Jason Kenney

[Canada Evidence Act, February 11th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak briefly to Bill S-5, notwithstanding my displeasure with the fact that the bill originated in the Senate, an issue that I will address in a moment.

I have some personal background working with persons with disabilities, particularly the severely handicapped in Canada. It is a constituency that I am deeply concerned about because the handicapped, particularly the severely disabled, are the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised when it comes to being able to express themselves and to participate fully in political life as well as in the judicial system. These are people who we often forget about because their voices are in many cases quite literally silent, people who have no voice.

For that reason I am delighted with the intent of the bill which is to provide special access to those who are disabled, those who are handicapped, to our judicial system. It is a very worthwhile objective.

I worked with an organization called the Neil Squire Foundation which develops technology for those who are disabled to better communicate and interact with the world. Technology such as the ability of high stem non-verbal quadriplegics through complicated robotics to type out words and express themselves through computer technology is revolutionary technology which is giving a voice to those who are quite literally voiceless.

The conventions of our judicial system do not always permit people who are physically disadvantaged to participate in giving evidence at trial and so forth. For that reason I am delighted the government has taken steps after extensive consultation to make such provisions in this act.

In reading the act there are one or two particular provisions I am concerned with under the section 2 amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act. I notice that section 48(1), under the amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act, states:

The Tribunal which will be appointed and established—the members appointed to that Tribunal will be persons who must have experience, expertise, interest in and sensitivity to human rights.

That seems on its face to be a harmless and sensible provision.

One thing that concerns me in creating criteria for the appointment of people to government bodies is that these criteria ought to be open to all Canadians, regardless of their religious or conscientious beliefs, to serve on such bodies.

This may seem like a bit of a stretch, however, given the recent amendments to section 2 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which inserted last year the enumeration of sexual orientation under the purpose clause of the act, I can imagine the situation where a person deeply concerned about human rights may not agree with the principle of sexual orientation as an enumerated ground for protection.

I simply raise this question because it is conceivable that under section 48(1) such an individual could be prohibited from taking a seat on the Canadian human rights tribunal. It is conceivable that the appointment of a minister of a particular religion, for instance, with certain convictions about the question of sexual orientation but who is still deeply dedicated to the principles of human rights protection in general could be objected to on the basis that human rights, as now defined by this act, includes sexual orientation.

This is one of the issues in which we find a potential tension between freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, and freedom from discrimination based on the grounds enumerated in the act.

I simply raise that as something for consideration. Perhaps as we proceed with this bill the government could address whether or not the criteria for appointment to the tribunal could potentially prejudicially affect those who do not agree with all the enumerated protections under section 2.

Having addressed the substance of the bill, I would like to speak to the process which is before us today, as has my hon. colleague from British Columbia.

It is no secret that the Reform Party opposes the current operation of and the system of appointments to the Senate. However, of course, it is an established part of our constitutional framework. It is something we recognize. It is something we have to work with. However, there is a longstanding convention in this place and in our mother Parliament, a convention which is respected by all parliamentary governments, that the lower house, the elected house, the House of Commons, is the place where legislation ought to originate.

This is an important principle. We are the commons. We sit in this place representing the people of Canada with a democratic mandate. We are accountable. Quite frankly, the members of the other place are not accountable. They are accountable to no one but themselves. Witness the atrocious antics of Senator Thompson.

Other parties may disagree with whether and to what extent the Senate should be reformed. But surely we can all agree that the government should do everything within its power to cause all legislation to originate in this place, in the democratic house of this Parliament.

The people in this House belong to five recognized political parties. The people in the Senate belong to only two recognized political parties. That means there are three distinct perspectives which have gained substantial support from the Canadian people, perspectives which are represented and articulated in this place every day, which have no presence, no representation and no articulation in the Senate. For that reason alone I think it is atrocious that this government would ride roughshod over our conventions, over our traditions and over the democratic legitimacy of this House by allowing such legislation as this worthy bill to originate in the other place.

I simply want to put myself on the record as saying that I believe close to 100% of my constituents believe that the other place should either be reformed and elected or, if not, abolished. They do not, I believe, want to see that place legitimized through the introduction of government legislation. And so I add this caveat. While I am pleased with my colleagues to support this bill, I am displeased, to say the least, that we have to continually fight against this government's effort to legitimize this unelected and unaccountable Senate.

[Middle East, February 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to take part in this take note debate particularly because I actually have a private member's motion before the House dealing with Iraq. Motion No. 279 proposes:

That in the opinion of this House, the government should endorse the formation of an international criminal tribunal for the purpose of prosecuting Saddam Hussein and all other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, including the unlawful use of force, crimes committed in contravention of the Geneva Convention and the crime of genocide.

I would like first to address the rationale behind my motion. Many people observing the debate tonight will have heard many members discussing geopolitical considerations, the question of war and peace, the question of the United States foreign policy and its relationship to the United Nations. However I am afraid that perhaps not enough people realize the extent to which we are dealing with an utterly morally bankrupt and tyrannical regime which is arguably the most vicious and tyrannical regime on the face of the world today.

World leaders in the past have drawn parallels between Saddam Hussein and other great figures of political and moral evil of the century like Adolf Hitler. I submit that such comparisons are not entirely outlandish.

I mention these things because it is important to understand with whom it is we are dealing. Saddam Hussein's regime, as was mentioned, has been responsible for the unlawful deaths, execution and torture of countless hundreds of thousands of his own civilians and hundreds of thousands of citizens of other nations such as Iran and Kuwait and the disputed territories of Kurdistan.

The United Nations has repeatedly reprimanded the Government of Iraq for its atrocious human rights record, a record which among other things has former detainees testifying as to torture techniques that include “branding, electric shocks administered to the genitals and other areas, beating, burning with hot irons, suspension from rotating ceiling fans, dripping acid on the skin, rape, breaking of limbs, denial of food and water, and threats to rape or otherwise harm relatives. The security forces in Iraq have killed many of their torture victims and mutilated their bodies before returning them to their families.” Also as a gesture they require the victims' families to pay for the cost of their execution. That is the kind of regime we are dealing with. It is a regime which simply cannot be reasoned with.

I have heard many members of this place say that we must fully exhaust all avenues of diplomacy. No rational person could possibly disagree with that proposition. The problem is that for seven years now the civilized world has attempted to implement and enforce United Nation Security Council Resolution 687 which requires the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction and facilities for the production of such weapons in Iraq.

For seven years the regime of Saddam Hussein has belligerently and deliberately lied, ducked, dodged, obfuscated and refused to co-operate with the order of international civilization in the unanimously passed resolution of the security council.

The United Nations, the United States, the European powers, the Arab neighbours of Iraq, and Canada as a middle power have all played a long and exhaustive role in attempting to find a diplomatic and peaceful resolution to what could be a devastating and violent conflict.

The diplomatic solution has not worked. That is why we are now at this juncture today. I emphasize this because many of those who have expressed enormous reticence at even Canada's symbolic involvement in military action, principally on the part of the United States, continue to emphasize the need for a diplomatic solution with their heads in the sand. They seem not to recognize that those diplomatic solutions have been tried and tried, have been exhausted and have proven not to work.

I could quote the head of the UNSCOM team of weapons investigators that has been operating in Iraq. He recently reported to the United Nations Security Council on discussions he had with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariz Aziz.

He says that these talks were characterized from the beginning “by extended statements by the Iraqi side to which no even remotely equal reply was invited, accepted or apparently wanted. Moments of abuse and denigration of the UNSCOM and its professional officers, an attempt literally to apportion all blame to UNSCOM past and present for the disarmament task had not been completed and sanctions on Iraq had remained in force, and the deputy prime minister spoke at length about how Iraq had divested itself long ago of all its weapons of mass destruction, their components and their means to produce them,” and on and on and on and.

This is the kind of diplomacy the United Nations faces when dealing with Iraq. Diplomacy cannot be exercised with a stone wall. Diplomacy cannot be exercised with a tyrant who refuses to negotiate. Diplomacy cannot be exercised with a tyrant who places no value on the lives of his own people.

There is one thing and one thing alone that Saddam Hussein understands: the force he has used so ruthlessly on his own people.

Let us get one thing perfectly clear. This is not some theoretical threat we are talking about. This is not some exercise in American sabre rattling that some of our more colourful members would suggest.

We are talking about a tyrannical lunatic who has control over weapons that could potentially kill millions of innocent civilians in terrorist attacks. Other members have discussed the verified evidence of chemical and biological weapons still in the possession of Iraq.

According to UNSCOM'S February 4 report there are “38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 litres of live CWHs, 6 scud mobile missile launchers, 19 missiles, 30 special chemical missile warheads, hundreds of other chemical and conventional warheads, hundreds of chemical weapon production items, 690 tonnes of chemical weapon agents, 3,000 tonnes of chemical weapon precursors and ingredients and a 1,000 kilometre range super gun.”

They have all confirmed the existence of industrial scale VX nerve gas production facilities and production of four tonnes of VX, one drop of which can kill. They have discovered 19,000 litres of botulinum, 8,400 litres of anthrax and 2,000 litres of aflatoxin. I do not even know what all these things are but I am reliably informed that each one of them is enormously deadly.

I want to close with this sentiment. If we do not join our allies in forceful action to intervene in this tyrant's refusal to obey the international order, are we prepared as peace loving Canadians to wake up some day in the not too distant future to hear broadcasts on our television news that Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Tehran or Kuwait City have been decimated with deadly biological weapons launched from Iraq? Are we prepared for that fate?

I submit we are not, and that is why I submit that the most peaceful thing we can do is to support our allies in intervening aggressively once it is determined that all diplomatic means to this problem have been exhausted.

[Customs Act, February 6th, 1998]

I am pleased to rise on behalf of the official opposition to address Bill C-18 which the Reform caucus will be supporting.

We think this bill seeks to achieve some worthwhile and admirable objectives in empowering our customs officers with certain police style powers to detain people suspected of serious crimes when they are clearly breaking our laws as they cross our borders. We support the intent of the bill.

In the debate on second reading of this bill we raised numerous questions which had not at that time been adequately addressed by the government but which we think have since been adequately addressed by the government and were comprehensively addressed by the parliamentary secretary in her remarks.

Those concerns included the cost of improving and upgrading the facilities of our customs ports to permit the detention of suspected criminals. The government advises us now that the costs entailed will be no greater than $5.5 million which we think is a reasonable cost for empowering these customs officers to protect our borders more thoroughly. We will of course, as in all matters, watch scrupulously the actual expenditures on this new program to ensure that costs are maintained within the amount estimated.

We also expressed concern about the training necessary to make our customs officers capable of exercising these new peace officer powers. We were particularly concerned about the growing number of student customs officers and to what extent they might be empowered by this bill. But we have been well advised by the government that adequate training will be in place for properly trained customs officers to exercise these powers and that student officers will not be permitted to exercise the powers granted by Bill C-18. So we are satisfied with that.

We were also concerned at the outset about adequate equipment. In particular, how is it that customs officers are not armed in order to enforce the law and protect themselves and to defend our borders against potentially aggressive criminals whom they may have to detain? We still have an outstanding concern in that regard. But the government has made a compelling case that immediate back-up support will be available with properly empowered peace officers, principally the RCMP, who can provide the kind of equipment needed to back up our customs officers in difficult and potentially violent situations.

Finally, we expressed a concern about the potential infringement of civil liberties of people who could be detained at the borders without due process. The government has satisfied us, as have organizations such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, that the bill is narrow enough in its scope that it is unlikely to lead to abuse of these new found police powers on the part of customs officers.

Our principal concerns have been adequately addressed. We are pleased to support this bill. It is unfortunate, in one respect, that it has been so long in coming. It is a bill which is really a gesture of common sense, a gesture to take the necessary steps to protect the integrity of our borders.

Let me take this opportunity to say that I have an ongoing concern that we are not doing enough to defend the integrity of our borders against smuggling and the importation of contraband across our ports of entry. I have raised in this House the matter of a certain senior, 25-year veteran customs officer named Dennis Coffey. Mr. Coffey has made very troubling allegations, under oath, about corruption, fraud, nepotism and abuse at the customs branch of Revenue Canada. He has indicated that there are tens of thousands of shipments coming through our major points of entry, particularly in Ontario, trucking points of entry as well as airports, where potential contraband shipments are not being adequately inspected.

This is a concern which was confirmed by a document which the official opposition obtained from the security division of the Department of National Revenue, which we released in December. It is a document which indicates that Revenue Canada believes there is a reasonably large quantity of contraband narcotics and illegal drugs being imported into Canada, across our points of entry, without adequate inspection by customs.

What this report suggests is that some drug lords are actually couriering their shipments of hashish, marijuana, cocaine and heroin into Canada with 24-hour, 10 a.m. delivery. I find it quite astonishing that a drug lord can get his shipment of cocaine to where he wants it in Canada more quickly than Canada Post can deliver a letter, and he can do so without fear of very serious inspection on the part of customs agents.

There are still some very large and troubling questions with respect to the administration of the various customs statutes. We must ensure that these contraband materials are not being imported into Canada. The official opposition intends to introduce legislation at some point in the future in this place to address those concerns. We understand that less than 1% of courier shipments from countries identified as major narcotics exporters are being inspected. A foreign drug lord can make the reasonable calculation that if only 1% of his contraband is going to be inspected and detained by customs Canada, 99% will get to his customers.

While we commend the good work done by our customs agents in this country, while we are pleased that they will now have these new powers to exercise, we are concerned that the government has not taken seriously enough the issue of protecting the integrity of our borders and we intend to fully pursue that issue and demand that we take greater measures to ensure that shipments coming into this country are properly inspected.

We are also very concerned that the veteran customs officer to whom I referred, Mr. Coffey, a dedicated 25 year servant of the revenue department, was dismissed this week by the Department of National Revenue for making public his allegations about fraud, waste, nepotism and abuse in his department. This is not how we should treat our customs agents. We ought to honour the service they give to the country. We ought not take this kind of draconian action against people who blow the whistle when they see corruption in their departments.

It is scandalous that the Department of National Revenue has dismissed Mr. Coffey. This underlines once more the need for tough whistle-blower protection legislation so that public servants can speak the truth and identify waste, fraud and corruption where they exist in the public sector without fear of intimidation or losing their jobs because of the government.

We will support Bill C-18 but we are not entirely pleased with the way the government has dealt with the protection of our borders and with the commendable service of our customs agents.

[Customs Act, February 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to seek consent to split my time with the hon. member for North Vancouver.

[The Economy, February 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, not only has health care funding been falling under the Liberal government but so too has the Liberal loonie recently to its lowest point in history, forcing our interest rates up by half a percentage point.

The Prime Minister says don't worry, be happy. Instead of giving Canadians happy talk, why does the government not act to restore confidence in our currency by devoting at least half of any future surplus to the dollar killing debt so that we can pay down our debt, restore confidence in our currency and our economy?

[Supply, February 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to get into this battle of the accountants that is happening here and remind the hon. member for Mississauga South that as an accountant he is wont not to see the forest for the tree. He knows very well all the detailed features of the comparative tax codes of Canada and the United States.

However, the bottom line, the forest, the big picture is that the U.S. tax foundation calculates that the total family tax index in the United States is no more than 34% of total family income, while the Canadian family tax index, calculated by the Fraser Institute, an organization which the hon. Minister of Finance has recognized as a great economic authority while speaking at its conferences, was 47%. This 34% versus 47% is the big picture.

[Ice Storm 1998, February 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I thank all the officers and employees of this Chamber for being so patient with some of us who must seem terribly long winded. It is an important gesture that so many members have been willing to speak to the devastation that so many millions of our fellow citizens have recently experienced.

While I as an Albertan did not have any direct experience with the devastation of the recent ice storm, I want to add the voices of my constituents in solidarity with those who were so deeply devastated by the adversity of ice storm and its consequences to the many eloquent speeches this evening. I represent some 75,000 people in Calgary who live in a part of the province that has been fortunate enough not to experience natural disasters of this nature. When they see a disaster occur in another part of their country they feel affected by it. Many of my constituents expressed to me their desire to assist in any way they possibly could.

My home parish, St. Bonaventure parish, managed to establish a charitable relationship with the St. Thomas More parish at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu which is in the middle of what was called the triangle of darkness in order to raise the necessary funds to support the people in Saint-Jean who have lost so much and are still just recovering.

My only experience with the storm was indirect in that I was supposed to be in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu to attend the Centre d'immersion de la Chambre des communes for French instruction. But on the day I was planning to leave the news of the storm came through and I was unable to travel to Saint-Jean. The Collège militaire, where the immersion centre operates, became an emergency centre for the people of that area. I would like to put on the record our thoughts for the staff of the House of Commons at the immersion centre in Saint-Jean, namely Elizabeth Gervais and her colleagues who are very dedicated servants of this place. I know they have no doubt been deeply troubled by this disaster.

Members of my party often criticize government. We are often characterized as being enemies of government, but one of the things we saw in this storm was the need for government. We saw government at its very best serving the people. We saw local, provincial and federal levels of government working together, marshalling all their resources, as other members have said, putting partisanship, ideology and politics aside to serve their people in their most urgent need.

We have learned many lessons about how we must be better prepared for such emergencies in the future. This demonstrated to those who are cynical about government that government can and must be a force for good in particular when it is so urgently needed at moments like this. That comment is no more clearly applicable than to our military, an institution which for too long in this country has been allowed to decline and dissipate in its strength and resources. For various reasons we have chosen not to invest in the resources needed by our military forces. Now we see how necessary they really are to people when it counts.

More important, the response to the recent adversity really demonstrates what Canada is all about, not government but civil society, community in the most authentic sense. It is about neighbour helping neighbour. It is a cliché but it is profoundly true. We saw the same kind of response to the floods in the Saguenay and the floods in the Red River Valley. We see it whenever Canadians are confronted by adversity.

The history of this country is one of carving out an existence in an intolerably cold and difficult land against the forces of the elements. Sometimes, such as in the last month or so, we find that the elements are stronger than we are. But by gathering together and through the power of synergy that we find in community and civil society and voluntary institutions, it is amazing what can be done to relieve suffering.

Finally, the last lesson I take from the recent adversity is one I learned in the only natural disaster I lived through, which was the terrible devastating earthquake in San Francisco in 1989. Several hundred people died in that city as a result of a huge earthquake in the bay area in California where I was going to college at the time.

I was sitting in a class studying Thomas Aquinas, the doctor of theology. The lecture was about Thomas Aquinas' writing on the grandeur of God and his dominion over nature. Just as we were discussing this rather prescient reflection by the great medieval scholastic, the world began to shake underneath us. I even wondered for a moment whether we were going to fall into the Pacific Ocean and whether it was the big one.

What flashed through my mind at that time which has stuck with me ever since is that no matter how pompous we are about our own powers as human beings, we are brought to the realization from time to time that we are really not in control of our own circumstances, that we are at the mercy of much greater powers than we can ever imagine. I think that was no doubt an emotion and a sentiment experienced by so many of the hundreds of thousands who struggled through this adversity.

I want to close simply by reiterating what some other members have said in their remarks, that financial help is still needed. For those who may be watching these debates, if they have not yet found a way to assist those who have struggled through the ice storm, they can still do so through the good offices of the Red Cross which I understand is still distributing funds to those in need. The Red Cross can be reached at 1-800-850-5090. I understand the Red Cross is still taking financial contributions and distributing them where those resources are most needed.

I want to commend all the other members of this place who have spoken so eloquently and our fellow citizens who have shown us what it really means to be a Canadian.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, February 3rd, 1998]

Madam Speaker, given the rule of relevance I will address the bill, but I would like to begin by commenting some of the remarks of the hon. member for Scarborough—Rouge River.

He and other members of his party seem to have taken the occasion of this debate on a technical tax bill to comment at length on the fiscal policies of the Government of Ontario. And well they should. The fiscal policies of the Government of Ontario have been deeply affected by the fiscal policies of the Government of Canada.

Many of the hon. members of the government have spoken about how the government is now offering a cash floor for transfers under the Canada health and social transfer to the provinces and what a wonderful commitment this is to our social programs, to health care, higher education, welfare and so forth. Rarely have I heard such duplicity in this place from a government which has just proceeded from four years of hacking and slashing those very same transfer payments.

The government ran in 1993 on a commitment to increase those transfers and proceeded to cut them from over $18 billion to under $12 billion in cumulative annual cash transfers to the provinces. These cuts had to be absorbed by the provinces without forewarning and without adequate consultation. It was the worst kind of downloading. For these Liberals to stand up in this debate in this place and proceed to criticize the very governments that had to absorb their cuts, the cuts they lied about in the 1993 election, I find really quite offensive.

Of course I would not suggest that any particular member mislead anybody. I am simply saying the Liberal party mislead Canadians in the 1993 election. It is a matter of record.

The Ontario government had to absorb those cuts, as did my province of Alberta. It is very interesting because this government is going to have to see the chiropractor, it has been slapping itself on the back so much about its fiscal policy, a fiscal policy which saw the government cut transfers to the provinces by nearly 35%, while cutting its Ottawa federal government program spending by only 9.3% .

The government did not balance the budget, taxpayers balanced the budget by working harder and paying more taxes while seeing federal revenues grow by $26 billion in the last three fiscal years. At least $8 billion or $9 billion of those new dollars came about through tax increase imposed by this government in this Parliament.

That does not include the huge hidden tax burden of deindexation of the tax brackets which was imposed by the Mulroney government in 1986 and which has been a destructive economic policy continued by this government. The tax deindexation has sucked a cumulative $13.4 billion out of taxpayers since 1993. It has pushed tens of thousands of low income people on to the tax rolls because we have not indexed the basic personal exemptions and the marginal rates. People who should not be paying any taxes are paying them today because of the callous tax policy of the Mulroney Tories and the Chrétien Liberals.

I want to directly address the hon. member's assertions regarding the fiscal policy of the Government of Ontario. He criticized the Ontario government by saying that Canada was cutting debt while Ontario was increasing its debt.

I do not know if the hon. member has ever seen the public accounts of Canada or if he has read any of the budgets of his Minister of Finance. I have and what I see is that since the Liberal Party came to power in 1993 it has added nearly $100 billion to the stock of the national debt. The scandalous $500 billion left to us by the Tories is now nearly $600 billion. That is not a subtraction but an addition.

Most Liberals should be assigned to a mandatory remedial math course because they think adding to the debt means subtracting from the debt. They added $100 billion to it, taking our debt servicing cost up to $47 billion a year. They pontificate about their commitment to social programs but they are spending more on the interest on the debt, the equivalent in tax revenues of $6,000 per family of four. That is how much they spend on debt interest. That is the amount of money spent altogether in the government on health care, education and old age security combined. Just what the government is spending in interest on the national debt, which it has increased by $100 billion, is almost equivalent to the entire annual budget of the Government of Ontario.

The greatest fraud in what we have heard in terms of the fiscal policy of Ontario is that it has made cruel, hard hearted cuts to social services for Ontarians to fund its tax giveaways to the rich. The tax cuts supported by Ontarians and laid out in the 1995 election in Ontario are steeply progressive. People at the bottom end of the tax brackets will feel the biggest proportional impact of the tax relief.

I hope members will listen to me because this is the most important fiscal lesson of the Harris miracle. The revenues in the Government of Ontario have increased since 1995 faster than they were projected to. Yes, it is true, the Ontario government cut the tax rates but the revenues went up because more people are working and paying taxes. The government has not had to cut a dime from any program to finance the tax cuts because the tax cuts have financed themselves through increased economic growth.

It is a Tory government in Ontario but it is unfortunate that the Tory Party here, the red Tory Party here, has publicly criticized Mike Harris' fiscal policy. The hon. member for Markham has publicly said that if the Harris government continues with its hard hearted policies it could affect the federal Tory Party. Imagine a member whose party is at 12% in Ontario saying that the Mike Harris' party at 35% might negatively affect their electoral outcome.

The point is that Ontario government's revenues have gone up as the taxes have gone down. That is why the fiscal policy of the government is not working. As it pushes tax rates up it continues to stagnate economic growth. We continue to see nearly 9% unemployment, 16% youth unemployment and shrinking family incomes. Now we see that our GDP for the last quarter is down for each of the last three months. We now see that our standard of living has declined faster than that of any other country in the OECD over the past 20 years. The government may call that a fiscal record to be proud of but I call it a fiscal record to be ashamed of.

If the government wants to emulate a fiscal record it should look to the Government of Alberta which cut its own program spending not by 9% but by 20% and did not complain one whit about the transfer cuts, the hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer cuts imposed on it by the Liberal government.

It just absorbed those cuts and maintained what are by far the lowest tax rates in Canada, allowing it to create the lowest level of unemployment, the highest level of growth, a shrinking level of poverty and a growing level of family income.

The moral of the story is that lower taxes mean more growth, more revenues and better fiscal balances. That is a lesson that I do not think this government will learn any time soon.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, February 2nd, 1998]

Mr Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member and concur with her comments about the hypocrisy of this Liberal government in claiming to be the great defenders of transfers to the provinces for health care just after having slashed several billions of dollars in such transfers. I think she made the point eloquently, a point with which we agree. I would however like to correct the record on a couple of points.

The hon. member suggested in her remarks that the Reform Party proposes to eliminate the equalization program and payments. That is inaccurate. We have proposed to reduce those payments by some 12% which is hardly the 100% she suggests. It is 12% because we believe that in one of the wealthiest countries in the world there really are not seven legitimate have not provinces. We believe those benefits would be better focused on the very poorest provinces as opposed to taking from two or three provinces and spreading them among seven or eight.

The hon. member also suggested that the Reform Party proposes the adoption of a free market American style health care system. That as well is inaccurate. First of all, roughly half of the American health care spending is funded by the public sector through medicaid, medicare and other programs.

That aside, the Reform Party supports a universal publicly accessible health care system. But we support a system which provides quality care, accessible to all, unlike the kind of care provided today in the socialist utopias of Saskatchewan and British Columbia where waiting lists continue to grow, where rationing is increasingly a problem, where expensive diagnostic infrastructure is less and less available to the people who need it and where specialists continue to leave for more hospitable health care systems.

The hon. member being from the NDP hardly has a clean record in her own party's management of the health care system. Therefore I think she ought to be somewhat tempered in her remarks.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, February 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, as a former Liberal, I am used to Liberal rhetorical tricks and the Liberal approach to the truth. It is a very creative approach.

I must say that I was really quite astounded by this last speech by the hon. member who blamed the Ontario government for all the negative impact on the health care system there as a result of health care cuts.

Let us get a couple of facts absolutely straight here. This federal government, the government of that member, has cut health care transfers to the provinces by 35%, by several billion dollars, after promising and committing not to cut them but to increase them in the 1993 election. That government lied and now it is trying to pass the buck. It does not even have the integrity to admit that it made a mistake.

The hon. member claims that the Ontario government has cut health care spending. He knows, as a former member of the provincial legislature, that just ain't so. The total health care spending in Ontario has remained constant and is now projected to increase. It has not cut $1 from the universal health care budget of the province of Ontario.

He says that people are getting less quality care. Perhaps they are, because the Ontario government has had to absorb the transfer cuts from this government but not because of less revenue as a result of the tax cuts in Ontario. The Mike Harris tax cuts that have led to tens of thousands of new jobs have also led to an increase in revenues. Liberals do not understand that lower taxes mean more revenues. That is what has happened in the treasury of the Ontario government.

This member, being from Ontario, ought to apologize to his constituents for misleading them. The Ontario government has more revenues than it did—