2.5 billion in the hole every year.

Telling us that this system represents enrichment for Quebec is false. My colleague from Lotbinière has done well to raise this aspect of the question.

[The Budget, February 29th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, we are going to talk of reality, not the inflated statements on the Minister of Finance's tape, as replayed by his parliamentary secretary.

Does he want to know about tax savings? A family of two adults and one child, with a single income of $65,000, will save $700 this year, which is barely $60 a month. That is a lot, is it not, $15 a week?

Taking the same family of two adults and one child, but with two incomes totalling $65,000, they will save $250 this year. Wow. Some tax cut. This is wonderful.

If I had had the time earlier, I would have also talked about the inflexibility of the federal tax system as far as Quebec is concerned. I will give some examples, if I may. Quebec gives tax credits for shipbuilding, but they are then taxed by Ottawa.

There is also inflexibility as far as deducting student loan interest is concerned. Since student debt load in Quebec is less than in the rest of Canada, our province is not getting its share regarding that tax deduction. This is an example of the inflexibility of the federal tax system.

Then there is the deduction for daycare costs. Everyone wants to copy Quebec's $5 a day daycare program, but the federal government has turned a deaf ear when it comes to making the necessary tax adjustments. Some families in Quebec will lose tax deductions, because they are claiming less in daycare expenses from the federal government. The tab is $70 million. I could have talked about this inflexibility.

Yesterday, it was announced—and I would have done it earlier if I had had the time—that the super deduction for research and development the Quebec government—through the Minister of Finance, Bernard Landry—had announced in its budget last year, a measure similar to what has been done in Ontario for ten years with the hundreds of millions received by Ontario businesses through federal deductions for research and development, is quite simply a thing of the past.

Businesses did not even have six months to take advantage of that deduction, while Ontario companies had ten years to benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars given by the federal government.

To those who claim that federalism is beneficial to Quebec, I say think again. It was demonstrated again yesterday that when Quebec has a good idea, Ottawa turns a deaf ear, because the Quebec government would look too good. When there is a measure that is good for economic growth, the government scraps it, as it did with the excellent Quebec research and development deduction. That is what is meant by federal flexibility.

I am tired of hearing about transfer payments being at the same level as in 1993. That is not the case. They are lumping cash transfers and tax points together. Tax points were transferred in the late 1960s. We wish the government would quit trotting out this tired old refrain. No one takes it seriously any more.

The truth is that provincial governments are out $4.2 billion every year, and the Government of Quebec is facing a $1.7 billion shortfall in health care funding. It is the fault of the federal government that people wait so long in emergency rooms and on surgery lists. It is the fault of the federal government that hospitals are closing, because, by 2003, it will have cut transfer payments for health, post-secondary education and social assistance by $31 billion. Members opposite should stop obediently playing the same old tapes, and the government should do its job.

[The Budget, February 29th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, we applauded the full indexation of tax tables, and we continue to do so, because the Bloc Quebecois has been fighting for seven years to convince this government to end this tax injustice whereby, for 14 years now, taxpayers have been paying an extra $3 billion in taxes every year. Indeed, without any announcement from the Minister of Finance about tax rate increases, the minister was collecting at least $3 billion per year.

We condemned this injustice. In 1995 we even tabled a report proposing a reform of the personal income tax system. In that report, our first recommendation to the government was the full indexation of tax tables to end this systematic robbing of taxpayers.

Seven years and $17 billion later—because the federal government's inaction has cost taxpayers $17 billion—the government finally decided to index tax tables. Let us render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Had it not been for the Bloc Quebecois, no one here would have talked about full indexation.

This year the Minister of Finance would probably have announced a $2 billion tax reduction without changing anything to the tax structure. In the end, he would have given $2 billion to taxpayers while at the same time taking back between $3 and $5 billion through the back door.

It is thanks to the Bloc Quebecois, the only party in this House to raise the issue, if this long term adjustment has been made and if, over the coming years, we will be seeing real tax reductions, not disguised ones.

Where are the tax cuts that everyone is calling for this year? There are none, or almost none. The most that the government has done is to freeze people's taxes at the same level as last year. That is it.

Next year there will be minimal tax cuts. I will give a few examples.

There will be no tax savings at all for a family of two adults and two children with an income of $20,000.

For a single income family of two adults and two children earning $35,000, the real tax saving this year will be zero.

For a single income family of two adults and two children earning $65,000, the tax saving this year will be $700—less than $60 a month.

But the lucky friends of the Minister of Finance and of all his colleagues, the folks who earn $250,000 and up, are the real winners this year. Their savings will be $4,796.43.

So much for tax relief. As usual, the Minister of Finance makes sure that these tax cuts are for those whose income is $250,000 or more this year. Next year it will not be all that different.

With full indexing, the tax cuts will happen, but mainly four or five years from now. In my opinion, those tax cuts need looking into more closely.

The Minister of Finance gave us an interesting show yesterday, but if we scratch the surface, we can see that the Minister of Finance is an expert at making things look good. However, when the time comes to take really effective measures, he will certainly not be the one to do so.

Now for agriculture. This is a particularly important sector and one which has in recent years been hit with considerable cuts in the successive budgets of the Minister of Finance, particularly the cuts to subsidies and the measures aimed at the farmers of Quebec.

After six budgets in which there have been more than proportional cuts in the federal agriculture and agri-food budget, it seems to me that it would have been a good idea for there to have been a little help this year for Quebec farmers in the form of subsidies.

This is all the more important, crucial even, because of the impasse in the WTO, where there are no longer any discussions about subsidy levels in the United States and Europe, and our international competitors receive two or three times what the agricultural producers of Quebec do.

How can there be competition against people who are being subsidized up to three times as much as we are? He ought to have restored some of the agricultural subsidies so as to enable that sector to be a front-runner on the international level, despite this inequity on the international level. He did not.

Everyone deplores this now, particularly the president of the Union des producteurs agricoles, who said that agriculture had been completely ignored in the budget. When agriculture was mentioned in the past six years, it was always to announce bad news, such as the elimination of certain benefits that had been in place until then.

I also want to mention infrastructures. There is unanimity against the minister. Again, in today's newspapers, we can see that all those who fought for a real infrastructure program to construct roads, and for other types of infrastructures, particularly municipal infrastructures, will be very disappointed. Some of them already are this morning, but those who were expecting more from the federal government will be even more disappointed.

Some claim that the opposition can say anything, that its members are not taking into account the need to achieve fiscal balance, etc. This is not true. Whenever the Bloc Quebecois has made proposals, it has always kept in mind the need for fiscal balance and sound management of public finances. The same cannot be said of the government opposite, given what is going on at the Department of Human Resources Development, including the scandal about the lost billion, the possibility of bribes here and there and the largesse toward friends.

We redid the forecasts by taking into account the evolution of the economy over the past three months and the most recent major criteria for economic forecasts.

We recalculated the Minister of Finance's surplus forecasts for the next five years and discovered that there will be not $95.5 billion in surplus, but more nearly $140 billion.

With the Minister of Finance we are used to errors in forecasting verging on 100%. Three months ago, he presented his economic statement. He forecast a surplus for 1999-00, that is, the fiscal year ending March 31, of $5 billion. Yesterday, in the budget, the surplus had reached $7.5 billion. In two months and a half, he erred by 21%.

There is worse to come. Yesterday, at the time of the budget, I took out his own department's latest financial review. In the first nine months of the current fiscal year, the surplus was already over $10.9 billion.

The Minister of Finance has a real problem. Either he does not know how to count or he does not know how to estimate or he does not know how to manage or he does not know what is happening in his own department, since the figures he gave yesterday, those of two and a half months ago and those of the same day in the financial review vary between 21% and 50%.

The problem is that the Minister of Finance manipulates figures. He is a great manipulator. I will not use any unparliamentary language, but we need only look at page 20, first column, table 1.2 of his budget plan 2000. It provides for spending in 2000-01 of $4.4 billion he committed in 1999-00. Already we have $4.4 billion that will be spent later on showing up in this year's figures.

Why does he do this? To mislead everyone. He talked about a $5 billion surplus. He realizes that the actual figure will be in excess of $12 billion. He adds $4.4 billion to this year's figures that will be spent the following year. He reduces this fiscal's real surplus of $12 billion by a corresponding amount. At the end of the year, he will crow that he was right on the mark.

It is really too bad that we are treated to this sort of sleight of hand.

He also could have brought in tax reform. That is what he did for individual taxpayers, but we encouraged him to do so for corporations. He did not follow our advice. Large corporations are carrying forward far too much in unpaid taxes. The amounts involved are not small. Year after year, profitable corporations carry forward over $45 billion in taxes they owe Revenue Canada.

I will mention just one, Bell Canada Entreprises, which has been in the news in recent days, which will acquire CTV at a cost of $2.3 billion. This is approximately what BCE owes the federal government in unpaid taxes carried forward. Another example is Bell Canada, which owes $2.1 billion. Seagram owes over $2 billion.

Seagram and BCE taken together represent enough in unpaid taxes to restore the Canada social transfer, to be able to invest in health and postsecondary education and help the poorest members of society. But the Minister of Finance does nothing.

We are keeping our eye on him for the rest of this government's term of office in order to see that he introduces this reform, that he stops arranging things to suit his little millionaire friends, that he gives a thought to the most disadvantaged and listens to people's pleas.

I move:

That the amendment be amended by adding after the words “real tax relief” the following:

“and real and immediate adjustments in the employment insurance system as well as in transfers to the provinces to fund health care, education and social assistance.”

[The Budget, February 29th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday was a great disappointment for me. The heart on my lapel is not a delayed celebration of Valentine's Day; it is for the community groups, the people working on behalf of welfare recipients, people without proper housing and others who are getting a dirty deal. A dirty deal particularly because the Minister of Finance has neglected them year after year, for seven years now, in his budget.

For some time, particularly in the last two and one-half years, the Minister of Finance has had surplus money coming out of his ears, but there has been not one measure to meet the needs of the least advantaged members of our society. Every year, an alarm is raised about the increase in poverty, in Quebec and in Canada, a cry from the heart coming particularly from community groups and the Front des assistés sociaux in particular. There is absolutely nothing in the budget to help them. There is no great source of pride to be found in discussing the budget of the Minister of Finance this morning.

From the social point of view, this budget is a total disappointment, with the possible exception of the Canadian social transfer, which is intended to fund health, post-secondary education and welfare, and which will be $2.5 billion over the next five years. That averages out at $600 million a year.

In order to re-establish the Canadian social transfer, which has been cut systematically every year since 1995, what he would have needed to announce, starting this year, is a reinvestment of $4.2 billion in the social transfer to the provinces. This would make it possible to meet the needs of those left lying on stretchers thanks to the Minister of Finance.

Instead of that, the Minister of Finance preferred using his surpluses for other purposes by ignoring the needs of Quebecers and Canadians, sick people and students, and by ignoring the broad consensus achieved at two consecutive premiers' meetings. On these occasions, the premiers asked that the Canada social transfer be restored to its original level, that is before the Minister of Finance began making deep, drastic cuts and gaining popularity, thanks to the surpluses coming out of his ears.

In that regard, the budget is a big disappointment. It is also disappointing to hear the Minister of Finance and his officials telling us, as usual, that, compared to 1993, there is more money in the social transfer for health care, post-secondary education and social assistance, and that they are taking into consideration the tax points given to the provinces, and Quebec in particular, at the end of the sixties, to correct a situation that was persisting.

That situation was the following. In response to the war effort, the federal government had borrowed the provinces' fiscal capacities, including income tax. The provinces, including Quebec, were given back through tax points the tax field borrowed from them in support of the war effort.

Tax points have been in use for a long time. They do not take anything away from Ottawa and they are not even recorded as a type of expenditure or revenue for the federal government. It is like asking the former owner of a house sold thirty years ago to fix the roof. In other words, it is no longer any of the Minister of Finance's business. It is not federal money but old tax points given away over thirty years ago. It is none of his business.

What should grab our attention is the government's cuts to cash transfers. By 2003 it will have cut around $31 billion in transfers to the provinces for health, post-secondary education and social assistance.

These are not small amounts of money. This year alone, the Government of Quebec is out $1.7 billion. This money could be used to hire 3,500 additional doctors and 4,500 nurses this year, as well as to invest $350 million in the education sector and over $350 million, close to $400 million, in income security. This is an extra $40 a month in the pockets of recipients, which they are not getting.

We have people coming into our riding offices who are short $40 at the end of the month to make ends meet, to be able to feed themselves and their children. The Minister of Finance has decided to turn a deaf ear to the pleas from those on social assistance and the least well off members of society.

My second big disappointment concerned employment insurance. We thought, or we would have thought, that the Minister of Finance had his heart in the right place. But it is now clear that the Minister of Finance is heartless because six out of ten unemployed individuals do not qualify for EI and are left on the sidelines.

The Minister of Finance announced yesterday that even over five years and despite the fantastic surpluses in the employment insurance fund, which the government has not contributed to for a number of years, there will be no improvement in the employment insurance fund.

Yesterday, I heard the messengers of the Minister of Finance playing the “there will be parental leave, a great improvement” tape again. They said the parental leave provided by the government from the employment insurance fund will be twice as long as what the Government of Quebec planned to offer pregnant women.

Yesterday, the Minister of Finance had management, unions and communities in Quebec saying unanimously that the measure proposed was so much showing off, for appearance purposes, an improvement on an empty measure.

In fact, half of the pregnant women will not benefit from this plan, because they will not be employment insurance claimants. Some will be unable to take advantage of this, because the plan covers only 55% of these women's salary. Drawing only 55% of one's salary over a year makes no sense. Even though the length of the program proposed by the Government of Quebec was shorter, the benefits were greater, as was the coverage. In fact, the Government of Quebec intended to provide coverage for self-employed women as well.

Everyone knows that this government is in its pre-election mode, that it is trying to win people over, trying to present people with window dressing. On the surface, that is all very well, but when thinking people scratch beneath that surface—and I think that the intelligence of Quebecers must not be underestimated—they find there is nothing underneath.

The government's treatment of social housing is a real scandal. That sector has had an injection of $58 million. Everyone in Quebec and in the rest of Canada has said that, right now, the minimum investment required Canada-wide to create a minimum of new social housing in order to partially meet the requirements of the most disadvantaged in our communities, who are paying more than 50% of their income for accommodation, would be $1.7 billion, not $58 million. That would not be enough to build even half an entranceway. This is truly scandalous. The Minister of Finance has not heeded the heartfelt cries of those in need.

I turn now to the tax cuts. The Minister of Finance is a great showman, and it is not the first time he puts on a show for us but closer scrutiny reveals it is all smoke and mirrors.

We do, however, have the honesty to applaud the full indexation of the tax tables and the tax structure in general. Why? Because we have been pestering the government, pressuring it, for seven years—

[Point Of Order, February 23rd, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, following statements and list changes made by the Minister of Human Resources Development, I would like to table, for her benefit and that of her colleagues, a book entitled “The New Adventures of Pinocchio”. I ask for the unanimous consent of the House to table this book.

[Taxation, February 22nd, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, by refusing to index the tax tables, the government pockets annually some $3 billion to $5 billion unbeknownst to its taxpayers.

Will the Minister of Finance acknowledge that, without full indexation of tax measures, the upcoming tax cuts he will be announcing will be artificial and will in fact be net tax increases instead?

[Point Of Order, February 22nd, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I have here an article entitled “Jacques Parizeau to Le Devoir : Canada Has no Other Choice but to Negotiate”.

I think it would be nice to have the consent of the House to table this document, which might enlighten all the federalist parties and all the federalist members of the House who want to deny Quebecers their most basic rights to freely decide their future and who are behaving like former Rhodesians.

[Points Of Order, February 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, following the introduction of a racist bill against Quebec and Quebecers by the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, I would like to table an article from La Presse canadienne dated January 29, 2000, regarding the role of the Bloc Quebecois in the achievement of sovereignty in Quebec—

[Supply, February 17th, 2000]

He does not even know what was going on at the CEQ. He was totally out of it.

[Supply, February 17th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I thank our leader, the hon. member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie, for this fine sortie against Bill C-20.

I would like to know his impressions on one specific issue. If, in 1995, during the referendum debate in Quebec, the National Assembly had passed such a bill against the federalist vote, limiting it so that it would have less weight than the sovereignist vote, what would people have thought of the National Assembly and of its Parti Quebecois members?