Preston Manning

[Taxation, March 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, who pays some of the highest taxes in Canada? According to a new study by the C.D. Howe Institute, it is not millionaires or the super rich. It is ordinary Canadian families making between $30,000 and $60,000 a year.

Young families are grossly and unfairly overtaxed. Nothing in last month's budget did anything to change that. Why does the government's tax policy penalize and discriminate against young families?

[Health Care, February 18th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is prepared to put his political animosity for the Premier of Ontario ahead of the health care needs of the people of Ontario.

The real reason he is envious is because Premier Harris spends three times more on health care than this government spends on the entire health care of the people of Canada.

Would the Prime Minister tell us what he would do to a minister who made those disparaging remarks about Premier Bouchard in Quebec instead of the Premier of Ontario?

[Health Care, February 18th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, if members want more, here is what Premier Klein really said. They should read the rest of Premier Klein's quote: “There are many in that caucus who scare me including the foreign affairs minister and the heritage minister”.

I will quote what this minister said: “The last thing we wanted to do was to give Premier Harris a gift that would help him get re-elected”.

Does the Prime Minister stand by the statement made by the President of the Treasury Board, or will he order him to apologize for that disparaging remark?

[Health Care, February 18th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday a senior minister of the government attacked the premier of the largest province in Canada.

The President of the Treasury Board said that he and many Liberals were reluctant to increase health care transfers to Ontario because fixing health care in Ontario might make Premier Harris look good.

Was the Prime Minister actually prepared to sacrifice the health care needs of Ontarians just because he dislikes the politics of Premier Harris?

[The Budget, February 17th, 1999]

The hon. member says to be Canadian is to pay taxes. That is the Liberal definition.

Finally, if we put all this together and look at the total tax revenue of the federal government, as expected, we get the same story. Canadians paying more.

At the end of 1993-94 when this government took office, total federal revenue was $107.3 billion. At the end of 1999-2000 the total of federal revenues collected will be $149.4 billion, an increase of $42 billion or 39%. In other words, there is an increase in federal revenues collected per taxpayer, and this is the budget that was going to alleviate the taxpayers from the great burden of federal taxation, of $2,020 or 24%.

This government has become the richest government in Canada's history. The economy can grow by 3%, which ought to be good news for Canadians. But when the federal government's revenues grow by 8% what that tells us is that when there is economic growth, a disproportionate amount of that growth is not going to the people who produce it, not to the companies that produce it, not to the individuals who produce it, but to the ever present government and its taxation department.

The great record of Liberalism is going to be this for the 20th century: a well to do finance minister and a well to do prime minister running the richest government in the history of Canada, one that is collecting $409 million per day from the taxpayers of Canada.

I think I have made the case. I could go on, but the case is that Canadians pay more.

If Canadians were paying more but getting more in terms of better government or better services, perhaps the government would have a leg to stand on or at least be able to explain or defend its record. But the other half of the equation, the other part of the bottom line, is that under this government Canadians are not only paying more but are getting less. In particular, Canadians are getting less in the one area they care about most these days, health care.

Time does not permit me to deal with all areas of government activity in which Canadians are getting less value for their money, the areas in which the productivity of the federal government itself is declining. No one should have any illusions that part of the productivity problem in this country is the declining productivity of government itself, getting less for the taxes that are paid and the cost of government being tacked on to everything we produce and sell in the world market.

I will touch on five areas in which Canadians are getting less. The first is employment insurance, a big bill. According to the chief auditor for this program, the government has been overtaxing Canadians for employment insurance on average by 37% for at least five years and it continues to do so. Yet during the same time benefits have decreased and the government has proposed to return only a fraction of the accumulated surpluses to the employers and the employees who put it up in the first place. In other words, with regard to employment insurance people are paying more and getting less. They are getting less employment insurance. They are not getting the premium refunds they should be getting.

The second area is the Canada pension plan. Under the government's proposals for this plan, a huge area of expenditure and investment, CPP premiums will increase by 41% over the next four years. Notice there is not a word about the CPP in the budget. Yet at the end of the day the most Canadians can expect from this plan even after these increases is a measly $9,000 a year pension which is less than half the pension a young worker would get if those same funds were placed in an RRSP. With regard to CPP under this government people will pay 41% more and they will get less.

Third is military spending. Since 1993-94 the government has cut national defence spending. This is the department Liberals love to hate. The defence department is the one they do not mind cutting. They have cut it by over $2.4 billion per year in absolute terms but the cumulative effect of the cuts is about $7.8 billion. This has set in motion the downsizing of Canada's military and a deterioration in morale which has significantly reduced our military capability. Now the government is preparing to put about $175 million per year for three years back into the military but it is not implementing the other reforms necessary to render Canada's military more effective. With respect to defence spending Canadians will still pay more but they will get less.

The fourth area is Indian affairs. According to this budget the government is putting half a billion dollars into Indian affairs but the government has done nothing to ensure that much of the $4.4 billion it is already putting in is not siphoned off by lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians and consultants in activities that benefit everybody else except the rank and file aboriginal, particularly on reserve. While Canadians pay more we would argue that the rank and file aboriginal on reserve sees less and less of these funds. Canadians pay more but the ones who really need the help get less.

With respect to getting less, let us take a look at the area of health care. This is an area in which Canadians are most conscious of getting less while paying more. This is an area where there has been more spin doctoring, shell gaming and rhetoric than any other, but that cannot hide the ugly truth. When this government took office transfers to other levels of government, the CHST, the Canada assistance plan, the EPF and equalization, amounted to $27 billion per year. In 1997-98 under this government transfers had decreased to a cumulative total of $21 billion, a decrease of $6 billion per year or 22%. The negative effects of this cut in health care transfers are well known to all members of the House. They include the hospital closures, the thousands of doctors, nurses and health care workers leaving the country, the 200,000 Canadians on waiting lists and all the pain, anxiety and anger these figures represent.

Canadians were beginning to refer to the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister as the Dr. Kevorkians of Canadian medicare. The government finally felt impelled to do something. So it decided to put $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year back into health care.

However, the spin doctors said that was not a very big number, $2 billion to $2.5 billion. They said you will not get a headline for a health care budget if you are talking about $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year. So they asked if it could be made bigger. Everyone knows what the spin doctors do when they get into something like this, they multiply it by something. So somebody said multiply it by three. Then some genius said no, multiply it by five. When we multiply it by five we would get a big number, up to $11.5 billion. This is the kind of math that goes on behind the budget.

Lo and behold we have an announcement by the finance minister that the government is going to put $11.5 billion back into health care. They say over five years very quickly so it does not get divided by five.

If you are to use cumulative numbers for spending increases on health care, you had better use cumulative numbers for the spending cuts on health care and social services to let people know what you are doing. Those numbers do not appear in the budget at all. I am sure the minister had them on a piece of paper and it fell out of the envelope on the way into the department. I am sure he was going to tell us all about them but they were not there.

So we have to do the math. We found that the government's cumulative cuts in the transfers for health and social programs are $21.4 billion by the end of 1999. Even if we put $11.5 billion back in there is a spending deficit. Canadians pay more and get less in health care, about $1,500 less per taxpayer than was spent in 1993-94.

Some hon. members are shaking their heads. They are looking around and talking to each other, saying this is confusing. Let me follow their train of thought. I can read their minds. The hon. members are saying that sometimes we are talking about the Canada health and social transfers and sometimes we are talking about the health transfers. If we say there is confusion, we say who is to blame for that. The government cynically and deliberately created confusion on that point.

When the government was cutting health care transfers it wanted to lump them in with the other social transfers so the health care cuts would be less visible to the public and the government would not get the blame. So when it cuts it mixes it in with something else. All of a sudden, now that it wants to increase it, it wants to make it explicit and visible again so the federal government can get the credit.

The auditor general is not going to be fooled by this kind of shell game and neither are Canadians. As I said earlier, I hope he devotes an entire volume in his next report to the shell game reporting that goes on with respect to the federal budget.

The bottom line of all of this, the unadulterated bottom line, the government's financial management since 1993-94, is Canadians pay $42 billion more taxes since the government took office, or $2,020 per taxpayers, and Canadians will get less, in particular $1,500 less per taxpayer, for health and other services. Pay more, get less is the legacy of the Liberal government in the dying days of the 20th century.

I got into this yesterday but the minister had spoken for an hour and 20 minutes and I could not get into this in any great detail to close off the debate. I want to elaborate on the point that Canada is becoming like old England. When the real king, King Richard the Lionhearted, was away on a crusade, a relative, Prince John, was put in charge. We quoted the little rhyme, “He wanted to be known as John the First but he ended up being known as John the Worst”. Why? Because with the aid of his henchman, the sheriff of Nottingham, he taxed his people to death. Under his regency the government got richer and richer—this is historically accurate—and the people got poorer services and poorer, period. In other words, it was a prototype of the Liberal government. Pay more and you get less.

They paid more and got less until a green clad reformer named Robin Hood assembled a group together, sort of a united alternative of Sherwood Forest, and Prince John's evil ways were restrained. However, that is another story I will save for another day.

Perhaps a little more seriously, it is worth noting that a little later Prince John actually did become king and the major landowners, taxpayers and business leaders, the barons and so-called magnates of the realm, staged a taxpayers revolt and made King John, the king of taxers, sign a humiliating document called the Magna Carta in which he promised not to overtax and abuse his subjects.

Finance ministers should take note of what can happen when taxpayers are pushed too far.

This weekend a group of Canadians will be meeting in this city to explore new ways and means of uniting Canadians to reduce the flood of Liberal taxation and the deterioration of health care under this administration. My hope is that convention will eventually result in a Magna Carta for Canadians that will free Canada from the pay more, get less policies of the Liberal government.

To complement that effort, my colleagues in the House will also use this budget debate to propose remedies to the current situation. They will propose ways and means of ending the shell game by making the government's financial accounting more accountable and more believable and transparent. They will propose reforms in health care financing and federal-provincial relations because the two are connected. They were not connected in the budget. They should be connected. The proposed reforms would put health and social service finances on a firmer foundation.

They will propose broad based tax relief greater in scope than anything this government has ever conceived so that in the end Canadians will pay less and get more.

In closing, I move:

That the motion be amended by replacing all the words after the word “that” with the following:

This House rejects the budget statement of the government because it is a continuation of the government's pay more get less policy which has savaged health care and burdened Canadians with high taxes thus undermining the productivity of the Canadian economy; and because this ever increasing high tax policy has significantly reduced the standard of living of Canadians and left the health care system in tatters.

[The Budget, February 17th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to begin the debate on the 1999 federal budget.

My colleague, the hon. member for Medicine Hat, as well as other opposition members will focus on various particulars of the budget, in particular the defects for which the government needs to be held accountable of which there are many. We will also be constructive. The opposition will be presenting constructive alternatives in the areas where we feel the budget is deficient, particularly with respect to tax policy.

It is my intent at the beginning to focus on the big picture, that is the financial performance and the service record of the government not just for the last year but since it came to office, and what that record and what this particular budget mean to Canadians in the future.

As members know, this is the sixth budget that has been presented by the current finance minister. If asked to summarize the net effect of these budgets, not just this one but the cumulative effect of the six budgets, in one sentence it would be this: that under this government, Canadians are paying more and getting less. Canadians are paying more and getting less and despite all the rhetoric, despite all the spin doctors, despite all the public relations that accompanied the budget yesterday, the total tax bill paid by Canadians has increased yet again while health care services and other services have been cut. Under this government Canadians pay more for less.

With respect to paying more, Canadians hear all the glowing references in the budget speech and the public relations that accompany it with respect to the performance of the economy, phrases like “unprecedented progress”, “we have strengthened the sinews of our innovative and productive economy”, “we have equipped Canadians to succeed”. Most of these phrases and words have been tested by public opinion firms. They test the words, find out which words resonate best with the public and those words find their way into budgets. This is not something surprising.

But the rank and file of Canadians will be asking at the end of the day: if everything is so rosy, why do I not have more money in my pocket at the end of the month and why do I not have more money in my bank account? The answer to that question in one word is taxes. Under this government Canadians are paying more taxes than they have ever paid before.

I would like to take a few minutes therefore to elaborate on this one simple phrase “paying more” and to demonstrate from the figures that were tabled by the government yesterday how Canadians are, at the end of the day, paying more. Let me start with personal income tax.

At the end of 1993-94 when this government took office, Canadians were paying $51.4 billion in personal income tax for the year. At the end of 1999-2000, they will be paying $75 billion for the year, an increase of $24 billion or 46%, an increase of $650 for every Canadian. The bottom line is that Canadians will pay more income tax than they ever have before, 46% more in total than when the government took office. Canadians are now paying the highest personal income tax rates in the The government taxes its citizens more heavily with respect to personal income tax than any other government of the G-7. That has not changed as a result of this budget. The Liberal legacy is Canadians pay more.

Of course, this government is not content just to tax you when you earn. The whole idea is to get you when you are coming and going so the government also taxes people when they spend. We have the figures on the GST consumption tax, a tax the government solemnly promised to remove before it became the government.

At the end of 1993-94 when this government replaced the Tories, Canadians were paying $15.7 billion in GST per year. At the end of 1999-2000 Canadians will be paying $21.6 billion in GST, an increase of $5.9 billion or 38%. That is an increase of $156 per Canadian. The bottom line is that Canadians are paying more GST under a government that promised to abolish it than they have ever paid before, 38% more in total than when the government took office. When it comes to consumption taxes, Canadians pay more.

The government plays a shell game with taxes to try to make taxpayers feel better off. It announces with great fanfare certain tax reductions, such as the modest reductions in the employment insurance premiums, and then it says nothing about or even hides increases in other taxes such as the CPP increases that are inexorably taking more dollars from Canadians each year.

There are two ways to cut through the shell game. One is to elaborate on how the shell game is played with respect to particular taxes and particular expenditures. I hope some day the auditor general spends a whole day explaining that kind of shell game to the House. But the simplest way to cut through the shell game is to look at the total federal taxes collected from individuals and total tax revenues. Here the story is the same. Canadians pay more.

If we look at total federal taxes paid by persons, and this includes personal income tax, employment insurance, GST and Canada pension plan, at the end of 1993-94 the total of all federal taxes paid by persons for the year was $94.3 billion. At the end of 1999-2000 the total of all federal taxes paid by persons will be $131 billion, an increase of $36.8 billion or 39%. The bottom line again, and notice the inexorable conclusion that we come to by working through the numbers, is Canadians paying more in total federal personal taxes than they have ever paid before.

[The Budget, February 17th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister refers to others because he is really afraid of his own record.

The real result of this government's health care policy is a two-tier health care policy where ordinary Canadians get put on a list 200,000 names long and wealthy Canadians go to the United States.

My question for the Prime Minister is how does it feel to go down in history as the father of two-tier health care?

[The Budget, February 17th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, no prime minister in history has taxed Canadians as much as this Prime Minister.

No prime minister in history has cut health care more deeply. For the last four years the accumulated total of health care cuts is over $20 billion. The budget proposes to put $11 billion back over five years and health care deteriorates as a result.

How does the Prime Minister intend to explain to Canadians that when they are paying the highest taxes they have ever paid, they are getting less health care than they have ever received?

[The Budget, February 17th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, at the end of this year, after all this talk of tax relief, Canadians are going to be paying $42 billion more in taxes than they were when this government took office.

While the economy grows at 2% to 3% per year, the government's revenues are growing at 8%. Never in Canadian history has any government taxed Canadians as much as this government.

My question for the Prime Minister is why, after so much talk of tax relief, are Canadians paying the highest taxes in their entire history?

[The Budget, February 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, if we do all that, if we say all the things these members do not want to hear, we get to the bottom line and that is that Canadians are paying more and getting less. They are getting less health care and less social services. In a word, this is a pay more, get less budget.

It reminds me of the time in old England when King Richard the Lionhearted was away on a crusade. He left a relative, Prince Jean, in charge of the kingdom.

To quote a rhyme from that period, “He wanted to be known as John the First, but he ended up known as John the Worst”. Why? Because with the aid of his henchman, the sheriff of Nottingham, he taxed his people to death. Under his regency the government got richer but the people got poorer. They paid more and got less, until a green clad reformer named Robin Hood created the united alternative, but that is another subject which I will save for another day.

I close by suggesting that King Jean and the sheriff of Nottingham retire to the castle for a night of revelling while Reformers will retire to Sherwood Forest to plot our plans for the next day, and that we return here tomorrow to debate the only real question this budget poses. Why should Canadians pay more and get less?

I move:

That the debate be now adjourned.

(Motion agreed to)