Madam Speaker, I would like to say, as I have done before, how much I always enjoy the speeches of the member for Burin-St. George's. However it seems to me he may have moved a little to the right of me since I last heard him speak.
He talked a fair bit about fire, in calling fire. The member is looking a little puzzled but I can see that he is a little more to the right than he was the last time I heard him speak. A matter of positioning I think, Madam Speaker.
The member repeatedly talked about the Reform Party crying fire. I think he misinterpreted us. We are calling smouldering embers that could burst into a flame at any time. I was rather hoping he would use his glass of water to douse some of those embers but he never did get round to it.
The bill we are debating, Bill C-54, is a bill full of what, I agree with the member, appear to be pieces of legislative housekeeping. Although there are one or two areas that give me a little concern, I will deal with those a little bit later in the speech.
First I would like to remind the House that Bill C-54 amends the Old Age Security Act, the Canada Pension Plan, the Children's Special Allowances Act, and the Unemployment Insurance Act. Clearly we are dealing with amendments to various social programs, programs which cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money and some of which are currently under review as a consequence of the discussion paper that was presented by the minister of human resources.
No doubt we will have to make some cuts to the social programs in order to gain control of federal spending. In case any member doubts the seriousness of the problem I would like to remind the House that the current debt stands somewhere in the region of $354 billion. This already enormous debt will increase by about another $2 million in the time it takes me to give this speech.
In case some of the members are rushing to check the Hansard of October 7, yes, in my speech that day I said that the debt would increase by $1 million, but I have twice the allocated time today so there will be twice as much quality content for government members to absorb. It should not be difficult for anyone to see the risk to our social programs posed by this enormous debt.
On Monday morning of this week I was a guest at Windsor Secondary School in my riding. I was invited by a political studies teacher, Mr. Tony Kapusta, to speak about life as an MP and some of the critical issues that are facing the country today. When I asked these grade 11 students to tell me what they thought were the really big issues facing Canadians, they identified Indian land claims, possible separation of Quebec, an out of control immigration and refugee situation, an ineffective Young Offenders Act, and justice problems in general. They also mentioned the debt and deficit in relation to social programs.
I asked these young people, who will actually have to pay off this debt-it will probably be $600-$700 billion by the time they are out in the work force-how long they thought it took for Canada to incur this debt. Their guesses included 100 years, 50 years. You should have seen the looks of astonishment when they found out that it has basically taken only their lifetime, something less than 20 years to incur this $534 billion worth of debt.
It was also a Liberal government in power when this whole deficit problem began so perhaps it is fitting punishment that many of the same people who were present in that Liberal government of the late 1970s will now be forced to face the problem of the smouldering embers that I talked about a little earlier.
The chief offender in fact may have been the present Prime Minister who, as the Minister of Finance on budget day, November 16, 1978, said: "Significant reductions in the deficit can be expected". The problem is he did not say when.
Now he is quoted in this morning's Financial Post as saying that if Canadians will not accept spending cuts in the next budget, then the government has no option but to increase taxes. The whole country is screaming for cuts to government spending and the Prime Minister is still talking about raising taxes.
It took 20 years to incur $534 billion worth of debt and he is still talking about raising taxes. How are we going to pay it off? Let us imagine for a moment that we could somehow manage to eliminate the deficit this year by cutting $40 billion in spending. Then let us say we could somehow manage to cut a further $10 billion from spending and begin applying it to paying off the debt. Allowing for ongoing interest, it would take at least 60 years to pay off the debt. This debt that we have incurred in less than 20 years would not be paid off by our great-great-grandchildren. To achieve that would, as I have just explained, require us to cut about $50 billion from spending this year, $50 billion from a total of about $165 billion or almost one-third of the entire federal budget.
The problem is that every day we delay making serious cuts it becomes harder and harder to take the first step. Every day takes us closer to that time when those smouldering embers burst into flames and the interest payments will end up consuming such a large percentage of federal revenues that the entire federal structure will collapse.
What will happen to our social programs then? What will it matter about all the housekeeping amendments in Bill C-54 if there is no money to pay the benefits?
Bill C-54, because it appears to improve the efficiencies of the Old Age Security Act, the Canada pension plan, the Children's Special Allowances Act and the unemployment act, may not in itself be an offensive bill. But the very fact that it deals with aspects of social programs raises serious concerns about how we can maintain these programs for those who genuinely need them before our out of control federal spending destroys the entire system.
I heard an NDP member in the House yesterday complaining that far too much attention is paid to the deficit. I am astounded that there are still members in the House who have not learned anything from witnessing the collapse of socialism in Sweden. How can they ignore what happened in New Zealand, a country that failed to gain control of its debt? When New Zealand experienced its debt crisis in 1984 there was a labour government in power, the equivalent of the NDP. But all the NDP philosophy in the world did not help them when nobody would buy their bonds. They had no choice but to cut social programs to the bone, to sell off the country's assets, and to deregulate unions; no choice regardless of the NDP philosophy.
Imagine how the labour, let us say NDP, prime minister of the time, the Right Hon. David Lange, must have felt. He had to tell the people of New Zealand that there was no free lunch, that they had been buying their social programs with borrowed money, and that the foreign lenders had decided they were sick of picking up the tab.
Let me read a recent quote from the Right Hon. David Lange:
There was an enormous revolution in the New Zealand economy. The outcome was that in the course of about three years we changed from being a country that was run like a Polish shipyard to one which could be internationally competitive.
Costs are big. People with privileges were dispossessed of them. They crashed. It was tough. But on the other hand there is something fair about a society which is transparent in its reward to people who work and which does not preserve for those who do not, an inevitable flow of taxpayers' money.
There is a key sentence in there from an NDP prime minister. Let me read that key sentence again:
But on the other hand there is something fair about a society which is transparent in its reward to people who work and which does not preserve for those who do not an inevitable flow of taxpayers' money.
The message is that people and companies which are cheating the system will have to be cast adrift. The regulations that permit people to collect benefits when they are earning above the average family income must be changed. Our social services have to be seen to be transparent and fair, available to those who really need them and unavailable to those who have been cheating or using the system to their own advantage.
It is extremely important that we voluntarily trim our social programs so that they are preserved for those who truly need them. The alternative could be having to deal with the aftermath of a New Zealand style debt crisis.
There is a lot of talk in the House too about training programs for people who are out of work. The human resources minister has been running around saying that these programs are going to be part of the new, revised social security system. I think the evidence is that government run training programs are on average pretty useless.
I see grant applications for UI training programs coming across my desk on a regular basis, as most members of the House must have. I have done a fair bit of in depth analysis of these programs. Typically they claim great success in placement, sometimes around 80 per cent, but on further investigation I have found that often this means that 50 per cent have gone on to a further training course that they could not have done without the first one. That is considered to be placement when in fact it is not a job at all; it is becoming a perpetual student.
The present programs are openly discriminatory. The application forms require the training company to fill in a quota of women, visible minorities, disabled people and natives. Instead of being able to choose the people with the best chance of success on the course, the trainers are forced to make racist and sexist decisions about who gets to be trained. It is a disgrace that the government is openly encouraging racist and discriminatory practices in its UI training programs. These abhorrent requirements should be removed from the application forms immediately so that prospects for training can be selected without regard to their ethnic origin, sex or religion.
In Vancouver recently I was listening to a radio talk show and a president of a local training company called to say that he was prepared to train people for existing job opportunities and that he would only ask for payment from the UI system when he made a successful placement.
What an opportunity for the taxpayers. Here is a private company that is prepared to risk its own money to select people, to train them and then to put them into a job and only ask for payment when the job is done. But our present laws do not allow for this option.
I would have thought the minister would be falling over himself to introduce an amendment to Bill C-54 that would allow this opportunity. I am very disappointed he has not done so. Instead of making meaningful changes to help reduce the cost of social programs, he is quietly funding special interest groups to lobby his ministry for retention of their own special interest program funding. Six days before he presented his social services discussion paper in the House, the minister's department had already approved lobbying funds to a special interest group in my riding.
I happen to think this particular group does some pretty good work helping disabled people to gain work skills, but I strongly object, on behalf of the taxpayers of Canada, to the handing out of lobbying funds to organized special interest groups. These
groups already have the advantage of being organized, with research material readily available to them and the ability to mount aggressive lobbying campaigns.
In a committee meeting on Monday the minister admitted that many special interest groups have already completed their submissions. How can this be? The people of Canada did not even get the chance to see the discussion paper until the first week of October. The minister has left us with the impression that his favourite special interest groups already knew what would be in it and had received special interest funding to ensure that they lobby to protect their own special interest programs.
How can we believe the minister is serious about social program reform when he has apparently already stacked the deck in favour of specific groups, forgetting as usual the most important single group of people: the workers who pay the taxes and who will have to deal with the debt?
Ministers of the New Zealand government thought that they could play that game too but the game had a finite end. They too used to hand out grants and privileges to special interest groups, to farmers and to businesses, but it all stopped because they failed to address the problem of the debt.
An excellent "W-5" program on the New Zealand debt problem was shown in Canada just over a year ago. In case some members of the House did not get the opportunity to see it, I have arranged to have it broadcast on the internal House of Commons television channel in the near future. I will send notice to all members to let them know when it will be shown.
However, as an update, I would like members to know that the minister of finance for New Zealand rose in the New Zealand House about one week ago to make a very important announcement regarding the debt. He had made a mistake about the budgetary surplus of $600 million predicted for this year. It was not going to be $600 million after all; it was going to be a surplus of over $700 million. The prediction for next year was $2 billion, a surplus of $2 billion, with tax cuts promised for the following year. How I long for the day when a minister of finance can stand in this House and tell us that there will be tax cuts the year after next.
Talking about the Minister of Finance reminds me that the Canada pension plan is also being amended in Bill C-54. The amendments are of a housekeeping nature, but it brings to mind that the finance minister has refused to deny that he may introduce a tax on RRSPs in the upcoming budget. I am sure government members are receiving plenty of letters about it because I certainly am.
Many Canadians have done exactly what the government has been urging them to do. They have been putting aside money for their retirement in RRSP funds. They have put aside these funds because they are afraid the present debtload will cause the CPP system to totally disappear. Even floating a trial balloon about the taxing of RRSP balances is a cruel thing to do, but to refuse to deny it is being considered is completely unacceptable.
The next RRSP season is due to peak around the time the next budget may come down. Unless the minister puts it on record that he will not under any circumstances tax RRSPs, he will cause a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the investment markets and a lot of stress for taxpaying Canadians.
While the government refuses to assure Canadians that their RRSPs will not be taxed, nothing is being done to bring the gold plated MP pension plan into line with the private sector. In the next month or so a large group of Liberal MPs will become eligible for lifelong pensions after just six years in the role of an MP. They will be sidling up to the tax trough for a combined total payout of around $53 million. It is a lifelong pension collected as soon as they are thrown out of office in the next election and fully indexed to inflation in later years.
I would like it on the record that I refused to sign the form authorizing 11 per cent of my salary to be paid into the MP pension fund. Despite this, the 11 per cent is being taken against my will, forcing me to bring this topic up regularly until I am permitted to opt out of the plan, or it is brought into line with plans in the private sector.
I am almost out of time. I did want to question some of the provisions of Bill C-54. Clauses 9 and 23 of Bill C-54 affect clauses 18 and 37 of the OAS act and permit the crown to attempt to recover accidental overpayments from more than a year ago, provided it would not cause undue hardship.
Overpayment is overpayment. I am not sure just because the recipient spent the money that there is a reason not to collect it. The key perhaps is whether the crown was negligent in overpaying and by its actions caused the recipient to believe that he or she was receiving the funds legitimately. I hope this area will be studied and addressed in committee in order to determine the true meaning and purpose of the clauses.
Clause 37 amends clause 86(1) of the CPP act and appears to make it more difficult for out of country residents to claim travel costs in the event of an appeal. I am curious to know how much money is expended on such travel claims and hope that one of the government members can clarify this point for me. I am all in favour of eliminating unnecessary government spending, but I wonder if justice is being done by making it financially difficult to appeal a ruling, especially if the appeal is successful.
Finally, none of us want our children to be deprived of all the social services that Bill C-54 addresses. I do hope the government will start to address the problems soon.
