Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate on the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1997.
The session has just begun once again and I must tell you at the outset that, as the member of Parliament for Brome-Missisquoi, and like many other members in the House, I took advantage of the summer months to travel a little around my riding and its municipalities to meet people and discuss with them the problems that concern them.
I think it is somewhat the role of a member of Parliament to come to the House and to show the colours of the people he represents, that is, to relate their concerns and to ensure the government responds to these concerns, and that is what the government is doing.
I will say first of all that the main concern of people is employment. We hear about "job creation" everywhere. Employment is the main concern of people. I would say the second one is taxes. People have had it, they are sick and tired of taxes.
The third concern is paperwork, bureaucracy. The next one is duplication. I will come back, in relation to the main estimates, to what we are doing as a government to deal with these issues.
The public also wants public administration, at the federal as well as the provincial level, to be closer to the people. I am listing these concerns in the order in which they were submitted to me. Another concern is the need for Quebec's distinctiveness to be recognized.
Before dealing specifically with the main estimates, it may be useful to look back at what the finance minister said when he tabled his budget on March 6, 1996. He stated, on behalf of his government, the principles for securing the future.
First principle for securing the future: governments created the deficit problem; now, governments must resolve it. I will come back to this later and try to demonstrate that the deficit problem is in the process of being resolved.
Second principle for securing the future, according to the estimates tabled last March for the fiscal year ending next March: we must provide hope for jobs and for growth. This is important, and it is precisely what we have heard and what elected representatives travelling around to meet their constituents have heard.
Third principle: we must be frugal in everything we do. This means spending less money. Simply put, waste is simply not tolerable.
Fourth: no new spending. We must avoid additional spending and reallocate instead. Fifth: we must always be fair and compassionate.
Those are the principles on which the finance minister's last budget was based. In terms of the goals and objectives pursued through this budget, we were told that the government should to be more responsive and that certain government activities should be more focused and affordable.
Let us look at some examples, starting with a problem I mentioned earlier, namely duplication. Here are two areas where we should try to eliminate duplication through legislation. First, agriculture. Just for food inspection, you have the Ministry of Agriculture and marketing board involved at the provincial level, in Quebec, as well as Health Canada and Agriculture Canada at the federal level. For a restaurant operating in Montreal, the City of Montreal's department in charge of monitoring restaurants in terms of public health is also involved.
As we can see, a single place can easily be visited by four or five different inspectors for the same purpose or for similar purposes. The government has introduced a bill respecting the national food protection agency. We must look for ways to do better, to improve coordination by avoiding duplication. That is what the people want and how they expect us to run the country.
Here is another example. We can talk about revenues. As you know, taxes are collected at about every level. At the federal level, there are all kinds of taxes, including customs duties. At the federal level, taxes are collected in several areas.
It is the same thing at the provincial level. That is why the government proposed the Canada revenue commission. I think the vast majority of Quebec citizens, who are part of Canada, would prefer not having to fill out two income tax returns. So it would be nice if both levels of government could come to some sort of agreement and establish a common, efficient mechanism for collecting taxes without resorting to a war of flags.
If they could agree, for example, that the federal Deputy Minister of Revenue and his Quebec counterpart would sit on this or that commission, people could send their money to one place and part of this money would go to the federal government while another part would go to Quebec. What we want is something simple and effective. I think this is important.
We said earlier that we must also keep a sense of fairness and compassion in all this. In this regard, I would remind the House that, as far as social programs are concerned, the Minister of Finance has given the provinces guarantees that cash transfers would never fall below a certain level in the next few years. So, under the new Canada social transfer for health and social programs, the federal government has made a commitment until the year 2003. For example, in 1999-2000, it will give the
provinces $25.1 billion, which should rise to $27.4 billion by 2002-2003.
This is important, because there are poor people in our society, as we recently saw on the news, especially in Quebec, where the cuts hurt. It is hard to understand-and the federal government's generosity is not in question-but it is hard to understand how some people do not have access to basic health care.
I mentioned earlier the importance of these transfers, whether it is money or tax points, in the health, education and welfare sectors. The federal government will continue to fulfill its obligations, as it undertook to do in the last budget speech.
Another issue which I want to discuss and which people have raised is that of job creation. If I refer to the main estimates in relation to job creation, it is because of the student summer employment program. You will recall that such a program was announced and the monies earmarked for young Canadians were increased from $60 million to $120 million.
I should tell you that, for the young people whom I met this summer, not just in Brome-Missisquoi but in other ridings too, this initiative worked perfectly well. Let me give you an example. Thanks to this program, and every member in this House can do the same, I arranged for a group of some 30 young students from Brome-Missisquoi to work in other Canadian cities. Five were from Cowansville and went to work in Victoria, B.-C. Similarly, five students from Victoria came to work in Brome-Missisquoi. The same arrangement was made for students from other cities in my riding, who went to work in Edmonton, Prince Edward Island and three ridings in Ontario.
These young people found this to be an extraordinary experience. It was a learning experience, and I will get back to this later on, to learn or become more proficient in the other official language. It was an experience to live with a family and to develop a better understanding the other Canadian culture. This is important. Then there was the work experience.
It is a fact that students have difficulty making ends meet. They struggle with increasing tuition fees and maintenance expenses. The program's first goal is perhaps to make sure that they get a summer job. This is for our generation of tomorrow.
Employment, as this example shows, is very important. With regard to job creation, I would like to deal with another small issue, that of research and development. In Canada, the government is currently spending, one way or another, some $7 billion on research and development, $2 billion in tax credits for corporations doing research and development and $5 billion in federal programs or federal agencies, whether in agriculture, in research centres or the National Research Centre, and so on.
There again, in order to do better, the government announced early in the summer the creation of a committee that will report on how to better commercialize the findings of research and development. That too generates employment.
All along, however, we must keep in mind the need to restore fiscal order. That is being done. When the Liberal government came to power, the federal deficit stood at $42 billion for 1993-94. A year later, it had gone down to $37,5 billion, and down to $32,7 billion the year after. In 1996-97, according to the Minister of Finance's budget speech, the deficit will have been reduced to $24,3 billion, and will get down to $17 billion in 1997-98. Thus, the deficit will have gone down from $42 to $17 billion. Over the last few years, we will have seen the annual deficit decrease by at least $7 billion every year.
As you can see, at that rate, we should get very quickly to a zero deficit situation and see what we can do when we have a zero deficit.
Another tool that is very useful to the members of this House is the public accounts committee. This is an important House committee that reviews the operations of various departments and hears from senior civil servants and deputy ministers who have to explain how they manage public funds.
Let me give you two examples where the committee, made up of a majority of government members, but chaired by an opposition member and with representatives from every party of this House, reviewed last year's budget, based on the auditor general's report. At one point, we realized that in the maritimes, about a hundred million dollars were spent on transportation. We were told quite plainly that subsidies under the program amounted to about 50 per cent of all transportation costs. Some people told us that they found out the bills were "boosted" or "inflated", that is how they put it, but the civil servants who manage the program said: "Checking the bills is not part of our job description. It is not part of our duties. We only issue cheques for 50 per cent of the total amount".
I think elected members of Parliament have to ensure that such things do not happen again. Let me give you another example.
When we looked at the moving expenditures for civil servants, we realized that the total amount for all departments put together exceeded something like $100 million dollars a year. That is how much the federal government has to pay to move civil servants from one end of the country to the other, from one province to another, from one city to another, and so on.
When I talk about moving civil servants, I mean moving their furniture, their dining room sets, their bedroom sets, etc. It is a lot of money. The Standing Committee on Public Accounts has examined these matters so that these things do not happen again. All that under the guidance of the auditor general. This is the role members of this House have to play.
I could give other examples, but I just added the concept of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts to the concept of sound management exercised by the present government. Sound management in terms of deficit reduction and in terms of expenditure review.
I realized something a few weeks ago. There was a meeting of public accounts committee representatives. The federal government is not the only one that has a public accounts committee. Every province is supposed to have a public accounts committee chaired by an opposition member to examine expenditures and management in a somewhat independent fashion.
Do you know there is one province in Canada that does not have such a committee with the same characteristics as the ones that exist at the federal level and in the other provinces? That province is Quebec. Quebec does not have a public accounts committee.
I take this opportunity to salute the courage and the open-mindedness of the two Quebec representatives at that national meeting, Mr. Baril, MNA for Arthabasca, and Mr. Chagnon, MNA for Westmount-Saint-Louis, who both said in front of their colleagues from the rest of the country that it would be important for Quebec to have a public accounts committee, particularly today.
There is an important example in all this. I will take the example of the heritage department. When we talk about the Main Estimates, yes there is a large budget for the heritage department, and part of that budget is set aside for official languages. This is important.
After visiting the students in Brome-Missisquoi, who travelled to various parts of the country this summer, I saw how important it was for students, families, everyone, that children, this future generation in the making, be able, if they wish, to learn our country's second language.
In this regard, the official languages program that provides assistance for French as a second language in the other provinces, and for English as a second language in Quebec, is a very good thing. It is important to ensure that our francophone communities outside Quebec, the one million francophones outside Quebec, can count on the federal government as they do.
And does Quebec get its fair share in all this? Yes, it does. The federal system is much more than a large book of account. In addition to a mathematical fair share, it must be remembered that Quebec benefits from a fair share that is difficult to quantify. NAFTA, the G-7, Canadian influence within the G-7, and the Commonwealth are also important and cannot be assigned a dollar value.
Mr. Landry claimed that the Quebec economy did not represent 20 per cent of the Canadian economy. In fact, Quebec's gross domestic product constitutes 22.4 per cent of Canada's gross domestic product.
I would like to add that Quebec receives much more than its fair share. Quebec was responsible for 21.4 per cent of federal government revenues, but was the beneficiary, in 1994, of 24.5 per cent of federal government spending.
In all this, there is a good place for Quebec. In all this, the government must go ahead and pass the main estimates, and I can tell you that I will be voting in favour.
