Preston Manning

[Economic Policy, October 17th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, deficit reduction is intimately related to social reform. The hardheads in the cabinet are looking for $7 billion to $10 billion of savings through social reform. The softheads in the cabinet think the best they can get is $1 billion to $3 billion.

Will the finance minister show some leadership right now by stating how much money he wants to save through these social reform programs?

[Economic Policy, October 17th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, today the finance minister repeated in graphic terms what Reformers have been saying for years. He said we are in hock up to our eyeballs and that the debt and the deficit are unsustainable.

Just this weekend it was reported that the Deputy Prime Minister, the Solicitor General, the Minister of Human Resources Development and the Minister of Public Works are still reluctant to attack the deficit while the Ministers of Finance, Transport and International Trade want to attack the deficit more vigorously. The cabinet is divided.

Will the finance minister tell the House whose position represents the position of the government, that of the Deputy Prime Minister and her free-spending friends or the finance minister and his deficit reduction?

[Social Program Reform, October 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, students know the difference between a repayable loan and a non-repayable voucher. I was endeavouring to get the minister to consider this more innovative way of transferring funding for higher education by paying directly to the students through non-repayable vouchers rather than through either tax points or transfers directly to the provinces.

Hundreds of thousands of students are worried that the federal government's withdrawal from federal support of higher education will damage the quality of their education. Students worry that the minister's scheme will end up loading themselves with a higher and higher debt load. Is the minister in his vaunted consultation process intending to travel and talk to university and college students to explain his position to them? I am certain he will get a warm welcome if he does.

[Social Program Reform, October 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, slashing $1.5 billion from transfers to higher education hardly seems like an indication of high priority.

In developing our approach on this issue, Reformers have said that the federal government ought to maintain as its highest spending priorities transfers in support of health care and education. We have advocated cutting virtually everything else in order to sustain those spending priorities.

I ask the minister, why does the government not preserve federal funding for post-secondary education at current levels and get more bang for the buck by transferring that funding directly to students through educational vouchers rather than to the provinces and the institutions?

[Social Program Reform, October 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the government claims to be concerned about education and job skills for Canadians but the social policy discussion paper tabled yesterday calls for the virtual elimination of federal transfers in support of higher education.

At the same time the government continues to spend billions of dollars on subsidies to businesses, interest groups and crown corporations. The minister must have had some set of spending priorities in preparing this paper. I ask the Minister of Human Resources Development, where does the funding of post-secondary education come in the government spending priorities?

[Social Program Reform, October 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, this figure of $15 billion which the minister bandies about is the government's figure. The government has a $40 billion deficit. It says it is going to get to $25 billion in three years. We know that math is not a requirement for being the Minister of Human Resources Development but that adds up to $15 billion.

Ministers who have grand plans and proposals and no ideas on how much they cost or how to finance them have been the curse of finance ministers since the days of Sir John A. Macdonald. I ask the finance minister, if the Minister of Human Resources Development cannot or will not provide Canadians with the cost and projected savings of his paper, will the finance minister agree to do so?

[Social Program Reform, October 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it is virtually impossible to have the public discussion that the minister asked for on social reform without Canadians knowing the detailed cost of the alternatives that are presented. They are not contained in the paper.

The social net is in a mess because Liberals in the sixties and seventies would not answer the questions: what does it cost and where is the money going to come from.

To facilitate the discussion that the minister says he wants, will he provide in the next week an addendum to the discussion paper detailing the cost of his social reform proposals and the expected savings?

[Social Program Reform, October 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the government's social policy paper is devoid of detailed information concerning the cost of the proposed reforms or the projected savings. It is that vacuum that is generating the speculation about what is meant.

It seems that the government either does not know the cost and savings figures, or if it does know it is hiding them from Canadians.

Is the Minister of Human Resources Development ignorant of the detailed cost and savings consequences of his paper or is he withholding them?

[Social Security Programs, October 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express on behalf of my colleagues and millions of Canadians profound disappointment in the social policy discussion paper tabled by the minister in this House and presented to Canadians.

The government has been in office for almost a year. It promised an action plan to reform Canada's frayed and overburdened social safety net. I remind the House it was an action plan that was to have resulted in legislation this fall. Instead it has produced a discussion paper listing various proposals without any clear plan of action by the government to meet the very real needs of the young, the old, the sick and the poor, without any clear commitment on the part of the government to get to the root of the problem of any real reform in the social safety net.

As a discussion paper the document is severely flawed because the options it offers are limited and vague and because there is no information on the costs of proposed programs. Since affordability under the current circumstances is a key criterion the absence of price tags and detailed cost estimates vaguely undermines the discussion paper's usefulness as a consultation document.

What is so tragic is that the real discussion of social policy and social reform has been going on in this country for years among ordinary people, among taxpayers, among certain academics, among the victims of the systems, among real reformers, but not among Liberals.

The federal government is not really in a position to lead a discussion on social reform. It simply needs to get in on the discussion which is already far advanced. Since the government's social policy review falls so far short of what was promised and expected, it falls to other members of this House to do three things.

First, we need to make clear to the minister what is unacceptable about the current operations of social programs in Canada. We need to spend some time on the unacceptability of the status quo. Second, we need to enunciate the principles of genuine social reform that should be applied to the hodge podge of proposals in this paper, principles that would form the basis of a real action plan in the months and years ahead. Third, we need to challenge the minister to address the root of the problem in reforming the social safety net, namely the over centralization of power and responsibility in Ottawa.

Allow me to respond to the minister's proposals under these three headings. First, on the unacceptability of the status quo, Canadians are committed not just in their heads but in their hearts to helping their fellow citizens in need. In a country such as ours it is simply not acceptable for children to be growing up without adequate food, housing, care or education.

It is not acceptable for senior citizens to be living out their years with inadequate care and resources. It is not acceptable for sick people to wait on longer and longer hospital waiting lists for fewer and fewer hospital beds. It is not acceptable for hundreds of thousands of able bodied working Canadians to be chronically unemployed and underemployed.

It is not acceptable that the billions of hard earned taxpayers' dollars that Canadians generously provide to the three levels of government every year for social spending are so mishandled that the basic needs of individuals and families are not met. It is not acceptable that the government respond to the needs of today by forcing the cost on to the Canadians of tomorrow through massive public borrowing. Growing public debts only contribute to the impoverishment of future Canadians.

Finally, it is not acceptable for a government that has been in office for a year to respond not with an action plan but with an inaction plan that will at best serve the government as an excuse for further delays. It is not acceptable that the paper fails to provide the cost estimates that are essential to a meaningful discussion. It is not acceptable that the major areas of social policy, including old age pensions and health care, both of which are in deep financial trouble, are being put off to some future date. It is not acceptable that legislation flowing from the discussion paper may take years to reach the House.

I want to impress upon the minister and his colleagues the unacceptability of the status quo.

Let me turn to principles of real reform. Allow me to list three principles of real social reform which would allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff in this paper and to separate those proposals which merely perpetuate or tinker with the status quo from those which would really meet the needs of the young, the old, the sick, the poor or the unemployed.

The first principle, social spending, in particular transfers to individuals, should be targeted to those among us who are most in need. Universality, where universality has come to mean that the taxpayers should pay 100 per cent of the bills for social services 100 per cent of the time regardless of the resources available or the financial status of the individual being served, should be abolished as a principle in the design of social programs. This traditional definition of universality is a Liberal invention whose wastefulness has ensured its extinction.

Traditional universality should be replaced by the principle of universal access to public support provided a real need exists and can be demonstrated. In days gone by the principal objection to needs based public support was that it required individuals to complete a means test. Today with the universality of the income tax form, targeted social spending is administratively feasible as well as desirable from a policy standpoint.

The grab bag of proposals that the minister has presented us with includes a couple of items that pay lip services to targeting social benefits to those in need such as the proposal for a targeted child benefit. However, if the minister were really serious about targeting social spending he would have included in his discussion paper figures and charts to illustrate how much of social spending is currently being transferred to people in various income categories including people who do not need it and how that social spending should be retargeted.

The Reform Party has conducted scores and scores of public discussions on targeted social spending. This is hardly a new subject, but the public is not stupid. In such meetings it asks hard questions: "Show us the current distribution of government transfers to individuals and households for OAS, for UIC and for Canada assistance. Who gets what? What households at what income get what benefits? Only then can we tell you whether the current distribution is fair or wasteful or needs to be tipped more to those in lower income brackets". We cannot have a proper discussion of targeted social spending without that data, yet the minister's paper fails to provide those.

The second principle, social programs should be financially sustainable. Social spending overall should be on a pay as you go basis, not continually financed through deficit spending. This means that the current levels of social spending must be reduced since the federal deficit cannot be eliminated solely through cost cutting in other areas of spending. Continued deficits simply impoverish future Canadians and ensure their dependence on an unravelling social safety net which is not financable in the future.

Transfers of wealth from better off Canadians to those who are truly in need are clearly well supported by Canadians but transfers from future Canadians to current Canadians through public debt are not, nor are inefficiencies and wasteful uses of taxpayers' money, nor are fraud and abuse.

In some cases the tax system should be used to recover all or some of publicly funded financial assistance provided the persons or households whose income levels exceed specified levels. This could include, for instance, relatively well off individuals who temporarily receive benefits between jobs.

If the government were serious about ensuring the financial sustainability of social programs it should have done two things. First, the discussion paper should have included the cost of the various alternatives and should have compared those with the cost of existing programs. Its failure to do this is the biggest single flaw in the document.

How can Canadians have meaningful discussions of alternative proposals when they have no idea of what they will truly cost?

The minister is still not adjusted to the fiscal realities of the 1990s. It is the 1990s, not the 1960s. It is irresponsible in the public arena and particularly in this Chamber where we are spending $110 million more per day than we collect in revenues.

It is irresponsible to propose anything, any policy option, without answering the three basic fiscal questions, what will it cost, where will you get the money, and why do we not spend less.

Second, the government should have established clear spending priorities, not just for social spending, but for the entire federal government. I have to wonder where those priorities are when the government proposes ending federal funding to post-secondary education while still spending billions of dollars to subsidize businesses, special interest groups and crown corporations.

Finally, in questioning the commitment of the government to financially sustainable social programs I note the absence of any clear plan to target and reduce social spending by the amounts required to meet the government's own deficit targets.

The third principle, the meaning of social needs should be personalized, privatized and decentralized so that individual families, communities and lower levels of government, not the federal government, are the primary actors. The best way to determine and respond to real needs is through empowerment at the personal family and community level. Big programs managed by central governments are enormously inefficient at getting the right help to the right people at the right time, enormously wasteful of taxpayers' resources and generosity.

Shared jurisdictions and shared cost programs must be eliminated. They lessen accountability for results, reduce the incentive to be cost efficient, breed bureaucracy, reduce flexibility and inhibit the application of common sense.

The patchwork of overlapping rigid bureaucratic social programs must evolve toward a single access point, enabling people in need to seek assistance through the empowerment of individuals and community oriented caseworkers. The empowerment of individuals and families is to be particularly encouraged because such empowerment reduces dependence on the state.

The distribution of federal transfers in support of education through vouchers is to be encouraged because it empowers individuals. The strengthening of families through more generous tax credits for the support of children is to be encouraged because the family is better able to meet the needs of children than any government. The single biggest cause of child poverty is family breakdown. To reduce child poverty, strengthen the family.

The delivery of social services by the level of government closest to the people and most responsive to the people, most accountable to the people, is to be encouraged. This requires recognition by the federal government that it is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, the government closest to the people.

The minister said in his statement earlier today that he has a commitment to decentralization. It is to be believed because it is written down in this green paper. The two pages he mentioned incidentally are dividing pages, just dividers.

Why should the provinces or anyone believe that assertion of commitment to decentralization because it is written in this paper when it is written in the Constitution of Canada that the responsibility for health, education and social assistance belongs to the provinces? That has not deterred the federal government from involving itself in centralizing programs in those areas through the use of its spending power.

If the government were really serious about decentralizing social programs, empowering individuals and freeing them from the iron grip of bureaucracy, it would have included specific options for turning over more responsibility, not just entering into administrative arrangements, for program delivery to communities, private organizations, and other levels of government.

I might add that in no area is the unwillingness of the federal government to decentralize power more evident than in the field of health care which is not even discussed in this paper. The total health care bill for Canada last year was $70 billion. Of that total 48 per cent was picked up by the provinces and local governments, 28 per cent by individuals and by private insurance companies, and less than 24 per cent by the federal government. Yet it is the federal government that presumes to dictate the terms of service and financing in the health care field for all other players, a position which prevents rather than facilitates genuine health care reform.

The federal government professes to be just a partner in health care. In reality it has become a junior, junior partner. But it always acts like the senior partner which is why the provinces and the public are so sceptical about government's professed interest in new partnership arrangements.

In conclusion I want to spend a couple of moments on getting to the root of the problem in social reform. I challenge the minister to reveal to the House the real reason he has presented a discussion paper rather than an action plan.

The reason is that he has been unable to reach substantive agreement with the provinces, the governments to which the Constitution assigns primary responsibility for health, education and welfare, the governments without whose support and co-operation meaningful social reform is impossible.

I challenge the minister to reveal to the House the real reason he has been unable to get the co-operation of the provinces in a substantive way. The reason is that his government is committed to status quo federalism, that his government and his leader are not committed to a rapid and substantive decentralization of power, particularly in the areas of health, education, social assistance and social insurance.

Until the federal government does become committed to such a decentralization, most of which can be done within the existing Constitution, I predict that status quo federalism will lead to nothing but the perpetuation of an unacceptable status quo with respect to Canada's social safety net.

Who will lose? It will not be the political elite and the special interests that support and feed off the current centralized system, but the young, the old, the sick, the poor, the unemployed, the taxpayers of today and the taxpayers of tomorrow.

My colleagues and I intend to challenge the minister to play catch-up ball, to move beyond vague discussions to real reform. We intend to challenge the minister to provide a detailed cost analysis of any options he proposes and set the social spending priorities. We cannot have a discussion without that material.

Above all, my colleagues and I intend to challenge the minister and the Prime Minister to get to the root of the problem of reforming the social safety net, namely 30 years of overcentralization of the power and responsibility for meeting social needs in the hands of the federal government.

[José Mendoza, October 5th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the answer to my question was not on the paper, and so it was not necessary to read the paper. My last question is still to the Prime Minister.

The immigration minister and the Prime Minister cannot dog responsibility for Mendoza and similar cases. They cannot continually shift the blame for these cases to the police, the courts or the refugee board.

As the head of the government, when is the Prime Minister going to hold the minister of immigration directly and personally responsible for the multiple failures of his department?