Mr. Speaker, I stand to speak on the Speech from the Throne, but I am having a hard time because there is so much smoke and mirrors in the speech. It is distorted to the extent that it is difficult to tell what is real and what is fantasy.
Here are some examples from the Speech from the Throne: “Canadians now have more money in their pockets because taxes have been cut”. Which Canadians? Certainly not the low income Canadians who have had their taxes increased by 5% by the government.
The speech also states: “Families now have real choice in child care”. That is $100 a month, $60 after taxes, this does nothing for early childhood development.
Another statement in the speech states: “a government committed to helping them get the medical care they need more quickly”. The Fraser Institute has just told us that in fact wait times have gone up. There is nothing in the speech to deal with health human resources which everyone knows is what will help to break wait times and there is nothing dealing with some of the management issues that we need to put in place to bring wait times down.
Another part of the throne speech states: “Our Government will stand up for Canada’s traditional industries. Key sectors including forestry”. I think we will recall that the government has done nothing to deal with the fires that occurred in the Okanagan, or to prevent them. It has done absolutely nothing for the pine beetle that is devastating British Columbia forests. It sold us out on softwood lumber, cheating our softwood lumber industries of $1 billion and now we are back speaking to the United States again about the same old thing. What fantasy world is the government living in is the question I want to ask?
What is interesting about the Speech from the Throne is what is not in it than for what is in it. The government speaks of concern for children but nowhere in the speech is there anything about sport or physical activity, yet one in four children in Canada are obese or overweight, 26% of them; 41% of children off reserve are obese or overweight and 55% of children on reserve are obese. Provincial and federal governments agree that we need to have a sport infrastructure to create daily physical quality activity for these children.
Our Liberal government put this in place. The Conservative government came into power and it disappeared. All the provinces are wondering where the sport infrastructure money is. It is not there. Two years later we still cannot hear about it. So much for caring about children.
As a physician I can tell the House that being overweight and obesity creates heart disease and will create type 2 diabetes, and our children will not live as long as their parents.
We have heard again in the Speech from the Throne about homelessness and housing. The government cancelled the Liberal $1.4 billion homelessness program. It cancelled the deal with the cities with which we were partnering to deal with housing and homelessness. The government obviously never spoke about housing before except in one word in the Speech from the Throne with absolutely no follow through on the sentence. It was just plunked into the middle of the sentence.
We know that in my city of Vancouver middle class people cannot afford to own their own homes. They cannot afford to rent affordable housing for their children. This is what is going on and we know that the government has absolutely nothing to say about it except words.
On arts and culture, why does it not surprise me that there is nothing about arts and culture in the Speech from the Throne? This is a government that voted against the UNESCO convention on the protection and promotion of cultural diversity, a convention that was written by and large by Canada over the past 10 years. The Conservative government voted against it.
We know that arts and culture is essential, not only for a sense of Canadian identity but for social cohesion in this very diverse geographic and demographic country. As well, in a post-industrial era if we wanted to really look at how Canada could be productive and competitive, we need to be able to stimulate creativity, imagination and innovation. That is what arts and culture is about. It is an essential part of an economic development plan.
While the Speech from the Throne is filled with all these wonderful buzz words, with all this fantasy and ideology, indeed I wonder if an ad agency wrote it because it is Pablum for the people.
There is such a lack of vision in the Speech from the Throne. It is so bland, so banal and lacking in substance that one has to wonder what there is to vote against. There is nothing there. It is a nothing speech.
Perhaps the only red flag in the speech that causes me some concern is the rehash of that old Brian Mulroney ideology about limiting federal spending and allowing provinces to opt out of shared programs. These programs are the glue that hold the country together.
Medicare will be gone if we allow provincial governments to opt out of shared programs. The federal government should be standing up for accessibility and portability for all Canadians, so that they can have access to social programs and medicare no matter where they live in the country, no matter what their language or who they are. That is not going to happen.
Mutual respect, which is a word used in the Speech from the Throne for this devolution of powers, actually in our language as Liberals means partnerships.
We spent a great deal of time as a government developing the social union framework agreement that allowed us to build partnerships with provinces and municipalities working together to create something that binds us as a country. This is gone. We see that the partnerships are gone. Obviously, it worked because we were able to develop shared programs on child care, the Kelowna accord, and we were able to develop a deal for cities in the country.
However, since the current government came into power, aided and abetted I might add by the NDP, it has actually had one agenda and that is to dismantle social programs, to dismiss the most vulnerable in our society, and to disregard agreements that have been written together by governments in the country.
Indeed, we are coming close to the Prime Minister's dream of firewalls around the provinces. But Liberals will continue to do what we do best: we will continue to respect Parliament. We will continue to ensure that Parliament works and that parliamentary democracy is honoured. We will be watching closely as the Speech from the Throne unfolds. We will stand on guard for a united, compassionate and strong Canada. That, Mr. Speaker, I promise you.