Monte Solberg

[Pensions, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, on the one hand why is the government breaking its jobs promise to Canada's youth and on the other hand if they ever do get a job forcing them to pay higher and higher taxes for ever diminishing benefits?

[Pensions, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw. The Liberal record is a 17 per cent jobless rate for Canada's youth and now under the guise of CPP reform-

[Pensions, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister is making lyin' Brian look good.

[Pensions, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, any reform of CPP must reflect fairness for all Canadians. If a 20 year old person invested CPP contributions in an RRSP at an average return of about 7 per cent he or she would have an nest egg of over a million dollars. That would give an annual retirement income over double what is being offered under the Liberal CPP plan.

How can the minister justify forcing young people to contribute to a plan that would have to rank as one of the worst investment schemes on the planet?

[The Budget, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I have the same response to my hon. friend. The Reform Party is an advocate of a much simpler taxation system that ensures everybody pays taxes. In fact we have been at the forefront of the debate in advocating a flat tax system and would certainly invite my hon. friend and others to contribute to that debate. It is wrong for people to escape paying taxes in this country if indeed they have an income, or in the case of corporations if they are making a profit. That would be the short answer.

The other point I would make to my hon. friend is we believe that subsidizing businesses by giving them taxpayers' money is equally wrong. That is something my friends across the way in the Liberal Party have been guilty of for a long time.

The most blatant example of that was recently when they gave their friends at Bombardier hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. I note in the budget that another $250 million has been set aside for precisely that. They should be ashamed of that approach to job creation because it only creates jobs for their corporate buddies in corporate Canada.

[The Budget, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, Liberal, Tory, same old story.

With respect to the CPP, I simply must point out that the finance department itself has called the premiums on CPP a payroll tax. Therefore it is a payroll tax and we must not mislead Canadians by suggesting that somehow this is an investment which is what I think my friend across the way wants people to believe.

In fact if it were an investment, it would be the worst possible investment I have ever heard of in my life: premiums go up 70 per cent and there is a 10 per cent decrease in the pension. How in the world can members across the way call that an investment? If it is an investment, it is a Liberal investment and the worst possible one I have ever heard of.

[The Budget, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of different issues there. I hope the hon. member will forgive me if I do not get to all of them.

He touched on students. I will try to answer the member's questions about what this budget does for students. As I said before, this budget is not remarkable only for what is in it but also for what is not in it. The hon. member forgot to mention that the government has already cut seven and a half billion dollars in the health and social transfer. Transfers for education have been dramatically reduced by this government. When the hon. member says that the government has thrown a bone to students, he has forgotten to say that it already took about 10 bones away. He should mention that in fairness.

The same thing applies to the disabled. There have been billions of dollars in cuts to health care. The disabled more than any other group rely on health care. In fairness he should point that out. We do not have a problem with the government contributing more money toward the disabled; that is not a problem. But he should in fairness point out that the government has dramatically reduced transfers to the disabled.

With respect to the child tax credit, we have no problem with money going into programs for poor people in this country. That is a good idea. We have no problem with that. Our point is that if you keep raising taxes and hurting people, poor people in particular who have the least income and cannot afford tax increases, then you are undoing any good you could possibly do by giving them more money through a program to alleviate child poverty.

With respect to technology, if you raise taxes through the roof, which is what this government has done, and then you throw people a bone in a pre-election budget, that is superficial. People understand exactly what the government has done in the past. Those cuts are still hitting home today. So let us not be misled.

What was in the budget with respect to agriculture? I did not hear anything. Was there anything? There was nothing in there, despite the fact that we have tremendous transportation problems in the west and we have a wheat board which many people would argue is completely dysfunctional. So let us not suggest there was something in there when there was not.

With respect to youth, I simply must say when the member talks about a youth strategy, what people really want are jobs. This country has a 17 per cent youth unemployment rate. It is horrendous especially considering the government ran on a promise of jobs, jobs, jobs. We do not need more programs, what we need are more jobs.

Finally with respect to CPP-

[The Budget, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to respond to the budget presented by the finance minister earlier this week.

I want to begin by pointing out that a budget can never be looked at in isolation from what is going on in the country. It can never be looked at in isolation from the government's history, nor from what is going on in the current economic and social climate.

Frankly, that is the great weakness of the government's budget. It wanted to give the impression that this was a budget about which Canadians should feel very good, that all the problems of the past were behind us and now we can look forward to a bright future.

When the government presents a budget that implicitly says that, it ignores what is going on in the real world.

The fact is many Canadians today are asking "If this is such a good budget, why am I not seeing any of the benefits? Why am I not, for instance, able to find a job? Why can I not rely on the health care system? What about the pension system"? Those are the kinds of questions people in the real world are asking today. I did not see any of that reflected the budget we heard just two days ago.

Some have referred to this budget as the fudge-it budget. I think that is a good name because this budget is remarkable not for what is in it but for what is not in it. A budget should take into account all the big issues that are out there today, particularly economic issues. The budget sets the agenda for the government for the entire year. However, if it does not address the issues that Canadians are concerned about, to that degree it has no relevancy to what is going on in the real world. Obviously if the government is going to show leadership, be responsible and accountable to Canadians then the budget should be relevant to the situation of Canadians today. But I do not think the budget is. I think the budget completely missed the point on some very important issues.

I mentioned a minute ago that people today are concerned about jobs. I was astounded when I read the budget document and the booklet dedicated to the issue of employment that there was not one reference to the fact that taxes kill jobs. I heard the minister say in this place that taxes, payroll taxes, are a cancer on job creation. Many people in this place have said the same thing. But in that whole document there was nary a reference to the fact that payroll taxes kill jobs.

It would be bad enough at any time, but coming five days after the finance minister announced a 70 per cent in payroll taxes for the Canada pension plan is absolutely astounding. How could he not know that Canadians were going to be outraged by a tremendous increase in taxes, the largest tax increase in the history of the country? There was no reference to the impact it would have on job creation.

When the government thinks it is going in its favour and announces a 10 cent or a 30 cent decrease in UI premiums, it crows about how many jobs that will create. It alleges that a 30 cent decrease in UI premiums will create 40,000 jobs. But on a huge 70 per cent increase in CPP premiums, there is not a word on how many jobs it will kill. There is not one word in the budget. Nowhere is it seen.

To bring forward a budget five days after it announced that CPP premiums were going to go up a whopping 70 per cent and to not even mention it is simply outrageous, neglectful of the responsibilities of the finance minister. Frankly, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt how out of touch the government is with the concerns of ordinary Canadians.

During the last election campaign the government ran on the issue of jobs, jobs, jobs. When I went through the jobs document I did not see a single reference to the 9.7 per cent unemployment rate. It was nowhere to be found in the document. There were some words in the budget speech about how we should be concerned about joblessness. However, in the jobs booklet, an appendage to the budget document, under the section of economic indicators one would think that somewhere in there would be a mention of the 9.7 per cent unemployment rate. Somewhere it would mention that we have 1.5 million unemployed Canadians.

Hon. member across the way will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that going into the last election we also had 1.5 million unemployed Canadians and he government ran on the promise of jobs, jobs, jobs.

We had 1.5 million unemployed Canadians at that point. Three and a half years later we present a budget with no mention of the fact that we still have 1.5 million unemployed Canadians. If the Liberals ran on that promise I would suggest, in the strongest possible language, that they have completely failed to keep that promise. The promise was a sham, it has not been fulfilled and Canadians have been let down, including the millions of Canadians who voted for the Liberals based on the promise that they would soon find employment. It simply did not happen.

One of the things that was not mentioned in the budget document, even though the Liberals had to put some numbers in but was not remarked on in any significant way is the fact that revenues have gone up dramatically under the Liberal government. Tax revenues have gone up dramatically. If we look at the five year mandate of the government, according to its own numbers going from 1993, including its projections for next year, its total tax revenues will go up about $30 billion. That means a 30 per cent increase.

However, if we look at what has happened to the incomes of ordinary Canadians, I would argue that in a direct comparison ordinary Canadians have fared very poorly. Their incomes have gone down 10 per cent. The government's income has gone up 30 per cent. There was no recognition of that in the budget.

Again, I think the budget should be relevant to Canadians. It should reflect what is going on in the real world. It is fine for the finance minister to speak from the Ottawa bubble and suggest that things are going well, but it ain't necessarily so back in the real world.

Taxes not only kill jobs but they make it impossible for people to fulfil their dreams. We should remember that the whole point of having a budget and of having a government is to serve the people. That is why we are here, we are public servants. However, I do not believe that has been reflected at all in this budget document either.

I would argue that what we find when we read the budget are a lot of self-congratulations and an attempt by the government to put the best possible face on a very bad situation.

I mentioned a minute ago that people are not able to fulfil their dreams because of the staggering level of taxes. However, that is probably the best case scenario for some people. For many people who went bankrupt, including all those people who went bankrupt last year as result of this government's high tax policy, it has been a complete and utter disaster. In 1996 in this country we faced record bankruptcies. That is not a surprise because, after all, we had record high levels of taxation. We had record high levels of personal indebtedness. We saw disposable incomes fall by $3,000 from the time the government came to power in 1993. Again, that was nowhere reflected in the budget documents. I believe it again reflects a disconnectedness with where Canadians are at today.

There are other reasons why I think we need to refer to this document as a fudge-it budget that does not give the whole story.

One of the things that the government and the minister crowed about was the new spending initiatives that he introduced in the budget, about $1 billion a year over two years.

However, what he did not say, and we should always point this out when we have a debt approaching $600 billion, is that this reinvestment was with borrowed money. That is the first thing we need to point out.

The second thing we need to point out when the government is proposing to spend new money on areas that it asserts are important to Canadians, and I believe it is right when it says that, is that when it spends a billion dollars in areas like research and development or health care initiatives it should, to be fair, point out that it also cut $7.5 billion from the Canada health and social transfer and it has made cuts to research and development in the past.

The impact of those cuts is far greater than the benefits of the money that it is proposing to put in. This year alone it is another $2.8 billion in cuts to the Canada health and social transfer, and it is crowing about $300 million that it is going to put into health care over a three year period.

Let us put things in perspective. For every $1 the government is putting back in this year it is going to take $10 out. I do not think that is much of a help to ordinary Canadians.

A lot of ordinary Canadians are going to say this is nothing but pre-election flimflammery. They have every right to be cynical about what the government is doing and they really wonder what the exercise or what the purpose of a budget is. If it is not to tell the complete story then what exactly is the government doing? Obviously it is trying to put the best possible face on a very bad situation.

One of the concerns I have is that over the three and a half years we have been here our party has railed away day after day on the problem of the deficit. I want to give the government some credit here. The government is finally taking the deficit situation seriously. After nine years that we have pounded away about the deficit, it has become an issue. I would like to suggest that perhaps the Reform Party can take a bit of credit for raising that issue and making it a big issue. I applaud the government for finally recognizing that it is important. It has taken a while but the message has gone through.

Where we disagree completely with the government on its approach to the deficit is in how it has lowered it. The government has taken a completely different approach than our party would have taken. I want to expand on that for a moment.

The government has raised revenues. It has raised taxes, raised revenues, and it has used that money in a couple of different ways. It has used it partially to reduce the deficit and it has used it partially to maintain a government that is far too big, far too wasteful, far to inefficient; a government that still has all kinds of pools of money to give out to special interests, to business groups and to many big businesses like Bombardier. The government has used the money to curry favour with regional interests. It has used it in a number of ways that are not very efficient and do not contribute to the overall betterment of the Canadian people and the Canadian economy.

That is one of the big differences between what the government does and how the Reform Party would handle this situation. The government says that it thinks it is okay to gradually reduce its spending until it has a government of around $107 billion or somewhere around there. We say it is much better to reduce the size of government down to about $94 billion and to turn the savings back to Canadians. In other words, the government has continuously raised revenues up, and that has come from only one place, from the pockets of ordinary Canadians. Meanwhile Canadians' incomes have fallen.

We say it is time to reverse that trend. We would make government smaller and give the benefits back to ordinary Canadians in the form of a $15 billion tax relief package. It would amount to $2,000 for the average family of four by the year 2000. I will go into that in more detail in a moment.

However, there is another area where we are critical of the government. We are critical of the government in so far as when it has reduced spending it has reduced it by cutting transfers to the provinces.

We came here three and a half years ago, coming out of an election campaign where the Reform Party proposed to balance the budget over a three year period. We called it zero in three. In that package we outlined a number of spending reductions. We said because Canadians have made it very clear that health care is a priority for them, we would preserve health care spending and higher education spending, but that just about everything else would have to be looked at. In that plan we were able to come up with enough cuts that we would be able to balance the budget over a three year period.

When we were proposing those things the government members across the way at that time during the election campaign pilloried the Reform Party despite the fact that we were going to save health care and save higher education. What did they turn around and do? They proceeded to cut health care far more dramatically than anything anybody in the provinces ever proposed. We proposed to save it; they cut it by billions and billions of dollars. There are hospitals closed around the country today due to what the Liberals did after they said they would not do it.

In the election campaign they went around the country telling people they were going to be the defenders of medicare. I do not think there is anybody who would buy that line today. The finance minister has served as the Dr. Kevorkian of health care in this country. He has pulled the plug on health care in many, many regions of the country. I hope the Liberals will pay the price for that.

Cutting transfers to the provinces is the wrong way to cut spending. We say that it is much better to look at your own house first. When you do that then you have the moral authority, you have exercised leadership and people are much more willing to accept cuts at their level if you have already demonstrated that you are willing to accept cuts at your own level.

In order to get its spending in line the government cut defence. It has cut that department by about $3 billion since it has been in power. Defence has been the whipping boy of successive governments for a long time and the cuts have to stop.

When we add up the cuts the government has made to transfers to the provinces which amount to about $7.5 billion, and the cuts which it has made to defence which are about $3 billion, it amounts to $10.5 billion. It has only cut $17 billion in total. The other $6.5 billion has come from cuts to its own administration.

If we add that to the increase in revenues which the government has brought in, which amount to about $28 billion and which include user fees and other revenues, this indicates that only about 5 per cent of the overall improvement in the bottom line is due to cuts in its own backyard. It has only cut itself by 5 per cent. Taxpayers have taken a major hit. Their pocketbooks are empty because of what the government has done. The provinces have taken a major hit. The people in defence have taken a major hit. But only 5 per cent of the improvement in the bottom line is due to cuts that the Liberals over there have taken.

One of the most egregious examples is the cementing in place of the MP pension plan that Liberal members were thrilled to engage in about two years ago. Now they turn around and say: "We are going to go after seniors and all the rest of the people who are coming up through the ranks and paying into the Canada pension plan by raising their premiums by 70 per cent".

It is typical of what has happened in this budget. It is typical of what has happened in the past. Liberal members pad their own pockets first and then ensure that their way is paid for by higher premiums and higher taxes from ordinary hard working Canadians.

This budget is a fudge it budget. It has not told the complete story about what is going on in the country. The government has proven that it is disconnected from what is going on in the country. The government has proven it does not understand the pain which ordinary Canadians are feeling. The government has completely broken its promise on jobs. It has left the young people of the country out in the cold. Youth unemployment stands at 17 per cent.

There is a better way. The Reform Party will provide people with a better way through lower taxes, smaller government and a reinvestment in social programs. I hope that Canadians punish the government in the next election for what it has done.

[Petitions, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition calls on Parliament to conduct a full public inquiry into the relationship between lending institutions and the judiciary, and to enact legislation restricting the appointment of judges with ties to credit granting institutions.

[Petitions, February 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I have two petitions to present. The first calls on Parliament to urge the federal government to join with the provincial governments to make the national highway system upgrading possible beginning in 1997.