Madam Speaker, the New Democratic Party will be supporting the Bloc Québécois motion. It is an excellent initiative, and we congratulate the Bloc on the introduction of this motion.
Liberals keep denying any fiscal imbalance, but the average citizen knows it exists, because he can see it in everyday life. It is obvious to the homeless on the street, and it was even more obvious when homeless people died in our communities because the federal government stopped building public housing. Waiting lists in hospitals are another sign. Citizens are affected in their daily life by the fiscal imbalance. This is not a discussion for professionals only; it concerns the average citizen.
Setting up a special committee to look into this matter is a good idea. We will want to contribute and help find the truth and suggest the viable and specific remedies we need now.
It is not the first time that such a committee has been established. I have with me the committee report on federal-provincial fiscal arrangements which was established in the early 1980s and reported out in 1983. All of the documentation is here. My colleague from Elmwood--Transcona represented our party on that committee at the time. That investigation came to some very important conclusions, the first of which was that the fiscal arrangements between the federal and provincial governments at the time needed some fine tuning but were working reasonably well. The committee concluded that the task force did not interpret current challenges to the system as calling for fundamental change in existing arrangements nor did it consider dramatic innovations necessary or appropriate at present.
About 10 years later the Liberals came to power and ignored the study's recommendations. Through the 1990s they engineered the most fundamental transformation of the financing of services to Canadians that has happened in several decades. The Liberals exercised what I would call cruel brilliance.
Under the guise of defeating a growing deficit and attacking the debt, the federal government passed responsibilities to the provinces and the municipalities at a rate that had never before been seen in this Confederation. In fact, the consequences are still being felt in our communities today, and that is the very reason why we are having this debate and why we are facing a critical situation.
The Liberals managed, through unilaterally transforming the entire structure of federal-provincial financing relationships without consultation, to leave provinces with, on the one hand, more responsibilities, and on the other hand, fewer resources available to attend to those vital responsibilities.
Some provinces, intent on implementing exactly the same ideological position that the federal government and the finance minister of the day in particular was pursuing, simply passed on exactly the same kind of fiscal transformation to the municipalities.
As a result, over the last decade we have seen a growth in indebtedness at the municipal level across the country. We have seen the provinces struggle to manage the responsibilities that have been left to them by the federal government with inadequate support. Mostly though, Canadians have experienced in their daily lives a deteriorating quality of life because of those very decisions. We must take a look at some of the examples and I will get to those in a moment.
The Liberals in power took the whole concept of the trickle down philosophy of economics and transformed it into force it down their throat economics. The provinces in this federation and the municipalities in our country had never asked to be charged with the responsibilities left to them by the federal government. That is why we have a growing crisis at the municipal and provincial level.
I salute Quebeckers for having brought this issue forward in such a forthright way. I salute the people of Newfoundland and Labrador who are now standing firm for their rights, calling for the crisis that they are facing with the federal government to be attended to.
Before I go further into the issue of the fiscal imbalance and the impact it is having on people's daily lives, I want to draw to the attention of the House remarks concerning the crisis in Newfoundland and Labrador. I was shocked to read the following statement about the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador in today's newspapers:
He may get some short-term gains but he'll pay for it in the long run.
It went on to say:
The problem that the premier will have eventually is that the truth will get out. And $1.4-billion or twice that perhaps will not end up in the pockets of Newfoundlanders for the sake of his ego and his political ploy.
What an outrageous statement for a spokesperson from the Prime Minister's Office to make about a premier of the country. This is bully politics. This is arrogance at the highest level. This is a slap in the face to a whole community which is trying to come to grips with the fact that there are resources offshore that could help take the communities of Newfoundland and Labrador out of the terrible situation in which they have found themselves for so many years. They are suffering under an economic maldistribution that leaves their citizens in a troubled situation.
Much of this applies to other provinces in Atlantic Canada. Right now we are singling out the situation in Newfoundland and Labrador. We have seen similar consequences in provinces such as Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, where fully one-fifth of the population now lives below the poverty line. Why? As the member for Acadie—Bathurst has mentioned to me, because the federal support and transfers for the social programs, the social infrastructure that gave us a high quality of life relative to other countries, has been decimated.
Let us come back to the consequences of these cuts. First, let us talk about education and finance.
The federal government unilaterally, without any agreement from the provinces, has withdrawn funding from post-secondary education financing at a horrifying rate. Approximately $7 billion has been removed. The results end up on the shoulders of our students, our youngest and our brightest. They are the people who we are trying to send forward into our economy, our communities and our society with some sense of optimism and hope and with the capacity to use the education they have just received. Instead, because of the federal government's unilateral actions, students are arriving in the workforce with a debt on their shoulders which is absolutely crushing.
The Prime Minister and his team may be proud of the fact that they have transferred debt from the nation as a whole, which resides on the shoulders of each and every Canadian and our great assets, to the backs and shoulders of the youngest and the brightest students. This is placing a millstone around their neck as they move from their educational career and training into trying to become contributors in our society.
The federal government may be proud of that. It may want to trumpet on a day in and day out basis, especially tiresomely during election campaigns, that it has wrestled the deficit to the ground. However, the cost of that effort was transferred to the shoulders of young people. It is now transforming our society into one where we have to seek out trained and skilled labour because our young people are increasingly becoming incapable of responding to the needs of the modern economy. This is short-sightedness at its worst.
When we turn to the issue of education, we see that the consequences of the fiscal imbalance has ended up affecting our youngest, our brightest, those to whom we should be giving as much hope, enthusiasm and support as possible. Instead, as a result of this situation, we are doing the opposite.
Second, let us turn to child care. Great hope was put in the minds of Canadians from coast to coast to coast in the election campaign of 1993, when after years of New Democrats being the only ones to really talk about child care on a pan-Canadian basis, we finally had the Liberal Party promising Canadians that it would initiate a program. In fact the candidate for prime minister at the time put considerable emphasis on this campaign promise. Little did Canadians know that he would turn right around and ignore that promise for 11 years and leave them in the lurch.
As I have mentioned before in other commentaries, I spoke to a young man who answered the phone when I called for a cab. He described the situation where he and his wife were very excited about the promise of a national child care program in 1993. She decided to study early childhood education. They had decided to have a family because they thought they would have access to child care.
Eleven years later he said that I should do whatever I could do to hold the Liberals to their promises because they had let his family down. His wife was unable to work as an early childhood educator, as she was trained to do, and ended up having to stay at home to look after their kids. They could not afford child care.
This is the kind of impact the failed promises, the broken promises and the transfer of responsibilities or leaving the responsibilities to the provinces and the municipalities, without the additional financial wherewithal that is required, has had on thousands of lives. It is not an academic exercise. This is not something for debate only between economists as though it is too esoteric for the average person to understand. The average person understands this very directly.
Let me turn to another example, the investment in communities and their infrastructure, such as public transit.
In the 1993 red book there was fanfare about the investment programs and infrastructure that would follow. Indeed, there were a number of programs. They would be announced in one election and would be delivered just before the next election so there could be some ribbon cuttings for the various members who wanted to take credit.
What we saw at the municipal level over the years was a steady decline in the size of those infrastructure programs. Meanwhile, there were rapidly increasing requirements for infrastructure across the country as our cities grew. The consequence of this was that people's property taxes had to go up. The federal government might have been claiming credit for wrestling a deficit to the ground and it might have been very happy announcing the largest tax cuts to the affluent and the large corporations in the history of the country. However, on the backs of ordinary Canadians, it was building up a property tax burden that it could not sustain.
In addition to that, what communities began to face was a deteriorating infrastructure, sewers, potable water, public transit systems and roads, housing and other forms of infrastructure, so much so that our cities began to be removed from the lists of the prime places to invest, the prime places to have conferences internationally and the best cities in the world. We began to fall off of those lists.
Did the federal government pay any attention? Did it reverse the trend? Absolutely not. What we saw once again was a fanfare, an election promise, 5¢ per litre of the gas tax. I know quite a bit about this 5¢ per litre. I was the president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities at the time the promise first began to be made. We demanded it. What we have seen is a steady erosion ever since election day on the 5¢ per litre of the gas tax. We are now down to some small portion of the gas tax that may flow at some point in the future once agreements and talks are finished.
For heaven's sake, that sounds a lot different than what we heard from the Prime Minister during the election campaign. He gave Canadians his absolute word that they would receive 5¢ per litre of the gas tax. That is only half of the excise tax. Let us remember there is a GST on top of that which the federal government is pocketing and using for its tax cuts for its friends or misspending, as we have seen in so many ways this government do. No wonder Canadians are coming to grips with this and saying, “Something has to change”.
The investment in the cities has to be transformed and that can be done in collaboration with provinces. It should address issues like housing, water, other forms of pollution to cut back on smog, transit systems, et cetera.
In the investigation that this committee conducts, we will be ensuring that the voices of communities will be heard, as well as the voices of provinces. That is absolutely vital. It can be done in the context of the responsibilities of our provinces without difficulty. We saw that happening, precisely, around the issue of housing when finally we were able to extract a few pennies from the federal government after a long effort at the municipal level and provincially. We were able to come to a workable relationship, including a very creative approach that was adopted in Quebec, which then became the leader on the production of social housing using the federal moneys.
Anyone who says that federalism stands as an obstacle to the achievement of these kinds of goals involving asymmetry to recognize and salute the achievements and possibilities in Quebec and anyone who says that we cannot accomplish such things is not looking at our best examples of achievement.
I hope that in addition there will be some attention paid to the way in which the federal government has stolen the employment insurance surplus year after year, billions of dollars of money that were there to protect workers when they fell on hard times and lost their jobs. If we look at the fiscal imbalance, a big part of it is represented by the way in which those funds, instead of being made available to workers and their families when they needed them, were stolen by the Prime Minister. They were stolen in a metaphorical sense by the government, placed against the deficit and the consequence of this was very severe.
First, people fell into poverty much more rapidly. They were unable to feed their kids. Second, provinces had to come back in with welfare and social assistance programs to backfill the funds that were not available because employment insurance payments were not available. That drove up the costs facing the provinces.
I remember this well because I served on the council of Metropolitan Toronto at the time. It was responsible for making out these payments. The consequence of the unilateral action of the federal government on employment insurance, by cutting off the benefits to which workers were entitled therefore generating a surplus that it could lift and put against the tax cuts for their affluent friends, was that welfare bills rose dramatically and people suffered. We had to raid the account that we had put aside to get new landfill and new waste management facilities to pay welfare. This is the kind of consequence that the downloading, the ramming down the throat approach to fiscal management the government, has produced.
I could mention a number of other areas. Certainly, we could focus on the issue of health. The government adopted a particularly cynical approach. Cut back the funding of health so dramatically that people will begin to notice the consequences in their daily lives and wait until the hue and cry has risen to a point where people demand that it be fixed and then come in and offer some cash to attempt to fix it. This is the most cynical manipulation of public opinion in Canadian history. Cutting the funding of these essential services, creating the waiting lists, creating the pressures and problems, only to come back and offer a solution later. Create the crisis, offer to solve it. This is not the way to go.
The New Democratic Party of Canada will be there, active on the committee. I hope the House will decide to adopt the recommendation of the Bloc Québécois. We certainly intend to do our share to raise these issues and others and generate the reforms that are required.
