My friend across the way says rubbish, but it was the government's industry department that said it. If he wants to say rubbish, he should say it to his minister because it came from his department.
These are some of the concerns the official opposition has, which were not addressed in the budget. There has been all kinds of talk about tax relief. The parliamentary secretary wants us to believe that taxes will go down $100 billion over the next five years. That is untrue. He knows very well that a big chunk of that was a cancellation of future tax increases that were automatically slated because we did not have indexation of the tax system. To the member, cancellation of future tax increases is not a tax cut.
The truth is that taxes will go down from levels of last year by about $43.5 billion. What that does not take into account is the huge tax increases between 1993 and, I believe, it was 1999-2000. In fact, between 1999 and 2000, we saw taxes as a per cent of GDP go from 44% to 44.3% in Canada. Therefore, taxes are still ramping up as a per cent of GDP.
This would be of concern even if it was only an abstract debate. However I want to argue that this has a huge impact on people my Liberal friends purport to care the most about. Who does this hurt the most? Does it hurt members of parliament? Does it hurt people who have a lot of skills, abilities and capital already? No. Who it really hurts are people on the low end, people who come from regions of the country where there are already high levels of unemployment. When the economy is not moving at capacity, those are the people who cannot find jobs. If they can find jobs, they cannot find jobs that will allow them to support themselves or their families.
That is what makes me a little ticked about this budget. The government has done nothing to stimulate the economy to the point where we will be able to climb out of this recession and start to build upon our standard of living relative to the United States.
For Cape Breton coal miners who were laid off as a result of the closing of the mines recently, there is nothing in this budget that gives them hope that somewhere in the very near future they will start to see the economy moving to the point where jobs will be created so they can get jobs that will allow them to climb out of that hole. People from a northern part of the country, where we have high levels of unemployment, or a single mom or someone who does not have a very good education will be in the same situation . For people who are struggling in an inner city somewhere, there is no hope in this budget that they will be able to climb out of the trouble they are in any time soon. That is because the government does not have a vision over the long run. It does not have a plan that will give people the hope they need to continue to go forward.
I want to argue that it can happen. We saw the economy really boom in the United States during the last number of years. We saw unemployment drop down to 4%, the lowest levels in 40 years in the United States. Even the poorest quintiles of its population, the poorest quintile of the black population, which is the poorest visible minority in the entire United States, had an unemployment rate of 7%, which is lower than our unemployment rate today of 7.5%.
When the economy moves that fast, companies move into areas where there are high numbers of unemployed people and they give them jobs, skills and some hope. Unfortunately, we have not done that in Canada and the government has provided no plan in the budget to do it.
I will conclude really where I began. There are many things to criticize in the government. I touched on a few at the beginning. However, where I am coming from today is that the government does not have a long term vision to get our economy moving fast enough to raise standards of living to help people on the low end of the income scale. The government purports to care about those people, yet it failed completely to address this problem in the budget.