David Christopherson

[The Budget, February 28th, 2008]

Meow.

[The Budget, February 28th, 2008]

You're voting to kill it.

[The Budget, February 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the remarks of the hon. member. Under different circumstances, I probably would be supportive of them, but I have to say this for many of us on the real opposition benches. To have the official opposition members stand up and give speeches criticizing and condemning the inadequacies of this budget knowing full well that their caucus is going to let this go by, whether two or three of them vote against it, whether they all march out again, as Canadians have seen them do, whether they sit down and do not do anything, or whether they just do not come into the House, whatever mechanism they use, the reality is that on the budget the hon. member is criticizing he knows that his leader has said they will allow it to pass.

I have a simple question. Does the member not feel that he has absolutely no credibility in terms of being an opposition member in this place when he is not prepared to put his seat on the line for the values he says he cares about?

[The Budget, February 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the federal budget was a huge insult to many people in my riding of Hamilton Centre. We needed support for our struggling steel industry, assistance to increase the number of family doctors and to shorten wait times, help for seniors, the disabled, new Canadians and others who are too often left behind.

However, as The Hamilton Spectator pointed out:

... there was no help available for urban centres where local taxpayers are burdened with mounting costs for infrastructure repairs, replacement and overdue maintenance

John Dolbec, CEO of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, was even more scathing when he said:

...we feel there is at this point a crisis in the manufacturing sector, and I don't think there is an acknowledgement of the depth and breadth of that crisis in this budget.

For a government with record surpluses and that has just spent $10 billion on debt repayment and $14 billion on corporate tax cuts, this budget is a slap in the face to hard-working Hamiltonians who deserve more support and assistance from their own government.

I say shame on the Conservative government and shame on the Liberals for supporting the government.

[Petitions, February 27th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, flowing from a public meeting that I and the members for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek and Hamilton Mountain, held on Hamilton Mountain, I am honoured today to present a petition from residents in the city of Hamilton who are concerned about the Conservative government's undemocratic negotiation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

They call upon the government to stop this deal until a transparent, accountable and democratic process has been established, including a full debate and vote in the House of Commons.

[Health Care, February 4th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, Hamilton's home care patients, their families and our entire city won a significant victory last week when we forced the provincial government to reverse a decision to shut out the Victorian Order of Nurses and St. Joseph's Home Care from home care nursing contracts.

VON and St. Joseph's Home Care provide highly respected and professional nursing to clients who suffer from chronic illnesses and medical conditions. The loss of these excellent nurses would have been a devastating blow to some of our most vulnerable citizens. But the Hamilton community was not going to allow it to happen.

Over 1,500 people came out to a rally where many speakers, including the federal NDP leader and myself, came to the defence of our non-profit service providers. Our community convinced the province to cancel the Hamilton process and review the province-wide program behind it.

How did we win? It was the unions representing these nurses leading this fight and a unified community standing together for quality, non-profit health care in Hamilton. When we stick together, we win.

[Canada Pension Plan, December 11th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, there are over 70,000 seniors living in my hometown of Hamilton. One in four of them lives in poverty, dependent on the government pension programs they paid into all their lives, and assured that the money they invested in public pensions would be there when they needed it.

They have been betrayed. Payments under the Canada pension plan have always been woefully inadequate.

Now, the federal government has learned that Statistics Canada underestimated the inflation rate for the past five years, meaning that CPP has not even kept up to the cost of living increases. Seniors' pensions should have gone up much more, but they did not.

In their recent mini-budget, the Conservatives gave billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of our most profitable banks and oil companies, but withheld the money that seniors are rightfully owed.

That is right. The Conservatives took money from the pockets of our poorest seniors and handed it over to the wealthiest oil companies.

Our seniors deserve better. They deserve more respect and they certainly deserve their fair share of the very pensions for which they paid.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I do not believe I said anything about the Liberals, but I appreciate the opportunity.

It is good to see the member on his feet. He said he had been on his feet before, but obviously not often enough. We keep having votes and the Liberals keep sitting in their places. They are not standing up for the people of Canada, which is what we are doing here.

The member opposite has a lot of nerve to talk about being responsible. We are 100% proud of the fact that we took $4.8 billion of money that was scheduled to go pretty much to the same crowd as that one, and we diverted that, and that was the Liberals with the Conservatives' support, the Liberal plan. We took that $4.8 billion and put it into all the things that the hon. member talked about. What that member would really like is to be an NDPer so he could be proud of his agenda and his track record rather than having to defend not even standing up and voting in this place.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this bill. I want to thank my colleague from Sault Ste. Marie for raising the issue of poverty because had the budget measures that we are voting on in another hour or so contained a poverty reduction, let alone eradication, strategy, we would be debating the merits of that.

Being in opposition, we would probably say it is not good enough. That is our job, but as it is, there is nothing for us to talk about on the issue of poverty because there is no money at all in here that is going to poverty. That is not what this is about.

We are talking about, and make no mistake, tax cuts, and for the most part, while the Conservatives can stand and talk about a few dollars going here and a little bit going there, at the end of the day, average Canadians are going to see a couple of bucks here and there if they are lucky.

However, close friends of this government that are already making megabucks are going to love this bill because it gives them more megabucks. Why would they not vote for the Conservatives? What leaves me a little confused is that those who do not benefit from this support the Conservatives when they are pretty much laughing up their sleeves at those who do support them because the best of what they have to offer, meaning all that Canada has to offer, goes to their friends. Believe me, the friends they hang around with every day are not the same folks that the member for Sault Ste. Marie hangs around with every day.

Not only is there not a plan here to deal with poverty, there is nothing here about infrastructure, and every one of our communities has a dire need for infrastructure. We have a finance minister who is on the record saying that the federal government is not in the business of fixing potholes.

Well, somebody better do it and somebody better do something about our sewage systems, our water treatment systems, our bridges and our roads. Right now, the attitude of the government is that it is, “Not our problem. It does not say in the Constitution it is our job, so we are not even going to worry about it”.

Are we debating anything here that goes for infrastructure? No. Is a tax cut going to build a bridge? No. Is a tax cut going to provide clean water for anybody? No. This is about taking bags of Canadian money and giving it to people and entities that already have it.

If people have any doubt, they should check and see how well the banks, the oil companies and the gas companies do in this bill, and compare that to what people in poverty in Hamilton are going to see, or any of our communities in terms of building the infrastructure so they can have the economic strength to provide those things.

Leaving cities out there dangling, like they are somebody else's responsibility, and expecting that we are going to have a strong, vibrant national economy is dreaming in technicolour. Without strong local economies, we cannot have a strong national economy, but the government does not take that approach.

I must say that for some of us, this is a matter of déjà vu, not only on the message that tax cuts solve all problems, but even the person delivering it. I spent 13 years at the Ontario legislature. Far too many of those months and years I had to listen to the current federal finance minister espouse the same thing as the provincial finance minister.

Let me tell members how that worked. There is a very telling point here. When the Harris government came into power in Ontario, it brought in massive tax cuts, saying that tax cuts were good for the economy because they would stimulate the economy and create jobs, people would be working and paying taxes, and at the end of the day, the government would have more revenue to do the things that it says the NDP wanted to do but there would be no money to do it. It came out with massive tax cuts in 1995, 1996, and I believe it carried on into 1997.

At the same time, Canada and most of the world was just coming out of a recession from 1989. In about 1993, 1994 and 1995 the indicators were there, but it did not really take hold until about 1996, 1997 and 1998, which coincides with the Harris government coming into power.

The Harris government was able, at the end of its fiscal year, to stand up and say “see, we were right. We cut taxes and our revenue is up”. The next year the same government stood up and said “we were right again. Here are the tax cuts and here is the increase in revenue”.

Both facts were true. There were tax cuts and there was an increase in revenue. But it had far more to do with the overall world economy, particularly the North American economy and the U.S. picking up and generating economic activity, which then put demand on the services and products that we produced.

The telling point is that when, as happens in a cyclical economy, it started to edge down a bit after we had this rather strong rise going into the late 1990s, there was a bit of a turn. The finance minister, and I am not sure if it was the one that we have now or his successor, still had the same message.

What happened on the way to nirvana, as Conservatives saw it, was that the economy was going down. We all knew it. The indicators were there. Nobody was hiding it. It was a known fact that the economy was about to get a little bit soft. Guess what happened? I think if the government had this magical formula of tax cuts creating more income, that the more trouble the government was in the deeper the tax cuts should be because the greater the reward in terms of revenue would be. It makes sense. If it happened in good times, then it is a magic solution to grab on to in the bad times.

That is not the way it happened. The finance minister of the day postponed the tax cuts for the coming year. Why? It was because the economy and the Ontario budget could not afford it. There was no better example than a group that said tax cuts work miracles and pointed to the revenue increases and said, “see, we cut taxes and we get more money. We cut taxes and we get more money. We are incredibly smart, we are”. However, when the economy was turning down and the next round of tax cuts was ready to take hold and provide its next phase of the miracle, the provincial Conservative government postponed it.

This argument that tax cuts alone are a saviour is so untrue. It does so much damage to this country's ability to rise to all that we can be. That is why we are so upset about this budget. It is because this bill is all about taking care of those who already have.

Any argument that somehow a working stiff somewhere else in Canada is going to benefit because the gas and oil companies got a bigger tax break is a bad joke. It is deadly in some cases, when we talk about the circumstances people find themselves in.

Canada is losing thousands and thousands of jobs in Hamilton, tens of thousands of jobs in Ontario, and hundreds of thousands of jobs across Canada in our manufacturing sector alone. What is this bill going to do for that? I have no doubt we are going to hear from the Conservatives, as we have before, that the tax cuts are going to step in and solve the problem.

It is the old Reagan trickle down theory. If the government takes care of the big corporations and the well off, then the little people will get the crumbs that fall down. Do members remember the trickle down theory when it came back around? It was called Reaganomics.

We have to remember what everyone would say to one another at that time about the trickle down theory. People asked if they had been trickled on lately. We have had all the trickling that we need in this country.

We will stand proudly against this bill because it takes us in the wrong direction. It does not put the assets and the value that Canada has to where it will do the most good for the most people. We will continue to oppose an agenda that takes care of the very few and leaves the vast majority behind.

[Infrastructure, December 3rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would bring to the attention of the minister that those councillors did not march here for the exercise.

After a decade of Liberal neglect, property taxes are going up, the cost to repair or replace aging infrastructure is going up and the federal government's share is going down. The Conservative commitment is less than 10% of the $120 billion infrastructure deficit, while 60% of our infrastructure is more than 40 years old and desperately needs replacing.

How much of a property increase is the minister willing to see in his riding?