Paul Crête

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, if making a case for the sovereignty of Quebec could be as successful as the process that led to the separation of Norway and Sweden, I think we will have much to be proud of. Today, small countries like these have practically full employment while we are stuck with a federal government that is as cumbersome and slow-moving as an elephant. It is so slow to react to crises that by the time it is ready with solutions, another crisis has already developed.

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, since the hon. member speaks French, he certainly did not listen to my answer, because I was talking about our bilingual colleges. I said we know very well that for any francophone, bilingualism in a bilingual college in any province of Canada leads directly to anglicization. When we know that, in Canada, we had to wait one hundred years for Supreme Court decisions allowing us to have French schools in some Western provinces and that we must still go to court to be able to preserve that, I think it is very clear that bilingual education in Canada does not have any future. You will have to walk all over us before you can impose the closing of the Collège militaire de Saint-Jean. You can be sure that the entire Quebec population will be behind us.

[English]

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, can the hon. member seriously tell us that in her riding, increasing the required number of weeks worked before one is entitled to unemployment-insurance benefits will not increase poverty? Let us not be mistaken here; the unemployed will be entitled to fewer weeks of benefits.

As for the issue of women, it is perverse for a member from Quebec to say such a thing; she should know better from her own experience in Quebec where the Bourbeau reform was implemented a few years ago and where women have to find witnesses and leave their homes in the evening just to prove they live alone. That kind of situation is unacceptable. We cannot maintain such a thing.

With regard to the member's question and comment, I for one trust Canadian and Quebec medias. I do not feel they lie, I think they report truthfully what they hear in the House of Commons. This is also partly what Mr. Martin, the Minister of Finance, realized the day after he presented his budget. He discovered that everyone thought he had made no changes at all and that surprised him a great deal.

My last comment is on the issue of what you call the separatists, or at least those who want Quebec to be sovereign. A sovereign country is one which makes its own legislation, collects its own taxes and signs all its treaties. We believe there is 3 billion dollars worth of duplication in a federal system and that means unnecessary expenditures; and because of your ideology, government members refuse to address that question. If they had the courage to do so, they would not have to take money away from the less fortunate among us.

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I am very surprised to hear such words from a member who lives in the poorest region of Canada. I feel she has lost touch with our planet.

How can you say that the Saint-Denis riding, in the region of Montreal-

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, the finance minister's budget speech, that could be described as "Campbell meat with Martin sauce", reflects the vicious circle of irresponsibility the federal government has got stuck in.

The Minister of Finance did not allow himself to do the job he has been elected to do. During the whole election campaign, he said "jobs, jobs, jobs", but when the time comes to create them, he is not there. Instead, he forecast a record deficit of $39.7 billion, and a new series of committees. There is a disease in Ottawa, the "committee disease", which I have rarely seen so rampant anywhere else.

The election slogan has fallen by the wayside due to the timidity of a finance minister who has given in to the federal bureaucracy. How then can politicians ask voters for their confidence when, every time, government parties promise one thing during the election campaign and do the opposite?

This budget will contribute to increasing the differences and disparities between the various regions of Canada because, under the guise of the infrastructure program, the federal government is cutting the budgets of the development agencies without giving the provinces any leeway to take over their own development.

The federal government is courageously taking on the weakest in the system by raising the minimum number of weeks of work required to be entitled to UI benefits and bringing down to 55 per cent benefits paid to unemployed workers. That is a Valcourt plus formula. What is worse, they assume that people do not want to work.

The lack of jobs and the extensive restructuring of the North American economy are blamed on the unemployed and on other people who try and improve their lot. Instead of trying to help them, we will take a whole year to cook up a reform, the contents of which are not known, when we should be up and running and taking immediate action. We were not elected to create committees but to take action.

I would like to underline more particularly that the situation in regions like Eastern Quebec is certainly as bad as in aboriginal communities, but I do not find the same level of support for those areas as for aboriginal communities. I think the needs of native people are real, but ours are too, and it is extremely unfortunate that the situation is handled the way it is.

Somebody said a while ago that there is no tax increase. Do you not think there will be a hefty increase for those people who will have to go from unemployment to welfare next year because they do not have those two extra weeks of employment? They will have to find news ways of making ends meet only to find that they are accused of cheating the unemployment insurance system or the welfare system.

The federal government turns a blind eye to the elimination of duplication, because it would have to admit that the federal system itself is the cause of runaway deficits. During the election campaign, voters kept asking the same question: Are you going to create jobs like the Liberals promise they will? Our answer was: Yes, but in order to do that, we need some leeway.

Because of a lack of political courage, the Liberals will not reach their goal since they cannot get this breathing space. In no way, since the recall of Parliament, has the government allowed us to seriously examine spending in order to remedy the inequities, the programs which were created a long time ago, but no longer meet our needs. In the national capital, we often forget what the situation of unemployed people really is. We do not want to look at that because if we did, the government would be forced to admit that federalism is costly for Canada as a whole.

If the Liberals had freed the $3 million lost because of duplication, they would have given hope again to the 25-35 generation whose potential is wasted. That generation includes technicians, engineers, skilled people who should be working. We will realize in 10 or 15 years that this generation has been sacrificed, that we did not give these people the opportunity to work for the good of Quebec and Canada. They will struggle along from one project to another.

The government also forgets-since it has decided to tax the elderly, we understand a little better its agenda, which is to become another conservative government-that unskilled workers older than 40 were the ones who were hardest hit by the recession. Nowhere do we find this search for fiscal fairness which was supposed to be the mark of this budget.

Forgotten were family trusts. Forgotten were the $250 million which are wasted because of duplication of labour services for Quebec alone. I personally had the opportunity to work in reclassification and labour assistance committees which systematically have both a provincial representative and a federal representative to do a job that could be done properly by one person only. Quebec has agreed for a long time to take full jurisdiction in that field but no one wants to hear a word about it.

The government reduces transfers to the provinces by $2 billion, which means $700 million less for Quebec. All the provinces will then have to accept the machiavellian plan of the Minister of Human Resources Development to reform social programs.

This is a very difficult situation to live with since the minister will then take advantage of the hardship the provinces will be faced with, because of the budgetary restraints, to impose on Canadians a reform that they do not want. In the foreword, the Minister of Finance said:

Our goal is a Canada where every Canadian able to work can find a meaningful job.

Unfortunately, there are no incentives in that budget for massive job creation, as promissed by the Liberals during the electoral campaign, for all unskilled workers, except for the infrastructure program and that will judged when it is operational.

By not having contingency funds coming from useless expenditures, the government is acting exactly like its predecessor, the Conservative government, but in their case, such an approach would have been understandable.

The government did not dare cancel the tax shelters of the rich. Rather it turned on average consumers-the elderly and the self-employed-by increasing their tax burden.

They went so far as to create two income classes for UI beneficiaries. Single people will have to prove they are not hiding a lover in their closet. What a good decision is this, the Year of the Family. Terrific! All the better since individuals living alone very often have fixed expenses which eat away at their budget. The only jobs created by this decision will be those of Axworthy's Macoute-style inspectors they will surely appoint, because of their bureaucratic logic. Federal Liberals should have taken advantage of the experience of their Quebec counterparts. A similar measure is now leading to the downfall of the Johnson administration.

In its process, the federal government even took the incredible decision of increasing the National Research Council's budget, an organization that is far from being as productive as regional research centres. Every part of the budget bears the

mark of Ottawa mandarins totally unaware of what citizens are experiencing in the regions, everywhere in Canada and in Quebec. The government members did not do their homework.

On another point, I want to remind the minister of defence that, during the campaign, we did advocate cuts in the defence budget. However, the decision to close the only French language military college in all of North America has been inspired by something else than pure financial arithmetics. I appeal to all the Liberal members from Quebec, who will be stigmatised by this decision, especially the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister and I come from the same region. The St. Maurice Valley is an area which had long been dependent on American or English-Canadian companies in the pulp and paper industry. Then, we had to slowly blossom as full partners. If he is not aware of the impact a decision such as the closure of the Collège de Saint-Jean will have, I think that he forgot what being a Quebecer means.

If the federal system can no longer assume the training of French-speaking officers in Quebec, Quebec will not take this laying down. We will fight as vigorously as others have done to protect the survival of the French fact in other Canadian provinces. The Acadian and francophone communities know full well that a bilingual education system is the shortest route to anglicization, for soldiers as well as ordinary citizens.

The Liberals have decided to make committees the corner-stone of their job creation program. Let me name a few: a task force to develop a code of conduct regarding loans to small and medium-sized businesses; a task force on the taxation of family trusts; a task force on an improved supplementary plan to make businesses more competitive; a review of how to increase the efficiency of federal assistance. Moreover, a discussion paper on science and technology will be published to trigger a national debate that will lead to a new policy in that area.

As a former civil servant, I know only too well this disease called "committee-itis". I know the recipe. It is the best way to go nowhere. A year or a year and a half from now, we will receive reports on reports. They will be quietly tabled here, on a day when the attendance is low, and they will not resurface until the following year.

Today, governments must react quickly to allow this country to enter the excessively competitive world market. While we prepare all these fine reports and that years of pussy-footing in committee go by, Canada will pursue its breathtaking drop on the list of nations with declining productivity. We were not elected here to set up committees.

Action was urgently needed to help college and university graduates. Now, forestry workers will have to hunt down 12-week contracts instead of 10-week ones. Of course, unemployment insurance officers will be overworked, chasing down the bad guys who are trying to save their skins.

The government is not taking its responsibilities and is behaving like a consultant when it should be governing. By giving itself additional time, it avoids making real decisions. However, unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals have dared to increase the qualifying period for unemployment insurance.

This budget appears to be the work of bureaucrats unaware of the devastating effect raising from 10 to 12 the minimum number of weeks of work required to be eligible for unemployment insurance will have in our local areas. I urge the Liberal members to remind their Minister of Finance of their election promise to put Canada back to work.

This budget will disillusion those who still believed in election promises. During the election campaign, I met people working in peat bogs and took half an hour or so to explain to them how politics could be useful and how things could change with the coming election. Now, when I will go back home, these people are going to come to me and say: "See, nothing changed. You elect a new government and, once in office, it does the exact same thing as the ones before". At least, I will be able to say that we did not change.

My cry to the Minister of Finance is also the cry of the regions, those struggling ever since fishing was restricted and doing their best to cope with their unemployment problems. These are also the regions that the young generation has inexorably fled, as well as those striving to pull through. No, the regions are not applauding this budget. They are scowling and looking forward to taking their development into their own hands. Two thirds of welfare spending goes to the various intermediaries in the system instead of to those who need it-that is something which should be attacked right away, and not worked on in a committee for over a year.

Those who are surprised that Quebecers regularly and repeatedly elect sovereigntists should understand why, faced with these successive Tory or Grit budgets that only show the influence of the federal bureaucracy. If only to get out of this infernal cycle, Quebec can no longer afford to stay in the federal system.

Indeed, next year at the same time, the Minister of Finance will explain to us why he could not keep the deficit to $39.7 billion, but that 1995-96 will really be the year when the government regains control of its budget. I would be quite prepared to bet on that with any hon. member. It is a well-known old refrain that rings hollow.

To avoid this sad situation, I again ask the government to strike a special all-party committee to analyze all spending. This would force government managers to answer our questions about the necessity of the work done and would show all of

Quebec and Canada that we, not the senior civil servants, are the ones running this country.

Tomorrow I will go back to my riding to tell the people of Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup that there is no more hope of regaining control of the runaway federal government. I would hope that they rise up everywhere to show their disapproval as they have been doing in the media for several days. On the weekend, when you meet your constituents, how will you answer them when they ask all government members how this Liberal budget is different? Is there any hope in this budget of putting Canadians and Quebecers back to work? It is up to the Liberal members to bring their government to its senses.

[The Budget, February 24th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I was rather surprised by the speech of my colleague, because my vision of the budget is entirely different from his.

How can he say that we are going to improve the quality of life in Canada, when the qualifying period for unemployment insurance has been raised from 10 to 12 weeks at a time when people are experiencing a very difficult economic situation in the regions of Quebec and Canada? How can he say that reducing the number of weeks of insurable employment for an individual to be eligible to UI benefits will improve the quality of life of Canadians? I believe that Liberals will have to admit, at the very least, that their budget is a conservative one.

What should we think about this budget, when the government is reaching into the wallets of senior citizens. They have paid their share all their lives and now that they are retired, all they deserve is to see their income cut back. I think the media were very clear on this. I would be pleased to hear the hon. member explain to me how this is going to improve the quality of life of Canadians.

Also, how can he say the deficit is under control, when it is the highest that any government dared make public? I am willing to make a bet with the hon. member that, next year, when we get the figures for the fiscal year, the deficit will be $45 billion rather than $39 as forecast, because the Liberals were not willing to take their responsibilities and reduce the duplications.

[English]

[The Budget, February 23rd, 1994]

Madam Speaker, the Minister of National Defence is putting words in our mouths that we never said. He is misinterpreting our statements. I am not talking about speeches which were read, but about speeches where he accuses us of being windbags. We are in a situation-

[The Budget, February 23rd, 1994]

Madam Speaker, on a question of privilege.

[Supply, February 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say to the hon. member for Vancouver North that I would probably have preferred to see the Reform Party introduce a motion proposing ways to modernize the members' representation role rather than strenghtening direct democracy. Indeed, I think the implementation of means such as electronic vote by telecommunications or teleconferences should be considered more urgent than presenting to the House petitions immediately after an election during which most of the issues at stake, at least for the coming year, were dealt with by the population.

I would like to ask the hon. member to clarify a point: could he explain what criteria would make a petition more acceptable than another because we would obviously have to answer questions such as how many signatures are required, or must a petition be signed by voters in each and every province? Could issues such as constitutional amendments be raised on a regular basis? Otherwise we will be discussing everyday matters.

[Supply, February 10th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's remarks but what I remember from suggestions made by my constituents during the election campaign is that they would certainly agree to see the House consider that problem in particular. As you said, the committee has been there for a long time but has settled nothing. The present situation is due to that committee's actions.

I think we have an obligation to take concrete action and that would be a way to prove our openness to the electorate. I would be very happy if they could see on television the efforts of members to control expenditures. We can be assured that that would seriously change the way people see politicians, at least in my own riding and I believe that would serve the interests of the whole country.

As far as overlap is concerned, by the way the committee has been presented to us, I do not believe its purpose is to duplicate the other one. We would be ready to give this committee the main role and we hope that the government would do the same and recognize the importance of controlling expenditures, in order to regain room to manoeuvre and revitalize the economy.