Monte Solberg

[Goods And Services Tax, March 8th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the government finger pointing on its broken GST promise seems to be intensifying.

Yesterday it was somehow the fault of Canadians that the government has failed to meet its promise and has failed to scrap the GST. Today we find out it is blaming the provinces. We had this embarrassing display from government members from Saskatchewan saying to the premier: "Please help us hide and expand the GST". It is ridiculous.

Why does the government not admit, why does it not come clean with Canadians and tell us it has absolutely no intention of killing, scrapping or abolishing the GST despite what it said during the election campaign?

[The Budget, March 7th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, there is another quote he might recognize. It was made in 1989 in the House of Commons: "The goods and services tax is a stupid, inept and incompetent tax". He said that in this House. He said that he would abolish it. The Deputy Prime Minister said on national television that if it was not abolished, she would resign.

Is the minister going to keep his promise or is he going to let the Deputy Prime Minister hang on her own words, as tempting as that might be?

[The Budget, March 7th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, for four years leading up to the election, the Liberals vowed they would scrap the GST. The finance minister talks about nerve. Yesterday he did not have the nerve to call the GST by its name in the budget. He did not have the nerve to even mention it.

The finance minister is playing Canadians as a bunch of suckers. He is saying: "Too bad you did not read the fine print in the red book, but we are not going to meet our promise on the GST". The evidence is overwhelming. They promised it. When are they going to follow through? When are they going to scrap the GST?

[The Budget, March 7th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has asked me to comment on the specifics. Let me comment on them as a whole first.

The government has majored on the minors with respect to these programs. It has tinkered with the mechanics of these various programs but it has not addressed the underlying problem which is that we do not have enough money to sustain these programs. That is the underlying problem.

We do not have a particular problem with the direction in which the government has moved with respect to old age security and the guaranteed income supplement. It makes some sense to us. We have applauded the government for that. We have publicly said we agree with that direction.

However to major on the minors gives people the impression that somehow the government is providing some long term sustainability for that program. That is not the case. We are simply going deeper and deeper into debt by not announcing a date by which we

will balance the budget. Therefore these programs ultimately are destined to become unsustainable.

On the question of child support payments, we have a concern about what the government has proposed. I am very concerned that by heavily taxing people who are currently getting a tax deduction for paying child support, we are going to end up driving a lot those people away from making their child support payments.

We support the idea that there should be stronger enforcement measures. There must be stronger enforcement measures. That is where the emphasis should be in our judgment. We also want to see more money end up in the hands of the children. That has got to be the idea behind this.

In what the government is setting out to do I think it is going to end up driving a lot of people who pay child support payments away from doing that. It is going to give them an incentive to skip their child support payments.

With some of the other things the hon. member has mentioned, for instance child tax credits and things like that, again the government has not got to the underlying problem. If we give somebody $120 or $10 more a month or whatever it is, that is peanuts compared to the debt the government is asking them to assume the moment they take on a job. They pay for that debt in the form of higher taxes and weakened social programs down the road. They pay for it in the form of higher interest rates. They pay for it in the form of higher unemployment. It is simply ludicrous to give them $10 in one hand and to take $10,000 from them on the other hand because of the interest on the debt.

Although tinkering around inside the envelope of the programs is fine, unless the government deals with the underlying structural problems then it is really not doing the job it was sent here to do.

[The Budget, March 7th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, in the 1993 election one of the things the Liberal government did was set up expectations. It campaigned on the promise that it would create jobs, jobs, jobs. Those were the expectations it left Canadians with.

In the 1996 budget and over the previous two and a half years we have seen nothing that solves the problem of the high unemployment we have in this country.

Today we have youth unemployment of 16 per cent to 18 per cent. We have 9.5 per cent overall unemployment. That is simply unacceptable. The government has failed miserably in its promise to create jobs for Canadians.

There are many good reasons for that. One of the things Canadians were hoping for in this budget was some tax relief, some light at the end of the tunnel. There is nothing like that in this budget. This budget is simply a cipher. It is a willow wisp. There is nothing to it. It is hollow. Anything proposed is over the hill and into the next millennium.

Canadians were hoping there would be something indicating stronger social programs down the road. They have certainly talked about the mechanics of social programs as they now exist and how they would change them. There is nothing in this document that explains it all. Nothing explains where the money will come from to sustain these programs over the long haul. By continuing to add debt on to debt the government is simply weakening these programs.

The government set very high expectations. It encouraged Canadians to think positively about what would come under a Liberal government. Unfortunately it dashed those hopes in the 1996 budget. It is simply an empty document with a lot of hot air.

It want to talk specifically about some of the challenges we face and how the government has failed to deal with these issues. I have talked about jobs, higher taxes and the unsustainability of social programs as they presently are. Now I want to talk about the cause of those things, why we have those problems.

The reason we have high unemployment is not that the government has failed to come up with short term, make work job creation programs, dusted off programs from the 1970s. That is not why we failed to deal with the unemployment problem. The problem is a debt of $575 billion. That has contributed to a structural problem with unemployment. That is why we have had 11 per cent, 10 per cent, and 9 per cent unemployment over the years.

This budget has completely failed to deal with that problem.

The Liberals are laughing at this. It is a big joke that we have unemployment. I do not think it is a joke. I do not think that when they went door to door saying they would solve the problem they made a joke of it. They led people to believe there was something serious going on and that they would solve it.

They have failed miserably to address the problem in the budget. They have not got to the root of the problem, the huge debt of $575 billion.

The only way we can create the jobs Canadians so desperately desire is to lower taxes and interest rates. The only way to do that is to wipe out the deficit and begin to pay down the debt. They have failed completely to do that. They have added $112 billion to the debt over the course of their mandate.

Not only have they failed to meet the hopes of Canadians with respect to jobs and job creation, they have contributed to the problem. They have added unemployment and for that they will be judged very harshly.

One of the concerns Canadians have, particularly those who are job creators such as small business people, is that we have extremely high taxes. The finance minister and members opposite have been crowing that they did not raise taxes in the budget. Raising taxes should not be a standard of a budget; it should be the exemption.

We have seen 22 tax increases since the government came to power. It has added $5.9 billion to the personal debt load of Canadians. That is shameful. Is it any wonder there are record bankruptcies in Canada. Is it any wonder people are so pessimistic about the future of the country.

The budget did not address that problem. There is no mention of tax relief. The reason there is no mention of tax relief is that the only way we can have tax relief is by wiping out the deficit. The government has failed miserably to address that problem.

The government did talk about a tax of one kind, in a very innocuous way about the GST. If I remember correctly, during the election campaign hon. members opposite told Canadians they would abolish the GST. They would axe it. They would kill it.

The Deputy Prime Minister on CBC national television on October 18, 1993, a week and a half before the election, said the GST would be abolished under a Liberal government and if not she would resign. Two and a half years and three budgets later, the Deputy Prime Minister sits in her seat and smiles. She knows the government has succeeded with its ruse, at least until now.

Canadians will not forget the issue. They will not forget that promise. They are already cynical about the promises politicians make. They will be very hard on the Liberals for that promise which they have failed to keep.

Not only have they failed to keep their promise with respect to the GST, the very tax they said they hated and would abolish, one which the finance minister called a stupid and contemptible tax, but they are talking about augmenting and strengthening it. They are talking about making it a tax which would reach more goods and services. They are talking about creating a super tax which in Ontario alone, according to a recent University of Toronto study, would kill 70,000 jobs. How does that square with their commitment to create jobs? It does not square at all.

I will talk about social programs. We have a situation in Canada today in which people are fearful about not being able to collect the pensions into which they have been paying over the course of their lifetime. The government has done nothing to address that issue. It has gone the other way.

The government talks about making changes to RRSPs which would mean that Canadians could contribute only until age 69 instead of age 71 and therefore they will not be able to save as much for their retirement. On the other hand CPP is in terrible danger. That works against the principle of merit. It works against the principle of initiative, that people should look after themselves. We are working against that. Why are we doing that? It makes absolutely no sense. We are making the pension system unsustainable on the one hand but also robbing people of the ability to save for themselves on the other hand. It does not make any sense.

Again, is it surprising that people feel pessimistic when the government does not deliver on its implied promise that somehow things would be better when the Liberals got to power.

I will conclude by saying Canadians want some hope. They want to feel optimistic about their future. This government led them on in the 1993 election by saying: "We will provide you with jobs, jobs, jobs". Implied in that was prosperity; implied in that was that we would have a strong social safety net. None of that is happening. Quite the contrary, it is going the other way.

In fact this budget has been a budget of irresponsibility in the sense that despite the fact the government knows that these problems sit over the heads of Canadians like a very sharp sword, it has not done a thing to deal with them.

[Goods And Services Tax, March 5th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, before the election the Liberals seduced Canadians with the promise of getting rid of the GST. Two years later, Canadians are left holding the GST love child and those sweet talking Liberals are nowhere to be found. They walked out.

The Minister of Finance said: "I would abolish the GST". Those are his words. Does the minister deny that he said those word? If not, why is he not meeting his promise?

[Goods And Services Tax, March 5th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, during the election campaign the Liberals went door to door promising to abolish the GST.

Let me quote the fisheries minister in the House of Commons on February 11, 1993: "Our alternative to the GST is that we are not going to have one. We are not going to have a tax that burns the individuals and the small businesses which then go broke because they cannot afford the people and computers to do it".

My question to the finance minister is when will he uphold the promise of his fisheries minister, his caucus and his own promise when he said he would abolish the GST?

[Committees Of The House, March 4th, 1996]

Madam Speaker, obviously I will not respond to everything because it would take too long. It is understandable that the Bloc members would like to assume all these chairmanship positions. That makes sense to me. I understand why they want that. Ultimately they want to go and become emperors in their own country. That is fine. They can pursue that.

The point I want to make and which we have been trying to make here is they should not be aided and abetted by the Liberals. They should not be turning the rules on their head for a party is committed to the separation of Quebec from this country. That party should not be using those rules to seek its own ends.

That is exactly what the Liberals have done. They have entered into this alliance, into this little intrigue with the Bloc Quebecois, with the separatists. They applauded them when the Speaker ruled that they should be maintained as the official opposition.

That speaks volumes of what is happening here about the commitment of these people to have federalists sit in the opposition and help guide the agenda. I understand where these people are coming from. We will never agree with them. We will never agree with the Bloc, but the conduct of the Liberals is unbelievable.

[Committees Of The House, March 4th, 1996]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member will be waiting a long time. The one who should be making apologies in the House is the one who is trying to rip the country apart.

The hon. member is arguing on the one hand that they should be allowed to sit as vice-chairs on these committees because of the great Canadian heritage they have helped to uphold. On the other hand he is saying that he would take his province out of Canada.

Let us not look backward for a moment; let us look forward. Are we saying that we want to put someone in charge of the Canadian heritage committee when we are sending a Canadian unity committee of that committee across the country to talk about ways to hold the country together? That is absolutely nuts. That is ridiculous.

We would be irresponsible if we did not note that leading up to the last referendum the defence critic for the Bloc Quebecois wrote a letter on his leader's letterhead to the Canadian military in Quebec and asked them to consider coming over to them in the wake of a referendum. If we did not take some steps to protect ourselves from what could happen as a result of that, we would be completely irresponsible.

The member is talking about talking Quebec out of Confederation, but let him not think that we should accept that. In his words, because he and the members of his riding are taxpayers somehow they have the right to sit as a vice-chair on any committee to propose things that would rip the country apart. That is nuts.

[Committees Of The House, March 4th, 1996]

It was very unfortunate, but he very wisely ruled that according to precedent he had to maintain the Bloc as the official opposition.

However what happened after that spoke volumes. When members of the Liberal Party applauded it said more in a few seconds than all the members in the House could say in an eternity. They applauded because they favour the separatists in the official opposition chair, none more than the hon. member Glengarry-Prescott-Russell who has made it a point to make sure every vice-chairmanship has gone to the Bloc Quebecois, the separatists, no matter how damaging it has been to the country.