John Williams

[Members Of Parliament, March 17th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, what seems to be happening in this House is most disquieting.

I believe that millions of Canadians share my very deep concern that certain members opposite are trying to undermine, perhaps even destroy, the reasons and ideas on which this place is built.

The result is that ideas, honest and vigorous exchanges and debate are being stifled by certain members opposite who label their opponents racist, redneck, bigoted and prejudiced.

It is a habit of certain members opposite to stand in this House and hurl insults or to go outside this House and amplify their remarks to the media.

Canadians want to know why the Prime Minister tolerates this behaviour. Does he truly believe that is Liberalism? Does he believe that this is what is called democracy?

[Father Albert Lacombe, March 10th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize the anniversary of the birth of Father Albert LaCombe, born on February 28, 1827.

Father LaCombe migrated from his native community of St. Sulpice in the province of Quebec to found the settlement of St. Albert in 1861 and several other missions in the province of Alberta such as St. Paul de Cris.

He worked with the native Indians of Alberta, the Cree and the Blackfoot. His efforts led to the peaceful acceptance of the building of the CPR. During the 1885 Louis Riel rebellion he acted as a calming influence in the region. He was also an adviser on the negotiations of Treaty No. 8.

Father LaCombe was also an accomplished linguist. He wrote a dictionary and a grammar book of the Cree language and he translated the Scriptures into native languages.

In conclusion, I wish to recognize Father LaCombe as a great Albertan and a great Canadian.

[The Budget, March 10th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, in her concluding remarks in answer to the previous question the minister said she had every reason to believe business is going to take up this challenge and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Why then do we actually need an infrastructure program which is going to cost the taxpayers another $6 billion?

The minister asked us to endorse the budget that was brought down by the Minister of Finance. In her speech she talked about creating jobs through small business. Why do we need a $6 billion infrastructure program that loads more taxes and more debt on the taxpayer? We have argued for a long time to start reducing taxes and allow business to do its job and that is how we will start creating employment.

In her remarks on unemployment insurance she was taking great credit for the fact that government is reducing UI premiums. Remember however that on January 1 the government increased the UI and now is taking it back. The net result is absolutely zero. For the government to take credit for reducing the UI premiums I think is false on its part.

The hon. minister talks about the budget, taking great credit for reducing the deficit to $32 billion. By the minister's own admission it will drop on its own to $41 billion this coming year.

Why is the minister asking for our support when the Minister of Finance brought down a dismal budget? It has not been accepted by Canadians and Canadians recognize that government has not even started to address the deficit problem, adding another $100 billion in debt.

Will the minister please explain why we should support the budget as brought down by the minister because I do not think we should.

[The Budget, March 10th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his speech. I know we are the opposition on this side of the House, but I do not think that means we have to be so negative. The hon. member knocks the budget but there is nothing concrete, no proposals being put forth by Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition that also sits on this side of the House. He talks about the bank's being difficult on small business, about the underground economy growing, about all things that are negative in the country. As members of the House we should be talking about the positive aspects such as how the federal

government transfers $3.5 billion to the province of Quebec through the equalization grants.

When are they going to start acknowledging these things rather than talk like a broken record and say that the duplication of federal-provincial programs seems to be the problem that faces the country? If we repeat that statement often enough people will start to believe it, but the point is that there are many positive things.

Will he recognize that we in the House make a positive contribution to Quebec and every other province in Canada?

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I offer my congratulations to the hon. member for Oxford on his maiden speech in the House. We are delighted to hear about the many facets of his riding and I can see that he has much to talk about.

On the budget, about which he did not have too much to say, he seemed to emphasize the fact that he was proud of his government's attempts to broaden the tax base and close the loopholes and perhaps raise taxes and so on.

I was wondering if he would agree with the previous speaker with whom I took issue who said he thought that we did not have a spending crisis in this country but that we had a revenue crisis in this country.

The hon. member seems to think that we should be raising more taxes. Again, I ask him the same question I asked the previous speaker. Does he think that while Canadians are groaning under the massive weight of taxes in this country, and while we are $500 billion in debt, we should not look at cutting spending and cutting that spending dramatically rather than trying to squeeze another dollar out of the Canadian taxpayer?

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have a few points I would like to raise in response to the hon. member's speech in defence of the budget.

He took great pride in talking about the new programs that are being introduced in the budget. This was presented by the Minister of Finance as being a tough budget. Yet 18 new programs are being introduced. We have gone 125 years since Confederation without these programs. This was supposed to be a tough budget and here we have the government starting off and spending on programs in brand new areas.

I have another point, and it is the one to which I would really like the member to respond. He said we have an income crisis and not a spending crisis. The country is $500 billion in debt. Canadians are groaning under the weight of taxes they can hardly afford to pay. I would like him to tell us why he thinks we have a revenue crisis rather than a spending crisis.

[Indian Affairs, February 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it has been reported in the media that members and supporters of the Reform Party have been maligned and labelled racist and haters of Indians by certain members of this House.

I find this repulsive and so do more than 2.5 million Canadians across this nation who voted for the Reform Party.

Many of those who supported our party are native Indians. I have two reserves in my riding and they as well find these remarks offensive.

Remarks of this nature serve only to create divisions in our country and foster hatred between different groups of Canadians where there should be friendship and understanding.

It is my fervent hope that the members who have made such offensive remarks will rise in this House and apologize and promise never again to make such hate filled comments, whether in private or in front of this House before the television cameras.

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, in response to the member's question, during the last election we stated quite specifically that we would cut back the old age security from families making more than $54,000.

During the election campaign when I told seniors that our policy was to cut off the old age security for families making more than $54,000, their response was generally that they wished they could have earned $54,000 a year as a family. Why should hard working Canadians, many of whom are just scraping by, pay their taxes for retired people to be in Florida, Hawaii or California courtesy of the taxpayers of the country?

I will address the second question. I listened to the excellent speech of the Minister of Industry earlier this morning. I raised the point then and I will repeat it again: Why are we spending $6 billion in infrastructure programs based on sewers, roads and low tech jobs when there is such a great need to ensure that the country is competitive around the world in the area of high priced jobs where education is required, where it is important

that we can compete? I have always said that the differences between $20 an hour jobs in Canada and $1 an hour jobs in Mexico are motivation and education. That is where we should be taking the $6 billion and putting it into high tech jobs.

We cancelled a helicopter program that was to create all kinds of research and development in the country in order to pave a road from here to there. That is where this government's priorities are wrong. It does not have a philosophy and a real plan of what it is trying to do. It is trying to appease various different projects with short-term solutions.

If we finally got our act together we could accomplish what the minister was trying to say. At the same time we could balance the budget and ensure that the country has a future for our children.

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, February 22, 1994 will go down in Canadian history as the day that the Minister of Finance failed to rise to the challenge of coming to grips with the fiscal problems facing this nation.

This government has a debt in excess of $500 billion and an annual deficit of $45 billion. The Minister of Finance has brought down an uninspiring and tepid budget with nothing but a little more taxes and a little less spending that barely addresses the issue of deficit reduction and elimination. By his own admission, the actions that the minister announced in this House on Tuesday will only reduce next year's deficit by $1.5 billion, from $41.2 billion to $39.7 billion.

The Minister of Finance had led us to believe that he was launching a major attack on the debt and deficit of this country. This was to be a tough budget, he said. He was going to break the back of the deficit and we all expected that the Minister of Finance was going to be decisive. His budget reduces the size of the expected debt in this country next year by less than .3 of 1 per cent. Is that what he calls an attack on the debt and deficit? Is that being decisive?

I have challenged the Minister of Finance on several occasions. I will say it again. Will the Minister of Finance dare to be great and balance the budget by the end of this Parliament? I have stated that he could choose mediocrity or he could choose to rise above mediocrity and reach beyond himself and lead this nation out of the dark tunnel of deficits and debt and into the sunshine of renewed prosperity. History has always given the accolades to the leaders who rise to the challenge while those who have failed to rise to the challenge have been buried in the ignominy of their failure along with their mediocrity.

It would appear to me that we may find the name of the Minister of Finance and his red book, or perhaps red ink book, buried in the footnotes of history along with his indecisive and inadequate policies.

The Minister of Finance broke new ground on January 31 by holding the first ever parliamentary pre-budget debate in this House. At that time he was demonstrating his leadership. He had no shortage of innovative ideas presented to him. If he had listened to Canadians he would have heard that they were disgusted with budgets that profess to address our fiscal problems through a little more taxes and a little less spending while waiting for the panacea to fall out of the sky.

This budget, in my opinion, has failed the test of financial leadership since the deficit and the debt tunnel has just been extended again. There is no sign of that ray of sunshine of renewed prosperity. According to my calculations, the light at the end of the tunnel may have been turned off as a result of lack of leadership and lack of vision.

In his report, the Auditor General stated that hard choices lie ahead. This government continues to pay millions of dollars of old age security to high income families.

These taxes are paid by working people, many of them just scraping by. To continue paying old age security to high income families means that he, the Minister of Finance, has dodged the hard choices which still lie ahead.

What about unemployment insurance? The Minister of Finance proposes to narrow the gap between employment income and unemployment insurance payments for people with modest income and dependants, thereby further reducing the incentive to work.

If there is one thing this country needs it is more jobs. This budget has presented easy choices but no jobs. The bad news is that the hard choices still lie ahead.

A previous Liberal government, back in the seventies, promised us a just society but delivered to us a debt society. If we examine the track record of the seventies we will see that the previous Liberal government spent beyond its means and the net result was a plethora of social programs and a mountain of debt.

In the eighties the Tory governments promised to reverse this alarming trend. Every budget in the last 10 years has professed to address the annual deficits as they continue to consume our economy like a cancerous growth. What was sold to us, sold to Canadians as a just society by the Liberal governments in the seventies, turned us into a debt society in the eighties. The Minister of Finance's budget by this new Liberal government gives us every indication that, in turn, this will turn us into a bankrupt society in the nineties.

I have spoken in this House of the difficult choices and how we have surmounted them in the past. I have drawn parallels between our current situation and the period at the end of World War II when the federal debt was 108 per cent of our gross domestic product. We had back then what we would call today a peace dividend as we wound down the war effort.

That was not a time without problems, however. Soldiers were returning from the war with no jobs; industry was in transition. The leaders of our nation at that time were able to open the door to a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity through leadership and vision.

Members will note that I said leadership and vision opened the door by using the peace dividend to buy the prosperity. We did not use it to buy more social programs.

We can do the same today by creating our own deficit elimination dividend. This country needs a dramatic realignment of our resources toward the opportunities available in this rapidly changing technological world. We have talents and resources that are in high demand around the world.

If we start exploiting these opportunities and teach our citizens to build on our advantages rather than holding each other's hand through social programs, it will be then that this country will have a bright future. The sunshine of renewed prosperity will once again be realized so that we can pass that prosperity on to our children.

Unfortunately, the Minister of Finance has put that reality on hold for yet another year, if not indefinitely. The deficit elimination dividend, obtained through a dramatic reorganization of our priorities that will balance the budget by the end of this Parliament, is the only hope that I can see for the return to economic prosperity in this country.

The Minister of Finance has failed to secure the economic future of this country. He did not rise to the challenge. He did not dare to be great and he passed up on an opportunity to balance the budget in this Parliament.

The day of fiscal reckoning cannot be postponed. We must face it and we will face it. Based on the budget tabled yesterday, Canadians will have to face that day of reckoning on their own without the leadership of this government.

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

First I have to say how much I enjoyed my colleague's speech about how enthusiastic he is about how bright the future of Canada perhaps will be. He talked about the electronic highway, and that of course is vitally important to the ability of this country to remain competitive in the years ahead.

He talked about putting new technology to work. He talked about a $50 million program to provide assistance in the new technology. He talked about a program to hire scientists and engineers to ensure that we can move forward and develop new products. He talked about a $10 million program for new product partnerships. I thought this was just great and wonderful.

If all these things are so important to Canada moving ahead and being competitive in the world, why are we spending $6 billion to fix the roads and sewers when these things that he has outlined are so vitally important for the country to move ahead from this point forward?