Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Centre.
I am pleased to speak to the supply day motion put forward by the fifth party in the House.
Many of the members preceding me have gone through the details of the program. I would like to talk to a few points which cause our party some concern. The first concern is that this program which is due to expire on November 15 of this year still is without any type of evaluation. While the supply day motion may have some merit, I think it is quite premature.
The Liberal member opposite talked about accountability. I know members of the government tend to choke on that word but we will accept the fact that the member was sincere in his comments. The SW program is probably one of those programs that should be evaluated before we decide to make it a permanent fixture.
The House would have been well served if the fifth party would have put forward a motion that tried to cure the illness rather than simply provide some medicine to look after the symptoms. We should be demanding from the government that it create an environment in Atlantic Canada where people can actually go to work.
The EI programs are fine and the benefits are fine for those who are temporarily out of work, but must we always be focusing on benefit programs? I believe the motion focuses on the wrong subject. We should be talking about what it takes to create jobs. That should be what the government and all of us in the House are paying attention to and not benefits. Let us get these people back to work again.
While we are talking about Atlantic Canada let us talk about the failure of the government, the Tory government before it and the Liberal government before that, and how they sold out the interests of the Atlantic Canada fishermen. Some years ago someone on this side of the House decided it would be a good idea to allow foreign boats to fish the waters off Atlantic Canada and reap the harvests. There was a bountiful harvest back then sometimes. They thought it would be a good idea to trade the interests of the Atlantic fishermen and Atlantic Canada in order for the provinces of Ontario and Quebec to sell manufactured goods in return to those European countries.
Someone got shafted in that deal, and who was it? It was the Atlantic provinces and the maritimes. To boost the interests of Ontario and Quebec those governments simply sold Atlantic Canada down the tube by allowing this massive overfishing by foreign interests in order that they could sell manufactured goods from Ontario and Quebec in Europe.
That was a tragedy. The results of that tragedy, of that insane decision, are still going on today. That is why we are talking about how we provide benefits for Atlantic Canadians who have no jobs.
The focus of the government should be jobs, jobs, jobs. Jobs are created by allowing the private sector to operate in an environment that is conducive to establishing a buoyant economy. They should be provided with low tax levels. There should be incentives for investors and business people to start new businesses and to expand their existing businesses. There should be some tax relief for employees of those companies from the massive burden heaped upon them by these governments. That would put more money in the hands of consumers which would allow them to spend the money within the economy and as a consumer driven economy it would grow.
The focus is wrong here. We should be talking about the obligation of government to create an environment that would allow the economy to become more buoyant and that would allow more jobs to be created in Atlantic Canada. That is where we should be focusing our attention. We should not be trying to simply put a band-aid fix on a very serious problem.
While we are on the subject of employment insurance programs I must talk about the massive raids the Minister of Finance and the Liberal government are embarking on in relation to the current surplus in the EI program. There will exist approximately $22 billion in the EI surplus. I am not saying that money is there. As a matter of fact there is nothing there but an IOU from our finance minister because he has already scooped it all.
The EI commission has clearly said that in order to sustain the EI fund and to provide a contingency fund for rainy days a surplus of some $15 billion would be required. That would be enough.
The finance minister is about to pilfer that fund to the tune of about $7 billion simply because he wants the money. He will change the law to get his hands on money that rightfully belongs to Canadian employers and employees. If that money were turned back in the form of reduced EI premiums, as the EI commission has clearly said and as the finance minister's own actuary and advisors have clearly said, massive jobs would be created.
The finance minister is not hearing anything about that. He wants to get his hands on that money, plain and simple, so that he can continue Liberal government overspending. Incidentally the government overspent its spending budget by some $3 billion last year despite all the crowing it did about balancing the budget and maybe having a surplus. In times like this that is atrocious.
What is even worse is that most of that overspending went to build a millennium monument for our Prime Minister who will probably be gone after the year 2000. He wants to leave behind this millennium project legacy which the government says will benefit post-secondary education. Billions of dollars will be spent to benefit only about 5%, if that, of all post-secondary education students.
The finance minister wants to scoop that $7 billion to make a legacy for his Prime Minister. He wants to build an election slush fund leading up to the next election so he can miraculously open the dikes and let the cash flow out. This is just a farce. I think members opposite realize what the finance minister is doing.
