1993-04-28

Ms. Albina Guarnieri (Mississauga East):: Mr. Speaker, for weeks Canadians have been led to expect a federal budget filled with significant measures to address the mounting number of casualties from the Toiy voyage to the bottom of the economy.
The document received Monday will be remembered as an April fool's budget, a sad hoax with nothing new and nothing now. This budget is more a prophecy than a plan. Virtually no new measures are included for 1993-94, nor is any improvement in unemployment or the deficit promised for the coming year.
Rather than assist growth this government assumes growth and assumes that Canadians will wait until 1998 for new jobs. Each Canadian who is out of work needs a new job, not the snow job offered by this government.
Canadians are tired of a regime that finds ways to be more mean with less means.



Mr. Bob Corbett (Fundy-Royal):: Mr. Speaker, in the budget that was presented by the Minister of Finance on Monday there were provisions for the privatization of a number of Crown corporations and other bodies. Among these was a commitment to study the feasibility of privatizing Transport Canada's helicopter operations.
Transport Canada operates a fleet of 44 helicopters whose chief responsibilities are navigational aid calibration, resupply operations, aviation inspector training, ice reconnaissance and pollution control.
Many of these responsibilities of Transport Canada's helicopter fleet are critical to save marine operations off the coastlines of Canada, including the Bay of Fundy which is partially in my riding of Fundy-Royal.
I would urge the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Finance to ensure that fiscal responsibility does not take precedence over the safety of mariners because no price is too great when human lives are at risk.


PUBLIC SERVICE
Mr. Eugene Bellemare (Carleton-Gloucester):: Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President of the Treasury Board announced the government's plans to cut at least 16,500 jobs in the federal Public Service over the next five years and to review its work force adjustment policy. These measures are an obvious attempt by the Conservatives to blame public servants for their own incompetence in managing the economy.

According to Treasury Board officials these cuts could mean a loss of $825 million to the national capital region's economy. If it is wise management the government wants, why is it not listening to the public accounts committee and the Auditor General's recommendations instead of cutting services that are provided to Canadians?
What Canada needs is not more unemployment or more people on welfare. What it needs to get the economy moving again is jobs, jobs and jobs.


NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
[Stage Direction]
April 28, 1993
Mr. Doug Fee (Red Deer):: Mr. Speaker, on a sombre note I rise to pay tribute to victims of work related accidents on this National Day of Mourning.
In Canada work place fatalities and injuries cost about $9 billion each year for direct compensation to individuals, retraining and lost productivity.
No amount of dollars can replace a human life. Occupational health and safety is everyone's concern. Safety and health efforts must be both preventive and proactive.
Education and training are required to nurture the kind of awareness that will minimize work place accidents and illnesses. While governments and laws serve a useful regulatory function, it is still the workers and employers who must work together to create safe work places.
On this sombre occasion, it is not enough to mourn those who have died. We must encourage everyone, labour or management, to rededicate themselves to improved safety programs and to making safe and healthy work environments a reality.


THE BUDGET
Mr. Ray Funk (Prince Albert-Churchill River):: Mr. Speaker, the bond rating agencies and the national media claim that this government has not made enough cuts.
That depends on who people are and where they live. Young people in Prince Albert-Churchill River and other far away places in this country will pay for the deficit with their futures.
Their futures depend on training, experience and research and development but my riding alone will lose over $1.5 million in training funding because of the effect of UI changes on the CJS program.
The government put control over student loans in the hands of the Royal and Commerce banks. Students who do not have a local branch or come from low-income families can go to the end of the line.
As MPs we all know the government cut the SEED program, which means fewer summer jobs. It cut funding for friendship centres which provide support for aboriginal youth. It cut federal-provincial forestry and mining agreements which are the only source of research and development in my constituency.
Shame on the government for making young people pay for the deficit with their futures, and shame on the national media for not reporting what is really going on this country.



Mr. Marcel R. Tremblay (Quebec-Est):: Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to mention the impact of the budget on transfer payments to the provinces.
The message from the Minister of Finance is that it would be irresponsible to penalize the provinces by reducing transfer payments at a time when they already have trouble making ends meet.
In fact, our government has decided to act responsibly by urging the provinces to join us in seeking concrete solutions to the debt problem.
There is only one taxpayer, and the only way to deal with our tax problems is to cut spending on government operations, be better managers, in co-operation with the province, and reduce the tax burden on Canadian taxpayers.

We must secure the integrity of our country first.


CANADA LABOUR CODE
Mr. Gilbert Parent (Welland-St. Catharines-Tho-rold):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to make it clear at the outset that I speak as a private member and not as the labour critic for the Liberal Party.
We are now in the process of revamping the Canada Labour Code. Among the suggestions I make to the House is one which would affect workers when they reach the final bargaining stage of a given work conflict.
April 28, 1993

I urge the House to consider the interest of the employees in allowing the employees to have a say in their future through a vote on an offer made by the management.
This is a feature which is already built into the constitutions of some unions but not all of them, which means that in some cases a significant number of employees may want to vote on the offer.
This feature might be of particular benefit when work conflicts last for an inordinate length of time. It should be noted that three provincial NDP governments, in Ontario, B.C. and Saskatchewan, already have this as part of their labour laws.


EMPLOYMENT
Mrs. Louise Feltham (Wild Rose):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to applaud the government of the province of Alberta for its initiatives to get people off welfare and into the labour market.
In 1990 the province began its Supports for Independence Program. The pilot projects have been a success and the minister of family and social services has announced a three-year plan to channel resources to provide support and incentive so that people on welfare complete their schooling, acquire job skills and find work.
Costs are recovered through a redistribution of welfare dollars. The focus has shifted from simply covering immediate financial needs to looking at the needs of each individual in order to get back on his or her feet.
It is a positive effort with the long-term goal of providing a path for people on welfare to a future of economic self-sufficiency. It is working because many on welfare want to be self-reliant.
This initiative is one that the federal government should encourage all provinces to follow.


THE PRIME MINISTER
Mr. Rey Pagtakhan (Winnipeg North):: Mr. Speaker, my constituents have been phoning my office with a very serious question. Namely, with one million children living in poverty and 1.4 million unemployed how can the
Prime Minister proceed with a $1 million farewell tour of Europe?
This leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of those who live hand to mouth, and further betrays the taxpayers who will be footing the bill for this extravaganza. These Canadians can never dream of spending thousands a night for hotel rooms for themselves and hangers-on. Many count themselves lucky to have a roof above them and a pillow on which to lay their heads.
A word of advice to this government on investing. Take the $1 million and send it to food banks like Winnipeg Harvest. For every $1 donated $20 worth of food can be gathered and distributed. Or take the money and put it into job training for the unemployed. That is investing in the future of all Canadians, not just in the future of the Prime Minister.


NATIONAL DEFENCE
Mr. Bill Casey (Cumberland-Colchester):: Mr. Speaker, those who criticize the federal government's intention to buy EH-101 helicopters never acknowledge the positive impact of this purchase.
The cost of the helicopters is projected to be $4.4 billion in 1988 dollars with a positive impact to the Canadian aviation industry in the amount of $3.2 billion. The contract would be spread out over 13 years and have a continuous benefit to all of Canada.
Recently an aerospace industry in Nova Scotia was forced to lay off workers and in its press release stated that the lay-off would not be necessary if it had the projected work from the EH-101 helicopter contract. In fact, instead of lay-offs it would be hiring more people for long-term, quality jobs.
To those who question the price of the helicopters I say that they must also consider the tremendous positive impact. To purchase a lower quality helicopter with no benefit to the Canadian industry would be worse than to buy a more expensive EH-101 when there is such a significant impact on our economy.


NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
Mr. Lyle Kristiansen (Kootenay West-Revelstoke):: Mr. Speaker, today, April 28, is Canada's National Day of Mourning for workers killed and injured on the job. It

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marks the third such official memorial since my NDP colleague, the hon. member for Churchill, succeeded in persuading Parliament to officially recognize this important day of reflection and commitment.
On this day thousands of Canadian workers and others have gathered in hundreds of communities across Canada to remember the approximately 1,000 of their workmates who have died in the work place during this past year and the roughly one million who have been injured on the job.
We particularly remember the 26 miners who were killed suddenly in the Westray coal mine explosion of May 9, 1992 and the nine who died at the Giant Yellowknife mine. However, it is not enough to remember.
Let us commit ourselves to improving the safety, health and related legislation which protects those who produce and distribute our wealth.
In particular, I urge this government to proclaim immediately the health and safety part III of the Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act which this House passed in 1986 and to enact Criminal Code amendments to protect Canadian loggers and mill workers from those who would seriously endanger their lives by the spiking of trees.


NATIONAL CONSUMER WEEK
Mr. Rene Soetens (Ontario):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House on this third day of National Consumer Week to highlight the importance of consumers in our marketplace.
Under the theme "It's Everybody's Business" National Consumer Week intends to heighten public awareness of consumer and marketplace issues. Every day millions of Canadians all across the country step into the national marketplace to choose from a sophisticated array of goods and services.
Individually, consumers might feel that their purchases have little impact on the businesses that serve them and less effect on the economy. Collectively however their decisions have an enormous effect on Canada's national economy and its ability to sustain itself against increasing competition.
That is why competent, well-informed and demanding consumers are a vital link in the chain that leads to prosperity. National Consumer Week is an invitation to all Canadians to work together in order to maintain a fair and efficient marketplace.
National Consumer Week will provide Canadians with an opportunity to become better informed on marketplace issues that concern them as well as their own rights and responsibilities in the marketplace.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Finance.
The minister has been trying to make excuses for the market's negative reaction to the incompetence and mismanagement shown by him and the Conservatives when it comes to the handling of Canada's financial affairs. Speaking about his budget he said: "I think there were hyped up expectations-I guess there is disappointment in that regard". Disappointment is an understatement.
Why is the minister blaming others for this sorry state of affairs? Did he not create these hyped up expectations himself? Why did he do this if he was not able to follow through in his budget both on the deficit and with a strategy for strong job creation and growth?


Hon. Don Mazankowski (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, the December statement and the budget were dedicated to creating the environment for economic growth and the creation of jobs while at the same time dealing with the fiscal problems of the nation. They also set in place a process to deal with the deficit problems faced not only by the federal government but by the provincial governments as well.
If the hon. member were to recall the position of the business community on the budget back in 1985, it criticized that budget when we were going to take $13.8 billion worth of expenditure cuts over a five-year period. It found that budget to be too tough, too mean-spirited and withdrew support for it.
April 28, 1993

It is that same business community that today is saying we did not go far enough when we are providing for expenditure cuts of $30.7 billion over a five-year period.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, are we seeing the end of a love affair between the Conservatives and business?
The Minister of Finance has also been reported as excusing himself and the Conservatives for the mismanagement and incompetence I have spoken about when it comes to handling Canada's financial affairs as shown by his budget because of the leadership race and the forthcoming general election.
I ask the minister why in his budget did the political well-being of the Conservative Party turn out to be more important than the economic well-being of Canada and the need both for the right action when it came to fiscal management and a strategy for strong job creation?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, clearly the well-being of Canada, Canadians and the Canadian economy was on my mind when I put this budget together. That is why, despite the resistance of the opposition who have refused to support the expenditure reduction initiatives, every single one of them since we have been in office, we continue to move forward.
The budget sets out to achieve the deficit targets for 1993-94. It provides zero growth in public expenditures. That is the lowest rate of growth in 40 years, since 1952. Program spending will come down to a 13.9 per cent share of the economy. That is the lowest in 30 years. That is a far cry from the close to 20 per cent share that was achieved during the time the hon. member was in government.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, the minister is proud of the targets set out in his budget, but Canadian Bond Rating Service Limited explained its decision to lower the credit rating of federal government bonds by referring to the fact that since 1988 this government had been systematically off target in meeting its deficit projections.
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I therefore ask the Minister of Finance how he can challenge the agency's decision, considering certain facts that clearly demonstrate the incompetence and poor management of his Conservative government. How can he do that?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member was following market trends, it appears quite obvious that international investors have totally dismissed and disregarded the CBRS announcement because it was based on erroneous information.
Today, Moody's Investors Service issued a statement saying that it has no plans to cut Canadian debt ratings. Canada's foreign currency rating was affirmed at AAA and was reaffirmed at AAA on January 28 after a three-month review period. Standard & Poor's also says it has no plans to lower Canadian debt ratings. Of course the hon. member knows these are the most prestigious and most followed international credit advisors and credit rating agencies.
The CBRS statement can only be dismissed as being erroneous and not having much impact.


NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
Ms. Sheila Copps (Hamilton East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Prime Minister.
The U.S. budget director said that NAFTA in its present form was dead in the water. However, this government is using its remaining weeks in power to try and force ratification of the NAFTA agreement as is.
My question to the Prime Minister is this: Why will the government not renegotiate an agreement that would be more in line with Canada's interests and why is it so anxious for Parliament to adopt an agreement even before it has been negotiated at the international level?


Hon. John McDermid (Minister of State (Finance and Privatization)):: Mr. Speaker, first of all the President of the United States and the trade commissioner of the

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United States have rejected the comments of Mr. Panetta. As a matter of fact I was watching with great interest last night when the President commented. I think I am quoting him correctly when he said that Mr. Panetta had a bad day when he made that statement.
The President of the United States, the President and the Government of Mexico and the Prime Minister and his government in Canada are dedicated to having the free trade agreement passed to become effective on January 1, 1994 and we are proceeding in that direction.


Sheila Maureen Copps: Mr. Speaker, I do not understand why the Conservative government always thinks it is better to cave in first and negotiate later which is what it is doing in this particular initiative.
I ask the minister to respond specifically to the fact that the Mack truck plant in Oakville, Ontario is being closed in a power play by the American company and the American union, even though it was the most productive of the Mack truck plants across North America.
Instead of ramming the NAFTA through Parliament why is the minister not renegotiating the deal to close the trade loophole through which the Americans right now are driving a Mack truck? What is the government afraid of?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I am sure the hon. member knows full well that any decision made by Mack truck has nothing to do with the free trade agreement. It has absolutely nothing to do with it whatsoever.
Companies rationalize and of course the Liberal Party in living back about 30 or 40 years does not understand that. There is a great deal of rationalization in the private sector. There is a great deal of rationalization in the public sector as well and we will see these types of things happen. We are also seeing rationalization taking place where companies are coming back and consolidating in Canada and closing down plants in the United States. It works both ways and the hon. member knows that.


THE BUDGET
Mr. Nelson A. Riis (Kamloops):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Finance who has accomplished the impossible. He has brought in a budget that has caused outrage in virtually every part of the Canadian economy and right across Canadian society. Even his own corporate friends have said the government has brought in an inappropriate budget.
For the first time this country's credit rating is going down. The dollar is dropping. Interest rates are going up. Will the Minister of Finance now admit, with the condemnation that his budget has received across the country, that what this government is doing is wrong and not in the best interests of the Canadian economy?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member who gets up and asks the question with glee had better wipe the smile off his face because what the budget has achieved is it has driven a wedge between the federal NDP and the provincial NDP.
Imagine this, Mr. Speaker: "Federal New Democrats are sharply criticizing Ontario's Bob Rae for what they call the provincial NDP government's Draconian attempts to cut the deficit. In an unprecedented break in party unity, federal NDP finance critic Steven Langdon says Rae is on the wrong track".


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I want to say to my hon. friend what a member of the House has stated about the Rae government is not supported by this federal caucus. This federal caucus is strongly behind the Rae government in its actions in Ontario.
I noticed that the minister chose-


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member for Kamloops has the floor.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to the Minister of Finance and point out that he refused to answer my question. I will repeat it for him. The budget that was brought in did absolutely nothing to assist those
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four million Canadians who are either unemployed or underemployed. Those who were calling for serious deficit and debt reduction have been ignored.
Will the Minister of Finance not acknowledge the fact that his budget, after eight and a half years, reflects the mismanagement of this particular government in dealing with the economy? Should he not do the honourable thing for Canada and Canadians and offer his resignation to the Prime Minister?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the Liberals do not agree with that. However, I am sure the Liberals are as concerned as I am about what the hon. member has just done. We have now discerned more division within the NDP ranks and he has just repudiated the party's finance critic. He has literally fired him on the floor of the House of Commons. What a shameful, shameful gesture.


Some hon. members:: Shame.


Some hon. members:: Resign.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, in the media today there was reference to the budget and this government as being a lame duck government. It is not a lame duck; it is a dead duck government and this budget reflects that.
Forget the Minister of Finance, I want to ask my friend the Prime Minister: Will he not acknowledge the fact that after eight and a half years of fiscal mismanagement, after eight and a half years of being in office, this country still has the same levels of debt and deficit and that nearly four million people are either unemployed or underemployed? Will the Prime Minister not do the right thing, send hope to the people of Canada and ask the Minister of Finance to step down from that position?


Right Hon. Brian Mulroney (Prime Minister):: Mr. Speaker, this is indeed an historic day. There has been the repudiation of the finance critic of the NDP. There has been further division between the federal and provincial NDPs and now, in terms of what has just transpired, they are going to have to get rid of that national anthem of Solidarity Forever because it is gone.
I do not want to hurt Mr. Rae, but I think most members of the House would indicate that the premier
of Ontario is on the right track in deficit reduction. He is trying to contain the cost of government expenditures. I regret that this finds disfavour with the federal NDP because it is the same policy that Mr. Romanow is pursuing and that Mr. Harcourt is pursuing.
The leader in this has been the Minister of Finance. I point out to my hon. friends one fact only, and they can make up their minds whether they think it is valuable. In 15 years program expenditures in Ottawa increased at a rate of 13.8 per cent a year, every single year for 15 years. In the last nine years this rate of increase has been reduced to 3.8 per cent. I think that is a remarkable tribute to this Minister of Finance as well as his predecessor.


Mr. Jean-Robert Gauthier (Ottawa-Vanier):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Finance.
It is obviously very embarrassing and unfortunate for a government to have the Auditor General of Canada point a finger at it. It is unfortunate and embarrassing to see a Conservative government, especially after nine years in power, trying to hide the whole truth about the increase in the budget deficit.
In an article in today's Globe and Mail, Mr. Desautels, the Auditor General of Canada said and I quote: "This is not the first time it has happened. There is very little information in the budget explaining why we are off target by so much this year".
I therefore want to ask the Minister of Finance why he can provide no clear justification for a deficit that will be $8 billion over his own 1992 projections.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I would be very glad to provide that information to the Auditor General because it is public knowledge.
I outlined that in detail during the December statement. I indicated that the slippage in the deficit was caused totally by the slippage in revenues which I estimated at $8 billion at that time.
In the budget I explained a further deterioration that had occurred since that time to the tune of about $1.1

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billion. It has been the slippage and the deterioration in revenues that have caused the slippage in the deficit.
That is indeed public knowledge. I would be very glad to provide it to the hon. member and certainly send it over to the Auditor General.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: Mr. Speaker, for two years the Auditor General has called upon the government to publish a score-card with the budget to compare results with projections. Obviously the Tory government does not want Canadians to see the score-card of the tired old government that has lost control of the budget reins.
The Auditor General suggests that unless the government explains in detail why it so widely missed the mark on the deficit this year, last year and the year before, Canadians should be sceptical about the projections of this year's budget.
I ask the Minister of Finance: Why should Canadians believe his projections or those projections this year when he has missed the mark in the last four years?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, there are a number of questions posed there and I hope I can answer them all.
First and foremost that is precisely why I made a statement in December, to lay before Parliament, indeed the public of Canada, the state of the financial affairs of the nation. I did it very openly. I did it again in the course of the budget. That information is all public knowledge.
The hon. member questions my figures. I am projecting a growth rate this year of something under 3 per cent. The IMF, in its latest forecast just issued yesterday, said that it sees Canada's growth rate for 1993 at 3.2 percent. Next year, 1994, it says that the growth rate for Canada will be 4.4 per cent, much in line with what we are providing.
I repeat and I say to my hon. friend who has been a long-standing member of this House and has seen Liberal years and Conservative years that he will know when we assumed office in 1984 the deficit to GDP at the time was 8.7 per cent. We have cut it in half. It will be 4.5
per cent this year and going down to .9 per cent at the end of the fiscal framework presented in this budget.


Mr. John Manley (Ottawa South):: Mr. Speaker, the budget presented on Monday resulted in a decline in the value of the Canadian dollar, a rise in the bank rate, Canadian debt being downgraded by the CBRS and unprecedented criticism of the budgetary process by the Auditor General of Canada.
The minister's budget does not meet the expectations of two of his cabinet colleagues when it comes to deficit reduction. It is clear the international markets have declared a lack of confidence in the minister as a result of their reaction.
In light of the lack of confidence in the minister and his budget, and given that confidence in the Minister of Finance is of vital concern to all Canadians, does the minister not have to choose between presenting a new budget and offering his resignation to the Prime Minister? Which will he choose?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member knows that yes, there have been some jitters in the exchange market that have been overcome. The market is strengthening. The dollar is going up and interest rates are moderating. The spreads are moderating.
I think the statement made by the Canadian Bond Rating Service has been largely dispelled by the action-


An hon. member:: Discredited.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: -and, as my hon. friend said, discredited by the action of the major credit rating agencies, namely Standard & Poor's and Moody's. There are a number of other international financial organizations that have expressed similar scepticism about the rather curious action on the part of the Canadian Bond Rating Service agency.


John Paul Manley: I should think, Mr. Speaker, that the minister would be more concerned with the judgment of the markets which have been quite clear.
I would also like to ask him about the opening premise to his budget in which he said that there were no tax increases, yet by reducing by $625 million the amount of the GST rebate payable to low income Canadians in the
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Oral Questions
current fiscal year he has effectively increased the net GST return for the current fiscal year.
Why did the minister try to pass off his budget as one that did not contain tax increases when he raised this year's GST burden on the poorest Canadians?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, in the hon. member's first question he was criticizing me and the government for not cutting enough. Other members have been criticizing me and the government for not cutting enough. He cannot suck and blow at the same time.
The fact of the matter is that there are $3.8 billion worth of real cuts in 1993-94. There are $5.8 billion worth of real cuts in 1994-95. There are $7.9 billion worth of real cuts in the end of the fiscal framework, for a total of $30.7 billion, the largest expenditure reduction in the history of Canada.


NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
Mr. Steve Butland (Sault Ste. Marie):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.
The news out of the U.S. is that NAFTA is dead. It is not only the opinion of Mr. Panetta but the majority of Congress. Death usually brings mourning, but the Canadian people will rejoice the death of NAFTA.
President Clinton and the U.S. Congress have indicated they will only support NAFTA if the side accords have teeth. Yesterday in committee we learned that the side accords will definitely have no teeth whatsoever. The obituary will read: NAFTA is dead.
Why is this government continuing to ram NAFTA through committee and subsequently through the House of Commons?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I will be happy to answer that question. The larger question though is: Where has the NDP gone? They have left the House to have a special caucus on unity and-


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Martin Brian Mulroney: On behalf of the Liberals, ourselves and others, may I just express the hope that this
break-up, this lovers' quarrel, can be patched up between Toronto and the federal NDP. I think we all would like to see a return of affection.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: They are looking for a marriage counsellor.


Martin Brian Mulroney: They are looking for a marriage counsellor.


Mr. Peterson:: Bob White is mediating.


Martin Brian Mulroney: I will not touch that one, Mr. Speaker. My hon. friend mentions it was indicated that NAFTA was dead in the United States, and he took some pleasure in that.
This of course has been repudiated by the President of the United States, by Speaker Thomas Foley who said the treaty will be approved, by Labour Secretary Robert Reich, by U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor, by Senate majority leader George Mitchell and by the spokesman for the White House.
My hon. friend may have want of a different question. My hon. friend says: "Maybe Brian Mulroney is on his last legs". I will tell him I will be gone before NAFTA is.


Mr. Axworthy (Winnipeg South Centre):: Why don't you take it with you?


Steve Butland: I am somewhat impressed, Mr. Speaker, with the Prime Minister's list but I can assure him I could provide a much longer list of congressmen opposed to NAFTA. I suspect in a vote that NAFTA will be dead.
This government strategy to ram NAFTA through is creating a legislative nightmare. Other legislation before the House will be impacted by NAFTA and will have to be changed later. Errata, which means mistakes and that is not surprising, are already being issued. Significant aspects of this bill will not be debated in the House but will be covered by regulations.
How can what amounts to an economic constitution of Canada be handled so quickly and so incompetently?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, the matter is being handled carefully and thoughtfully by the government, by members of the opposition and by others in the House. It is an important question that is in the process of being debated and considered by the House, and the House will render a

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judgment, a yea or nay on this. That is the way democratic institutions function.


Mr. Harvey (Edmonton East):: Closure.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Closure. That is a good suggestion. Could we consider that?


Lloyd Axworthy: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Secretary of State for External Affairs.
For the last two days we have been raising questions with the minister and the Minister of National Defence about the precarious situation of our troops in Bosnia. We have been told that in fact everything is under control.
This morning we learn that French defence minister Frangois Leotard has said this about French peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, and I would like to quote: "If questions as simple as the definition of mission, the clarity of command and the sufficient finances are not resolved, we will withdraw our troops".
Clearly the French defence minister is deeply concerned about the situation of their troops. His decision puts in real jeopardy our own peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.
I want to ask the minister: Have they had discussions with the French to discuss these concerns raised by the French defence minister? How does it impact upon the security of our own troops who are presently facing renewed fighting around Srebrenica? Is the minister finally going to do something about clarifying the role of our troops in that veiy difficult theatre of operations?


Hon. Barbara McDougall (Secretary of State for External Affairs):: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is quoting the French minister out of context, but let me say that all of us have concerns.
There is no country which has troops in Bosnia and indeed many which do not have troops in Bosnia which is not concerned about the situation there on the ground and the kinds of actions that we can be looking at in
terms of how to resolve this very difficult situation. I have never suggested that we have not had concerns.
What I have said is that by working closely with our military and all of the allies which are involved in the theatre in Bosnia, we feel that everything is being done that can be done and should be done to accomplish the mission. Our commanding officers in the field and our three officers in headquarters at the United Nations obviously reflect the realities back to us as to what they feel the situation is. We will continue to have those concerns.
If we did not feel that our Canadians could accomplish their missions, then we would raise it with the United Nations. When we have concerns, we do that and we will continue along the path we are taking now.


Lloyd Axworthy: Mr. Speaker, as the minister well knows, the French have over 5,000 troops. They are the best equipped contingent within the UN arrangement in Bosnia.
If the French follow through with their threat to withdraw their troops, it puts our contingent in a very serious and very precarious situation.
It really points out the unresolved issue that we have sent troops to handle humanitarian missions. They are now being asked to protect enclaves and to protect civilians but there has been no clarity from the UN or from our government or anybody else as to exactly what the rules of engagement or the terms of that operation should be.
I want to ask the minister: Is it not time that we had a serious debate in this House of Commons about the role of our peacekeepers in Bosnia and that this government seek to ensure that if we are going to be asked to protect civilians in Bosnia that our troops are properly equipped and properly given the kind of support needed to complete that mission?


Mr. McKnight:: It's an opposition day tomorrow, Lloyd.


Barbara Jean McDougall: Mr. Speaker, quite aside from the fact that tomorrow is an opposition day, and I am sure the hon. member could raise whatever he wishes to raise in this debate, I would certainly be interested in knowing from him what he thinks we should be doing.
April 28, 1993

Does he think we should withdraw the people that we have there? Does he think that we should abandon the humanitarian effort? Does he think that we should abandon the United Nations on the ground and all the people we are assisting?


Lloyd Axworthy: What is your position?


Barbara Jean McDougall: I have made my position and the position of the government very clear in terms of our troops both in Srebrenica and in other parts of Bosnia.
As the hon. member knows, I am hoping to go there next week. I will meet with our people on the ground. In the meantime we have excellent communications with our people there. We will continue to take their advice and to work closely with our allies.


SOMALIA
Mr. David Dingwall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.
The Minister of National Defence acknowledged on Monday that there is a concern over secrecy and that the public has a right to be informed about the difficult events in Somalia.
On the other hand, the minister set up a behind closed doors inquiry whose report she can censor and continues to refuse to answer very specific questions about what she knew, when she knew it and what she did about it.
My question to the Prime Minister is this. If the government is so concerned about not prejudicing the investigation which will take place, why will the Minister of National Defence not have an open public inquiry that will review the situation of our troops in Somalia and also review very carefully the role of the Minister of National Defence?


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, as the minister said on several occasions and indeed as the Judge Advocate General has indicated, it would be most inappropriate to go into the details of the case
Oral Questions
while the investigation is going on. The hon. member knows that. He knows that details cannot be discussed.
In terms of the inquiry, the inquiry was announced by the minister on Monday. The mandate of that organization and the people will be announced by the chief of defence staff this afternoon at 3.30 p.m. There will be civilian individuals on it. Obviously the inquiry has to be in camera because the kind of information adduced could be prejudicial to the investigations under way and make it impossible for justice to occur.
The intent of the government is to seek the truth and not to ascribe motive or lay blame. It is absolutely false of the hon. member to claim that the Minister of National Defence will censor the report before it is released.


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, the minister knows very well that there are many unanswered questions still to be discussed and answers to be provided.
For instance, why did the senior military commander in Somalia try to conceal one of the four deaths as the minister claimed? Why was the minister not told it was a homicide for two weeks, so the minister claims?
Now General MacKenzie, a retired general of the Armed Forces, said: "I am very concerned for the morale of our troops in Somalia".


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: And he said the Liberals and the NDP are causing the downfall of the morale.


David Charles Dingwall: The inquiry announced by the minister of defence is being held from the point of view of a person who had to find some way to deflect or to delay.
My question to the government House leader is why is the government trying to whitewash this matter? Why not have an open public inquiry and give everyone an opportunity to participate?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, again the hon. member has made false statements.
He indicated that the minister of defence did not know about the situation and did not take the appropriate

April 28, 1993
Oral Questions
action. That is false. The situation was brought to her attention immediately and an investigation was done as per the regime in the military.
That led to the requirement to send out an investigating team from Ottawa. That investigation is under way. Again I repeat, I wish the hon. member would have respect for our legal system and recognize that the kind of thing he is asking for would be prejudicial to the individuals involved.
In terms of former General MacKenzie's comments, what he was saying, the kinds of questions asked in this House by the Liberals and NDP have been damaging to the reputation of the Armed Forces. That is precisely what he has been saying.
What we seek through this board of inquiry is an independent board with civilians on it who can look into the situation, report back in a relatively short timeframe. In the meantime, I wish hon. members of the opposition would show respect for the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces who are doing outstanding work in Somalia and other places around the world.


EMPLOYMENT
Mr. John A. MacDougall (Timiskaming-French River):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Last Friday, central Timiskaming was dealt a major blow with the provincial government cancelling 200 job relocations by the ministry of natural resources. There was the closing down of the agriculture college involving 50 jobs.
The area is now facing 35 per cent unemployment. Over the past 20 years, 127 townships have been under a land caution with no development. Both the Ontario and the Supreme Courts have ruled but the province insists that the federal government should be at the table for negotiating settlements.
Can the minister tell my constituents if the province is correct that the federal government should be at the table?


Hon. Thomas Siddon (Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development):: Mr. Speaker, I wrote last week to the minister of native affairs for the province of
Ontario and Chief Potts of the Teme-Augama Anishna-bai band arising out of the finding of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1991 that the treaty rights of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai had been adequately dealt with by way of the Robinson-Huron treaty which was signed over a century ago and that any further disputes between the province of Ontario and the Teme-Augama Anishnabai could be dealt with by the negotiation of a treaty between those two parties and that the federal government would deal with any outstanding claims against us through our specific claims policy.
Those negotiations should proceed between the two other parties.


OZONE LAYER
Ms. Lynn Hunter (Saanich-Gulf Islands):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Acting Minister of the Environment.
Canadians are extremely worried about the disappearing ozone layer. There are record high levels of ozone depletion. It is 24 per cent over Ottawa today.
I ask the person speaking for the Minister of the Environment how much money this government has allocated to research the impacts and adaptation to ultraviolet B radiation.


Hon. Mary Collins (Minister of Western Economic Diversification and Minister of State (Environment) and Minister Responsible for the Status of Women):: Mr. Speaker, as I indicated in the House on Friday there are a number of initiatives that this government has taken with respect to the ozone layer.
That is not only in ensuring that Canadians are aware of the changes that potentially could impact on them but on the broader research side and in the leadership position with the Montreal protocol dealing with ozone.
Our continuing efforts to work collaboratively with the provinces is not only to get rid of the existing substances which cause the depletion of the ozone layer but also to ensure that we are not adding to that.
This is an ongoing activity under our green plan with a number of departments in the provinces and we, indeed, intend to meet our targets and in fact hopefully even better them.
April 28, 1993


Lynn Hunter: My supplementary is for the Minister of National Health and Welfare. I ask the same question I asked this time last year.
Right now tens of thousands of Canadians are developing skin cancer and cataracts because of exposure to cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. I ask the minister again this year if he will finally introduce legislation to rate and test UV protection of both sunscreens and sunglasses.


Hon. Benoit Bouchard (Minister of National Health and Welfare):: Mr. Speaker, the member knows that the Minister of the Environment in collaboration with the Department of National Health and Welfare made a declaration last year and strengthened the sun exposure regulations.
In terms of the legislation we are still working with the Department of the Environment and when there is reason to believe that the legislation is necessary we will pass the legislation. So far the Minister of the Environment has worked in a way that we believe it should work in terms of the necessity at the time and that which we still have.


PUBLIC WORKS
William D. (Bill) Casey: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Public Works and it is my standard question about the fixed link.
The fixed link remains a key to transportation and development in Atlantic Canada. I see where the public works department has begun public hearings for the second time. Could the minister outline the future of the fixed link and if it is approved by the panel when can construction begin?


Hon. Elmer M. MacKay (Minister of Public Works):: Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to respond to my colleague on this very important private sector initiative.
Public Works Canada is presently conducting a section 12 determination pursuant to the recent Federal Court decision. Public meetings to give residents on both sides of the strait an opportunity to become familiar with this
Oral Questions
specific environmental evaluation documentation and provide their comments will be ample. These comments will be taken into consideration when the section 12 decision is made.
In addition and according to the environmental assessment review guidelines order, public works will continue to invite comments on the section 12 decision.
The premier of Prince Edward Island and I have had recent discussions and we can count on her co-operation on the constitutional issues.
I am surprised to hear my colleague from the Annapolis Valley who was part of this House and who can attest from long experience what is required to help the region and to help transportation and economic development take such a short-sighted and counter-productive view of this important project.


THE BUDGET
Mr. Maurizio Bevilacqua (York North):: Mr. Speaker, in last year's budget this government projected an unemployment rate of 9.5 per cent. Now it is projecting an unemployment rate of 11.1 per cent for this year. Clearly the economy is getting worse.
The absence of an economic plan in this budget clearly reveals that this government is exhausted, lacks ideas, and the political will to bring about positive change in Canada.
My question is for the Minister of Finance. When will the minister realize that his stay the course, do-nothing approach has devastated the lives of millions of Canadians? When will this minister change the course?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, once again may I simply point out to the hon. member that based upon the latest IMF forecast we are projecting Canada to have the fastest growth in the G-7 countries at 3.2 per cent this year and 4.4 per cent next year.
I remind the hon. member that there were 200,000 new full-time jobs created since last August, 48,000 jobs created last month. We are expecting 300,000 new jobs created from the fourth quarter of 1992 to the fourth quarter of 1993 and over 400,000 jobs in the next year.

April 28, 1993
Routine Proceedings
We expect to bring unemployment down to 7.5 per cent by the end of the fiscal framework.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, for nine years this government has asked Canadians to sacrifice themselves to build a strong economy for future generations.
This do-nothing budget however gives no hope to the over 420,000 young people who are presently unemployed and the hundreds of thousands of students who will be looking for summer employment.
Why has this government turned its back on Canadian youth?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member knows that since we have come to office Canada has had the second best rate of growth in the G-7 and the best rate of job creation of all the G-7 countries.
The February 1992 budget, the December statement and this budget provide the basis and foundation for long-term sustained growth and price stability, job creation and a growing economy and at the same time contain the deficit.
Yesterday they were raising Cain with me because the budget was cutting too much and was not satisfying the needs of the big business community. Today they are taking a different approach and I can only concur with the findings-


Mr. Speaker:: We must push on. The hon. member for Willowdale.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to the finance minister's prognostications, we know how wrong his forecasting has been in the past.
The legacy of this government as it leaves office is a $30 billion high-tech trade deficit, a fall from fourth to eleventh place in our ability to compete, 16 per cent of our manufacturing jobs lost in the last four years and 11 per cent unemployment, the highest in the G-7. This is the Tory economic legacy.
Why did the government not use last Monday's budget, its last chance, to introduce a comprehensive economic strategy, a means to get rid of the
deindustrialization of Canada and get Canadians back to work?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I disagree fundamentally with the hon. member. He knows that we have had the second best productivity rate in the G-7. That is showing up in our ability to compete and our ability to achieve exports and that does create jobs. Our exports to the United States have increased by over 21 per cent which is the highest in history.
Here is the legacy: Let us look at Canada's industrial production over the last three months compared to other countries and I know the hon. member will really take this into consideration. This shows the trend. Canada's industrial production is growing at the rate of 4.3 per cent, the U.S. at 4.1 per cent, Japan at minus 5.3 per cent, Germany at minus 11.2 per cent, France at minus
3.7	per cent, U.K. at 1.7 per cent, and Italy at minus 2.9 per cent. I can say that I am proud of that legacy.



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Hon. Gilles Loiselle (President of the Treasury Board and Minister of State (Finance)):: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 32(2), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to the 17th Report of the Standing Committee on Finance, the first report of the Subcommittee on Regulations and Competitiveness.


TRANSPORT SAFETY BOARD
Mr. Jean-Guy Hudon (Parliamentary Secretary to President of the Privy Council and Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs):: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 32(2) and on behalf of the President of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada it is a pleasure to table, in both official languages, the annual report of the



April 28, 1993

Transportation Safety Board of Canada for the fiscal year ended March 31, 1993.
Pursuant to Standing Order 32(5), this report is deemed permanently referred to the Standing Committee on Transport.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]


GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO PETITIONS
Mr. Charles A. Langlois (Parliamentary Secretary to Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and to Minister of National Defence):: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to 27 petitions.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]



MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT RETIRING ALLOWANCES ACT


Mr. Pat Nowlan (Annapolis Valley-Hants) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-425, an act to amend the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 68(2), the motion is deemed adopted.


John Patrick (Pat) Nowlan: Madam Speaker, this bill is one in which there is some duplication with some other bills of members on the whole question that irritates the public more than any other one thing about members of Parliament both in the national House and in many provincial houses. It concerns our pensions.
This bill would amend the pensions act to make sure the vesting no longer occurs after six years but at 60 years of age, six years is rather obscene, and eliminate the double-dipping provisions of members obtaining a pension and a government pay cheque in other forms. This is also very irresponsible.
I think, knowing full well that this bill may not pass before this House is dissolved, that more members who
Routine Proceedings
can focus attention on this will have to be accountable with the electorate in the election and make sure that in the new House this bill can be revived and changed in conformity to the public interest in something that is so sensitive and so wrong at the present time.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Mr. Nowlan moves that the bill be now read the first time and printed.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1), the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.



FEDERAL-PROVINCIAL FISCAL ARRANGEMENTS AND POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION AND HEALTH CONTRIBUTIONS ACT MEASURE TO AMEND

Mr. Mac Harb (Ottawa Centre) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-426, an act to amend the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements and Federal Post-secondary Education and Health Contributions Act.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 68(2), the motion is deemed adopted.


Mac Harb: Madam Speaker, the purpose of this bill is to ensure that there is a standard school leaving age across Canada and the federal money that is contributed to the provinces for post-secondary education is used solely for that purpose.
The reason for this is because a lot of the money that the federal government gives to the provinces for education is not being used by the provinces for education but for something else.
As well, the standard school leaving age across Canada varies from one province to the next. Therefore this bill will have a uniform standard school leaving age. It will also ensure that money given to the provinces for education is used for education.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Mr. Harb moves that the bill be now read the first time and printed.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1), the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.

April 28, 1993
Routine Proceedings INCOME TAX ACT



MEASURE TO AMEND

Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (St. Boniface) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-427, an act to amend the Income Tax Act (public safety occupations).


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 68(2), the motion is deemed adopted.


Ron J. Duhamel: Madam Speaker, this bill would permit registration of the pension plan allowing nurses early retirement on the same basis as is currently permitted for public safety employees. Early retirement would be available as early as age 55, for 25 years' service, a combination of age and service totalling 75 or total and permanent disability.
Currently the early retirement rights of public safety employees are governed by the income tax regulations and cover fire-fighters, police officers, corrections officers, air traffic controllers and commercial airline pilots.
This bill places the right to early retirement in the Income Tax Act and adds nurses. The amendment would be effective for 1993. It seems to me that the demands being made on nurses in today's society warrant such consideration. Income security is important, not only to them but to all Canadians and we have the responsibility to provide it.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Mr. Duhamel moves that the bill be now read the first time and printed.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1), the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.



HOUSE MANAGEMENT


Charles A. Langlois: Madam Speaker, you will recall that the week before the Easter recess of
the House, I had the pleasure, on behalf of the Committee on House Management, to table the 83rd report of the Committee on House Management, which deals with parliamentary reform.
The time has come, after consultation with the other parties, for concurrence in this report.

Today I would like to move that the House of Commons concur in the 83rd report of the House Management committee, a report dealing with parliamentary reform.


David Charles Dingwall: Madam Speaker, I just want to understand this correctly.
The parliamentary secretary made reference to the 83rd report but I believe it has to do with the broadcasting of various standing committees of the House of Commons. I do not believe it refers to the subject matter of parliamentary reform which is for another document.
If I am in error I hope the parliamentary secretary will correct me. If I am not in error I hope he will do the honourable thing.


Charles A. Langlois: Madam Speaker, I am sorry, the 83rd report of the House Management committee deals with broadcasting.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Does the hon. parliamentary secretary have unanimous consent to present the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.

Mac Harb: Madam Speaker, this petition is signed by many of the senior citizens who live in my riding of Ottawa Centre.
April 28, 1993

They call on Parliament to take all the necessary measures to enshrine in the Constitution the obligation of the government to provide universal, publicly-funded hospital and medicare to all citizens.


Ross Harvey: Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition signed by several residents of the province of Alberta, most of whom reside in Edmonton.
They argue that the current Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement sharply reduces the power of all Canadian governments to develop the Canadian economy. They argue that more than 400,000 Canadian manufacturing jobs have been lost since the FTA became law in 1989 and that if implemented the North American free trade agreement will cause even more Canadian jobs to be lost.
They call on the House to reject the proposed North American free trade agreement and recommend to the government that it use the FTA's termination clause to end the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.


Mr. George Proud (Hillsborough):: Madam Speaker, I rise, pursuant to Standing Order 36, to present a petition on behalf of many Canadians who call on Parliament to amend the Canada Labour Code to prohibit the use of replacement workers by employers during a strike or lockout in federal jurisdictions.


John Patrick (Pat) Nowlan: Madam Speaker, I too rise under the provisions of Standing Order 36 to present a petition from 27 very conscientious and serious citizens of my hometown of Wolfville, Nova Scotia in regard to outlawing the serial killer board game which I know has come up in this House before.
Quite frankly I think it is appropriate because of the repugnance of this game to read the first whereas of this petition. The petition reads: Whereas the parents and grandparents seek a ban of a new game to be introduced in Canada called the serial killer board game; whereas this game comes with a body bag, 25 babies and four serial killer figures, the object of which is to commit murder and the person with the highest body count being
Routine Proceedings
the winner. The petitioners further state that this game is not in the best interest of children and in the wrong hands could become dangerous and they suggest it could easily impress young people.
Therefore my petitioners humbly pray, as I think all members in this House agree, that this type of obscenity should not be allowed in Canada. I hope the government continues to proceed to ban it.


Mr. Dennis Mills (Broadview-Greenwood):: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I have the privilege of presenting to Parliament the signatures of hundreds of Greek Canadian citizens from my riding.
The petition states that the Government of Canada has decided to amend the Canadian war veterans act so that effective March 2, 1992 persons are no longer eligible for benefits under the war veterans allowance program based on resistance service only.
Therefore the petitioners humbly pray and call upon Parliament to accept legislation designed to rescind the above mentioned amendment in order to stop the discrimination between Canadian veterans of the resistance movements and veterans of the formal military capacity since all were fighters against the enemy of Canada, stop the discrimination between Canadian citizens who should all have equal rights in terms of where they live and receive their rightful benefits and deal in a humane manner with senior citizens who after many years of work and service to Canada are now forced to again move back under often veiy difficult conditions.


Mr. Vic Althouse (Mackenzie):: Madam Speaker, I have a petition from constituents in the Wynyard-Quill Lake area who point out that if the North American free trade agreement is put in place the agreement will cause Canadians to lose more good jobs. They point out that it places restrictions on the ability of future federal, provincial and territorial governments to assist Canadian industry, conserve natural resources for Canadian benefit, and advance needed social programs.
They therefore call upon the House to reject the proposed North American free trade agreement and to recommend to the government that it use the termina-

April 28, 1993
Routine Proceedings
tion clause to end the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.


Douglas Fee: Madam Speaker, I have two sets of petitions. Over 2,000 people signed the first one which recognizes that treaty rights entitle Indians to preserve their traditional way of life, including hunting, fishing and gathering, but express concern that completely unregulated hunting interferes with good conservation and sound wildlife management.
They call upon the government to conclude an agreement with Canada's treaty Indians regarding sound wildlife management, including a restriction on native rights to hunt, fish and gather for personal consumption needs and a prohibition on the sale for profit of wildlife meat or parts obtained by treaty rights.


Douglas Fee: Mr. Speaker, I have a second petition signed by a number of people from central Alberta who are expressing their concern that Planned Parenthood is asking for government funding for a project known as sexuality information resource clearing house, the funds for which would come from the tax money of the citizens of Canada.
They are expressing concern that this is an unnecessary duplication of services already provided, and call upon Parliament to withhold all financial support for the Planned Parenthood project.


Mr. Guy Saint-Julien (Abitibi):: Madam Speaker, I would like to table a petition from the golden age club of Dubuisson in Abitibi, which says that violent movies on television are dangerous and therefore unacceptable, because they incite more violence.
The petition says that all toys which incite violent games are unacceptable and should not be made. Also, freedom of the press in reporting acts of violence should be limited and information on violent acts which is repeated too often on all television networks and on radio can incite others to commit the same acts of violence.
Therefore these petitioners humbly ask Parliament to legislate on the above points, in order to eliminate violence in our society so as to better protect our children and give all our fellow citizens a better quality of life.


Mr. Jesse Flis (Parkdale-High Park):: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36,1 have the honour to present additional petitions from residents living on Bloor Street, High Park Avenue, Pacific, Quebec Avenue, Oakmount, Mountview, Pinecrest, Glenlake, Gothic, Glenavon and other nearby streets who state that they are very satisfied with the service and location of sub-post office No. 166 located in the High Park Pharmacy.
The petitioners humbly pray and call upon this Parliament to urge the government to keep post office No. 166 located in the High Park Pharmacy operating in its present location and with its present service.


Mr. Alex Kindy (Calgary Northeast):: Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition pursuant to Standing Order 36 with 20,000 signatures which is part of a total of 50,000 in memory of all children who have suffered at the hands of others.
We have formed this petition to stress our beliefs that the penalties in respect to child molesters and child murderers are far too lenient in this country. We strongly request that this petition be heard as a people's vote to reinstate capital punishment for child murderers and to stiffen penalties for child molesters.
If we do not protect our children from the people who commit these heinous crimes, who will? Your petitioners call upon Parliament to enact legislation against these types of offenders. I support this type of petition.


Ron J. Duhamel: Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition. The signers of this petition say that pension indexing in no way meets the financial needs of seniors.
April 28, 1993

They also point out that general indexing, even with the supplement, is insufficient. The petitioners mention as well that poverty is increasing rapidly among the elderly, many of whom live at or below the poverty line. In closing, they add that these seniors are experiencing serious income problems.


Ron J. Duhamel: Madam Speaker, I have another petition from people in Manitoba.
The petitioners ask Parliament to ensure that appropriate language is used on radio and television. They also condemn violence that is used on radio and television. They point out that violence is not necessary to inform or entertain in English, French or any other language. They say it goes against some of the principles they use to raise their families.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)
Charles A. Langlois: Madam Speaker, the following questions will be answered today: Nos. 320 and 448.


Mr. Gardiner: With respect to the television ads relating to the report of the Special Joint Committee on a Renewed Canada, (a) which department or agency assumed the costs (b) what were the costs of production and placement (c) what persons or companies received contracts for these ads and what were the dates and amounts of these contracts?


Hon. Paul Dick (Minister of Supply and Services):: The
television ads for the special joint committee are budgeted for under the Department of Supply and Services Canada. This was done on behalf of the cabinet committee on communications in support of communications requirements of the Federal-Provincial Relations Office.
Routine Proceedings
Advertising expenditures were $3,335,869.18 and the advertising firm was Publitel.
Due to the time of year, the contract was divided over two fiscal years:	1991-92,	$970,582.00;	1992-93,


Mr. Manley: For 1991 and 1992, how much has the federal government spent
on city core revitalization and how were these funds allocated?


Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Public Works Canada (PWC) manages a number of properties located in city core areas. Those buildings, as they grow older, often require important renovations in order to respect increasingly stringent health and safety standards. Such renovations do not show up in the numbers related to city core revitalization projects.
Public Works Canada manages a major capital project program under parliamentary vote 15-real property program capital expenditures.
This vote involves the construction of new federal buildings and the renovation or redevelopment of existing federal buildings. Some of these projects are located in city core areas. The Pacific-Western regions of PWC had three such projects and there were two in the Quebec region, as follows:
Victoria-Custom	House (816 Government
Street)-Renovations
This project, at a total cost of $4.4 million, involved the conversion of a portion of the lower two floors from government office space to commercial retail and the installation of a new heritage exterior facade on the 1957 addition. The project was undertaken on the urging of the city of Victoria and the downtown business community to contribute to the revitalization of Government Street and the inner harbour/Empress Hotel/provincial legislative precinct. The project was substantially complete in the spring of 1992 with capital expenditures of $2.5 million in 1991-92 fiscal year.
Whitehorse-"Elijah Smith" Federal Building (308 Main Street)-Redevelopment
This $24.7 million project involved the phased demolition of the old federal building and the construction of a new Government of Canada office building. The Elijah Smith building is a four-storey, 9,500 rentable square metre office building occupying an entire city block on

April 28, 1993
The Budget
Main Street. The project was substantially complete in the spring of 1992 with capital expenditures of $10.8 million in 1991-92 fiscal year.
Winnipeg-MacDonald Building (344 Edmonton Street)-Renovations
This project, at a cost of approximately $6 million, involved a major upgrading of all floors of the building to give it an economic life of 25 years. The project was completed in 1992 with capital expenditures of $2 million in 1991-92 fiscal year.
Chicoutimi-Old Port of Chicoutimi
1991-	$186,850-fitting up of cycling track, surveys and other legal conveyancing documents, soil decontamination, river bank management
1992-	$97,959-fitting up of cycling track, surveys and other legal conveyancing documents, soil decontamination, river bank management
Trois-Rivieres-Old Port of Trois-Rivieres
1991-	$369,265-reimbursement to the city for operating and maintenance costs for the previous calendar year
1992-	$424,576-reimbursement to the city for operating and maintenance costs for the previous calendar year
The following two projects were carried out under parliamentary vote 20-crown corporations program:
Montreal-Old Port of Montreal
1990/91-$14,363,000-operating and capital expenses
1991/92-$42,232,612-operating and capital expenses
1992/93-$13,457,000-operating and capital expenses (Apr.-Dec.)
Toronto-Harbourfront
1990/91-$3,648,932-operating and capital expenses
1990/91-$3,700,000-loans to cover capital asset expenses
1991/92-$11,000,000
1992/93-$8,200,000 (Apr.-Dec.)
Toronto Harbourfront was the only project done in conjunction with a city/region.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The questions as enumerated by the parliamentary secretary have been answered.


Charles A. Langlois: I ask, Madam Speaker, that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Shall the questions remaining stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Charles A. Langlois: Madam Speaker, I ask that all Notices of Motions for the Production of papers be allowed to stand.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Shall all notices of motions stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Tuesday, April 27, consideration of the motion of Mr. Mazankowski that this House approves in general the budgetaiy policy of the government; and the amendment of Mr. Gray (Windsor West) (p. 18487); and the amendment to the amendment of Mr. Langdon (p. 18534).
Madam Deputy Speaker:: When the House rose yesterday, there were two minutes left for the hon. member for Carleton-Charlotte. After that we will proceed with questions and comments.


Mr. Greg Thompson (Carleton -Charlotte):: Madam Speaker, I will continue where I left off yesterday and will conclude by saying that the Canadian economy is moving along well.
It is probably not moving as fast as we would like but as I indicated yesterday, most economic think tanks and the International Monetary Fund have predicted that Canada's economy will outpace those of all other industrialized countries in the next couple of years.
There are a number of reasons for that and not just the major ones that were introduced two days ago by the Minister of Finance. It simply builds upon the consistent
April 28, 1993

sound fundamental management of the economy by the government since 1984.
It also builds upon our economic statement last December in this House. As evidence of that we have had a tremendous turnaround in the economy. In fact as the minister noted in the House today, 200,000 jobs have been created in Canada since August of last year and
48,000	new jobs were created last month alone.
In addition to that, we can go back to the heart of many of these budgets introduced. In fact 148,000 Canadians took advantage of the housing program announced a year ago regarding the use of RRSP contributions toward the construction of a new home. That is one indication of what we have done on this side of the House in recent months. There is the reduction in personal income tax and changes to the Small Businesses Loans Act.
Those things are all adding to the base that we set in 1984. I am quite proud of that record. I will entertain questions and comments from the other side of the House.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Madam Speaker, once again I find myself having a difference with the member for Carleton-Charlotte. This has been a repeated exercise over many months. I must tell him that I have a lot of respect for the member when he talks about this approach to the fundamentals being in place. I understand where he is coming from. I recognize the lower interest rates and I recognize practically no inflation in this country. However, in our communities now because of this obsession with zero inflation we have between the welfare rolls and the unemployment rolls well over three million people out of work.
We agreed on both sides of the House in the last four months that the key to creating new jobs really did lie with the small business sector. All parties put the Small Businesses Loans Act through the House. I am sure that Canadians have heard more about the Small Businesses Loans Act in the last 90 days than they had in the previous 15 years.
The problem I have with the government on the Small Businesses Loans Act is that it is not honouring the commitment it made in this House just two months ago. The Minister of State for Small Businesses and Tourism
The Budget
stood up in this House and said that he was going to have a promotional package so that the small business community would be aware that this particular instrument was out there for small businesses to use. That has not happened.
I know that Scotiabank has taken out some ads in the paper and I commend Scotiabank for that. I commend the Bank of Montreal for coming in at one point under prime for loans under $100,000.
Does the member not really believe that this recovery cannot happen unless the banks are aggressively promoting and utilizing the Small Businesses Loans Act? If the member does believe that is necessary then what will he and his government do to make sure that happens?


Gregory Francis Thompson: Madam Speaker, there is no question that small business is the backbone of the Canadian economy. That is where most jobs occur. The biggest single employer is the small business sector.
We have done many things on this side of the House as a government and with the support of some members opposite in that regard. Of course, the changes to the Small Businesses Loans Act to which the member refers is an example of that.
I did in fact put that question to the minister responsible for small businesses, as the member acknowledges, not too long ago in this House because that has always been a concern of mine. We do what is necessary in this House but we expect co-operation from those lending institutions outside of this House to really make it happen on the street. I acknowledge that that has not happened in previous years up until these changes to the Small Businesses Loans Act.
There are provisions within the Small Businesses Loans Act that make it more lucrative for the banks to become involved with small business. There is an indication that is happening but rest assured-and I will say this to the member from Broadview-Greenwood as well-I will continue to press the minister to make sure it does happen.
I know the Minister of Finance was a small business owner at one time and is very sensitive in this regard. I am going to continue to hold the banks' feet to the fire and make sure it does respond to legislation brought into this House because it is very important.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
There are many small businesses out there that are cash starved. They are not asking government to do anything for them. They are simply asking the banks to respond in a positive way and I hope they will. Rest assured I am going to do my best to make sure they do.


Ron J. Duhamel: Madam Speaker, I want to ask my colleague two questions.
He indicated there has been some management on the part of the government and the basics are in place. How can he say that, and I do not say it unkindly, when right now well over 1.6 million Canadians are without work and 2.7 million Canadians are receiving social assistance? Over two million Canadians will be fed at food banks, the deficit is well in excess of $30 billion and the debt has surpassed $450 billion when it was less than $200 billion when this government came into power.
My province of Manitoba has taken five major hits. Regional development has been cut and there have been cuts to VIA Rail and CBC again and again. Mining and forestry agreements are no longer going to be in operation. There will be jobs lost in all of these areas.
How can people have hope? How can people from Manitoba and other regions think that this particular budget will help sustain what we have now and make it grow? I just do not see it.


Gregory Francis Thompson: Madam Speaker, I hope I have time
for my response.
There is no question, as I mentioned yesterday in my speech, that 1.5 million Canadians are unemployed. None of us can take any satisfaction from that no matter which side of the House we sit on.
The point is that the Canadian economy is moving in the right direction. As evidence of that let us take a look at some of the numbers. I quoted the numbers in regard to the IMF and the predicted growth within the Canadian economy, sustained growth over the last number of years and the projections they are putting forward for next year and the year after. That is all encouraging but I go back to some of the numbers on which we can hang our hats.
For example our exports last year were at an all-time record high of $157 billion. What does that do? It translates into jobs. As I articulated earlier, 200,000 jobs
have been created since last August and 48,000 jobs were created last month alone. That is an improvement. The difficulty is that when the economy is moving along the impact of the growth will not be felt this afternoon or next week. It takes time.
Obviously the fundamentals have to be put in place so that movement continues and we have done that. I think we have to emphasize that because all of us would like to pick up the magic wand, wave it and cause unemployment to cease but that is not the way it is.
I go back to the heart of the matter. The fundamentals are in place and I think that is what the member has to take a very hard look at.
With regard to the situation in Manitoba and all the provinces, the transfers to the provinces, particularly the poorer provinces and we include Manitoba in that, have not been touched. For example the transfers to the province of Manitoba and my own home province of New Brunswick have not been touched and they will actually increase beyond increases in other sectors.
In fact the finance minister in the province of New Brunswick was very positive in his response to the budget introduced two days ago.
He said: "Listen, how can I criticize the federal government because we do have a cash crunch in this country. We do have some problems but the transfers to our province of New Brunswick are increasing as they will to Manitoba". We recognize that those provinces depend on those transfer dollars.
We are being criticized in some quarters for not having cut back on those transfer dollars but coming from one of the poorer provinces, I would say the government did the right thing in that regard.
For example, the province of New Brunswick depends on direct cash transfers from the Government of Canada for 40 per cent of its revenues. Those have been left intact and this year will amount to approximately $1.5 billion. The government can take some encouragement from that.


Hon. Lome Nystrom (Yorkton-Melville):: Madam Speaker, I want to say a few words about this non-event that is called the budget.
April 28, 1993

I have seen a number of budgets in my day in the House of Commons and I cannot recall a budget that has been such a non-event, non-existent one composed of smoke and mirrors as the budget we have before us today.
There is scarcely a budget in this country either federally or provincially that does not have a tax change, that does not have a program change, that does not have some new initiative. Yet we have a budget here that accomplishes basically very little.
It is really a continuation of the same statement we had last year in the December economic statement. Of course, as a result of the budget, nobody is happy.
I am not happy because it does not tackle the big problem of job creation in this country. It also makes things more difficult for the farmers in the prairies, particularly in Saskatchewan. Even the friends of the government are not happy. The business community and the investment community are not happy with the government.
A bond rating company in Montreal lowered the credit rating of the Government of Canada yesterday from an AAA rating to an AA rating. I think that may be the lowest credit rating the federal government has had in history. An AA rating is very low for the federal government of this country.
The Canadian dollar went down as a result of that. The minister across the way knows that the Canadian dollar value went down. Yesterday the Bank of Canada boosted the central bank rate significantly to try to prop up the Canadian dollar. We have already had short-term immediate consequences of this budget presented by the government across the way.
There is no vision in the budget. There is no plan. There is no direction as to where this government wants to go. Despite nine years in office, 11 per cent of the Canadian people are unemployed. Another huge percentage is on welfare, working part-time, has dropped out or is underemployed.
The Canadian Council of Bishops said two weeks ago that over three million Canadians are either unemployed or underemployed in this country. What a shame for the wealthiest country in the industrialized world to have such human waste and human devastation.
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We have had nine long lean years of the Conservative Party and yet 11 per cent of our people are unemployed and over one million people are on welfare.
Let me talk about the deficit. That is like putting the skunk in the hen house. The Conservative Party talks about the deficit but what has happened to the deficit in this country? This year it is still going to be over $32 billion. Last year it was about $35 billion. In 1984 when this Prime Minister came to office the debt was about $160 billion. This year it is going to be $458 billion.
It has gone from $160 billion to $458 billion and that comes from a Conservative Party that says: "Look, keep electing us and we will control the debt and the deficit in this country". Now the leadership candidates, in particular the Minister of the Environment and the former Minister of Justice, are going around this country saying: "Look, we have some ideas on how to control the deficit and eliminate it in three years".
That is like the chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. If they have these ideas about how to get rid of the debt and the deficit, why did they not say something when they were sitting in the cabinet for the last five years to eight years? They are misleading the people of this country as the Conservative Party has historically done. The Conservative Party has destroyed this country economically. It has driven people on to the unemployment rolls by driving up the interest rates. It brought in a GST which slowed down the Canadian economy, strangled small business and made more paper work and more bureaucracy for the small business community. It brought in a trade deal with the United States that has given away our sovereignty and that is now resulting in hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs in Ontario in particular. This loss is not temporary like in the last recession but it is permanent this time.


Mr. Heap:: Two-thirds of them.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Those jobs are moving south of the border to the United States and more recently they are starting to move south of that border into Mexico.
As my friend who is the member for Trinity-Spadina in Toronto says, about two-thirds of those lost jobs are lost permanently in the province of Ontario. It is because the government has given away too much. It has given

April 28, 1993
The Budget
away the store and destroyed this country. It has destroyed this country economically and is destroying many of the other institutions that we have in this country as well.


An hon. member:: It calls it economic management.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: It gave cutbacks to CBC, VIA Rail, and the post office system. There is the destruction of rural post offices. In fact even in my small city of Yorkton with about 18,000 people, by no means a small town or a village, we lost our post office two years ago because of this government.
The government is destroying the very institutions of this country that bind us together east and west with the trade deal with the United States. Now of course we have NAFTA, which is the North American free trade agreement with Mexico and the United States.
Even the President of the United States is not happy with NAFTA. He wants to negotiate side agreements and parallel agreements. Yet we have a government now that is trying to force NAFTA through the House of Commons, dissolve this country even more in terms of north and south and to play the tune once again of large multinational corporations.
That is not good enough. Regardless of who wins the Conservative Party leadership in about six weeks, the Canadian people will know that a Conservative is a Conservative is a Conservative and this is the kind of economic policy that has been set by this government for the last nine years.
In this budget, even though it did not change very much, there were a few changes that are going to hurt ordinary people. The GST for example now has a tax credit that is paid out to the poorest Canadians four times a year. I know people in my riding who get that cheque every three months. So what is this government going to do? Instead of paying it out every four months, it is now going to pay it out every six months to the poor people. This will make it more difficult for the poor to provide for the needs of their children: food, shelter, clothing and their own lives. By doing that the government is going to save $7.5 million.
If the Prime Minister would cancel his fancy farewell tour to Europe we would probably save about $1 million. That would be more significant than stopping the payment of those cheques every three months to the poor
people so that they have some money on a regular basis to feed their families.
It is $7.5 million a year. That is important but in the over-all budget it is a very small drop in the puddle. It is a very small drop and it helps ordinary people when they need it the most. These ordinary people are going to spend that money right away. They are going to pay some of it back in taxes. They are going to stimulate the economy by buying goods and services.
Second, another change in the budget, perhaps most significant of all, is the change to the Crow benefit for prairie farmers. I think that is probably one of the only, if not the only, announcement of a legislative initiative in the budget. Look at page 53. The government says that it is going to cut back the Crow benefit by another 10 per cent. The Crow benefit was an agreement signed by the federal government to last in perpetuity to provide $720 million a year for the farmers to pay the railways to subsidize the movement of grain.
A year ago the federal government decided to cut it back by 10 per cent, some $72 million, unilaterally. That is not co-operative federalism. That is not going out and saying to the provinces and the farmers of this country: "We want your input and involvement before we make an important decision". That is the Minister of Finance reaching into farmers' pockets in my riding and in ridings across the prairies and taking out $72 million.
Now the government is saying that in the next fiscal year it is going to increase it. It is not just a 10 per cent cutback but a 15 per cent cutback. The year after that there will be a 20 per cent cutback and that will go on in perpetuity. A 20 per cent cutback is over $140 million a year. This is unless the federal government negotiates an agreement with the provinces and the farmers to change the method of payment from the railways to the farmers. If the money goes directly to the farmers then there goes the grain subsidy. There goes some orderly transportation in this country.
The wheat pools in the prairies have said to keep the money going to the railways. The National Farmers' Union has said the same thing. The Saskatchewan government has said the same thing. The people of my province have said the same thing. Yet the government across the way wants to change the method of payment to satisfy some of their wealthy friends, particularly the
April 28, 1993

large grain growers of southern Alberta and the cattle producers of the prairies.
That is nothing short of blackmail by the federal government and nothing short of a bribe. It is saying to the prairie farmers that if they do not agree to the change in the method of payment then another 10 per cent will be cut off the Crow benefit and they will lose another $72 million a year.
That is not good enough at all. We want to build a strong country and create jobs for our farmers and our people right across the country.
There is a third part that I want to mention about the budget in terms of some of the changes that are not really seen as that significant overall but in terms of people who are affected directly this is extremely important in addition to the GST and the Crow benefit. It is the announcement of further cutbacks in regional development.
My guess by looking at page 53 of the budget is that the cutback in regional development is going to amount to approximately $500 million a year. Maybe we should cut back on some things. We have a deficit problem. Why not cut back on military helicopters and save $5.8 billion rather than cut regional development in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan and northern Quebec and save-


Mr. O'Kurley:: That is over 14 years. What are you talking about?


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: I did not say for a year for military helicopters. Please listen.
Why not cut back by $5.8 billion on military helicopters instead of cutting back by $500 million per year on regional development? If one comes from Atlantic Canada, northern Quebec, northern Ontario, parts of the prairies or B.C. one realizes how important it is to have money going into regional development.
The unemployment rate in Newfoundland and New Brunswick is criminally high. Yet the government is now saying we should take $500 million a year out of regional development so it can spend that money on military helicopters that we do not need.
The Budget
It is a question of priorities. Sure we have a fiscal problem and a deficit. We have a debt that is the highest of the G-7 nations. It is a matter of priorities. Take the money away from military helicopters. Bring in a fair tax system so the rich pay their fair share and so corporations pay their fair share. Plug some of the loopholes in the tax system. Get rid of capital gains exemption of $100,000 except for farmers and people with their principal homes. It will then raise more money and there will be more revenue for people to spend. If we have more revenue we will tackle the debt problem. If we have more revenue we will save our social programs.
Finally the most important thing of all is a jobs plan. We are one of the few countries in the world that does not have a jobs plan. If one looks at Europe, Japan and the new administration in the United States they are talking about how to put people back to work and how to create more wealth and how to actually get people producing something and paying taxes for the benefit of the country and society.
The only way to reduce the debt in a real and meaningful way is to create jobs so that people are off welfare and unemployment insurance and are contributing taxes to the government of Canada and taxes to the provinces.
If we put another half a million people to work the debt will go down. We will have more cash for the social programs and the other programs that are so desperately needed.
Our party said about two months ago that we had a plan and strategy for full employment. It was announced by our leader. It is a plan that would see our country investing more money in research and development. We are among the worst in the industrialized world in terms of the mere pittance we put into research and development today. We are also among the worst in terms of the money we spend in training our workers for the new challenges that lie ahead.
There are a lot of areas in this country where we could be investing money in terms of infrastructure. There are a number of things we could also be doing well, things that are natural for our country to do well if we spent more money on them.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
We could be investing in things like transportation, communications, agriculture, mining, forestry, resources of that sort and investing more in the environment, an issue that is becoming more and more important every day. We could put more money into social housing, co-op housing and things of that sort. These are things that should be done but are not done by the government across the way.
If we are to solve the debt problem, if we are to get rid of some of the human misery we see today, we are going to have to put every single ounce of our energy into a national job strategy that involves not just the federal government but the provinces and the territories, the trade unions, the farm sector and the private business sector as well.
There should be an assault on unemployment and poverty like the assault we had during the Second World War. If we were able to mobilize our resources for combat in the First World War, the Second World War or other wars throughout history, surely to goodness we can mobilize this country's resources to fight unemployment and put people back to work. This would give them some dignity and pride in their own lives and help them make a contribution to their own economy.
I do not have too many more minutes left but before I finish I would like to say that Saskatchewan is a prime example of what Conservatives have done to this country in the last eight or nine years. We are a province that is now losing people. We now have the highest unemployment we have ever had in the history of our province. It is up about 8 per cent or 9 per cent. We are a province in which more and more people are on welfare. More and more people are dropping out. They are disillusioned. We are a province now that is losing farmer after farmer each and every single day. We are losing our small towns and villages.
Despite that the federal government in the last few years has been cutting back every year, except this year, on transfers to the provinces in terms of health, education and equalization. It has cut back on the increase. It has cut back in my province by some $500 million over what it would have been if the formulas had not changed. These are the changes in the formula for equalization and the changes in the formula for transfers under the fiscal arrangements we have in this country.
We now have a province that is worse off than it was in the 1930s. For nine years we also had a Conservative government with Grant Devine as premier. The province when he took over in 1982 had a debt of some $3.5 billion. Nine years later, our debt is now about $15 billion, the highest per capita debt anywhere in this country, including Newfoundland and Labrador. Nine long, lean years of Conservative government and the debt goes from $3.5 billion to some $14 billion in the province of Saskatchewan.


Brian Alexander O'Kurley: That's just not true. Thlk about the operating surplus.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: I invite the noisy member from the Conservative Party across the way to come to Saskatchewan and make some of those comments. He would be driven out of town.
We are now in a position where because of Conservative governments hospitals are being closed down, rural communities are being destroyed, the province is on the brink of bankruptcy. That is the Conservative legacy. A Conservative legacy is one where there is no vision, where there is no dream about what this country could be.
We need a change in this country. We need a change badly. We need a government that will put jobs first, a government that will put people first. We need a government that will rescind the trade deal to regain some of our sovereignty we have lost because of the free trade agreement with the United States. We need a government that will get rid of the GST and bring in a fair tax system based on the ability to pay.
These are things the Conservative Party has done to destroy this country. Another four years of the Conservative Party and I fear for the future of Canada.


Gregory Francis Thompson: Madam Speaker, it is quite amusing to listen to a member of the New Democratic Party speak of the difficulties in Saskatchewan.
Those members forget that their own party formed the Government of Saskatchewan. Who do you blame? When he is laying blame and pointing fingers in Saskatchewan I think he has to point fingers at his own party and his own premier. But let me take him up on some of the other points in his speech.
April 28, 1993

One of the things he mentioned was that this country would be a lot better off in terms of debt if we had half a million more people working. Well, if he would just watch the Canadian economy grow and if he looked at the statistics which are there for everyone to see, he would be quite pleased. Since August we have created
200.000	full-time jobs and last month alone there were
48.000	new jobs in Canada. So with that kind of a track record he will not have to wait too long to see an extra
500.000	people employed in Canada.
Sorting through what he has said and one must examine it very carefully, for example, the free trade agreement with the United States of America. In the last year alone for our trade component we have had $157 billion in exports, 80 per cent of which were exported to the United States. That is the largest total in the history of Canada. It is working very much in our favour.
If we want to see the Canadian economy grow, let us continue with what we are doing. Let us not throw out some of the policies that are working. We can always come under scrutiny on anything we do as a government, but examine the facts and examine them very carefully. Do not forget who is the premier of Saskatchewan.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Madam Speaker, I am very pleased that my friend across the way said not to forget who is the premier of Saskatchewan. The premier is Roy Romanow. He took over from Grant Devine, who in nine years drove the debt in our province up from $3.5 billion to $15 billion. That is without precedent anywhere in this country, including during the 1930s and the Great Depression. Nowhere in this country on a per capita basis, perhaps nowhere in North America, has a debt gone up as quickly as it did in Saskatchewan during the Conservative years of Grant Devine.
After 17 months of government Premier Roy Romanow has cut our deficit in half and he has done that without the help of the federal government. He has done that despite the fact that the rate of increase in transfers to the province has gone down, which has cost us over $500 million in the last year. He has done that despite the fact that the federal government across the way has promised time and time again a third line of defence to help prairie farmers, but yet has reneged on that prom-
The Budget
ise, so that money is not there and many farmers are living in poverty.
No, I have not forgotten who is the premier of Saskatchewan. The premier of Saskatchewan is cleaning up the mess the Conservative Party left our province in over the last nine years, as had to be done a number of years ago after the 1930s. I say to my friend across the way that when the debt goes from $3.5 billion to $15 billion in nine years something is seriously wrong.
The people in my province will not vote Conservative again for at least another generation because of the legacy Grant Devine has left behind. There is no party in this House that has less credibility in the debt issue in Canada than the Conservative Party sitting across the way.
In the 1930s it was Prime Minister Bennett, a Conservative prime minister, who brought us the Great Depression and brought us debts right across this country. In the 1980s it was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Premier Grant Devine who did the same thing in this country and in my province. The people of my province will not forget.


Jesse Philip Flis: Madam Speaker, I appreciated listening to the comments of the member for Yorkton-Melville. He speaks very passionately about the province he represents, Saskatchewan, a province where we farmed for 22 years. We had to leave our family farm because it could not support a family of eight.
My son did the opposite. He got married and moved to Saskatoon, had a job, bought a home, had two children, and now finds himself unemployed. He is looking for another province to move to. When the hon. member says that Saskatchewan is a good example of what this government has done to this country, I know exactly what he is talking about.
He also mentioned that his party had an excellent jobs plan, as to how we can put people back to work. I am very interested in that. I think all Canadians are. The hon. member for Carleton-Charlotte keeps tossing out the figures of 200,000 jobs created since last August, 48,000 jobs over the year, et cetera. But he does not say what the net gain is in job creation. Big deal: if 200,000 jobs are created but 300,000 jobs lost, what has been accomplished? We are in a losing mode.

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The Budget
I know the premier of Saskatchewan and the premier of Ontario are trying to create jobs. We heard in Question Period today that the finance critic of the New Democratic Party is disagreeing with the approach taken by the premier of Ontario.
I am wondering in fairness, and I ask this question very seriously, whether he supports the approach the premier of Ontario is taking or does he support the finance critic and the approach his finance critic is taking?


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Madam Speaker, the finance critic of our party speaks for himself and only for himself. He does not speak for our party caucus on this particular issue.
Premier Rae in Ontario is doing what he can do in a very difficult situation. He is in a situation now where if nothing was done the deficit of that province would be $17 billion. Premier Rae is now in the process of consulting public service unions which is the proper thing to do.
I am glad the member raised this point. There will certainly be difficulties in the province of Ontario when a lot of things have to be done that are not very easy and not very comfortable. At least in Ontario he is consulting the trade unions and the public sector trade unions in the province.
In Manitoba with Conservative Premier Gary Filmon there was no consultation whatsoever with the public sector when he decided to dock the public servants several days of work. In the province of Manitoba the workers are going to lose. There will be about 10 or 12 days without pay. It is a unilateral decision by the Conservative Party that the workers will have to take time off without pay in Manitoba.
They did not consult the public sector unions. They did not negotiate with them. They did not do anything at all with them in terms of a consultative process. All of a sudden they just announced it: "You take days off without pay".
That is not the way to run a country. At least in Ontario Bob Rae is sitting down with members of the public sector, negotiating with them and talking with them about the very serious problem facing the province of Ontario. He is doing the right thing. In principle I believe he is doing the right thing. I cannot comment on all the details in Ontario as I am not familiar with them.
I know in my own province of Saskatchewan that the premier has done a commendable job in a very difficult situation. The people of our province are behind the premier in terms of trying to get control of the economy once again. If we do not get control of our own economy, it is going to be run by the bankers and the international investment traders and we are going to have even less flexibility in terms of protecting our social programs and doing what we should be doing as Canadians.


Ron J. Duhamel: Madam Speaker, when our colleagues from the government side talk about the jobs that are created it seems to me they forget to talk about the jobs that have been eliminated. When they talk about job creation they forget to talk about the kinds of jobs. Are they long-term jobs? Are they well paying jobs? Are they part-time jobs that lead to nowhere.
I wonder if my colleague would care to share with us his insights on that particular point.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Madam Speaker, no government in the history of this country has lost as many jobs as the Conservative government across the way. There has been a tremendous job loss in this country since 1984, despite the fact that we had some pretty good economic times in the mid-1980s.
A lot of the jobs that are now being created are low paying part-time jobs. They are not unionized. There is no job security. There are no benefits for the workers. They are the lowest of the low in terms of jobs and in terms of providing some money for the worker and her family or the worker and his family.
We need an all-out attack on unemployment and on poverty. We need more money put into research and development, more money into training, and more strategic investment in the things we can do well as Canadians. Other countries around the world are doing it and there is no reason we cannot as well.


Hon. Bernard Valcourt (Minister of Employment and Immigration):: Madam Speaker, there are times when circumstances dictate a change in course for the ship of state. That is what we had to do in 1984. At that time, as everyone will remember, we were headed straight for the rocks.
April 28, 1993

The Budget
At other times the course is maintained because only some minor adjustments are needed to continue to make progress. No one should be surprised that my colleague, the Minister of Finance, did exactly that in the budget which he tabled on Monday and which I support without reservation.
In the past eight years, our government did the right thing at the right time for our economic strength. We should not be surprised that not everyone was pleased with this. Some think that the budget should have provided more drastic spending reductions. Others think that their favourite program should have received more funding from the government or that we should have adopted the solution that they advocate.
The money market had certain expectations and some credit rating agencies had others.

Some wanted short-term solutions to immediate problems and others wanted nothing that was not directed to long-term gains. In each case it was the task of the Minister of Finance to find the balance and do the right thing for Canadians, and that is exactly what he did.
All the comments we have heard about last wills and testaments and the labelling of existing programs as instant job creation projects is the height of irresponsibility. It is easy to become a 10-second hero by delivering clever second guesses with the principal objective of getting attention from the camera and headline writers. Perhaps some people are impressed with those who complain of government spending in one breath and who present a long wish list for spending increases in the next.
It is like St. Augustine's famous prayer: "Lord give me chastity but not just yet". Those would-be finance ministers from whom we have heard need to understand that countries are strengthened by serious reflection and wisdom, not by loose tongues craving quick attention.
Fortunately the Minister of Finance has met the expectations of most Canadians by placing before the House a budget that is realistic, responsible, coherent, achievable and right on course.

I believe that Canadians got what they learned to expect from this government: effective policies and long-term strategies that attack problems at their roots in order to find lasting solutions.
All Canadians agree that governments at all levels must get their finances in order. Canadians therefore recognize that the Minister of Finance has presented them with a budget that will maintain the same direction for five more years, so that Canada will be quite ready for the next millennium, the 21st century.
In his December economic statement the Minister of Finance emphasized the importance this government attaches to reducing the deficit so that we can attain our objective, which is to lay the foundation for lasting economic growth. Canadians want an end to the deficit and the debt which are irresponsibly mortgaging our grandchildren's right to decide their own future for themselves. They want the deficit to be reduced the right way, by reducing spending not raising taxes. That is what the Minister of Finance did. They want public spending to be restricted, but not so much that the government can no longer do its job. That is why this government has increased the efficiency of the Civil Service since 1984.
In real terms-and very few Canadians, even in this House, seem to realize it-the cost of administering the federal government is less today than it was eight years ago, although our population has grown by 10 per cent.
It is thanks to this kind of management that we can cut more than $30 billion over the next five years in this budget and overspending will not endanger the country's future prosperity. Of course the budget must be seen in the light of the many other long-term initiatives taken by the government because they are all part of a complete mutually supporting package of measures to put Canada's economy in order.
The people opposite seem to tamper with the truth about the economy. I will remind them that our ability to maintain social programs, establish environmental enterprises, be responsible members of the international community and maintain prosperity depends on a solid economic base. If this base is neglected, as they always tend to do in their simplistic, one-dimensional, magical

April 28, 1993
The Budget
proposals then none of these important objectives will be achieved.
Remember that since 1988 every budget cutting measure that we presented in this House was opposed by the opposition members of all parties. How can they get up with a straight face today and criticize the government which is trying to get public spending under control by presenting a proposal that will nearly eliminate the deficit in five years?

I resent some of the comments we hear. They talk about the unemployed. I feel deep compassion in my heart for people who are jobless. There is a recipe to help those people.


Mr. Kilgour:: Oh, sure, we know all about your compassion. Tell us about your compassion.


Dennis Joseph Mills: You support the banks and the way they treat small businesses.


Bernard Valcourt: These people argue that it is by throwing more money at them. They would increase taxes. They would throw more money at them. They did that for a long while. They had 16 years of doing that. Program spending increased at the rate of 13.8 per cent a year on average. That is their record. That is their legacy. They have not changed. The proof they have not changed is that they have opposed every measure to cut expenditures in the country.


An hon. member:: Like hell.


Bernard Valcourt: They have opposed them.


Mr. Harvard:: What a disgusting performance.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I beg the hon. member's pardon. This was an unwarranted comment. It is the duty of the Chair to be able to hear what someone who has the floor says. When there is screaming in the House of Commons-


An hon. member:: So was he.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: -that would not be proper even in a back alley. It is totally inappropriate.


An hon. member:: It is frustrating.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Yes, I can understand that it is frustrating for everyone on all sides of the House, but screaming is certainly not warranted at this time. The
comment made by the hon. member from Edmonton was certainly not warranted either.


Bernard Valcourt: Madam Speaker, I was trying to say that as a government we did not choose to accept the suggestions of the opposition to inject additional new funds or to worsen the deficit. We definitely did not choose that route proposed by the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party.
They may have succumbed to the temptation in past election years but we took the responsible course of action. It is my firm belief and that of my colleagues in this party, along with many Canadians, that creating jobs is the task of the private sector. No amount of government spending of tax dollars will equal the drive and productivity of small business in creating jobs.
We did what governments should do. We have created an environment conducive to job creation by reducing the deficit. This means less borrowing, lower interest rates and lower taxes. These are all conditions that stimulate economic activity leading to more important, satisfying jobs.
In my own area of responsibility we have taken the initiative to use unemployment insurance to provide new opportunities for workers. Understanding that we find ourselves facing relentless and strong competition in the changing, knowledge-based global economy we have moved to increase work force skills so that in the years ahead Canadians can enjoy long-term rewarding employment which contributes to the prosperity of Canada.
These are times in which we simultaneously see unemployment of workers in older sectors while employers in the new sectors complain they cannot find enough workers with the necessary skills. That is the reality out there. We hear that every day.
We have shifted funds from their traditional passive use as temporary income support to active measures which will make future income support less necessary. Based on recommendations of the Canadian Labour Force Development Board we have invested $2.21 billion to help over half a million unemployment insurance recipients to renovate their job skills for the labour market of tomorrow.
That is a 19 per cent increase over the 1992 expenditure and a 400 per cent increase over the 1990 expenditure. We have increased to $110 million funds for the
April 28, 1993

self-employment assistance option which helps qualified workers to become entrepreneurs running their own businesses.
For those UI recipients who wish to arrange for their own training support will be increased to $455 million this year.

As Minister of Employment and Immigration, as I was just saying, I know how tragic unemployment is. I am aware of the suffering the unemployed go through. Imagine a man, woman or a young person anywhere in the country who wants to work and is looking for a job and is qualified to hold a job but unfortunately, due to weak market conditions, is unable to get work. The measure announced in December pays special attention to these experienced workers who for years contributed to Canada's prosperity but suddenly lost their jobs as a result of technological change.
Some skilled people held the same job for 15 or 20 years but suddenly lost it because of technological change and then they do not have the skills needed for other work. We have allocated $300 million to help these people acquire the skills that will again enable them to be productive workers. In all, we have directed $3.8 billion to labour market programs that will affect more than a million workers. Canadians will appreciate that we are working on this with other interested parties. Federal government funding has acted as a catalyst to provide the appropriate infrastructure for employers, labour, community groups and provincial governments to implement economic initiatives commensurate with their own requirements.
Pooling all sectoral resources is the only way to proceed if we want to create a society in which all Canadians will have a chance to succeed, at any stage in their lives.
I have said repeatedly that we are investing in mechanisms to help workers quickly get back on their feet and develop their full potential. We do not want to provide lifetime safety nets that keep people in a state of dependency and make them lose all initiative. That was the result of the policies developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
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We want to use our social programs to help people who have found effective solutions, who make the right choices and who are promising. I have to analyse this budget from the perspective of my department, but also from the perspective of the Atlantic region which I represent in Parliament.
In fact I can assure the House the Atlantic region has not been overlooked in this budget because in the past we in the Atlantic region have been through some difficult times, and we have always come out on top.
People in the Atlantic region have always been willing to shoulder their fair share of the burden and to adapt their expectations and institutions to meet new challenges. We knew that in the end we would be better prepared to meet the challenges of the future.
This year the federal government will spend $5.2 billion in the Atlantic region, or $2,250 per capita. I submit that the decision to exempt these transfer payments from spending cuts reflects the federal government's understanding of the fiscal problems in the Atlantic provinces due to the recession and economic restructuring.
Transfer payments to the provinces will continue to increase at a rate of 4 per cent annually, although all other government spending will be capped at 1.5 per cent, which is below the rate of inflation.

While this budget's proposals on the deficit are alone enough to earn its commendation it goes much further. It goes much further in advancing the government's long-term agenda. The finance minister has set a goal of zero cash requirements by 1997-98, at which time net new federal borrowing will be eliminated completely.
That is the way it was in Canada during our lifetimes before we got blown away by thinking that there is no day of reckoning. Once we have put ourselves back on course the government can then begin to pay down the debt which continues to sap our reserves.
Inflation has been beaten back. Interest rates are at a 20-year low. Exports are surging, as my colleague from Carleton-Charlotte pointed out earlier. Business has become increasingly competitive in Canada. Small businesses are doing much better. In both new and old marketplaces trade agreements are opening up more markets for quality Canadian goods and services.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
For the first time in decades Canadians can now clearly see the solid foundation which we have been building and on which we all can successfully compete in a very different world than the one which existed before this restructuring started.
In this and other ways this government has not shirked from any opportunity to make positive adjustments to help Canada confront these new global realities.
We know some people in this country want to wish away the challenges but that is not what we have done. The issues that everyone else has been afraid to touch were put at the top of the public agenda by this government rather than hiding them away as others have done for fear of controversy.
We did not shy away from attacking the underlying causes of problems, even at the price of popularity as measured by fickle will-o'-the-wisp polls. We had faith that over the long run Canadian men and women would see that we have done the right thing. The budget the finance minister has tabled before this House is in that category of principled action.

I agree, there is not much to rejoice about in the budget. There may be nothing to rejoice about, but there is no reason for despair either. It is a firm budget. It is a realistic budget that indicate we have a long way to go. It makes no unreasonable demands but continues to deal gradually with the consequences of past excesses. It reflects the fact that Canadians understand there is no easy, quick solution to our problems, although there are still politicians proposing the so-called quick fix. This budget states the facts clearly and honestly.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Madam Speaker, I do not believe for one second that the Minister of Employment and Immigration is happy presiding over this nation's current condition of unemployment. Under his reign we have the highest rate of unemployment in the history of Canada. We have over three million people now looking for work in this country.
Whether it is 3.1 million or 3.2 million the bottom line is that we have a crisis of unemployment in this country. I believe the hon. minister wants to fix this problem as much as any other member in this House. He must want to fix it.
However I believe there is a very important point that the government is missing. As Liberals we stood up in this House of Commons over the last three months and supported the government's initiative called the Small Businesses Loans Act. We supported it, we did not criticize it. We worked together and came up with amendments. Last year I think it cost the Treasury $29 million from the float in write-offs to small businesses but if we take into account the benefits in employment measures it cannot be criticized. It is a good piece of legislation.
The problem is that the financial institutions of Canada, the banks, the credit unions and others that could be eligible to lend money under the Small Businesses Loans Act are not making that act work. So when we come to the floor of this House of Commons and try to bring attention to this problem but do not seem to get any reaction we get terribly frustrated.
My question to the minister is a very simple one: Is he satisfied with the way the financial institutions of this country, the banks and the credit unions, are treating small business? Is that why we hear nothing from the government in terms of chastising, pushing or motivating banks? Is he satisfied? If he is satisfied that is fine. It is a simple yes and I will sit down.
However if he is not satisfied, could he commit on behalf of his government, the small business community and the unemployed that he will take a message to the cabinet of Canada, the Prime Minister of Canada and the Minister of Finance and say: let us do something to move the financial institutions of this country to honour an act of Parliament that was passed by all parties in this House?


Bernard Valcourt: Madam Speaker, I do not know if this has ever occurred to the member concerning these financial institutions and banks but it is Canadians' savings that these financial institutions and banks are using to lend to small businesses. Maybe if they did not have such a good lender in the federal government there
April 28, 1993

would be more money available for small businesses. I am talking about interest rates here.
EIow can the hon. member stand up in this House and complain? I know the member and I think he is a good member for a Liberal. He is concerned about his concitoyens in this country and small business. He cares about the economic prospects of his constituents and other Canadians just as I do.
He must accept the fact that we have to pay for this deficit because we pay interest on that debt. We know what the impact of this is on interest rates. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. If all the money required to finance government activities is used to pay interest on the deficit then it leaves much less in the coffer for those institutions to lend to the private sector and to small businesses and it drives the cost up.
We need a Small Businesses Loans Act to create incentives for those institutions to help the private sector and the small businesses grow.
How can they on the one hand want to have that capital accessible to the private sector and small business and at the same time in a consistent way oppose every measure proposed by this government to try to reduce and eliminate this deficit? How can they do that? How can they argue that we should have such an economic climate because he may want to rely on the Small Businesses Loans Act. I cannot wait for the day when we do not need the Small Businesses Loans Act and when the private sector and market forces will allow a business person in Canada with a good idea and product to go to the private sector market-a bank or financial institution-to get his or her loan. It makes sense to go ahead and succeed. That is what I would want.
However, before we get there we are going to have to pay our way as Canadians and that means we must stop borrowing to do everything we do every day.
We are now borrowing to pay the interest on the debt. When one gets to that point one has a serious problem. Now the Minister of Linance has put in the window a fiscal framework that sees Canada without a borrowing requirement of .9 per cent by the end of this fiscal framework.
The Budget
I think if we want to help small business then it is by what the Minister of Linance has shown us.


Jesse Philip Flis: Madam Speaker, I suggest the minister change his speech writers. I suggest that the minister should come to my Toronto riding and walk with me to visit the seniors, the unemployed and the small businesses. Then he will write his speeches himself rather than come into this House and read what some bureaucrat has written for him.
He talks about how this government increased efficiency. Just last week my office was flooded with calls from seniors who are receiving Old Age Security, government income supplements and other assistance from the government. They were calling my office because they cannot get through to the government number. I had my staff in Ottawa and in Toronto phone this same number. It took over 100 calls to get through to this number. This is what this government calls efficiency. It is cutting back on the Public Service for the sake of efficiency and that is frustrating people out there. People are having mental breakdowns because of this government.
I called the number myself and finally got through. After listening to nine minutes of beautiful music I got to the right person. I investigated the problem. The problem is that this one telephone serves the catchment area of greater Toronto, Oakville, and a WATS line to Peterborough. It is a catchment area of four million people under one number. This is the government that preaches efficiency. He wonders why there are frustrations out there, why people want to commit suicide and why people are having mental breakdowns. I urge the minister to come out to my riding. I will show him what the efficiency of this government has done.
The minister mentioned employers who cannot find workers with appropriate skills. I would like the minister to table the employers who are looking for workers today so all members can have it. Yesterday I had appointments all day in my office and I was talking to people who are unemployed, exhausting their UI and do not want to go on welfare. They are frustrated.
In the Parkdale CEC, if someone wants to phone in and have an appointment for retraining it takes six

April 28, 1993
The Budget
months before he or she gets an appointment. That efficiency means six months for an appointment. I would like to hear the minister's response.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: There is one minute left.


Bernard Valcourt: Madam Speaker, If I have only one minute left then I will use the minute to point to all Canadians. It is too bad they are not all listening to that kind of statement because that is only proving one thing. The Liberal Party has not changed.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Point of order.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I am not deaf. The hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood on a point of order.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Madam Speaker, I apologize for raising my voice. I rise on a point of order and in the interest of trying to communicate our message. I share every syllable that the member for Parkdale-High Park has just uttered in terms of what is happening in the greater Toronto area.
Maybe in the interest of being constructive and looking out for those people we could get unanimous consent to extend the minister's time in answering questions seeing as we have him here.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is there consent to add to the period of questions and comments with the minister?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: It is agreed for an extra five minutes. The hon. minister.


Bernard Valcourt: Madam Speaker, I was trying to make a point. In a serious debate about the economic future and the budget the hon. member stands up and talks about a phone line in his riding. I am not diminishing the importance for seniors accessing a phone line to get some information from the Government of Canada. I guess the way he put it was as if we had a really long cabinet session. You should have been there, Madam Speaker. The cabinet sat there. We spent almost two hours trying to decide whether it would be one line or two in that part of Ontario.
They are trivializing the debate by not pointing to the fundamentals of the economy.


Dennis Joseph Mills: I cannot believe it.


Bernard Valcourt: This is about trying to set the fiscal framework and the finances of the taxpayers of Canada on a course where Canadian taxpayers are going to get value for their money from government services.


Ms. Blondin-Andrew:: Why did you not do it when you took over in 1984?


Dennis Joseph Mills: Talk about your tax increases.


Bernard Valcourt: The people who are yelling are the Liberals who were spending $1.23 out of every dollar that Canadian taxpayers were sending to Ottawa when we took office in 1984.


David Kilgour: What is it now?


Bernard Valcourt: For every Canadian taxpayer who sends a dollar to Ottawa this government does not spend $1.23. It spends $0.96 for program spending.
Look at those Grits, those Liberals. They have the gall to stand up in this House and tell Canadians how offended they are that this government has doubled the national debt in eight years.


David Kilgour: It has more than doubled.


Bernard Valcourt: Is that not terrible? We doubled the debt in eight years.
What those members do not add is that they took a debt and increased it 11 times in 16 years. That is what they did. Now today, they do not even have the honesty to tell Canadians: "Listen, take the debt that the Conservative Party inherited in 1984 and look at the compound interest on that debt. The total compounded interest is larger than what the debt was in 1984".


Mr. Keyes:: How much short-term money did you borrow abroad?


Bernard Valcourt: That is the reality. Today they stand in this House and complain.


Jesse Philip Flis: Madam Speaker, I have a point of order. In all honesty I ask the minister if he could table the list of employers who claim they cannot find workers. This would be such a great help to the 1.5 million people unemployed. Please, Mr. Minister.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The hon. member who is an experienced member knows that this is not a point of order. We are getting back into debate.
There is a minute and a half left for the hon. minister.
April 28, 1993


Bernard Valcourt: Madam Speaker, we were talking about the importance of this budget in the future.
The hon. member wants to talk about unemployed people. He is arguing that there are no jobs out there. It is true that we have a high rate of unemployment.


Jesse Philip Flis: Would you table the employers?


Bernard Valcourt: No, I do not have a list of private sector people who are looking for people for jobs.


An hon. member:: You said you did.


Bernard Valcourt: The hon. member could talk to small business people right in this city-


Jesse Philip Flis: I do every day.


Bernard Valcourt: I met a small businessman last night in Ottawa who is looking to hire four persons. He is looking. Out of respect for the individual, who does not want his name made public, I will keep his name private but I will give it to the member, so that he can send those poor unemployed people who want to work right there.


David Kilgour: One and a half million.


Bernard Valcourt: It is all right to try to score political points on the misery of people. However, what we are proposing to Canadians is not magic or an instant solution as with the Liberals where they spend more of the taxpayers' money and increase the deficit. Tax people. That is their way.
This is what we believe. To really help Canadians one must have the fundamentals right and in place. That is what we have been striving to do. Canada is poised for recovery like never before.


George Albert Proud: Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join in this very quiet debate this afternoon. There is a friendly discussion going on.
I rise today to make a few comments about this budget that I feel is a terrible effort at financial management by this government. This is another long string of inept fiscal and other measures that have been pushed upon Canadians by this present government. It is a measure of ineptitude which fortunately we will soon have an opportunity to change.
The Budget
We have endured incredible hype about this budget in the past number of weeks as story after story circulated about the Draconian cuts that would be coming. Of course it is the classic manoeuvre of governments in the pre-election period to heighten the worst expectations and then try to show the voters what good people you really are.
In this case the government has not succeeded. The people have not been fooled and they will soon be able to pass judgment upon this government.
Thankfully, this is the last budget this government will bring down. It makes this an opportune time to review the government's record with regard to its fiscal management and forecasting ability.
This government has paid lip service to the concept of deficit reduction ever since it was elected. What we have seen, however, is not debt reduction but a massive increase in the public debt which now stands at record levels.
The promises of this government have never been matched by performance and we have no reason to believe its forecasting ability is going to improve at this late date.
The present finance minister missed on his projections not by thousands, not by millions, but by billions of dollars. There has been a mistake of $1.1 billion since December. He now tells us that the deficit in the coming year will be $35.5 billion. How do we know if this is correct? What is there in the government or the minister's track record that could possibly inspire any confidence?
Let us examine how we have arrived at where we are today. Jobs, jobs, jobs was the cry of the present Prime Minister before he was first elected. Jobs as a result of free trade was the promise in 1988. Deficit reduction was a priority throughout the past nine years. We now have the sad spectacle of the Minister of Finance of a government that made jobs, jobs, jobs its rallying ciy standing before this House and saying, in effect, that an unemployment rate of 10 per cent is quite acceptable and will continue in double digits into the foreseeable future.

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The Budget
What does the future hold? I believe the government does not know. It does know how to attack hard-working Canadians and has gone out of its way to create a two-class system in this country: the rich and the poor. Sadly enough, during these past nine years the government has put middle-class Canada in a vice and slowly tightened the grip, forcing a wedge between the haves and the have-nots. This action is reprehensible and the government will feel the result of it in the near future.
Since the day it was elected this government has applied a double standard to the governing of this country. The Prime Minister at the outset appointed a huge cabinet to make sure as many MPs as possible shared in the spoils of victory. He appointed extra senators to impose an unpopular tax on Canadians and raised the art of patronage appointments to a new high.
On the other hand this government provoked a bitter strike with some of its lowest paid workers and now attempts to justify further slash and burn tactics by blaming government employees and programs for its financial ineptitude. The fact is that the economy has shrunk because of the government's mismanagement and therefore the deficit continues to grow.
To me, this is a government at war with itself. It is still talking and acting as if it was an opposition party. The Conservatives have been in power for almost nine years. It is their policies that have failed this countiy. It is their policies that have prolonged the recession so it now rivals the Great Depression of the 1930s. They must take the blame.
There are now food banks in every major city in Canada, more Canadians are living below the poverty line than ever before and the government has stood idly by and watched this happen. The institutions which have bound this countiy together have been destroyed and what was once an open and generous society has been threatened.
The government has also turned on the poorer regions of this country and is, in essence, cutting them off. It was noted in this House yesterday that the VIA Rail cuts will soon mean that only the corridor from Quebec City to Windsor will be serviced by passenger trains.
This is only a surface symptom of what is happening. Can you imagine how the people in my region where unemployment reaches 20 per cent feel when they hear that regional and industrial development will be cut and funding through ACOA will be cut by 25 per cent over the next few years?
We have just lived through this government's mismanagement of the fisheries and its total failure to act on behalf of the Canadian potato producers during the devastating PVY-N crisis and now we are told that more cuts are coming.
My province of Prince Edward Island will be the first affected by cutting the forestry agreement.


Bernard Valcourt: Madam Speaker, on a point of order. I wish to apologize to the hon. member for Hillsborough.
I would like to formally designate Thursday, April 29 as the second allotted day for this supply period.


George Albert Proud: Madam Speaker, as I stated, my province of Prince Edward Island is the first that will be affected by the cutting of the forestry agreement. A one-year extension of the current federal-provincial forestry agreement which expired March 31 has gone up in smoke.
If I might for a moment quote Prince Edward Island's minister of agriculture, Walter Bradley, he said:
This announcement was completely unexpected, officials of both levels of government were in the process of finalizing priorities on a work plan for the coming year.
He went on to say that the non-renewal of the agreement will cost 250 direct jobs. He further stated:
The unilateral announcement by the federal government will impose serious hardship on wood lot owners, sawmill operators, and silviculture workers, not to mention the economic and environmental impact on the province.
These figures may not seem big to a government which is oriented toward big business and multinational corporations but they are significant numbers in a small province like mine. This government still has not learned after nine years in office that it is there to serve all Canadians of all social and economic levels and not just the big interests and the stronger members of our Canadian family.
April 28, 1993

It is interesting to note that despite the fact the government feels it has to close down a large segment of the forestry industry in Prince Edward Island it has chosen to leave the golden helicopter deal intact in an obvious ploy to help the leadership aspirations of the Minister of National Defence. We may not be able to afford pilots but we will have the choicest helicopters that money can buy.
The minister may have thought he was delivering a message of hope when he read his budget speech. What he did say was that he hopes things will get better. There is a distinct difference. He presented a budget that he said would restore confidence in Canada. Instead, the dollar has dropped even more as his friends in the financial markets have passed harsh judgment on his performance and that of his government.
This is a pre-election budget with no clear direction and no blueprint for the future. Our young people are facing another summer with few employment prospects. There is no job creation program for youth or for those millions of other Canadians who are out of work.
There is no clear plan to improve Canada's infrastructure. There is a lot of the minister's hope that things will get better and his wish that the economy will improve. He dreams that private businesses, at least those that have not moved, will be able to turn the economy around. Obviously he has given up trying himself.
The people of Canada will soon have the opportunity to pass judgment on this budget and on the nine years of this government's rule. They will remember nine years of a government saying one thing and doing another. This government talks of restraint and deficit reduction yet the deficit has increased beyond our wildest fears. It talked of jobs, jobs, jobs, yet joblessness is at an all-time high.
It talked of tax reform yet the goods and services tax has failed to make even a dent in the deficit, while at the same time causing Canadians undue hardship every day.
The government has managed the economy of this country with ineptitude and incompetence. It is my hope that when it is gone others will be able to pick up the pieces and return Canada to some of the glory it has seen in the past.
The Budget
The fortunate thing about this budget is that people will not have time to forget it before they go to the polls. The government's fear of the electorate has forced it into a corner and it must face the judgment of Canadians soon.
I believe that judgment will be harsh, and deservedly so. This government has done much harm to this country. This is a bad budget and I urge my fellow members to vote against it.


Mr. Peter Milliken (Kingston and the Islands):: Madam Speaker, I certainly have spoken on budgets before in this House, although perhaps not on the budget debate but often on the borrowing bill the government normally introduces subsequent to a budget.
This year we had the borrowing bill first because the government was so disorganized it could not make up its mind about what to put in a budget. Having seen the one it produced the other day we can understand why. There is a complete lack of any ideas on the part of the government to try to ameliorate the economic situation it has created in this country and which has brought ruin to thousands and thousands of Canadians.
We have had record bankruptcies for the last few years, thanks to the government. We have had record unemployment for the last few years, thanks to the government. The Minister of Finance and his cabinet colleagues have really made a terrible mess of the finances of Canada. That is not unusual in my own experience because the last time we had a government that made such a mess of the national finances was the Diefenbaker government in the 1950s and early 1960s. I can still remember the clean-up job the Liberal Party had to do when it took office after defeating the Diefenbaker government in 1962.1 will not dwell on that today.
What I wanted to talk about was the fraud that is being perpetrated on the Canadian public by the Minister of Finance and the government in the budget that has been presented. We have got this very fancy little booklet that the government has produced en masse for people to read and it is full of statements that are utterly misleading and false.
I would like to quote one of the statements the minister had the nerve to read in the House during the

April 28, 1993
The Budget
course of his budget speech. It was so patently false I was amazed. If he had been on oath he would have been accused of perjury. He said: "Less borrowing, lower taxes, more jobs and more choice. That is the direction in which people want to go and that is the direction in which this government is going". He was all wrapped up in these words.
Let us look at the record, let us look at the facts that back up that statement. First of all, he said less borrowing. The deficit has increased for the last four or five years. It has gone up consistently every time and the minister says there is less borrowing. Where? Who is borrowing less as a result of this government's economic mismanagement? Certainly not the Government of Canada and certainly not the people of Canada who are having to pay the interest on the public debt. The less borrowing statement is patently false.
He said lower taxes. Where are the lower taxes? He told us there were no tax increases in this budget. That statement is also false because taxes are going up in this country because of the deindexation of deductions which this government has done in its past budgets. The government knows it is going to get more money this year as a result of the removal of the indexation provisions on all the deductions in the Income Ihx Act and the removal of the indexation on the rates of tax on various levels of income. Those have all been taken out, so taxes will go up this year.
The government says there are no tax increases. There are not any in this budget but there are tax increases coming into place as a result of previous budgets. We have had something like 35 tax increases in the last eight years already. He said lower taxes are what Canadians want. If they are what they want and that is the direction in which the government is going, where are the tax decreases? Where are the lower taxes? There were none in this budget.
Then he said there are more jobs. Where are the job creation schemes in this budget? There are not any. The government announced with some pride that it was laying off 16,000 public servants. The President of the Treasury Board spoke in the House yesterday and shed crocodile tears at this loss, but he is party to the government that is doing this. He is letting these people go-
The minister said this is job creation, more jobs. What is it? Is it job loss or job creation? Why does the minister not tell us? Why does the Minister of Finance not tell the truth to Canadians instead of these falsehoods? Why does he not tell them that there are not more jobs but fewer jobs as a result of this budget. It is a do-nothing budget. It is worse than do-nothing. It is damaging to the Canadian economy.
Then he said more choice. I do not know what he meant by that. I do not think he did either. I think he ran out of words with more in front of them. He had to think of words that he could put more in front of to make it sound as though something was better. He stuck in the word choice. I do not know what choice he meant. If he meant that one has more places one can go for help from the government that is false because it is closing offices right, left and centre in an effort to save money. The government makes us make these long distance telephone calls that cost more and tie up Canadians more in their efforts to get answers from the government. There is not more choice. There is less.
He said this is the direction the government is going in. I would like to know where he got that idea. I suspect somebody, some Tory hack in his office, wrote that statement and stuck it in because I notice it is on all the little budget summaries the government is handing out, the one card deal. I notice that is on there in heavy print almost word for word, though not quite the same. I suppose he said it in different places in different ways, but it quotes him as having said it that way on April 26. That is something that is wrong.
The other thing I wanted to refer to was the minister's incredible statements about the reduction of the deficit. Every year for nine years we have heard about deficit reduction in Canada. It is always just around the comer. We remember the former Minister of Finance, the member for Etobicoke Centre. He is long gone from that job and everybody has forgotten him. He used to talk about holding the course. He used to say that we are going to hold the course. We did not hear that expression in the budget the other day, did we?


Mr. Ferguson:: That is what the Titanic did.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: It is like the Titanic, but he did not use the expression. I guess the Minister of Finance realized that being in charge of the Titanic one ought not hold the
April 28, 1993

course. Maybe he has realized that the ship of state he has been running on icebergs for the last few years is really coming to ground. He did not use it.
We did not hear about the fundamentals either. We used to hear how we always had the fundamentals right.
I do not think the government ever knew what the fundamentals were, let alone whether it got them right or not. It has them all wrong. Everything is wrong in this budget.
Let us go back to these figures on deficit reduction. This is an unbelievable set of statements. The government says that its budgetary deficit this year will be $35 billion. This is the fourth or fifth straight increase in the deficit. Every year the government says it is reducing the deficit, it has control, it has the fundamentals right, it is doing everything right and everything is working. Yet the deficit has gone up again for the fourth or fifth year. The projections are that it will go down next year and the year after that until in 1996-97 it will be down to $14 billion, according to page 62 of the minister's budget.
He has nothing in here to back that up. The minister has the credibility of Mother Goose.


Gilles Loiselle: I'll tell him.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Tell him. I urge the President of the Treasury Board to go and tell him and get out his Mother Goose books to see if they have any more credibility than this budget document. It is absolutely unbelievable. I have here an old budget just to prove my point. It is dated November 8,1984, and is from the former Minister of Finance, the member for Etobicoke Centre. It was not actually a budget but an economic statement. This was his first effort.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: There was one of those last December.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: That was not the first economic statement but it was the first Tory economic statement in a number of years. The Tories told us that with their projections everything was just going to be terrible because of the awful state of affairs they inherited from the previous government. They went on and on about that for pages and pages. I quote from page 97 of Hansard from November 8. He said:
With this set of projections-the deficit for this fiscal year would
be $34.5 billion, almost $5 billion higher than projected last
The Budget
February by the previous government. That is bad enough but that is not the worst of it. Current projections show the deficit increasing next year to more than $37 billion and remaining between $34 and $38 billion in every year for the balance of this decade.
That was to take us up to 1990. Remember he was talking in 1984. He continued:
This is in marked contrast to previous projections that showed the deficit declining over that period.
The former Minister of Finance was very upset about these projections and he decided he had better do something about it. He said he would take action, and so he did. He took action and introduced all kinds of tax breaks for his wealthy friends and various other benefits that he said were going to help solve this problem. Of course they did not. He said:
But move we must.
This is from page 100, so we can see how long he went on about this stuff. He said:
Our goal is to reduce the projected level of annual expenditures by 1990 by $10 to $15 billion, inclusive of the measures I am announcing tonight.
He already had other cuts but we know that the expenditures did not decline by $10 billion or $15 billion by 1990. They never got down anywhere near that far. Now they have gone up by a lot more than that, and those were good times. They were growth years, record growth years. One would have thought the minister could have salted away a bit of money for the rainy day the way Conservatives are always saying we have to do. They always blame the Liberals in Ontario for not salting away enough money for the rainy day. Now we hear the same song and dance from the socialists.
That is what the minister did, and of course his deficit projections were all wrong. If those figures were accurate I think we would find that the deficit by 1990 would be down to about $15 billion. It never got anywhere close to $15 billion in 1990 or any other time since this government took office. It has always stayed in the $30 billion range. It has never been able to get out of this, and now it is up as high as $35 billion.
We had these awful projections that if something was not done the debt was going to be something like $415 billion by 1990. It is way over that. It is going to be $500 billion very shortly according to the minister's own projections and his own budget that he introduced.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
The national debt will hit $500 billion in early 1994. This was considered a national catastrophe in 1984. For that reason the Tory government said it was going to take action, solve that problem and make things work. Every year in every budget it has told us that the actions it was taking were saving us billions of dollars and it was going to solve this deficit problem. Yesterday was the latest example and now the deficit is worse than ever before. This government is hopeless. It cannot organize anything. Its projections have the credibility of Mother Goose.
The Minister of Finance should withdraw this budget. He should get out of office and call an election. He is incompetent and the whole government is incompetent to govern this country. It has made a terrible, terrible mess of it. Even Jeff Simpson in The Globe and Mail wrote an article entitled "From a tired government, a budget without inspiration or conviction".
Everybody knows this is a tired old broken down Tory government that is breaking the whole country down by hanging on to office. My colleague from Hamilton West says he cannot withdraw because there is a leadership campaign. Call an election anyway. Let the people make a decision. We do not need a new leader in the Tory Party. Putting a new label on the old bottle will not do any good.
There are two things that we have suggested that I would like to draw to the minister's attention as something he could have done to improve this mess.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: Mr. Speaker, I am very interested in what my colleague from Kingston and the Islands has to contribute to this debate. As we are dealing here with the budget, I am most interested in his suggestion that we tell the Minister of Finance to just withdraw his budget, resign his job and let us get on with an election.
I wonder if he can really do that because what he was really doing was probably giving us a pre-leadership budget. Really, what can the Minister of Finance do when Campbell and Charest are running against each other?
Maybe the member for Kingston and the Islands can explain this to me, but as I recall was it not Campbell who said the deficit was going to-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Again I have to say to the hon. member that he is speaking of the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of the Environment. Please.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: I will respect that wish of the Chair. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, for correcting me. I just wanted to make it clear to my constituents who I was referring to. They may not follow all these positions quite as closely as the member for Kingston and the Islands and I do. They change so often who can keep track?
The Minister of National Defence told us we could get rid of that deficit-and the member for Lincoln can tell me as I think she is co-chairing her campaign-in five years, I believe. We are not going to have a deficit any more after five years. Then the Minister of the Environment said we can get rid of it in four years. As a result we are going to end up with individuals who can produce plans for us that say we will not even have a deficit.
Now wait a minute. The Minister of Finance gave us a budget that said we are going to be about $8 billion- It is five minutes for questions and comments, right, Mr. Speaker? I am taking a couple of minutes just to ask my question. I will cut off now so I can listen to my colleague from Kingston and the Islands who may explain this pre-leadership budget which could develop into a preelection budget in another month or so.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands will have at least one minute.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Mr. Speaker, I will be pleased to respond to my very distinguished colleague from Hamilton West as quickly as I can.
It is clear that the Minister of National Defence thinks the deficit can be solved in five years and I think the Minister of the Environment said four years. They are influential ministers in this cabinet so one would think that in the years they have been there they might have done something to bring this about. But clearly the deficit has gone up and not down with them in the cabinet. They have been utterly useless as far as deficit reduction is concerned. I think the Secretary of State for External Affairs has done more to reduce the deficit
April 28, 1993

than either the Minister of the Environment or the Minister of National Defence. I think neither of them has any idea how to solve the problem.


An hon. member:: Well, she is not flying first class anymore.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: And unfortunately she is leaving public office. They are losing the people who could help and they are gaining-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret that the hon. member's time has expired. I really regret that because he always comes up with a very good speech.


Ms. Barbara Greene (Don Valley North):: Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to follow the member opposite who is certainly quite capable of telling many nursery stories. I was amazed at his presentation because he seemed to have such a strong interest in reducing the deficit and yet his party's policy on that particular issue is so vacuous.
I understand that his leader has announced he wants to reduce the deficit to $25 billion. That of course would mean that the debt would continue to rise. Our policy is to reduce it to less than 1 per cent of the gross domestic product by 1997.
Clearly the opposition members of both parties are only interested in spending and continuing to spend. The level of restraint that has been indicated in this particular budget is certainly far beyond anything they are considering.
The only party in Canada aside from our party that is prepared to tackle the deficit is the Reform Party and I think its method of tackling the deficit is just unacceptable to Canadians.
I feel very confident about what Canadians think. I participated in this budget process and I consulted my constituents. I sent them out a "You Be the Finance Minister" pamphlet that many of them took the opportunity to fill out. Many of them went through this exercise and a vast overwhelming number balanced the budget.
The Budget
My people are going to be very disappointed that the finance minister did not cut further. I was initially quite disappointed but in considering it I think we are quite right, this is a pre-leadership budget. Certainly this is going to be the main issue in the next election. I am absolutely confident that the vast majority of Canadians want to see the deficit cut further. They want to see the national debt paid down.
The only programs that my constituents wanted to increase or remain the same were health and welfare, the environment and agriculture. With respect to transfers to persons they cut everything but seniors' benefits. Transfers to the provinces, health, education and job creation were the only things they did not want to cut.
It is clear to me that the finance minister followed the wishes of my constituents and Canadians across this country. He cut everywhere they suggested with the following exceptions. He did not cut other transfers to persons. My constituents were not aware who these other persons were. I am sure they would not want to cut funding to veterans or the disabled.
Similarly he did not cut payments to less wealthy provinces, the EPF funding and the CAP. As he has stated this has to be negotiated with the provinces. It has to be done together. These programs are too important and clearly my constituents want health and welfare to remain. They wanted cuts made to the Canada Assistance Plan but I think we must all agree in this House that the least able Canadians must be helped and that must be treated in a very sensitive fashion.
Similarly the minister did not cut funding to Indians and Inuit. All of the other areas that my constituents wanted to cut were in fact cut and those they did not want cut were not cut.


An hon. member:: Wow, that is great.


Barbara Greene: I think the member is quite right. This is a pre-leadership budget and an election is imminent. There is no new legislation possible so the finance minister had a dilemma. The problem in the 1992-93 budget was that the revenues anticipated did not appear. Spending is under control. This government has a very tight control over spending in this country.
The problem was the revenues and some of that can be addressed administratively looking at some of the slip-

April 28, 1993
The Budget
page. For the rest of it we have to have an improved economy. In looking at this budget he had to balance the two objectives of restraining spending and controlling the deficit as well as stimulating the economy.
He needed something credible and achievable that was sensitive to the public's wishes. He was also constrained because he could not touch $41 billion in debt payments. The programs he did not touch cost about $52 billion and the debt payments are $41 billion. That meant only about $60 billion worth of expenditures could be tackled and over the five-year period that section of government spending will be cut by $30 billion.
The 1993-94 cut is $3.8 billion rising to $5.8 billion in 1994-95. Those are very substantial cuts given the fact that these departments have been under restraints since 1984 and the demands of the population are not diminishing. It is going to be a tremendous challenge to those departments to maintain the quality of services that Canadians are used to.
We had a remark earlier by one of the members about a particular incident that occurred in Toronto. My office was also flooded with calls. The fact is that was not a reduction in service at all. There was a major computer error and a lot of papers went out that were inaccurate. They were followed very quickly by a second series of computer runs. The elderly people were very confused. These were the statements regarding their OAS benefits.
At the same time another office was transferring to a different location so calls were being rerouted to the Toronto office and the phone lines were jammed. I think that is very peculiar. Usually my office finds that the Department of National Health and Welfare does respond. We do occasionally have to intervene but we are able to get through and resolve those problems. I think there will be a real challenge.
We also deal with immigration a lot in my particular office. I am pleased with the new measures which will result in greater efficiency and greater uniformity in the treatment of people. The calls will be centralized to one location. Of course there will be reductions in the cost. A 1-800 number is going to be open for a much more extended period of time with a whole bank of switchboard operators and a computerized system where people will be able to access information quickly. It is going to be a tremendous improvement.
We have had to deal with many immigration inquiries and I think that by centralizing and upgrading the service tremendous amounts of money will be saved. The total amount of savings in the immigration budget is $1 billion. The legislation that went through will result in that. That is something my constituents are very much in favour of.
I think the minister has presented a very realistic attempt to continue on course at this time. It is a thoughtful and strategic approach that will help Canadians compete and help our economy grow. It will help to drag us out of our fiscal sink-hole.
The members opposite said there is nothing in the budget about jobs. I listened carefully to what my constituents were saying. I attended many of the prosperity sessions. The business community wants us to provide a stable economic environment. They want low inflation and low interest rates. That is what this budget is trying to do. They do not want new taxes. Many of the items in this budget will help them in terms of their business loans under the Small Businesses Loans Act and other measures will improve the taxation system for business. These are nitty-gritty things, the kind of things the Grits opposite never think about.
There are very real cuts in this budget. Those constraints on the departments will result in very real cuts. The departments will be challenged. They will have to come forward. I think we will have ministers delivering a succession of bills to accomplish those goals. There have been tremendous improvements. It will be a manageable means of cutting that will give proper consideration to various alternatives.
Certainly as far as the provinces are concerned we have to work together on those programs because the Canadian public value them. We have to talk about efficiencies in the health care system and in our social spending.
I think the Reform Party has been very aggressive. Many of my constituents who responded to my questionnaire are leaning toward the Reform Party because they are so deeply concerned about the deficit. However they clearly do not want the cuts that the Reform Party wants to make. One of their suggestions is to base the OAS tax-back on family income rather than individual income. My constituents oppose cuts to seniors' benefits, health, education, job training and agriculture. Shifting the tax back in that manner would mean that couples
April 28, 1993

would be very unfairly treated. Right now seniors receive their benefits based on individual income. Requiring women in a significant majority to lose their OAS benefit because their husbands have a high income I think would be most unacceptable to my constituents and indeed I think very unfair.
We have the tax back in place for those who are quite wealthy and who are not receiving the OAS. I think any further tampering with the seniors' benefits would have to be something that would be considered very carefully in conjunction with the seniors.
As a baby boomer I am concerned about what is going to happen to our benefits when we get to retirement age.
I do think that retirement benefits for seniors have to be looked at. I think we have to secure the retirement income of Canadians who have lived and worked in this country. That I think is an undertaking that our members are very concerned about as is the general public.
I have already mentioned that the Liberal target for the deficit is $20 billion to $25 billion. I think that is far away from what we are talking about. We are talking about eventually a zero deficit, but in terms of the five-year approach we are talking about it being 4.5 per cent in 1993 and .9 per cent by 1997. The Clinton budget in the U.S. has a target of 2.5 per cent by 1997.
Actually we have done a lot better than every other G-7 nation. When we look at our particular situation and the international statistics we have confronted a worldwide recession. The latest revised forecast from the IMF indicates that we are projected to lead the G-7 nations with respect to economic growth.
We have mortgages with the lowest interest rates in 35 years, inflation at the lowest level in 30 years, government spending at the lowest level in 33 years, productivity and unit costs that have gone down 6.6 per cent and the highest exports in history. In terms of managing this economy I think we are doing very well.
Obviously it is a very difficult period for many Canadians. However, when we actually look at the job statistics that have been churned out there has been a tremendous amount of movement. We have a very dynamic economy. There are new jobs being created and
The Budget
other jobs being lost. We are facing a revolution in terms of technology.
What is the answer to that? Is the answer to put up fences to attempt to control what is a natural occurrence in a dynamic economy or to tiy to help Canadians to adjust by giving them better training, better education and creating an environment that encourages businesses to expand and to locate in Canada?
We now have through the efforts of the finance minister the best tax regime in the world for research and development. I am proud of that. I think that is something business really wants.
Of course the Liberals have opposed every single cut that we brought forward and so has the NDP. The only cut that they would like to see that we would not like to see is the helicopters. This amount of money is $4.4 billion over 13 years in 1993 dollars. That averages $340 million per year. They have spent this at least 10 times over.
There are a number of people who are talking about day care versus helicopters. They say we should do this or do that and reduce the deficit. This would not make any kind of significant reduction in the deficit because it is too small. It is not even $1 billion. It is $340 million a year.
We know it is a tremendous boost to a great number of industries in Canada. In terms of job creation and retaining the kinds of jobs that we need to move into the future it is excellent.
It is something that the companies are now delivering, having receptions for and recognizing. I think more Canadians will realize that this is an expenditure that is important to Canada and a good way to create good long-term jobs.
The NDP of course offers a full employment strategy. As the chair of the poverty committee I have had a great deal to do with the NDP's full employment strategy. I have been trying to find out what it is for four years. We kept asking the hon. member for Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing for specific examples. We kept asking him to bring forward his suggestions. None were brought forward.

The Budget
I have however seen an NDP job strategy in Ontario. It has devastated Ontario. It is clearly something that is really smoke and mirrors in the strongest sense of the word. It has resulted in devastating consequences in Ontario. It has exacerbated the recession, scared the hell out of business and really contributed to the situation we are in currently. I am pleased however that Premier Rae seems to have learned a lot lately and is attempting at last to tackle some of the serious problems.
I attended a Conference Board session out west where I met with various leaders from across the country in the business sector, the government sector and the education sector. It was a very stimulating experience. Their concerns were much the same as the concerns of my constituents and I think that our government is certainly on the right track.
The Conference Board predicts that all Canadian governments will be constrained in spending for at least the next 10 years. I think we need to stop joking around in this Chamber and start looking at this in a serious fashion.
The challenge will be to make better use of scarce government dollars and yet treat Canadians fairly and allow these scarce government dollars to be given to those who need it most. That is exactly what we are trying to do at the poverty subcommittee. We have been examining the issue of poverty measures and the use thereof with a view to providing a means of identifying and monitoring the welfare of Canadians at the bottom end of our society so that governments will be held accountable and we can actually see whether or not programs have in fact worked.
We are looking at this situation and I think in terms of policy it will be extremely important. We do not now have a poverty line. Statistics Canada has repeatedly told people that the low-income cut-offs are not a poverty line and in fact they make a very poor poverty line.
I will mention one little item to illustrate what a poor poverty line they make. It includes taxes in the current numbers. If one takes taxes out one reduces the number of poor in Canada by 3 per cent. If one looks at the elderly population one reduces it even further. This is because under our taxes we transfer considerable amounts of income to low-income Canadians. Surely when we are looking at poverty in Canada we should be
considering the impact of what in fact we do through the tax and transfer system.
I have been accused of playing with the figures for the benefit of our party. The fact of the matter is that this is -historical data. The Liberal Party will be pleased to learn that it makes them look better too because many of the tax measures that were introduced were introduced under the Liberal Party. One can see the pattern that has occurred through the tax transfers.
However, in looking at poverty, we need national standards. The amount of money one needs to live in Toronto is not the same amount of money that one needs to live in Vancouver, Calgaiy, Winnipeg or Montreal. We know that through very accurate data now collected by Central Mortgage and Housing on every single community in Canada and Statistics Canada with respect to Agriculture Canada. There are tremendous variations.


David Kilgour: Mr. Speaker, will the member tell us whether there is one person in Canada other than on her side of the House who has had anything positive to say about the budget? Second, I would like to know the name of the person or the organization.
We now have 10,000 people a month visiting our food bank in Edmonton. I am wondering if she has any thoughts of that in view of the budget.


Barbara Greene: Mr. Speaker, with respect to the budget all the international agencies that are used to monitor this sort of thing have given it very high ratings.
Those are delivered across Canada to businesses and so on. That is why we have seen stock market activity in this country that shows quite clearly that the business community has confidence in this government and not in any other group.
With respect to the food banks, Edmonton is in a province with welfare rates that are probably inadequate to cover basic necessities. I feel that food banks are a humiliating and degrading way to give people basic necessities.
I very strongly believe that we should have welfare rates in this country that are sufficient to cover basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter along with all the basic essentials.
April 28, 1993

I think we should work toward eliminating food banks. Indeed, when people working at the food banks appeared before our committee they said exactly the same thing. They want to eliminate the need for food banks.
I know that in Ontario and in Toronto in particular we had many discussions about this when I was on the community services and housing committee for 11 years. We attempted to get proper rent supplements and so on. We felt that the incomes of poor people should be sufficient to cover basic necessities.
There have always been agencies that have given out food. I think we have to talk about a system in which the self-esteem of people in low income situations is considered and they are helped in a very positive way. They should be given the basic essentials and also pathways out of poverty.
Our recommendation in the poverty subcommittee was for welfare to be at a basic needs level and for the child benefit to be on top to ensure an adequate discretionary income for children. I think those are very excellent goals.


Mrs. Christine Stewart (Northumberland):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the budget that was brought down by the Government of Canada on Monday of this week.
In listening to the last speaker in this House I am wondering if I am in the House of Commons of the right country. The words I have just heard do not reflect to any degree what I have to say about the budget that was brought down on Monday. They do not reflect the opinion that is widespread in my own constituency.
The motion we are debating is from the minister who wishes us to agree in general with his budget statement. I have to put on the record that I could not do that. Instead I would totally support the motion of non-confidence put forward by my own party which says that this House condemns the government for presenting a shopworn copy of last year's budget.
It fails to present a realistic and comprehensive program to create jobs and an economic recovery to permit the millions of Canadians whose lives have been crushed by Tory policies to regain their hope and livelihood.
This government fails to offer a credible and fair plan to control and reduce public debt. It fails to provide
The Budget
Canadians with a true and accurate account of the eight and a half years of Conservative government mismanagement.
This government is in serious trouble. This country is in serious trouble. The credit rating of this country is in doubt today. The markets are volatile.
Canadians, including constituents of mine in Northumberland are very concerned about the future of this country. They no longer feel that they live in the Canada they grew up in, that they prospered in, that offered them the opportunity of a bright future. Canadians do not know that vision of their country today. They long for it and hope it will return, that prosperity will return. However they were devastated with the budget as it was presented on Monday.
The most important fact is that the budget does nothing to get our economy moving forward again. We see a stand-pat budget, one that talks of further cuts, cuts into the future. It is a very safe budget for a government that is going into a federal election this year, a government that postpones to three years hence words about cuts. It has been promoting and selling to the Canadian people that the only policy and the only problem of any significance and any importance in this country is the debt and the deficit and the deficit in financial terms only.
People in this House recognize that the deficit and the debt are very serious problems and must be addressed, but this party would do something to help this economy recover. The economy must be helped to grow. The budget we were presented with on Monday does absolutely nothing to encourage that. Instead it deadens any spirit of optimism and hope people might have had.
During the tenure of this government Canadians have had their taxes raised 36 times. Consumer spending is presently down because of the fear experienced by Canadians. When members on the other side of the House speak it sounds like another country. Instead of a recovery however in my constituency there are still more and more jobs being lost as companies close and leave, as more and more people close up shop and go into bankruptcy. Just yesterday we heard of the difficulties of the Mack truck company. It is closing its doors and is purported to be moving south.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
The government says that we have an unemployment rate of around 11 per cent and that we have to expect that to continue well into 1994. In the constituency of Northumberland that is not a believable figure. A census was done in a neighbouring township to my riding of Northumberland. It was found that in fact the unemployment level was 14.6 per cent. Over 6 per cent of the population said that they were grossly underpaid. They were working but did not derive enough income to support themselves in any lifestyle that way not just survival.
Recovery in this country with no jobs is no recovery. We must have a recovery that provides jobs for Canadians. We have over one million people unemployed in Canada and the government wants to know what the Liberal Party would do that is different. We would create wealth in this country. We would put people back to work. If we put one million people back to work we would save $20 billion and that would go a long way to reducing the deficit.
In the budget we heard the finance minister talk about what was going to occur in Canada next year, the year after that and five years hence. So many of the things he said were just absolutely unbelievable. If we consider his prognostications about the deficit itself, it is interesting to look back to last year where in his budget speech of February 1992 he said that the deficit for 1992-93 would be $27.5 billion. In December he changed his mind. He regretted that his prognostication was out and that it would rise to $34.4 billion. Monday he said that since December he had to change his mind again and that now the deficit was going to be $35.5 billion. That is a difference of $8 billion in his prognostications for one year, the year we have just gone through.
How can we possibly believe a finance minister who says that in the year 1997-98 our deficit will be only $8 billion? In 1988 the deficit for 1992 was to be $19.5 billion. Monday it was changed to $35.5 billion.
This government has no credibility whatsoever and it is very obvious in all of the economic measures it has brought down, which I believe we have debated against very honestly and forthrightly. We have tried to point out the problems with the cuts, cuts, cuts this government has brought forward. We have tried to show that they were not good for this country. Obviously the government has not come up to its own predictions about its
policies. It is way off track which is not just causing a lot of consternation for individuals in Canada but for people around the world.
The Liberals would follow a two-track policy for economic recovery in this country. One track would deal very specifically with the deficit and the debt, knowing that those are very serious problems. There must be expenditure reductions by streamlining processes and eliminating duplication, while continuing to deliver the basic services that Canadians need. This must take place in consultation with the provinces.
We have done an analysis in doing some economic union work with the western provinces. We have shown that in one year, if we could do our government purchasing together, work more efficiently together, we could save $5 billion. Working more efficiently and streamlining our systems and processes does not mean cutting, it means saving billions of dollars.
Our government would also do many things to foster economic growth, investing in people, investing in research and development and infrastructure. People must be put back to work so that they are paying taxes rather than collecting unemployment insurance or welfare payments. As I said before, we have to remember that one million Canadians are unemployed and that is costing our country $20 billion a year.
To my mind the deficit that is more important than the financial deficit is the human deficit. We can work with monetary policies to reduce the deficit and we will do so. But the human deficit is going to be long term and will be very hard to cope with.
I recommend to everybody the report put out by the Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology in January 1991, which talks very clearly about the long-term negative effects of poverty on people in Canada. We know that the joblessness and consequent poverty in this country have been very much responsible for family breakdowns, stress, abuse against women and children, violence and crime, the breakdown of society. We need to get Canadians back to work and this budget is no solution to that end.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: Mr. Speaker, we are talking about a government that has set itself a priority. The priority this government has set itself is the reduction of the deficit, the reduction of the national debt. That is the yearly amount of money we spend and the collection of all those different years of budgets.
April 28, 1993

The Minister of Finance should take a moment to walk in his riding. I invite him to come to my riding of Hamilton West. If he were to sit in the local coffee shop or to take a walk around the downtown market or streets for just a few minutes, he would quickly realize that he has his priorities wrong, that the Tory Party has its priorities wrong.
That is because most people today are talking about jobs: "Give me a job. Give me the opportunity of a job". Then everything else will look after itself and we will not have to worry about whether there is enough money in the kitty to pay for social services. We will not have to worry whether there is enough welfare money in the kitty.
My constituents are telling me: "Stan, get into the House of Commons and will you just repeat it again and again and maybe, just maybe one of the new leadership candidates will understand that the priority in this country ought to be jobs. Let us create jobs".
When was the last time we heard about jobs from this government? Well, as many of my colleagues have already said, it was in 1984. The Prime Minister of this great country said: "My priority is jobs, jobs, jobs". That is a direct quote.
What do we have? Today we have 1.6 million people who are unemployed and over three million who are underemployed. That means people with some kind of a job, part-time jobs here or there, who really want to be employed full-time but cannot because the jobs just are not there. What do we have? We have around four million people who are unemployed or underemployed.
I ask my constituents this simple question: Are you any better off today than you were in 1988? Are you any better off today than you were back in 1984 when this government took office? Chances are you are going to say that you are not. How can we not be when we are in the greatest country in the world, Canada? With all our opportunities, with all our advancements in education, with all our natural resources, we sit here with close to four million people either out of work or looking for full-time jobs. Horrible, it is just horrible.
The Budget
My constituents would have something to say about it if I did not get specific with this government about the problems in Hamilton West. In Hamilton West the unemployment rate is higher than the national unemployment rate which is 11 per cent. In Hamilton it is 11.7 per cent. Hamilton has 38,000 people unemployed. It is inexcusable.
Let me talk about youth unemployment. Hamilton West and the city of Hamilton and area is proud to have McMaster University, which is one of the major employers in our area. Youth unemployment in Hamilton is at 19 per cent. Nineteen per cent of students cannot find jobs.
Let us jump over to bankruptcies in Hamilton. We are talking about consumer and business bankruptcies. In 1988 there were 508 consumer bankruptcies and 102 business bankruptcies. In 1992 that number has jumped to 1,504 personal bankruptcies and 201 business bankruptcies.
I do not have to convince my constituents in Hamilton West of that. We all walk around downtown. We see how many stores in Jackson Square have masking tape over the glass. They are all shut down. It is now free rent for a few of the stores still there that use it for storage space next door. It is a horrible situation.
Regarding welfare statistics, the case-load in Hamilton has increased since 1990. In November 1990 the general welfare assistance case-load stood at 9,836. By March 1993, just last month, the case-load for general welfare assistance was 17,011. That is an increase of over 40 per cent.
But this government keeps telling us: "Stay the course. We know where we are going. We are going to build on what we have in this country". What we have in this country is a hell of a mess. There are people looking for work. We have to create the jobs.
Like all the budgets of the Tory government since 1984, this budget provides no hope for Canadians and it is filled with the usual empty rhetoric. Most of all it is laden with all those unrealistic projections. The budget is silent on a whole range of issues including, tragically, solutions for the 1.6 million Canadians who are unemployed and the over three million Canadians who are underemployed or have part-time work and are looking for full-time jobs.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
Not only did this government promise jobs, jobs, jobs back in 1984 but it also promised the most generous retraining programs for workers laid off because of that Mulroney trade deal back in 1988. I have to be honest. There were more than a few friends of mine in Hamilton West who said the trade deal had a chance and they were going to vote Conservative because it just might be the ticket. Part of the reason they did so was that this government promised them "the most generous retraining programs this country has ever seen". Those were the words of the Prime Minister.
Have they developed? There are constituents sitting in Hamilton West today who had good jobs, a wife, children, a mortgage and maybe even a cottage or a boat. Tragically eight years later some of my constituents who were married are no longer married. They are divorced. They no longer hold a mortgage because they cannot afford to pay the mortgage. They no longer have the luxury of a cottage or a boat. That went long before the mortgage went.
This was because of the stress put upon them by the inability to have a job that was not there. The government promised they would be retrained. They lost their jobs because of the free trade agreement. They lost their jobs because that company went south. They did not get retrained. They could not get retrained. There was nothing to be retrained for and if they could be retrained this government was not going to help them get retrained.
Ten minutes go very quickly. I will conclude my remarks in the same manner in which I began, with a question. Why did we have this budget in the first place, if that is what we call a budget? It is a total failure. In the end how does it all matter? It is another tired piece of guesswork from a lame duck government which within just a handful of months will not have the mandate to carry through with any of it.
Canadians are the lucky ones. After all, this is a pre-leadership budget that may be discarded anyway in the next couple of months to make room for a pre-election budget which probably will be brought in by the minister of defence, the Minister of the Environment or whoever wins that leadership contest. God knows that this thing called a budget lacks the economic plan to
produce R and D, training and most of all jobs to turn this country around, to instil a new confidence in the Canadian people. That is what a budget has to do. That is what this budget did not do.
The Prime Minister and the finance minister should hear the people when they say: "Give me a job. Give me the retraining that is needed for that job". Everything else will look after itself.


Mrs. Suzanne Duplessis (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister for External Relations and to Minister of State (Indian Affairs and Northern Development)):: Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to the budget brought down by the Minister of Finance on Monday.
First of all, I would like to congratulate the minister on his realistic approach to the difficult choices he had to make. In this budget the government is staying the course set in 1984 with a view to reducing the deficit and, within a reasonable period of time, to eliminating it altogether.
As we have said repeatedly, these difficult decisions must be made and implemented now because the deficit, and especially the interest on the debt it generates prevents us from introducing new social measures.
A government's budget at whatever level is no different from a family budget. Of course there is a difference in scale and complexity, but in both cases, if we continue to spend more than we earn, we are soon faced with a crisis.
We all know there are not umpteen ways to cut the deficit. We either increase revenues or cut spending. Increasing revenues would have meant increasing taxes. The Minister of Finance wisely preferred to cut departmental spending.
Canadians already bear a heavy tax burden, and announcing new tax increases would have had a disastrous impact on the economic recovery.
Both business and individuals pay their fair share of taxes, and I think their resources are stretched to the limit. Raising taxes would have been the easy way out but unrealistic in the circumstances. That is why the Minister of Finance preferred to make further cuts in government operations and departmental spending.
April 28, 1993

Like any business faced with revenue shortfalls the government has decided to cut operating costs and program spending. For instance, the federal Public Service, where the number of positions has already been cut by 90,000, will be expected to reduce the number of public servants by about 16,500 over the next five years. However, despite these cutbacks the government's intentions are clear. It wants to do, and will do, everything in its power to prevent any reduction in services to the public.
As the Minister of Finance pointed out, and I quote: "The government will continue to streamline its operations and improve the cost-effectiveness of its service delivery. We will make government smaller, simpler and more accessible to Canadians."
I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate members of the federal Public Service on the excellent way they are doing their jobs. They are all doing everything they can to help us improve the way government responds to the needs of the public and they have every reason to be proud of their record. It will not be easy for them to manage these new cutbacks, but we are asking them to co-operate because they must realize that the government has no choice and that as responsible administrators we must stay the course on reducing the deficit.
They will all have a major role to play in this process, and I am convinced we will again be able to rely on their efficiency, competence and dedication to help us in this difficult task.
As part of its policy to cut costs and improve service to the public, a commitment made in 1984 and reiterated subsequently, the government has adopted a number of measures aimed at simplifying communication between business, individuals and government. For instance, the minister announced a simplified GST system for small business. I am referring to improvements in the quick method for computing GST which would simplify procedures for hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
These are not necessarily headline grabbers, but based on my conversations with business people, I can assure you these measures are most welcome because while reducing the cost of government operations they also reduce administration costs of Canadian businesses.
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Less paper burden means businesses have more time and money to spend on improving and expanding their operations.
These are very simple little measures that have a big impact, directly and indirectly, on the cost of management for our Canadian businessmen and women.
We must also be pleased that social programs were not affected by the announced cuts. In fact, aid for seniors, the program for the disabled, veterans' pensions and benefits, some programs for native people, the national employment strategy and famine relief in the world are all exempt from restrictions.
We thus ensure that those most in need will not be penalized and I think that is a very wise choice, because in these difficult economic times, it would be irresponsible to cut more from the resources for the most disadvantaged. More than anyone, they feel the impact of Canada's financial difficulties. Someone earning $60,000 a year can support a $10 cut, but for someone living below the poverty line, this same $10 cut has frightful consequences.
We must clearly understand that Canada's financial situation cannot be seen in isolation. Canada is strongly influenced by the world situation. In this increasingly international world in which we live, when the market economies are more and more interdependent, we benefit when the world economy is well but we suffer when it is doing badly.
There is no use hiding our head in the sand. For several years we have been living through a worldwide recession which Canada, as a major industrialized country, could not escape. However because of the spin off benefits generated from the wide range of initiatives for economic renewal taken by this government since 1984 the Canadian economy is improving and is in a very good position to perform well in the coming years.
For example, according to the OECD's predictions Canada will have the highest growth rate of the G-7 countries this year and next. In the past few months we have witnessed an encouraging turnaround in economic growth, employment, retail sales and several other important indicators. The most vigorous growth was in

April 28, 1993
The Budget
our exports which are mainly responsible for the economic recovery.
Strong exports were made possible by a spectacular improvement in our cost competitiveness as well as greater access to the American market under the free trade agreement. This strong performance of our exports will continue to support the economic recovery in 1993-94.
As I said earlier, Canada either benefits or suffers from the global economic situation, but we must also promote trade and encourage policy harmonization on the domestic market.
If the federal, provincial and territorial governments shoot in all directions chances are that nothing great will come out of it. That is why I again applaud the Minister Finance's commitment to working and co-operating with his provincial counterparts.
The money comes from only one source the taxpayer. That is why it is essential that a national cure be found for the national debt problem, as Canadians want. In that sense the federal and provincial governments must work together toward achieving this goal. If the federal government reduces its debt at the expense of the provinces that solves nothing. It simply shifts the taxpayers' burden from one level of government to another. That is simply juggling the books.
Knowing that, the Minister of Finance preferred to play it straight by not cutting provincial transfers, a decision applauded by the provincial finance ministers, including the Quebec finance minister, Gerard D. Levesque. After the federal budget was tabled, he said: "The federal minister is tackling the deficit with measures that will benefit Quebec and Canada's economy in the medium and long term. For the immediate future, like all governments, he was forced to maintain a delicate balance between the need to sustain the economic growth and his desire to fight the deficit. Some will say this is not enough, but as Quebec Minister of Finance, I am satisfied with these measures", concluded Mr. Levesque.
Following the tabling of the budget some said that the proposed measures were not sufficient. I believe that we have to be realistic. On the one hand it is interesting to note that our message finally got through and that the
public is now aware of the negative impact of a large debt. Now that the citizens of our country are convinced like us of the importance of our efforts, this will certainly help us keep going in the same direction.
For a long time we had the impression of preaching in the desert. However, our tenacity and the firm belief that we were right succeeded in making Canadians more responsible and understand that the debt is not only the government's problem but also their problem as taxpayers. Canadians now realize that the services which they have been enjoying are not free and that it is they who in the end must foot the bill one way or another.
This new awareness explains why some now say that we are not going far enough. To those people I say that based on the realism which has always guided our government, the implementation of drastic measures at this point would have adversely affected economic recovery and consequently federal revenue. As the minister of finance in Quebec said, and I quote: "Every time there are cuts, it affects the economy and this does not help government revenue".
As a responsible government we must take realistic measures which will not affect recovery and especially job creation because this is the way, and it is the only way, that we will be able to reach our goals, namely the reduction of the deficit and the growth of our economy in co-operation with all our partners.
I am therefore very pleased to see that the Quebec government is willing to co-operate with us to harmonize its fiscal policies, and I do hope that all the other provincial governments will follow suit. It is not through confrontation but rather through dialogue that we can make great things happen, and this is very true in the case of the economy.
This budget is tabled at a time when the public has never been so concerned with the expenditures and borrowings of our various governments. This concern is justified. Canadians know that they cannot indefinitely let the debit balance of their credit cards increase and then borrow just to pay interest. They saw what happens when a government behaves as though it was not subjected to the same basic rules of common sense.
What happens then is that taxpayers have to pay more and more for fewer and fewer government services because the interest takes an increasing portion of each dollar in tax revenue. Increasingly heavier taxes slow
April 28, 1993

down the economy, which in turn impedes job creation. Owners pay higher mortgage rates because government borrowings result in higher interest rates on loans. And higher interest rates have a deterring effect on investors and consumers, which also contributes to slowing down growth and job creation.
Finally, in order to maintain a standard of living which no longer matches our revenue, we rely more and more on foreign lenders. Our country becomes less and less in control of its economy, and an increasing part of our revenue must be used to pay interest to those foreign lenders.
Canadians want to remain in control of their future. They want their government to have the means to maintain essential social services as well as some fiscal flexibility when faced with new priorities.
To reduce borrowing and taxes, increase employment, and expand possibilities; those are the goals of Canadians. It is in this direction that our government has been going since 1984 and we will stay the course. More jobs, a strong and growing economy, and more choices.
First and foremost, we must maintain, and we will maintain, our strict and responsible policy regarding expenditure control.
Since 1984-85 we have made very real progress in an uncertain, changing international climate. We have reduced the annual growth in federal program spending from 13.8 per cent to 4.1 per cent. We have cut the federal deficit as a proportion of national revenue from
8.7	per cent to 5.1 per cent. Thanks to tight spending control, we have changed an operating deficit into an operating surplus, which means that the government is now spending less on its programs and services than it collects in revenue, and this has been the case for six years.
In the past few years a persistent painful economic slowdown throughout the world has forced governments, businesses and households, both in Canada and abroad, to change their future plans. This has accelerated the fundamental restructuring of our economy in the face of global economic change.
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To help Canadians deal with the economic slowdown and adjust to world competition, we took resolute measures in the 1992 budget and last December's economic statement. We reduced the income tax on individuals. We improved and restructured the child benefit plan so as to help low and middle income families. This will put $1.7 billion in the economy this year alone. We established the home buyers' Plan to help Canadians buy or build a house with funds in their RRSP.
As I have repeated so often, as responsible individuals we must not leave our children and grandchildren with a poisoned heritage. We have a responsibility to build a strong and prosperous society in which future generations can develop and fulfil themselves when it is their turn to take over.
I will conclude by saying that despite the energetic spending control measures taken by our government since 1984, Canada is still faced with the serious problems of rising public debt and the very high costs of servicing it. If we do not control the deficit we will suffer the consequences. The economy will be weaker, jobs will be even more scarce and it will not be possible to maintain the programs to which we are attached.
Our government has taken difficult but necessary measures. It has the situation under control. It has a concrete way to achieve its objective and, as we see light at the end of the tunnel, I trust that everyone will co-operate to help us so that together we can manage in a reasonable time to reduce and, why not, eliminate this weight that each of us is dragging, namely the deficit.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I could not let the member go without making a couple of short comments.
The way this government has mastered the art of propaganda is unbelievable. This is a government that was elected nine years ago stating that it was going to be the champion of focusing on deficit and debt reduction. Yet here we are nine years later with a debt that has at least doubled in the last nine years.
What is amazing about these speeches this afternoon, and I listened to the Minister of Employment and Immigration as well, is that things are being said like no tax increases, no increases to the deficit and no cuts to

April 28, 1993
The Budget
the provinces. The member just said that the government has reduced taxes to individuals. Does this government think that Canadians are stupid?
We have had 33 personal tax increases. Does the government think that Canadians have forgotten about the GST? What does it think when it says no cuts to the provinces? It cut out program spending which helps create jobs and now the welfare payments in this country are ballooning in every province because there are no capital works projects or special recovery projects for people to work at.
The government cut here but there is a welfare expense to the province and then it wonders why there is a provincial debt. This government has systematically dismantled the national government in the last nine years. It stands up all day long and throws out this con job, this propaganda, that all of a sudden it is focused on deficit and debt.
I cannot believe for a second that the member really believes her own speech. If she were to compare what she just said to what the Ministers of Finance have been saying on behalf of this government over the last nine years she will see, and I think Canadians realize, that there is absolutely no consistency and no trust left in this . Conservative government from the people of Canada.


Suzanne Fortin-Duplessis: Mr. Speaker, I will tell my colleague from Broadview-Greenwood that I am quite confident this government will be re-elected. When people are in the voting booth and compare how the Liberals ran the country when they were in office and the way we have done, how we had the courage to take tough measures, I am not worried, people will know where to put their X on the ballot.
By way of explanation I will tell the hon. member that, when we came into power in 1984 we were left with a poisoned legacy. If we had run things the same way as the Liberals did in the previous 15 years the national debt would now be $800 billion to $900 billion. Because we reduced program spending and administered judiciously we were able to limit the debt growth to $450 billion.
I want to tell the hon. member that we made every possible effort. I would therefore like to give him a few small points of comparison with the former Liberal government and show him how we governed, despite all the constraints we had, like a growing Canadian population and a whole lot of other things.
First, let us compare the two recessions. In the 1980-81 recession the deficit was $14.7 billion. In 1984-85 it was $38.5 billion. It more than doubled in that period; it grew 160 per cent. In 1989-90 the deficit was $29 billion and in 1992-93 it was $35.5 billion. This is an increase of less than one-fifth 20 per cent.
Now let us compare the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product. In 1984-85 it was 8.7 per cent of GDP. In 1993-94 the deficit will only be 4.5 per cent of GDP, a reduction of 50 per cent. If we compare the growth in spending, the average under 15 years of Liberal rule was 13.8 per cent a year. Since 1984-85 it has averaged 3.6 per cent. Comparing Canada with the United States, in 1992-93 Canada's deficit was 5 per cent of GDP compared to 5.1 per cent in the United States. It is expected that in 1997-98 Canada will have a surplus equivalent to 0.1 per cent of GDP, while the United States will still have a deficit of 2.5 per cent of its GDP. Does the member want me to continue?


Mr. Les Benjamin (Regina-Lumsden):: Mr. Speaker, I am happy to see you in the chair although I am sorry to afflict you with what I am going to have to say. You never know, I might convert you.
I have been through a number of these budget debates since 1968. I have listened to Conservatives kicking the heck out of Liberals about what they were doing in their budgets. Boy, the whole country was going to grind to a halt over what they were doing, to hear them tell it. They were very specific.
When they got through with that, I will be darned if they did not get elected. The next thing we know the Liberals are in opposition and the Conservatives are in the government.
As one might expect, the Liberals asked the Conservatives exactly the same questions.
April 28, 1993


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: The Conservatives gave them the same answers.


Leslie Gordon Benjamin: Yes. They were doing exactly the same things.
I rushed over from the committee meeting and got some notes which I am not going to use. While I was in my office I had the TV on. There was a member from the government side talking about food banks. If there is anything a Tory should never talk about, it is a food bank.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: Hear, hear.


Leslie Gordon Benjamin: He was complaining about how the Liberals caused them. They both caused them. As a result of the economic policies of consecutive Liberal and Tory governments we have been afflicted with food banks. The member who spoke from the government side said they are being closed down. I would sure like her to find me one. If she can, it will only be closed because it could not get enough funds and supplies to keep it open. It would be for no other reason.
Government cabinet ministers have talked about
200,000	new jobs created but I still do not know where they are. A whole bunch of my constituents have not been able to find them and it is not as bad in my city as it is in the cities of both of my colleagues here.
Let us go into this business of deficits and debts. Any government of any political stripe that becomes so hypnotized, terrorized and mesmerized by the size of the current deficit and the accumulated debt becomes immobilized.
If we learned nothing else from the dirty thirties it was that it was the time one spent money one did not have. The current taxpayers and their successors, their children and grandchildren, would have to pay it off.
For a fundamental civilized Christian reason we do not treat people that way in tough times. We just do not do it. Much fuss has been made about the $450 million or $480 billion of the current debt of Canada and the current deficit of $35.5 billion that will get added on to the national debt.
What else is new? I want to say something. I am a child of the dirty thirties. Successive Conservative and Liberal governments in my poor begotten province did not pay their bills. They lost the store. In fact, they bankrupted the whole province.
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An hon. member:: Why?


Leslie Gordon Benjamin: They did not pay their bills that had accumulated from previous years. They should have borrowed some more money, put people to work and then they could have paid their bills.
I am just an ordinary prairie country boy. I am not a fancy economist or financier but it just seems to me that it makes common sense.
Some of the national debt goes back to 1930 because governments in those years could not make their payments and they piled up. They would put out another bond issue to pay off the previous one. If we took that and all the debt that was accumulated during the war at the end of 1945, added up the total national debt and translated in 1993 dollars it would be just as high or higher than it is now. What else is new? We have been through this before. We have to rely on the people, put them to work and the national government has to provide the leadership.
The hon. member for Vegreville, the Minister of Finance, is a good friend and an easy fellow to like. He and I are colleagues from the class of '68. He looks a heck of a lot younger than I do and I am not sure if he is. I never thought I would live to see the day when my hon. friend from Vegreville, the Minister of Finance, would sound like R. B. Bennett and Mackenzie King of 1935 or 1938. The government has not learned anything in 60 or 70 years, in fact it has never learned anything from experience. It does not have to believe me. It does not have to listen to the NDP. It does not have to listen to those terrible socialists.
In country after country in Europe it was the socialists who bailed them out of their economic and financial mess. In 1944, when members of the old CCF-bless their hearts-formed the government led by Tommy Douglas the accumulated debt went back to 1930. In fact two issues of bonds were defaulted upon as the Tory and Liberal governments could not make the payments and the federal government had to step in and pick them up. There were those debts from the dirty thirties plus what happened in the Second World War. Most of the taxation ability went to the federal authority for the war effort which nobody complained about and the provinces starved.

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The Budget
From 1930 to 1945 the deficit of the province of Saskatchewan was as big as it is today. Today thanks to the beautiful blessings of one Grant Devine, the late unlamented premier of Saskatchewan, our debt is now bigger than it was then. When Liberals and Tories talk to me about running governments according to sound business practice, the only kind of business they are in is misleading the people of this country and ruining the economy of this country.
I will not be here much longer. This is my last term but I have listened to the same damn thing every bloody year since 1968. I do not ask anybody to believe me, listen to me, pay attention or do anything about anything I say. I ask them to look at what has happened while they were here. If we do not learn from history and from our own actions we are condemned to repeat them and the government is repeating these in spades.
This budget does nothing about the deficit or debt. Why? Because in the traditional old-line party practice in tough times everybody has to be careful and cut back.
I look at the financial pages. I inherited some shares in a company that was supposed to be going great guns. It is in a resource industry. I think they should call it "the dry hole drilling company". It has gone from $10 a share down to I think 13 cents now.
That is what has occurred under private enterprise governments. Their friends who have those shares made a bundle. They bought them at ten bucks. I refuse to buy stocks. I inherited the ones I have, a whole 100 shares. I have fun looking at the financial pages. I have begun to look at other issues of bonds and stocks.
There is the whole issue of privatizing. It is terrible for the government to own anything. It is going to privatize Air Canada for example. It conned 4,000 employees, even though I told them not to, into buying shares at ten bucks a share. It told them of the glories of free enterprise, profits, dividends, ad nauseam. You will be lucky, Mr. Speaker, to get three bucks for those shares. If you can get three bucks for them and if anybody in this place has them get rid of them quick.
We have been in the hands of incompetents. When they talk about governing according to sound business
practices I would not let them manage my chicken coop if I had one. I am not just criticizing the government. I say the same thing about the Liberals. They were masters at it.
When the Liberals got excited about the deficit and the debt they made some cutbacks. Not as many as we have today but for those days there were quite a few. You should have heard those stories. They were up screaming their heads off about those cutbacks. They raised hell. They moved want of confidence motions. The cuts were as welcome as a skunk at a garden party. That is how they acted.
Then the Tories defeated the Liberals, as if that was a big deal. I will be darned. The next thing I know the Liberals are getting up raising heck about the Tory cutbacks. Thlk about pots calling kettles black. That is a little much. They sure did not fool us fellows down at this end of the Chamber. I do not think they fooled many people in the country. When I go to Gopher Gulch and Grasshopper Flats and when my colleagues go back home to their people or when they travel around this country, we find it is not being swallowed. It is not being believed.
We have moved a subamendment. It is not only to try to defeat the government. That is a minor detail. That is going to happen anyway, if not this year then next year, whenever. It is not long for this world. We moved on a basis of some kind of principle and policy. We are having a little difficulty with the Tories enunciating policy because they are victimized with the present government, especially Tory candidates for the leadership. They are a little bit hard put to announce policies. However I do not hear any nuts and bolts policies from the Liberals. I have listened to them for, God knows, 45 years, my membership in the NDP. In fact, the Liberals forced me into joining the NDP. They forced me. After I got out of the Armed Forces after the Second World War, I said: "My God, it's the only place for me to go". They drove me out, and they still drive me out.
There is nothing so obnoxious as a reformed sinner. If the hon. gentleman had just told me to come back, I would ask come back to what? He did not mind telling me to come back to what. If it is different from what we have got now I will be glad to listen to him.
April 28, 1993

It was no great move philosophically for somebody to move from the Tories to the Liberal Party, and vice versa. In the years I have been here I have seen a whole bunch of them do that. They can do it without even blushing. They do not even know how to do it the right way. The first thing you do is tell your leader, your caucus and then your own membership. Then you resign your seat and run for re-election with whatever new party you have chosen. That is called honour in politics. You wonder why Joe Citizen says "those damned politicians". That is one of the reasons. You have got the ethics of a tomcat that just came out of a back alley.
If I ever had to part company with the NDP-I do not think it will happen, I hope it never will-I would let the party know ahead of time at the national, provincial and federal levels. I would have the courtesy to tell it and then I would quit and get out of the way. Let it do what it wants to do because it would not listen to me before. That should apply to every member of any party.
Some people say we need a two party system. If it were a choice between the Grits and the Tories that would only be a one party system. The communists could take lessons. There is no fundamental basic philosophical difference between them. One wants to do "open for business, free enterprise, marketplace" quicker than the other.
Somebody should tell me what the difference is. When I said that those governments of any political party are hypnotized, I meant it. When they become so hypnotized, so mesmerized and so terrorized that they become immobilized then they have lost sight of the fact of why they are there, what they are there for and what they are there to do.
When the good times come is when to put money in the bank through taxes and whatnot. "Save for the rainy days", my mother always said. When it is bad times you share with all your fellow Canadians what it costs in order to have all of them live decently, in a decent home, with enough money for food and full opportunity for their children. We share that. If we are not going to share it we become the old 19th century jungle.
This budget puts us and keeps us in the jungle. I would be glad to pay an extra 1 per cent or 2 per cent or
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whatever on my income tax if I knew it would go toward that purpose. Nobody objects to the amount of taxes they pay if they know what they are going for and who they are going to benefit.
Today at a committee meeting there were a couple of individuals who make more than $250,000 a year. The poor fellows. When I see them I see corporations that make a profit. Even after their write-offs they do not pay any taxes. Now that is not totally unjustified and unfair. It was not just done by this government. The Liberals were saddled with it. In fact I think they started it.


An hon. member:: 1974.


Leslie Gordon Benjamin: It goes back farther than that. They started giving those kind of benefits to corporations in the late 1930s and the early 1940s.
We are not going to be a party to this by either party. For all I know the Liberals are going to vote for our subamendment. I hope they do not because then I will worry about what we are doing wrong.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The hon. member's time has expired. I will let him have another 30 seconds to wind up.


Leslie Gordon Benjamin: I implore Canadians to bring down this government and prevent a Liberal one from taking its place.


René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, I rise today with pleasure to participate in this budget debate for a number of reasons. Hopefully, over the-


Leslie Gordon Benjamin: Mr. Speaker, on a point of order. I understand there should be a 10-minute question and answer period. Is no one going to ask me any questions? I would love it if they would. If they have any curve balls they would like to throw.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I am sorry, but there are no questions or comments.


René John Soetens: The reason I am participating in this debate is to talk about some of the good things in this budget, some of the things that have probably been mentioned by some of my colleagues and some of the things that have been opposed by some of those on the other side of the House. I would like to very briefly run through what I think are some of the highlights of the budget.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
One of the first highlights in my opinion is the fact that there is no tax increase. I believe this is our third budget in which we have been able to do so. I have been here for five budgets. I feel quite comfortable in saying that we did not raise taxes in this budget, we did not introduce any new taxes in this budget and this is the third year we have managed to do that. In fact last year we reduced taxes in a number of areas. I wish we could have done that again this year.
For those who might say there were no tax changes simply because it is an election year, I can only refer back to last year and the year before and point out there were no tax changes in those years either.
Basically there are no tax increases in this because we on this side of the House understand what our constituents are saying and that is no tax increases. I am happy to say there are none.
There is another very positive aspect about this budget. There is no real growth in spending. I sent out a questionnaire to my constituents called "You be the finance minister". I asked them to tell how they would spend money if they were the finance minister.
Consistently the responses that came back to me were to freeze spending. In some cases they would have a little more in one area, offset by a saving in another, so that the bottom line remained the same. I am happy to report that this budget does exactly that. It freezes spending, the total amount, at what it was last year so there is no real growth in spending. Personally I think that is a very positive situation.
It goes a little further than that though as far as my view on this budget and why it is positive. There are some real important changes in this budget. There is one change that is in here that I might point out. If some member would like to ask me a question in a few moments about the helicopter contract, I would be happy to respond as to why I think it is such a good idea that this budget does not touch the helicopter contract.
Over and above that there are things it does touch and I would like to really emphasize those, such as the need for provincial co-operation. The deficit and debt of the Government of Canada are not just a problem of the federal government, but a problem that all the provincial governments have as well. What we have done with this budget is to say look let us bring everybody together,
discuss the areas where we have a problem and see if we can arrive at some common solution between us. I think that is very positive.
There have been some cuts unfortunately but some of the cuts I do not have a problem supporting. For example the ERDA agreements. We hear the business community all the time talking about cutting grants to business. Lo and behold what did we do? We cancelled, we stopped funding the forestry economic agreements, the mining economic agreements. These are agreements which put taxpayer funds into private enterprise. We have cut them. It is interesting now that the business community affected by those cuts is complaining but that is the way life goes. Everybody expects you to cut, just not in their area.
More important, we have also signalled to all the provinces affected with the various economic development agreements that when their particular agreement comes up-there is a list of 10 or 12 of them-for renewal those in fact will be looked at and discussed and simply not automatically renewed. I think that is very positive.
We have talked about Public Service reform. I note Bob Rae in Ontario is talking about how he is going to cut 10,000 employees out of 900,000. He says Tories in Ottawa do not know how to do it. Well, 10,000 out of
900,000	versus our proposal for 16,500 out of 250,000. It seems to me Bob Rae has not got it quite right. To have the same equation he ought to be looking somehow at finding 50,000 or 60,000 jobs in the public service in Ontario that are not needed.
In fairness they may be needed and maybe Bob Rae cannot find more than 10,000 but if he is going to criticize our cuts he ought to look at the actual numbers to determine whether we are doing our share. I am happy to report that we are.
There are some other changes. There are the changes in the freight rate system we have in this country such as the Crow rate. I appreciate that does not affect my constituency. It is a very important benefit that we have established in this country for western Canadian grain farmers. We have said we are going to review that, we are going to see if there is some better way of helping grain farmers. That is a very positive thing to do.
Right now all we do is give that money to railroads. Maybe we ought to give it to the farmers to let them figure out if there is a better way of them bringing their
April 28, 1993

product to market than using the railroads, That is healthy and puts a little competition against the railroads. I bet there are some trucking companies that would be quite prepared to say that they can haul the grain for less than the railroads. That benefits everybody if one can create some real good competition.
What does the end result of this budget bring forward? It brings forward a very important aspect of the debt and the deficit in this country. Deficits are of course a function of one's ability to pay. Our ability to pay has been improving. When we were elected the deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product was over 8 per cent. This budget foresees that at the end of the next period of fiscal responsibility, which is a five-year phase, we expect that to be down to less than 1 per cent. That is a very positive step toward getting rid of the deficit that we have in front of us. We can better make the payments.
What is the opposition's alternative to that 1 per cent target? Its alternative is that we should have a 3 per cent target. That is certainly better than it is today. Today we are approaching 4 per cent. They think it ought to be 3 per cent. I commend them for that but why do we stop at 3 per cent? Why in this country should we be happy with a deficit of $25 billion or $20 billion a year? It was that mentality of the 1970s that got us into the 1980s and into the 1990s with this huge debt we have. There is this idea that it is okay to have 3 per cent of the income as a deficit. That is unacceptable.
I see in this budget that the Minister of Finance is very clearly saying that as we go out for the five-year period we are not only going to be below 4 per cent, the 3 per cent Liberal target and the 2 per cent target, we are going to have it down to less than 1 per cent.
What do all of those things do to the Canadian economy? We have had some discussion in this House about the forecasts that exist by various monitoring agencies about growth in Canada. I am happy to see that the International Monetary Fund is forecasting a growth in Canada of 4.4 per cent next year, which is the highest rate of growth of the seven major countries that they compared us to: United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S. None of them have a 4.4 per cent
The Budget
growth. We are number one next year in the forecast and of course for 1993 we will continue to be number one.
There are two other areas that I would very briefly like to touch on which emanate from last year's budget and that in a sense were responded to in this budget. Last year the finance committee did a review of the issue of quarterly instalments that people would have to pay if they owed income tax of $1,000 a year or less.
We recommended that level be raised. Now Canadians who owe $2,000 a year or less in income tax do not have to file quarterly instalments. That is a very direct recommendation that went to the Minister of Finance from the finance committee and, lo and behold, he delivered. It is very positive and very good for a lot of Canadians whether they are seniors or low income Canadians. In Canada it affects an awful lot of people very positively.
The second thing he dealt with was regulatory reform. In last year's budget the Minister of Finance asked the finance committee to review the process of regulatory reform in this country because it impacts on Canadian business and ultimately in the cost of everything Canadians buy in this country.
The finance committee set up a subcommittee that I chaired. I am happy to say that we issued a report back in September and filed it through to the House. The President of the Treasury Board today responded to this as a direct result of the previous budget. People will find that the Government of Canada has again listened to the problems and concerns of Canadians and the impact that they can have on business. Today we have a very positive response about changes they can make to the regulatory process.
Those are some of things that have caused me to be very positive about this budget. There are really many others. The ultimate feeling I have on this budget is to emphasize that the Government of Canada said no to spending increases, no to tax increases and yes to fiscal responsibility.
That is what I believe in and that is why I am here. I am glad to be able to support this budget because of that.


Mr. Stan Wilbee (Delta):: Mr. Speaker, I was very much impressed with the presentation of the hon. member. We were listening carefully to those very good factual comments he was making. He mentioned that he does

April 28, 1993
The Budget
favour the purchase of helicopters. This has been very controversial in Canada. Personally I also agree with it. Could he perhaps enlighten us further as to some of these very valid reasons why the Canadian government should proceed with the helicopter purchase?


René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that question. Right through my years of political involvement and in advance of that, I have always had the opinion that Canadian forces should have some of the most modern technology available. Part of the reason I had that opinion was because there were spin-off benefits to Canadians by having them supply modem technology.
I would just like to share a letter I received from one of my constituents in a business in Whitby called Andrew Canada Inc. It employs 154 people and has been located in the town of Whitby since 1953. It provides, among other things, communications technology to the helicopter program. It says, to be very blunt:
We are currently negotiating a contract to design, develop and manufacture airborne radar antennas for the helicopters. Through technology transfer agreements related to the program we will acquire new, specialized skills and know-how which will not only enable us to fulfil the helicopter contract, but will also allow us to become recognized participants in the future airborne antenna market world-wide. The benefits of the program to us are potentially long term in excess of 15 years.
I should point out that there is a further benefit because I know that that is great for my riding. The letter
goes on to say:
Technology benefits will also flow down to our intended subcontractor in the maritimes, who will acquire new techniques for the fabrication of antenna reflectors.
I am happy to see that my concept of government buying technologically advanced pieces of equipment has the benefit of first giving our forces the proper modem equipment they should have, but secondly and more importantly, providing spin-off benefits. Very clearly here is a case in point where there will be spin-off benefits that will enable Canadian companies to be competitive world-wide with technologies.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Questions and comments are now terminated. The hon. member for Cambridge. They have split their time, just for the benefit of the hon. member for Winnipeg-St. James.


Mr. Pat Sobeski (Cambridge):: Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to participate in this year's budget debate.
I believe that the budget presented a couple of evenings ago is a credible fiscal plan with very realistic objectives. I think in recognition of the need to further enhance Canada's competitive position and the economic recovery, as my colleague mentioned just a few moments ago, the budget included no new taxes.
Another benefit I thought in the budget was that the fiscal plan features tight control over program spending with the growth held to the rate of inflation. In other words there is no growth at all in real terms.
My colleague, the member for Ontario mentions the finance committee. Two years ago our committee work included the development of the Spending Control Act. That resulted in a 3 per cent cap on the growth of program spending. This meant if expenditures on a program rose above the projection that it would have to be offset by reductions elsewhere.
The Spending Control Act did not allow increased borrowing or increased taxes to fund spending that was higher than planned. That was two years ago with a 3 per cent cap.
Of course we all know that as a result of this government's policies inflation now is below 2 per cent. I thought it was probably a good idea that maybe we should take a look at lowering this cap. That was my main recommendation to the Minister of Finance in the discussions leading up to the preparation of the budget. I am happy to say that he did listen.
I believe the new target that will be established will be
1.7	per cent. If we were to take a comparable figure from the U.S.A., it is 3.3 per cent. By putting controls and more caps on spending this will result in a savings of almost $3 billion by 1995.
People will ask whether this is a realistic target. I believe it is. The proposed spending control limit last year was $100.1 billion for the 1992-93 fiscal year. For that fiscal year the Minister of Finance presented main estimates of $99.1 billion. As such the 1993 budget presents a fiscally responsible plan that will deal with the federal deficit.
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As acknowledged by the Minister of Finance there is only one taxpayer to foot the bills. The fiscal problem is a national problem that must be addressed by all levels of government working together.
Passing the federal fiscal problems on to the provinces would not have been productive especially from a taxpayer's point of view. Therefore the 1993 budget could have cut deeper and more quickly but this inevitably would have required substantial cuts in the major transfers to provinces.
However, in recognition of the fiscal difficulties that provinces are confronting the federal government chose to exempt transfers to provinces from further restraint. Instead of cutting transfers to provinces the budget laid out a process that will lead to a combined federal-provincial approach to our national debt problem.
Why has the Minister of Finance in recognition of Canada's collective fiscal problem asked his provincial counterparts to attend this special meeting? The purpose is to begin working with the federal government on a co-operative approach to developing practical solutions to the national debt problem.
I want to put a few facts on the record. In 1984-85 the federal deficit was $38.5 billion. In this year's budget it is $35 billion. In essence it stayed the same in dollar terms. The total deficit of all the provinces in 1984 was just slightly over $8 billion. Today the deficit of all provinces is $24 billion, which is a 300 per cent increase.
The message is that the provincial administrations now show the same symptoms that plagued the federal Liberals in the early 1980s: a combination of large deficits, growing debts and rising debt charges that mutually fuel each other.
Let us look at some of the pressures that were on governments to spend prior to today. We know for example that between 1975 and 1990 the combined health, social services and education sectors represented a large and growing source of spending pressure.
Relative to total program spending between 1975 and 1990 these health, social services and education costs rose by almost 5 percentage points as a percentage of gross domestic product.
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What other factors have resulted in an increase in the GDP share of spending? First, we all know and recognize the growth in interest charges on the public debt. A second one is the growth in health care spending primarily reflected in the growing per capita demand for medical services.
When we talk about health care spending, what are some of the factors that are causing health care spending to increase? First, we have the aging of the Canadian population. We are seeing new medical technologies which result in new treatments. We are also seeing the growth in the number of services per physician within a system that pays physicians on a fee for service basis.
That is the past and we all recognize those pressures on spending. What about the future? Where are we going to see the future pressures on spending? One will be because of changes in demands for existing programs. For example, the aging of the population will continue to increase and as a proportion of the population the demand for medical care and age care facilities will clearly increase.
At the same time there will be a drop in the age of university students that will result in lower university enrolment. We are seeing the same pressures, because of the economic restructuring, on unemployment insurance, in the Canada Assistance Plan and in labour market training.
People want to see more money spent on environment and justice issues. We have some things that are going to lower the cost to government such as falling interest rates, falling inflation and certainly the increased public concern on the over-all level of taxation.
What I want to do is quickly summarize. The spending pressures I have mentioned on health care, education, employee retraining, environment and justice are all issues that are a joint responsibility between the provinces and Ottawa. In many cases Ottawa is just a silent financial partner. It makes sense to me that if we are going to deal with these spending pressures, does Ottawa do it unilaterally? Does the finance minister just say that this is the way it is going to be and download the problems on to the provinces? Or do they want to work together?

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The Budget
I congratulate the finance minister who has demonstrated the desire to give co-operative federalism a chance to work and an opportunity so that all governments at all levels can move in the same direction in reducing the debt and encouraging economic growth.
I trust that in that forum the moral suasion of the taxpayers will encourage the federal and provincial finance ministers to succeed together.


John Harvard: Mr. Speaker, one really has to wonder why the finance minister brought in his spring 1993 budget. It is completely lifeless. It has no imagination, no ideas, no strategy to address our pressing economic problems and no hope for the 1.5 million unemployed Canadians.
It shows beyond all doubt that this government has run out of gas. It is old and tired. The only thing left is for this government to be put away into the history books. I am confident Canadian voters will do just that in the coming election.
This budget must be particularly galling to the few remaining supporters of federal Conservatives who believe the government was serious about attacking the deficit. The budget does nothing about deficit reduction. In fact it forecasts an increase of over $1 billion in the deficit.
To many of us, however, that comes as no surprise. This government has talked big about deficit reduction, almost from the first day it took office in 1984. Consider the fact that the deficit is $8 billion over its 1992 projection, a projection given by the finance minister. Right now it stands well over $30 billion. In the meantime our debt under almost nine years of Tory rule has shot up well over 100 per cent, from about $169 billion to almost $460 billion.
This government has howled long and hard about the deficit it inherited. That may well have been fair at the time it took office, but the government cannot avoid its responsibilities. It has had nine long years to deal with our deficit and debt problems and in that regard it has failed miserably. Blaming politicians from another time just does not wash.
The 1993 budget does absolutely nothing to address the severe problems of unemployment. There are at
least 1.5 million Canadians out of work and I suspect the real figure is well above that. There is no hope for the unemployed in this budget. There are no attempts at job creation, no strategy to get people back to work. Let us face it. Until we dramatically reduce unemployment there is no hope of returning to prosperity and attacking the deficit in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the gross domestic product.
Over and above the pain they inflict on workers and their families the huge unemployment figures are damaging to the economy. It is estimated the cost of one million unemployed Canadians is somewhere between $20 billion and $25 billion annually. A big chunk of that is the payout through unemployment insurance, $19 billion a year right now. That is a huge cost to our economy. Think what we could do with $19 billion if the unemployed were working. I should say here that the $19 billion does not include welfare payments.
Moreover, if we create jobs for the unemployed they in turn will regain their rightful status as productive citizens. They will pay taxes on their earnings. That is how the government wall be able to reduce, if not totally eliminate the deficit.
Economic growth and creating jobs are the essential tools in attacking the deficit. Another tool is controlling government spending and eliminating waste is part of that. This government believes only that cuts in government services promise a return to prosperity. That is not true. Without economic growth, without creating jobs, this economy is not going anywhere. It can talk all it wants about increased productivity but if we do not get economic growth and we do not get more jobs, the economy is not going anywhere.
Canada needs a new vision. Canada needs new fiscal management. The old Tory crowd does not have it. They are over their heads. At a time like this my advice to the government is quite simple: Stand aside and let someone with ideas and vision take over.
We have a vision. We have proposed, for example, an infrastructure program to pump some life in the short term back into the economy. A renewed physical infrastructure is one of the building blocks of a new prosperity. We have proposed a national apprenticeship program. This would involve the co-operation of senior govern-
April 28, 1993

ments, the private sector, labour and educational institutions.
The private sector needs trained young workers. Many students grow disillusioned with the traditional school system. I should point out that Germany graduates about
600,000	apprentices a year while we graduate only 24,000. An apprenticeship program would be a challenging alternative for many of these students. It would help them make the transition from school into the work force.
We also propose a Canada youth service. This program would enable young people to give service to their country and develop essential skills and work habits in the process.
We would build a value added economy. That is the way of the future. We are far too prone in Canada to market raw materials. When we ship raw materials out of the country for processing, we are shipping jobs out of Canada. That is why we assign so much importance to value added activity.
We would revitalize the small business sector. While the government has been cosying up to big international business, small business has been neglected. When the government was killing the economy with high interest rates and the high dollar, the pleas of small business were ignored. Ask small businesses about their problems in getting financial assistance from banks or other financial institutions. We are committed to addressing that problem.
We are also committed to a global trade strategy. I emphasize it is a global trade strategy. Beyond our difficulties with the free trade agreement, our trading interests transcend the United States. We must look for trade growth in Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
Another move we Liberals would make, and this perhaps is the most important of all, is that we would forge new partnerships with all stakeholders in Canada. That includes the provinces, the private sector, labour, the municipalities and volunteer agencies. We have thought long and hard about this new approach to our problems because the Tory approach has been a disaster.
Leaving it to the big boys does not work. Trickle down does not work. It did not work in Britain. It did not work in the United States, where trickle down took that country from the greatest creditor country to the great-
The Budget
est debtor nation. That took only eight years under that dreadful actor from Hollywood.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the finance minister's budget is its central message and that message is this: Tory economics work, everything is okay and the government is not changing a thing, it is staying the course. It is that message that tells us just how out of touch this government is.
I want to remind everyone that there are at least 1.5 million Canadians unemployed. Almost 400,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, lost forever. There have been over 200,000 business and personal bankruptcies since 1989 and about one million Canadians depend on food banks every year. Despite the havoc wrought by Tory policies the finance minister pays no attention to them. If he had admitted to even some self-doubt perhaps his budget would have received more understanding.
Marshall Cohen, the chief executive officer of the Molson companies, recently questioned the standard faith of neo-conservative economics. That faith says that the current economic restructuring will pay off, that ultimately for every job eliminated two will be created. Mr. Cohen says it is time to question that faith and it is time to think that Canada is not heading for a jobless recovery but a jobless economy.
I think Mr. Cohen is in touch with reality. This government's finance minister is not. His mind is elsewhere. There is no indication that he will ever come to his senses. There is only one remedy for this. All Canadians know what that remedy is and I think they are more than eager to apply it at the next election.
I want to finish by saying that the budget cuts about $90 million from regional development in the current fiscal year and another $100 million in 1995. To me that is madness. Regional development has been a unique Canadian way to develop the economy from coast to coast. It has been of particular help to the have-less regions. I come from a have-less region.
In Winnipeg we have called for a new core area agreement. This budget is not going to give us that. We have called for a new cultural industries agreement, something like the one we had a few years ago, one that created a lot of jobs and provided a lot of spin-offs in the economy. It looks like we are not going to get it. This budget does absolutely nothing for the port of Churchill,

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The Budget
a port that must be preserved and if preserved would be a great help to prairie farmers.
I will conclude by adding one comment to a remark made by the member for Ontario. He boasted about this budget taking 300,000 Canadians off the list who until now have paid quarterly income tax instalments. He is right that far. What he neglected to say is that while the government is proposing to take 300,000 people off that list, the government has added 500,000 new names to the list of those who have to pay quarterly tax instalments. I wanted to mention that in order that his remarks are put in their proper context.


Patrick (Pat) Anthony Sobeski: Mr. Speaker, I would just like to put a few comments on the record about employment.
The manufacturing sector in Ontario has begun to see the recovery. Since October manufacturing employment has risen by 2.5 per cent or 42,000 jobs in Ontario. Since August 1992 in Canada full-time employment has increased 200,000. So far this year full-time employment has increased 66,000 across Canada. At this pace that would represent a 260,000 job increase. I wanted to put those comments on the record.
I would also like to put this comment on the record. This comes from Conestoga College. It is a release indicating its graduates are doing well in securing employment. It says: "The 1991-92 graduates of Conestoga College did well in locating and securing employment within six months of completing their program of study. Of the 838 graduates available for employment, 694 almost 700, or 83 per cent were successful. In spite of the economic uncertainty employers continue to demonstrate their confidence in our program by hiring Conestoga College graduates. Eighty-two per cent of our graduates found employment, 62 per cent of them directly related to the their programs".
This is excellent news in these times of high unemployment. Conestoga College in Kitchener is doing an excellent job in producing graduates. I wonder if the hon. member wants to congratulate the students in their success, but also all those companies that are starting to grow, making employment for these graduating students.


John Harvard: Mr. Speaker, I am always prepared to offer my congratulations to anyone who is able to
prosper in this country, to do well despite Tory economic policies and that is what is happening. A lot of people out there are showing plenty of resourcefulness and industry despite the disastrous policies of the government.
Let me just say that this member and all other members on that side of the House can crow about certain success stories. That is fine in itself, but we are not going to have true prosperity and success in turning the economy around until we get people back to work. It is a Pyrrhic victory. That is what it is.
The member for Cambridge mentions those figures. They are happy figures. I am happy for them, but we have to address unemployment. Until we get the unemployment figures down we will not get the deficit down, we will not get the debt down, and we really will not have a return of prosperity. That is where the government is wrong. It does not seem to understand that until it attacks the unemployment problem this economy is never going to go anywhere.
Having increased productivity and increased trade figures is only a partial answer. It does not answer the misery people are feeling out there. There is a lot of despair because they do not have jobs and they lack confidence in the future.


Ralph Ferguson: Mr. Speaker, this budget is nothing more than a stale leftover from last December's failed economic statement, twice warmed over and reheated. In fact in the dying days of this Conservative government I cannot help but think of this budget as one of the first signs of rigor mortis setting in.
There is absolutely nothing in this budget that will get the economy moving again and will put Canadians back to work. Canada's 11 per cent unemployment is the highest of any G-7 country. There are 1.5 million Canadians still looking for work and suffering hardships in society that they should not be suffering in this day and age.
On page 21 of the budget the Minister of Finance says:
The medium-term projection underlying the fiscal plan is based
on the assumption that some excess capacity in labour and product
markets will remain through 1998.
April 28, 1993

The Budget
That is little hope for the unemployed. In plain English this has made it clear there will not be enough jobs for Canadians five years from now if this government stays in office.
Studies have confirmed that unemployed Canadians cost the federal government more than $20 billion a year each and every year this government remains in office. These unemployed people are not able to contribute to society, contribute to our economy and feed back through the system.
In 1991, 1.4 million Canadians were out of work and last year 1.5 million were out of work. If over the last two years half these people had been working, the government would have saved close to $40 billion. That is $10 billion more than this budget proposes to cut mostly four or five years from now.
Nor is there anything in this budget for Canadian youth who already face dismal summer job prospects. Youth unemployment is currently at 17.6 per cent. With this budget the government is now telling Canadians that it is going to solve all of its economic problems by assuming strong economic growth. Yet the government has no detailed economic plan to nurture innovation, training and infrastructure, the building blocks of a strong and prosperous economy.
However the government's own budget document states that projected growth "will not bring the economy to full capacity utilization for 1998". In other words, Canada is still in for five more years of recession-like conditions with economic activity at levels well below that of the 1980s.
There are no economic priorities in a $5.8 billion face-saving gesture for the Minister of National Defence. The budget keeps Canada's helicopter program intact, and meanwhile the Tories are stealing from the poor by postponing their January GST tax rebate.
The 1992-93 deficit is $8 billion higher than the Minister of Finance said it would be in the February 1992 budget and $1.1 billion more than he said it would be in his economic statement last December.
No wonder the dollar is dropping. No wonder there are questions about our credit rating. Not even Bay Street believes this government any more.
In 1989 the government forecasted a national debt of $440 billion in 1993-94. Now it is forecasting a debt of $491 billion. That is an increase of $51 billion over the last three years in its forecast. In fact the $35.5 billion deficit for 1992 is the highest deficit ever reported in the House of Commons. In 1984 when the government was first elected there was an accumulated debt of $168 billion, accumulated in the 117 years since Confederation.
However, after only nine years of this government's mismanagement, the debt ballooned to $458 billion. So much for fiscal management and the Conservative 1988 election slogan of "managing change".
This economy is not a gambling table. We need solid forecasting. We need solid projections. We need solid growth in this country. It cannot be achieved through the roll of the dice. So much for fiscal management.
The government claims the budget will deliver $30 billion in spending cuts and other measures. Only $3.8 billion is forecasted to be delivered in the upcoming fiscal year. Out of that $2.8 billion was already announced in December and $615 million is only a shift in the timing of the GST credit. Calling that a saving is like skipping December's mortgage payment and claiming in January that money has been saved.
The projections of the Minister of Finance confirm that the Conservative leadership candidates, the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of the Environment, were out to lunch when they promised to eliminate the deficit in four to five years respectively. Either that or the leading Tory leadership candidates are saying the Minister of Finance does not know what he is talking about.
More than the Minister of Finance do not know what they are talking about. The candidates do not know what they are talking about. Unless they come out with some creative new programs that will stimulate the economy it is going to get even worse.
There are no positive viewpoints. I should say that perhaps one of the things that might be close to being positive would be that there are no additional cuts to the federal-provincial transfer payments. Three hundred thousand Canadians, mostly senior citizens, will no longer have to pay income tax in quarterly instalments. I was pleased to see there were no further tax increases.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
However, after 38 consecutive tax increases by this government, this commitment is a case of too little too late.
Since 1984 revenues collected from persons have increased by 126 per cent while revenues collected from corporations have increased by only 1.8 per cent. This budget does not improve that. It offers yet another series of measures designed to save corporations $400 million over the next five years and no similar tax break for ordinary Canadians.
I do note in this budget document the government finally recognizes that since 1984 Canada has been buying more goods and services from other countries than we have been selling and thus we have had record current account deficits. I have spoken about this in the House before on at least three or four different occasions. Last spring Canada was running a record current account deficit of $29 billion. In 1984, before this government was elected, the current account deficit did not exist. There was a current account surplus of some $2.7 billion.
We have not had a single quarter, let alone a single year, in which we recorded current account surpluses since this government came to power. Arthur Donnor, a prominent economist, argues that each $20 billion worth of current account deficits equates to roughly 500,000 jobs lost. Now we know where the jobs went. It is the current account deficits.
The interest payments and the dividends going out of this country are draining our economy, a haemorrhage that must be stopped.
In terms of agriculture I was shocked to read the budget papers because I saw what was happening to the method of payment of the Crow. I am going to put on record a letter from Prairie Pools Inc. It says that the federal budget is a coercion. It is dated Monday, April 26, 1993. I quote:
The Federal Government's plan to cut an additional 10 per cent from its expenditures on western grain transportation assistance unless there is a change in the method of payment amounts to coercion of western grain and oilseed producers.
"It appears to us that since the government has not been able to get agreement from farmers to change the method of payment through consultation, it has decided to force the issue with spending cuts," said PPI Chairman Ken Edie.
The federal budget indicates that on top of the 10 per cent cut announced for 1993-94-another 5 per cent will be cut in 1995-96
and another 5 per cent will be cut in 1996-97. However, it also indicates that these cuts could be reallocated to support a change to a producer payment for the federal assistance.
The 10 per cent cuts announced in the December economic statement will remove $73 million from the prairie agriculture industry in each of the next two crop years. Tlie additional cuts announced in the budget today would take another $65 million out of the prairie farm economy. "These are cuts that farmers who are already suffering from depressed prices and rising input costs, can ill afford, " said Mr. Edie.
"Prairie farmers have always tried to work with governments to develop policy and programs in the best interests of the industry and the national economy," said Mr. Edie. "We believe that changes should be made through negotiation and agreement by all major stakeholders, not through strong arm methods".
To include such coercion in a budget that completely circumvents the consultation process is unacceptable to society. Where is the trust this country is built on?
We need something positive. We need to rekindle the spirit of pride that built this nation. We need to rekindle the spirit of positive programs, programs that those on this side of the House are prepared to deliver.


Patrick (Pat) Anthony Sobeski: Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a question of my colleague from Lambton- Middlesex. He talked in terms of billions and I would like to put it in simpler terms.
Being from Ontario, when Bob Rae took office 12 cents of every tax dollar went to pay the debt. If he does not get his social contract with the 900,000 public servants in Ontario, by the end of two years 26 cents of every tax dollar will go toward the debt.
I mention this because people can understand it. Back in 1979 the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans stood in the House and proposed a budget of 18 cents a gallon, and the voters turfed him out because everyone could understand 18 cents.
In 1967 when the Liberals were in office, centennial year, 11 cents of every dollar went toward the debt. That left 89 cents for program spending. By 1983 as a result of Liberal fiscal management, 32 cents of every tax dollar went to pay interest on the debt and that left only 68 cents for programs plus what had to be borrowed.
Instead of talking in billions would the hon. member, my colleague from Ontario, please explain to me in simple terms how going from 11 cents of each tax dollar to 32 cents has not caused a hole, exactly the same hole
April 28, 1993

that Bob Rae is causing for the next government in Ontario?


Ralph Ferguson: Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate the question. The member raised a very good issue. Over 24 years, from 1960 to 1983, the increased cost of servicing the debt amounted to 21 cents. Then in the Tory years that followed it ballooned to 43.2 cents.
I cannot speak on behalf of socialists in Ontario. I understand there is a difference of opinion between them and socialists here in Ottawa and I do not want to get into that today.
I point out that one thing that really concerns me is that a lot of those public debt charges are going out of the country. They have borrowed outside Canada. In 1984, 92 per cent of all federal government borrowings were from Canadians: Canadian banks, lending institutions and Canadians themselves.
That has dropped off dramatically. That is one of the things that is wrong with this government's policy. It is not borrowing the money from Canadians who want to reinvest in Canada. It is borrowing it offshore and the interest is all going out of the country. Is it any wonder we are in deep trouble? It is going out of the country. It is not benefiting Canadians. It is not giving them a chance to invest in their own country.
That is why I say that with positive programs we can rekindle a sense of pride in being Canadian and rebuild this country. We have done it before after both world wars and we will do it again. Just watch us.


Mr. Allan Koury (Hochelaga-Maisonneuve):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to take part in the debate on the April 26 budget, but above all I would like to send a message to my constituents in Hochelaga- Maisonneuve.
First of all, there will be no tax increases.
I would like to go on to the measures announced in the budget and provide some background as well. There will be no new taxes, less government borrowing, lower taxes, more jobs and more choices for the future. That is what
The Budget
people want and that is the direction in which this government is going.
Spending cuts, together with other measures in this budget and combined with the cutbacks announced in the December 1992 statement, will yield savings of $3.8 billion in 1993-94, rising to $7.9 billion in 1997-98. Over the five-year period the total savings will be more than $30.7 billion.
Between 1993-94 and 1997-98 the average annual growth of program spending will be maintained at 1.7 per cent. This means that, allowing for inflation, there will be zero real growth in program spending.
Reducing the deficit means less government borrowing, lower interest rates and lower taxes, all of which will stimulate economic growth and job creation.
The budget reinforces the action taken in the February 1992 budget and the December 1992 statement, both containing measures aimed at supporting economic recovery.
Specific measures include a one-year exemption from unemployment insurance premiums for new employees of small businesses; a 10 per cent investment tax credit for small businesses; an increase in the loan limit under the Small Businesses Loans Act to $250,000, and a two-year extension of the Small Business Financing Program.
Cuts in personal income taxes and enriching and restructuring the child benefit system will inject $1.7 billion into the economy this year alone. However, we are not the only ones facing financial challenges. These are difficult times and many countries are carrying a heavy load. In fact most are introducing spending cuts similar to our own.
Measures to promote job creation are also included in this budget, which reinforces the measures introduced in the February 1992 budget and the December 1992 economic and fiscal statement by focusing on a sound monetary and fiscal policy, streamlining government spending, upgrading the skills of Canadians and encouraging the private sector to expand and create jobs.
It is essential to restore the financial health of the private sector and thus restore its confidence and facilitate the investment that is essential to economic growth and job creation.

April 28, 1993
The Budget
The home buyers' plan helps Canadians buy or build homes using funds from their RRSPs, and last year
148,000	Canadians took advantage of this plan.
The government has made accommodation more affordable for Canadians, thanks to lower interest rates, the possibility of using RRSP funds for the initial downpayment on a home, and the availability of 95 per cent mortgage insurance for first home buyers.
The federal government, operating through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, will no longer fund housing through 35-year subsidy commitments which impose most of the costs on future taxpayers.
However CMHC will look at ways to increase efficiencies in the financing and delivery of its programs and resulting savings will be reinvested in social housing to maintain existing housing stock in good repair and provide some scope for new commitments. Increased efficiencies will be obtained as a result of direct funding.
CMHC will maintain its current funding level of about $2 billion a year. Similarly, special purpose funding for shelters for victims of family violence, the National Strategy for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities and for native housing on reserves will continue.
Considering the overriding need to restrain spending increases and control the deficit and the national debt, the federal government cannot afford to let new social housing commitments accumulate as it did in the past.
The government, through the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, will be able to maintain its housing stock by spending $2 billion annually and thus meet the needs of 650,000 low income families seeking accommodation. Quebec's subsidy share will remain more or less the same, at $685 million annually. Furthermore, a safety net including the cost of shelter for the indigent will still be provided under the Canada Assistance Plan.
To help control unemployment insurance costs and protect the integrity of the unemployment insurance account the average benefit rate will be maintained at 57 per cent of average weekly insurable earnings after 1995.
For the sake of comparison, in the United States the benefit rate is 50 per cent for a period of six months, while in Japan the rate is 48 per cent for a maximum of 7 months. Canada, with its rate of 57 per cent for a maximum of 12 months compares very favourably in this respect.
In the December 1992 statement we announced that funding for regional development would be reduced by 10 per cent for both 1993-94 and 1994-95.
As a result of measures introduced in the present budget, funding will be reduced by a further $90 million in 1993-94 up to a total of $415 million in 1997-98.
As for repayable contributions, by 1997-98 regional development funding will be reduced by $100 million per year, based on the pool of funds expected as a result of the contribution repayment policy announced in the 1990 budget.
I see you are signalling, Mr. Speaker, but I have not quite finished.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The hon. member will have a couple of minutes left plus 10 minutes for questions or comments when the budget debate starts again.
It being 7.45 p.m., it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings, pursuant to Standing Order 84(4), and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the amendment to the amendment that is now before the House. The question is on the amendment to the amendment.
Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment to the amendment?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those in favour of the amendment to the amendment will please say yea.


Some hon. members:: Yea.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those opposed will please say nay.


Some hon. members:: Nay.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: In my opinion the nays have it.
April 28, 1993

The Budget
And more than five members having risen:


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Call in the members.


PAIRED MEMBERS
[Stage Direction]
Andre
Attewell
Belsher
Bird
Blackburn (Jonquiere) Blenkarn
Bouchard (Roberval)
Brightwell
Cadieux
Casey
Champagne (Champlain)
Clark (Brandon-Souris)
Collins
Corbeil
Cote
Crosbie (St. John's West)
Danis
DeBlois
Della Noce
Dick
Domm
Duplessis
Epp
Feltham
Members
Atkinson
Beatty
Bernier
Bjomson
Blais
Bosley
Boyer
Browes
Campbell (Vancouver Centre)
Chadwick
Clark (Yellowhead)
Cole
Cooper
Corbett
Couture
Crosby (Halifax West)
Darling
de Cotret
Desjardins
Dobbie
Dorin
Edwards
Fee
Ferland
Cardiff
Halliday
MacLaren
Young (Acadie-Bathurst)
[Stage Direction]
Anderson
Comuzzi
MacAulay
Wilson (Etobicoke Centre)
Madam Deputy Speaker:: I declare the amendment to the amendment lost.
It being 8.16 p.m., this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m. pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 8.16 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Thursday, April 29, 1993