Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to this motion today. I must tell members that our party will be standing in opposition.
I do think that my hon. friends from the Liberal Party and from the Bloc both missed the most important point. I want to make my argument on three different tracks.
First of all, while we know that the Atlantic provinces did receive compensation in the harmonization deal, we should not assume for a moment that compensation was the right thing to do.
Second, if it was wrong to give that money to Atlantic Canada, then it is equally wrong to offer that kind of compensation, if you want to call it that. I think it is euphemistic to call it compensation. It is wrong to offer it to Quebec.
Finally, we should point out that Quebec entered into this deal willingly. It asserted its independence and made this deal quite willingly in 1991.
I want to expand on those points. The first thing is was the money that was paid to Atlantic Canada really compensation? We should ask ourselves how this all came to pass. We look back on this, back to 1993, to the deputy prime minister's promise on national television about scrapping the GST.
We all know about the sorry episode that followed thereafter. We ended up with the deputy prime minister's having to resign and run in a byelection. She was eventually demoted. She lost her job as the deputy prime minister. It was a sorry episode in the history of the Liberal Party.
Of course, what happened when the government was trying to find some way to make it look like it fulfilled its promise, it rushed out to Atlantic Canada and said “we will give you $1 billion in political hush money if you will go along with our harmonization deal”.
Where do my friends in the Bloc think that comes from, that billion dollars? It does not just come from the mint. We do not just print it. It comes from taxpayers, including from taxpayers in Quebec who already face the highest tax burdens in the country almost and probably in certain ways they do.
We need to remember that taxpayers had to cough up that billion dollars from all across the country. Just because Atlantic Canadians received this money in what I think was kind of an unseemly way does not mean we should also offer it to the province of Quebec. Two wrongs simply do not make a right. They never have and they never will. We absolutely disagree with the premise.
I want to touch for a moment on the last point I made which was that this money comes from Canadians. Where is this money supposed to come from in the current context? The government is talking about a fiscal dividend, however we want to define that, but certainly it will have a surplus.
Instead of that money going toward reducing the debt, which sits at $600 billion, instead of reducing the tremendous tax burden that people face in this country, personal income tax rates that, relative to our G-7 trading partners, are 52% higher than the average, which is absolutely shameful, instead of granting relief to those people, including the people of Quebec who stagger under even higher burdens than the Canadian average, according to the Bloc Quebecois plan we are going to give the money to governments to do with it what they will.
We argue that the money is much better left in the hands of taxpayers. We will make that argument forcefully over the next several months as that issue grips the nation. It is certainly a big issue today. We say let us remember where that money is coming from.
The final point I want to make is that Quebec is the one that entered into this deal willingly, presumably because it thought it would help its economy. It asserted its independence, which is always the argument of the Bloc Quebecois members, “we are an independent nation, we are a people, we will go ahead and make our own deals”. They did make their own deal. Now they are saying “we have decided that we want to change our mind; not only did we make a bad decision back then but we want compensation for making a bad decision”.
They cannot have it both ways. I point out to my friends in the Bloc that almost every program we have in this country today is a transfer program of some kind. Inevitably my friends in Quebec do extraordinarily well, which is one of the most compelling arguments we can make to keep them in Confederation. Why in the world would they step out into the great unknown when they know that they have not only very generous equalization programs but even in programs like the Canada health and social transfer they do extraordinarily well. Almost every program has become a transfer program of some kind; the harmonization deal obviously for Atlantic Canada, but two wrongs do not make a right.
Even the infrastructure program was based on a formula that included unemployment so that higher unemployment provinces like Quebec got more money. What about employment insurance? Huge amounts of money are sent into a province like Quebec because we have regionally extended benefits primarily as an inducement to keep provinces like Quebec in the fold.
We have regional development which overwhelmingly benefits provinces like Quebec. Even the cultural grants in this country disproportionately go to the province of Quebec.
I am making the point that Quebec has already done extraordinarily well by Confederation. With the greatest of respect to some of my friends in the Bloc, this is beyond the pale. They are simply asking too much.
I am going to conclude simply by saying that compensation to Quebec for the GST deal which it entered into sets a horrible precedent. Canadians simply cannot afford it. If we do it for Quebec then we need to do it for every province. We are talking about not a few billion but tens of billions of dollars. Ontario would want $3 billion and on and on it would go.
Where is this money supposed to come from? Where does it come from? It comes from the pockets of ordinary Canadians. We simply cannot afford to tax them ever more to give money to provincial governments. It is absolutely ridiculous.
That is the first point I want to make in summarizing as we enter this whole debate about the fiscal dividend. Let us not give the money away before we even get to the point where we have some money to give away.
Second, let us remember that two wrongs do not make a right. It does not make any sense that because money was paid to Atlantic Canada as sort of political hush money because of a dirty political promise that the then deputy prime minister made that it necessarily follows that we give the money to Quebec.
That is ridiculous. Two wrongs do not make a right. Every child knows that and I am surprised that some members in the House do not understand that.
I point out to my friends in the Bloc that they entered into this deal willingly. They made that decision in 1991 and rushed headlong in. They undoubtedly will enjoy the benefits of harmonization. They claim they already have. Are they to argue then that if they do better in the long run on harmonization than they projected they will turn some of the benefit back to the federal government? I doubt it. I do not think we will hear that.
Let me conclude by saying that Reformers will be voting against this motion. We think it is a foolhardy motion. We think the best solution of all is to take that fiscal dividend and turn it back to ordinary Canadians to spend in the most productive way possible.