Mr. Speaker, this morning we notice that there is yet another international report that speaks of the need for Canada to invest in children. It is very much connected with the budget that we are debating today.
The annual UNESCO report on education in developing nations finds that the majority of countries, especially Canada, need to focus their efforts on policies that address the needs of an age group that it says is often overlooked. The report urges Canada to ensure that early childhood education is a high priority.
We know that in this budget, that is proposed for April 2007, the money for early childhood education will be eliminated. This follows a report that comes from the OECD which says that Canada is in fact at the bottom of the heap. It says that Canada has a failing grade. The report said that it is Canada's dirty little secret that we have actually tumbled down all the way to the bottom in the ranking. The report said that Canada should be investing at least $10 billion, which is the OECD goal, and 1% of the GDP as the minimum government investment.
We are at this time a dismal .03%, which is a fraction of the OECD target. It is no wonder that Canadian productivity is slipping and that Canadian businesses and industries are worried about our competitiveness and the competitiveness of our workforce. The OECD has clearly made a link between the national investment in quality early childhood education and productivity and competitiveness and growth.
I want to speak a bit about some of the kids in this country. A few years I asked children in my riding of Trinity—Spadina what they would do to make the world a better place. A five-year old wrote back and drew a very cute picture. She said that she wished from God that there would be money to buy groceries.
If we think about it, Canada is a really rich county. We have children in Canada that are praying to God for enough money to buy groceries. This means that obviously in her house and in the houses of some of her neighbours and friends there is no money to buy groceries. This means that oftentimes this little girl would go to bed and wake up hungry and would not be able to concentrate at school.
We see this especially in aboriginal communities. There are boil water advisories. We know of kids that have to sleep in shifts because there is not enough room in the bed in their house for them to be able to sleep at the same time. There is often only one room and there are several children.
In this kind of situation it is inexcusable that the government in this budget would not invest in aboriginal housing and early childhood education. Any money that the government has put aside in trust is last year's budget surplus. That money came from Bill C-48. This was the NDP budget money. These are the only dollars that the government is in fact investing in aboriginal housing, foreign aid and many other critically important areas.
I particularly remember a young person from the Dene nation. She had tears in her eyes when she talked about the sense of hopelessness that she had in her area. Yet, there are so many young people with many talents and skills to offer if they were to receive the kind of support and training that they so desperately need. These are young people who want to lead their communities and set a good example. We have not given them the tools in the budget to contribute.
On the youth employment front, I have received many letters from people in Toronto who talk about the importance of investing in young people, especially in the summer time. We know that recently there was a budget cut of at least $55 million. At this time we should be investing more on youth employment rather than cutting it.
I have a letter from Jacob Blomme, a concerned student, who talks about the job he has during the summer and how essential it is for him to have the opportunity to work in his field of study, so that he can make connections and be job ready when he finishes school. He knows that he is going to graduate with a $25,000 debt, which scares him because he is going to have to pay it back himself. Without jobs and training in his field of work, it is going to be even harder for him to find a job in the future. These are the young people of our future.
I have other letters. I have one from Canadian Crossroads International, for example, that talks about hiring dozens of young interns in recent years during the busy summer months to train young people overseas as volunteers by creating and supporting networks, working with HIV Without Borders, helping to manage the international AIDS conference in 2006, and supporting fundraising and ongoing research for organizations.
There are other organizations that say they desperately need money to invest in young people. They talk about the youth employment program standing out as a bright light of hope and empowerment in their own communities.
There are youth organizations that, because of training in the arts, were able to create many jobs, like the Fringe Festival in Toronto. There is a ticketed attendance of 47,000 people and $340,000 was given back to artists in the neighbourhood. When we invest in young people and in the arts, as a country we actually get the money back in our budget.
There is really no excuse. We know there is a surplus of $13 billion and none of it is invested in people or the future of our youth. It is the same with the new surplus of $6.7 billion. There is nothing invested to help people break the cycle of poverty or to eradicate child poverty. With the surplus, somehow the government feels it can tell Canadians they are overtaxed. It slashes programs and calls for tax cuts and yet our children go to bed hungry. I do not know whether members of Parliament know what it is like to go to bed hungry, but there are certainly a lot of those kids in this country.
If we look outside this country, we know that foreign aid is desperately in need of getting a boost in terms of investment. We know that more than 800 million people go to bed hungry around the world and 50,000 people die everyday from poverty related causes. That is why we absolutely have to increase Canadian aid by 18% annually and commit to a plan to meet the internationally agreed target for aid spending of .7% of our GDP by 2015.
We must also raise the annual Canada child tax benefit to $4,900 per child and ensure that all low income kids receive the full benefit of this program because that is in fact the demand of Make Poverty History. Think of what we could do with $20 billion. There are so many lives we could touch, but I fear the government does not get it. Perhaps it is not surprising that the government has so few women in their caucus.
The government thinks that the war on poverty is really a war on the poor. It thinks poverty is a nasty little habit that should be punished, stopped and penalized. It punishes the poor and gives tax breaks to those who do not need it. It gives the biggest baby bonus allowance to the spouses of the wealthiest people and the least to single mothers. We have a war against the poor rather than a war against poverty.
When we asked the government why it continued this track, why we were here day after day, it said it was because the Liberals were just as bad in the last 13 years. Imagine that. We had 13 years of Liberal neglect of important programs and the government used that as an excuse to reward the wealthy and punish the poor. This government seems determined to behave just as badly as the Liberals and to be even meaner in the neglect of social programs.
What kind of dumb ambition is that? That is the kind of ambition that we do not need in this House of Commons. We want to compete to be the best, not compete to be the worst, which is what is happening right now. Imagine being worse than the Liberals. I cannot even imagine that, but it is happening in front of me.
This House should rise together and demand better for refugees, children, senior citizens, women, aboriginals, immigrants, and for all of us. This budget is a sham. The poverty is real and more children are going hungry during this Parliament.
