Finally, Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien have come clean about the billions they are accumulating in their surplus.
In his sixth annual fall update, Finance Minister Martin announced that, over the next five years, the federal government will accumulate a surplus of at least $95-billion.
He is consciously underestimating this figure by tens of billions.
All through the 1990s, Martin consciously exaggerated the size of the federal deficit. He needed the deficit as a whip to bully people into accepting his drastic cuts to social programs.
By 1997, his predictions had become ridiculous. He was predicting a deficit of $17-billion. In fact, there was a $3.5-billion surplus that year.
So you can bet that the real federal surplus over the next five years will be far higher than $95-billion.
This surplus has been created by making the poor and the working class live in misery.
Employment Insurance is just one example.
Over the past five years, the feds have taken in $21-billion more than they have paid out in employment insurance premiums.
Yet in 1997, only 24 percent of the unemployed qualified for benefits, compared to 54 percent in 1990, when the unemployment rate was three percent lower!
Martin has carved out his surplus on the backs of the unemployed.
But who will reap the benefits?
"We are going to bring our taxes down with exactly the same fervour that we proceeded to eliminate the deficit," Martin told the Commons finance committee.
We know from the experience in Ontario and the United States that this means tax cuts for the rich. The poor and workers will see hardly a penny.
This in a society where the poor and workers are sinking under a weight of debt and cutbacks.
In Canada as a whole:
€ One in five seniors live in poverty, according to the National Advisory Council on Aging.
€ Fifty-nine percent of elderly patients admitted to hospital for acute care suffer from, or are at risk of, malnutrition, according to the Canadian Medical Association.
€ The Innu people of Labrador and Quebec, living in terrible poverty, have the highest suicide rate in the world, according to the rights group Survival for Tribal peoples. Nearly one-third of the entire Innu population have attempted suicide.
In Ontario, Canada's richest province:
€ One-quarter of tenants, or 300,645 households, are paying out more than 50 percent of their income on rent, according to a group called Putting Housing Back on the Public Agenda. Yet, "there is almost no new affordable housing being built" in the province according to the group's spokesperson.
€ Almost half of Ontario's 170 hospitals expect to run deficits totalling $265 million this year.
€ Ontario universities need at least $1-billion more in excess funding to deal with the flood of students expected in the next few years.
And in Toronto, Canada's richest city:
€ Sixty percent of those who rely on emergency shelters would have qualified for employment insurance, workers' compensation or disability benefits before these programs were viciously slashed, according to the Income Protection Group.
€ Seventy-eight percent of Toronto residents earning less than $30,000 said they are experiencing financial difficulties, compared to only 35 percent for those earning more than $60,000, according to an Angus Reid Poll.
"If the poor are more pessimistic and the rich are more optimistic, it would coincide with reality," said Anne Golden, president of the United Way of Greater Toronto. "In terms of market incomes, there is a growing wealth income gap in this country."
And this is the situation for workers and the poor after seven years of economic expansion!
The conclusion couldn't be more obvious.
Spend the surplus. Restore our social services.