John Bryden

[Supply, February 4th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, if I had it my way no tax points would be transferred to provinces for any consideration. By assigning tax points to the provinces we have in effect lost control over federal spending on health care. With the tax points it is absolutely unconditional how provinces spend federal dollars.

If members opposite were to move an amendment to their motion to remove the word unconditional, I guarantee them absolutely that I would vote for their motion. I look forward to the time when they actually take out the word unconditional.

[Supply, February 4th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, unlike my colleague who just spoke, I have little objection to this motion. For the most part, it is an excellent motion.

I point out that it says that this House urges the government to respect provincial jurisdiction in health care management. I heartily endorse that. That is precisely what is in the Constitution. I am sure that given the right conditions, all the provinces would certainly endeavour to manage health care in a proper fashion.

On increased transfers to the provinces for health care, I think I can speak for just about every member on this side that we would want to see more money go toward the health of Canadians. I am hoping in the budget that is coming out very shortly that the government in its wisdom will find more money for health care in the provinces. We must remember it is a provincial jurisdiction.

Finally, regarding using budget surpluses to encroach upon the health field, quite honestly I do not really know what that means. I certainly would not want to see the federal government encroach in any improper way on provincial jurisdiction.

The only word I have difficulty with in the motion is the word unconditionally. The motion suggests that the federal government should transfer billions and billions of dollars to the provinces for unconditional spending in health care. I have difficulty with that.

Currently the total cash and tax point transfer for health and social spending from the federal government to the provinces is about $26 billion. The difficulty is that any time any government, person or organization gives money to another organization to provide services there has to be some level of transparency and accountability. We have to know we are getting a return on the money we put out to an organization, a province or whatever.

I will give an example in my own province. I hope the Bloc members are listening. I cannot speak for the experience in Quebec because I do not live in Quebec; but I do live in Ontario and can say that there is a general feeling in Ontario that the transfer money coming from the federal government for social spending will not get to where it ought to be.

There are indications of this suspicion. A person came to my riding and described a billboard in Mexico which read “Invest in Ontario—Low Personal Income Taxes”. I do not know for certain but it leads to the suspicion that perhaps the Government of Ontario is using some of the money that is supposed to go to health care and other social fields for something else, which enables it to cut personal income taxes as indeed it has done. That is only anecdotal, but I have actual evidence that this general opinion is held by people in Ontario.

Every fall at fairs in my riding I hold opinion polls. I have four jars on a table. People are given four coloured beans and asked to pretend they are the Minister of Finance and have a $4 billion surplus. Each jar is separately labelled. One is labelled “Reduce the Debt”; the second is “Increase Social Spending”, the third is “Cut Taxes” and the last one is “Reduce the GST”, because I am still very opposed to the GST.

Just in passing, the results among 494 players at the Rockton Fair in my riding last October was 36% for reducing the debt, 30% for increasing social spending, 23% for tax cuts and 11% for reducing the GST.

Members will notice that the figure for increasing social spending is only 30% which seems to be very low, but I have to explain the context in which the question was put to the people who participated in the poll. I should also say that fall fair, one of the biggest in the country, attracts people from all over the province, from Toronto and the Hamilton area; it is a very large catchment area.

If I gave the four beans to persons who were to participate in the poll and said social spending, they would advance the bean toward social spending. However, if I said to them “Oh, just one moment. Remember that the federal government does not control social spending. If you put that bean into the jar for social spending, health and all the rest of it, remember that it is the Government of Ontario that will actually decide how that billion dollars will be used”, people would dart back as if they had touched something hot and would put the bean in another jar.

I watched the poll all the way through. I stayed there for the three days that it was carried out. Roughly half the people who would have put money into social spending changed their minds when they realized that social spending was an area entirely under provincial jurisdiction.

That raises the whole matter of what is wrong. If the public gives money to any organization and is uncertain about whether the organization will actually spend the money where it is supposed to, we have a problem. It is a problem that is easily fixed. The way to fix it is to require an agreement of the provincial government in which it assures the federal government that it will spend the money it receives from Ottawa on health care and agrees to demonstrate that it is spending the money in that way. In other words, there has to be some form of accountability. There has to be some form of transparency.

In the social union talks which concluded today I notice that one item agreed upon by the provinces—and I believe it also applies in the health care field—was the consent to a third party audit of money being received from the federal government and used by the provinces for health care. In other words, the actual spending on health care by a province would be audited. I will say, for example, Alberta keeps very careful track of how its health care dollar is spent. Why should all the provinces not do precisely that?

When we talk about unconditional we talk about no transparency and no accountability. However if we all agree that the money coming from the federal government is to be used on health, there should be no barrier by any province to disclosing in detail how the money is spent.

Quebec has one of the best freedom of information laws among the provinces. I hope the federal government would revise its own access to information law so that the provinces can look into the financial affairs of the federal government in the same way as we would hope the people of Canada and the people of Quebec can look into how money is spent by the province of Quebec on health care.

I do not see much problem with the motion. If I thought there was even a distant chance of getting unanimous consent I would move an amendment suggesting that we drop the word unconditional. If that were agreeable to the opposition I am sure we on this side would support the motion whole-heartedly.

I do not feel I should give my party whip a heart attack by moving a motion at this time so I will pass and ask the Bloc Quebecois to seriously consider amending the motion by taking out the word unconditional and I am sure it will get overwhelming support on this side for its motion.

[Supply, February 2nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member on his excellent speech and the background he gave us on the situation.

If I understand correctly, he is saying that we are having this debate prematurely. What really ought to be occurring is that we should wait until the appeal courts hear this case. As the member suggests, in all probability they will throw it out and we will not have to invoke the notwithstanding clause.

Perhaps what the Reform Party ought to do is reconsider the motives for bringing this debate forward to the House at this time and that it ought to have been postponed until we saw due process in the courts. At this time I expect that every member in the House would support invoking the notwithstanding clause if by the rarest of chance the appeal court upheld this abominable decision. However, I do not think it is going to happen. I suggest the member is really supporting what the parliamentary secretary said in her speech.

[Finance, February 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the problem is that we would require an auditor general to oversee the spending of the municipalities. Basically aboriginal self-government is the creation of the municipalities by the federal government. They are not really nation states; they are really like municipalities.

The real answer in my mind is to require these organization to have the same type of rules of disclosure that exist in something like the access to information act or freedom of information. It is the elected people who have to determine whether a government at any level is doing its job properly. If we do not have those rules of transparency the people will never know and cannot act responsibly.

[Finance, February 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to share my time with the member for Mississauga West. I thank the member for his very kind comment.

Aboriginal affairs issues are very difficult because they involve money and the privacy of individuals. We do not want to interfere and deprive people of the ability to spend money in a way in which they control their destiny. As I see the problem, governments have been far too sensitive about that issue and have not required the sort of performance guarantees we require of other sectors of the community.

I tell the member opposite that I like the government's attempt to bring self-government to various aboriginal communities across the country, provided those self-governments have the same level of transparency and accountability that we expect of every other level of government and organization in the country that is dependent on shareholders or the support of the people.

The government is moving in the right direction. There is a lot of resistance. There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of worry that we will upset the aboriginal community. However we know that it has not been working in the past. In this one area of politics we should all be on side, on all sides of the House, to try to solve the problem in a compassionate and effective way.

[Finance, February 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in this debate.

It really is not a prebudget 1999 debate. It really is a prebudget year 2000 debate. I think we all know that the budget for this year is pretty well carved in stone, as it were. We really should be directing the government toward what the government should be doing in its budget for the year 2000. Governments need a lot of time to prepare the budget. I think eight to ten months is the normal timeframe that this government works on in preparing its budget.

There are two issues I would like the government to address in the course of this year in preparation for next year.

One pertains to charities. I think I am well known as someone who has advocated very strongly that the government should reform the charitable sector, should create rules of transparency, should create better corporate governance and also should redefine what charities are.

I draw attention to a supreme court ruling which came down just this past week. It called upon the government no longer to rely on the courts to define what a charity is, but to bring the matter before parliament and before all Canadians to look at the whole issue of the not for profit sector. I am confident that the government has taken this issue very seriously. I am aware through my own contacts that various government departments are working on this issue.

The new issue I would like to bring before the House has to do with the government's relationship to the aboriginals and the fact that we are spending a lot of money on trying to help the aboriginals in all parts of the country. There seems to be a problem. We still have a widespread indication of poverty and hardship among aboriginals both on reserve and off reserve.

I sit on the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. The Assembly of First Nations came before the committee in April this past year. It made the observation in its report that the average income of aboriginals was about $14,000 and the average income of non-aboriginal Canadians was around $24,000. The assembly actually made an error which it later corrected in correspondence and noted that the average income of Canadians was actually $20,000.

I took it upon myself, as sometimes is my wont, to examine these figures in greater depth. I set the Library of Parliament on the problem. I wanted to know not just what the average income of aboriginals versus non-aboriginals was, but the average real economic benefit of society that is accruing to both groups of Canadians.

I do not find it very comfortable to actually look at any group of Canadians based on racial background, but we have this problem in this particular instance where the aboriginals are defined separately in the Constitution and they receive separate treatment by the Government of Canada in many respects. That makes this question one which we should and can address.

Let me give a few of the figures. The first figures I have are the average incomes. The document which the Assembly of First Nations quoted from is a report produced by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in 1991 or 1992. It deals with per capita incomes of aboriginals and non-aboriginal Canadians as of 1990.

An interesting aside is that one of the things the report notes is that between 1985 and 1990 the income of aboriginal persons rose from $10,000 to $14,000. The precise figures are $10,833 to $14,198. It is interesting to note that this is an increase over that period of some 31.1%, whereas over the same period the incomes of non-aboriginal Canadians only rose by 6.9% to $20,264. There are two figures, $14,198 average income per year per capita for aboriginals and $20,264 a year per capita for all Canadians including aboriginals.

I have something else here which is part of the Library of Parliament study which it did at my request. It contains Statistics Canada data and various data from other very good sources. It points out that as of 1992-93 total federal government spending on aboriginals was $6 billion and some change. The provincial and territorial spending was $5 billion. This totals $11.628 billion.

This is all very well and good but this chart I have before me averages it out to show that per capita spending on aboriginals both on reserve and off reserve in 1992-93 was $15,714. Members should hold this figure in their minds because this chart also did the same work to determine how much is spent on all Canadians during the same period. When we talk about spending we are talking about education, income transfers, housing, health care and social services, everything a government does for its people.

The average for all Canadians from the federal and provincial governments is $10,026 per year per capita. Just to repeat what I said, all governments spend an average of $15,714 per year for aboriginals and all governments spend an average of $10,026 per Canadian.

In order to get a picture of the real situation with our aboriginals and with the spending of all governments on aboriginals, we add the figure for spending on aboriginals and all Canadians to the figure for income of aboriginals and all Canadians. The wealth we derive from society is what we can earn with our own labour and what we receive in the form of social services from the government.

When we add up those figures we find that the total per capita economic benefit per aboriginal is $29,912. The total per capita spending for all Canadians is $30,290, a difference of only $378. Something is terribly wrong. For some reason the total economic benefit going out to all aboriginals and to all Canadians is within $378. Yet we have problems all across the country on and off reserves with widespread poverty and people living in social conditions that are an embarrassment to the rest of the world. Canada has difficulty holding its head high when we speak of how we treat our aboriginals.

I hope the government is listening. The problem revolves around not how much money we are spending in terms of benefit or how much income the aboriginals are getting per person. What is wrong is that somewhere there is a major glitch. The $11 billion as of 1993 from this government and the provincial governments is not getting to the people effectively. It revolves around issues of accountability and re-examining the entire structure of how we fund the aboriginal community both on and off reserve.

We have here one of the most crucial and most difficult problems that affects Canadians and that every Canadian should worry about. I hope the government will look at my figures and consider what it should do.

[Committees Of The House, December 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

Pursuant to its order of reference of Tuesday, December 1, 1998, the committee has considered Bill C-49, an act providing for the ratification and the bringing into effect of the framework agreement on first nation land management, and has agreed to report it with one amendment.

[Supply, December 1st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, given what the member has said, does he agree that the federal government and the provinces should certainly negotiate and try to come up with a more effective social union, but would he not agree that it should not be at the price of weakening the federal government's influence in the lives of Canadians? We have to keep the federal government strong. Would he not agree with that?

[Supply, December 1st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I gather from the remarks of the Bloc Quebecois leader that he welcomes the motion of the Reform Party. I presume it fits perfectly into the sovereignist agenda of the Bloc Quebecois. Is that not so?

Is the Bloc Quebecois not supporting the motion because the Bloc Quebecois is on the same wavelength as the Reform Party and the Reform Party is on the same wavelength as the Bloc Quebecois? It is sovereignty and it is separation that the Reform Party is supporting here. We can see this clearly.

[Supply, December 1st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I ask the member, is what we are really talking about here not just a warmed over Charlottetown accord which is going to give more power to the provinces, weaken the federal government and play directly into the hands of separatist Premier Lucien Bouchard? Is that not what they are proposing on the other side?