Bill C-28 (Historical)

Budget Implementation Act, 2006, No. 2

A second Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on May 2, 2006

Part 1 implements the following income tax measures proposed or referenced in Budget 2006:
–       the new Canada Employment Credit;
–       the new Textbook Tax Credit;
–       the new tax credit for public transit passes;
–       the new deduction for tradespeople’s tool expenses;
–       a complete exemption for scholarship income received in connection with enrolment at an institution which qualifies the student for the education tax credit;
–       the new Children’s Fitness Tax Credit;
–       a doubling, to $2,000 from $1,000, of the amount on which the pension income credit is calculated;
–       an extension of the $500,000 lifetime capital gains exemption, and various intergenerational rollovers, to fishers;
–       the new Apprenticeship Job Creation Tax Credit;
–       a reduction of the current 12 per cent small business tax rate to 11.5 per cent for 2008 and to 11 per cent thereafter;
–       an increase, to $400,000 from $300,000, of the amount that a small business can earn at the small business tax rate, effective January 1, 2007; and
–       a reduction of the minimum tax on financial institutions.
Part 2 implements the proposal in Budget 2006 to lower the income tax rate on large corporation dividends received by Canadians.
Part 3 implements the proposal in Budget 2006 to reduce excise duties for Canadian vintners and brewers.

Budget Implementation Act, 2006, No. 2

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we have talked about a lot. Since 2000, there have been billions of dollars of surplus, but 1.2 million children are living in poverty and no progress has been made in reducing it since that time. The child poverty rate is stuck at around 18% since 2000, which is no progress whatsoever.

The number of children living in poverty has risen by 20% since 1989. It has got worse. Low income couples with children are still $9,900 below the poverty line. The poverty rate is virtually unchanged at 12%, and 41% of the food bank users in 2004 were children. That is approximately 325,390 children.

There is absolutely no progress. Will the member of Parliament from the NDP acknowledge that those are the facts in front of us?

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

I would like to give the floor to my colleague.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Earlier today I took part in a meeting of the Standing Committee on Status of Women. I might have made a statement during the proceedings that some may have found inappropriate. I simply wish to apologize if I offended anyone and I withdraw anything that may have been offensive.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

The Chair thanks the hon. member for the point of order.

In response to the question from the hon. member for Trinity--Spadina, the clock has run out but I will allow the member for Acadie--Bathurst a few moments to respond. I would ask that he keep an eye on the Chair, please.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for stopping the clock for one minute.

The answer to this question is simple. We have a $50 billion surplus and yet 800,000 people do not qualify for employment insurance. With those 800,000 people who do not qualify there are children. That is why I said that we have more food banks now than we have ever had and there are children there too.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to speak against the government's Bill C-28. I do this because it is part of the budget of 2006, which we on this side of the House are completely against.

Although there are provisions in the bill that we do support, as they are Liberal proposals from our budget in 2005, we do not support the agenda of the minority Conservative government at this time. Speaking of its agenda, it is important to note that, as we campaigned on, the Conservatives are showing their true right wing hidden agenda now that they are in government.

When the Conservatives introduced the budget, they announced massive spending cuts within it, even though they were handed a $13 billion surplus from previous Liberal governments. Why would they do such a thing when we have so much richness in this country that was left to them by our government? They did it because they had to appease their ideological, right wing Conservative base.

What did the Conservatives do with those cuts and where did they cut? They eliminated the early learning and child care program agreement across this country. It seems that the signature of the Crown means absolutely nothing. The fact that the Government of Canada and the provinces signed an agreement means nothing. By the way, that also happened with the Kelowna accord. Everybody had signed the agreement but again those signatures meant nothing.

I will not go through all the draconian cuts to Status of Women Canada of $5 million, plus changing all the criteria, which means that equality seeking groups can no longer get funding. Justice seeking groups can no longer get funding. It seems that the minister responsible for Status of Women said that women were equal in this country anyway because it says so in the charter. The fact that we need programs and advocacy organizations to ensure that actually happens means nothing to them.

They made cuts to the literacy program. I do not know what the Conservatives have against people learning to read and write in order to improve their skills so they can get better jobs. Productivity in this country is a major issue. The government says that it is interested in productivity and yet it is cutting literacy education which is where it is most needed.

Cuts to affordable housing affect the most vulnerable in our society but the Conservatives do not care. They have their narrow voter base to support and that is as far as they will go. They pick and choose income tax measures that satisfy the minority voters who support the Conservative Party. They believe it does not matter if it is bad for the economy as long as it helps them to get a majority government. Even their own right wing think tank has said to them that cutting the GST is a bad move because it does nothing to increase productivity in this country, but they did it anyway.

The NDP is no better. It used its own agenda to force an election and now it must deal with the consequences of a Conservative government.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

It is with regret that I interrupt the member but we will now go to statements by members. When we return to the study of Bill C-28, there will be sixteen and a half minutes left in her time.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-28, A second Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on May 2, 2006, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Before question period, the hon. member for Beaches—East York had the floor. There are 16 and a half minutes remaining in the time allotted for her remarks. I now call on the hon. member for Beaches—East York.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I said before question period, I am obviously not supporting the bill because of the cuts the government has made. Some of those are the elimination of the child care agreement and cuts to the Status of Women program, the literacy program, affordable housing and many others. Also, budget 2006 increased income taxes to Canada's lowest income earners and slashed important social programs.

Canadians will get a chance to cast judgment on this meanspirited government and they will see that the Conservatives are prepared to compromise the economic status that Canadians have worked so hard to achieve. The Conservative government had the opportunity to bolster productivity and lift Canada's capacity to generate long term growth and prosperity, but it threw that out the window for immediate growth of the Conservative Party instead.

As we have said before, the tax provisions outlined in the budget only benefit small segments of the population and when examined more closely, put more strain on students, low income families and the environment, among countless others.

Again, the Canada employment tax credit increases the basic personal exemption, but it only applies to employed taxpayers and not to all Canadians. To make matters worse, the government decreased the basic personal exemption for all Canadians, therefore raising their income tax. Especially for seniors and people on fixed income, this is absolutely appalling. We were raising the personal exemption up to $10,000 from $9,800. Now it has gone down to $9,300. Our system would have at least taken about 250,000 or more seniors off income tax rolls altogether. Therefore, this has hurt people because it is actually a tax increase.

Also the Conservatives are essentially giving only $77.50 per year to students who spend $500 on books. The Liberal government had proposed to pay 50% of the first and last years of the post-secondary program.

The program the Conservatives have does not create access for students to post-secondary education, who are struggling and pay little taxes to begin with. By cancelling $3.11 billion over five years and replacing that with $175 million tax credit is shameful. It is so paltry and absolutely embarrassing.

Again, the government obviously does not have a plan for prosperity. Education is a major part of prosperity and that does not seem to be part of its program. As far as I am concerned, it has a plan for disaster. Education, prosperity, innovation, research, students, universities and partnerships with the provinces are all gone. There seems to be no need for the government to invest in Canadians and to work with provinces.

Again, the transit credit that the government has put in is a joke. It leaves rural Canadians scratching their heads as to how this will benefit them. It does not increase in any way the ridership or take cars off the road. Environmental groups have no idea where the Minister of the Environment gets the idea that 56,000 cars have come off the road. Maybe she just thinks it is a good number. There is no way to verify any of that until well into next summer.

We all know that transit is not feasible for many Canadians. Money needs to be invested in better access and improved transit. A dollar per month tax credit will not do it. Nor will it do it with the environment, nor for people who need the investment, nor for the investment that the previous government was making with municipalities. The partnership that existed between the Government of Canada and the municipalities of this countries on many levels, housing, transportation, environment and green environmental programs is gone. That kind of partnership does not seem to exist.

I am not quite sure if the Prime Minister has even met with the mayor of Toronto. If he has, I am not sure what came of it. At this point I suspect that has not even happened, not in any meaningful way.

The fitness tax credit is the perfect example of another selective tax measure that effectively does nothing but support those few families that have children already enrolled in sports. Anyone paying the bill for sports knows that the final value of $77.50 for a year is no real help to anyone. It is a bit of candy in the window like the Conservatives have done in many other things, but there is no real value behind it. Actually, if we eat too much, it will give us a toothache. Added to that, the parents who pay for children to take acting classes or piano lessons or anything such as arts or culture related are left with no help from the government. This is no surprise. A carton of yogurt has more culture than the Conservative Party as far as I am concerned.

To top it off, all these tax credits are washed away with the half point income tax hike the government introduced. By raising income tax, the government is cancelling out any of these tax credits and putting low income Canadians at even more risk. They try to give it with one hand, then they hike the taxes on the other side and we realize at the end of the day we really do not have it. It is like “now you see it, now you don't”.

Again, the much touted GST cut does little for the poorest of all Canadians. It does not benefit all Canadians as the Conservatives claim, it only benefits the rich. People need a lot of money to spend before they can benefit from the GST reduction. The GST is not charged on basics such as food and housing, which are most of the expenditures of low income households and we all know that. There is nothing in this budget for the 1.2 million children and families living in poverty.

The government has to be concerned with the most vulnerable and all citizens of our country, which the budget and the Conservative Party do not do. As far as I am concerned, the recent budget cuts are meanspirited and expose a direct attack on Canada's most vulnerable. The average Canadian citizen is going to feel those cuts very badly.

All Canadians have to live with the cuts aimed at a very narrow spectrum of Conservative supporters. Ontarians remember the Harris tax cuts that left Ontario with no services and a massive budget deficit, something that the current government is still trying to fix. It is taking a long time and it is going to take much longer. Now we have the main player in that, the now Minister of Finance, who will do the same thing to all Canadians as he did to Ontario, no services and a deficit to boot.

The minority Conservative government is poised to cut even more. This “fend for yourself” society will leave our most vulnerable behind as we all know. I cannot support this direct attack on our citizens and the most vulnerable of them, and therefore cannot support the bill.

The current Minister of Finance in Ottawa was very much involved with creating the mess that we have in Ontario. Most Ontarians remember that there were constant tax cuts and constant service cuts. Welfare recipients were cut by 20%. All of the services at the municipal level are now fee for service so children who need the services have to pay a fee for them. For fixed income families and low income families, this means children cannot use sports and recreational facilities.

However, Mr. Harris, like the current government, had a lot of ideas about how to put those children in jail. We have an increase for building the jail system in the budget. This seems to be the current government's same pattern because it has the same bright lights guiding it too, the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Finance.

I look forward to the next election when the people of Canada will pass judgment on these outrageous cuts and meanspiritedness. A Liberal government can work to cleaning up the mess the Conservatives are making of our great country. As I said, it is rather sad. The Liberals came in 1993 and had to clean up the mess that was created by the previous Conservative government. We had a deficit of over $40 billion, high interest rates, high unemployment and an economy that was in the tank. There had been huge cuts in services. There was the brain drain, which we all talked about for so long. There were no research funds of which to speak. Canada was nowhere when it came to research, investment in education and so on.

The Conservative government also cut the court challenges program and the women's program. It was forced to reinstate it at one point. We had to fix it and it was hard to fix. That hurt Canadians.

We moved beyond that. We moved to the point of reinvesting so the brain drain became the brain gain. We provided 1,000 research chairs for all the universities across Canada. The Liberal government established centres of excellence: the centres of excellence for women's health and the CIHR. We made investments in high technology and science to increase investment in this country to help our economy and our productivity.

Just before the last election, universities and colleges in this country said the brain drain had become a brain gain. More people were coming back to Canada. More young people were staying here because of the investments that the Liberal government made in our economy and our people. This included the investment in early education and child care, another major investment for our future productivity.

The Governor of the Bank of Canada, testifying at the finance committee, said very clearly that if he had $1 to invest, he would invest it in children and early education and child care. This is where the returns are in terms of our health as well as our productivity and economy in the future.

We were able to increase the guaranteed income supplement for seniors and invested $1 billion to look at a national program for caregivers.

The Conservative government does not seem to think that any of that is important. What did it do in the last budget? It eliminated the child supplement. Imagine taking away the child tax credit, which goes to modest income families in this country, and the child supplement, which goes to the poorest of families, while at the same time raising their taxes by .5% and lowering their personal exemptions.

The Conservative government lowered the GST, which these families cannot benefit from, and then taxed the little $1,200 it gave them for day care, which is not worth very much. There was no mention of child care or early education to speak of. These people have not gained anything. They have lost all the way through.

That is why I say the budget is meanspirited. It hurts people. It is absolutely unbelievable that a government with a $13.2 billion surplus would cut social programs. I understand there is even more money in the kitty of some additional billions of dollars. The government had this $13 billion surplus thanks to the management of the Liberal government.

What did the Conservatives do with all this money? They cut services. They cut literacy. They seem to have something against people who have not been able to get proper reading and writing skills and are not able to fill out their own application forms for employment or read the safety standards in their places of employment. They are not able to get the kind of quality jobs our economy is producing. An economy is competitive only if there is a modern well-skilled labour force. This again goes to competitiveness. The Conservatives talk about this only in terms of text facts, but they do not invest in people and literacy is about investing in people.

Then there is the court challenges program. The government is afraid of being challenged by the citizens of Canada. The court challenges program was established to allow the citizens of Canada to be able to challenge all levels of government policies and laws if they abrogated citizens' rights. Other countries have lauded us for having the strength and the respect to give that kind of control to our citizens. It strengthens our democracy. The previous Conservative government cancelled this program. We came in to clean up and reinstated it. Now the government has cancelled it again.

In addition to that, and this is not following the budget but nonetheless the cuts continue, the Conservatives have now cut money to Status of Women Canada and they have changed the criteria. Women in this country, according to the Minister of Status of Women, are equal because it says so in the Constitution and therefore they no longer need anything else.

Women fought so hard for their equality in this country. The only reason women have equality in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is because of Status of Women Canada which was established in 1971. When women were not in the charter when it was presented to Canada, they marched on Parliament with the assistance of women's organizations and fought for their rights. That is why they are in the Constitution in the first place.

The funding for those organizations that helped us to get our rights in the Constitution is going to be eliminated, so they will not be able to advocate, to research, and to fight for equality and social justice in this country. I cannot imagine a government eliminating the words social justice and equality by cutting funding to the women of Canada.

I will conclude by saying that quite frankly, I see very little in this budget to support. I am saddened by the fact that this is where we have arrived on this day.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I would like the member to elaborate a little on the cuts to women's programs and the change in direction based on what they were able to do with the little amount of funds that they did get. I wonder if she could comment not only on the cuts to their programs but other things that may affect women's groups such as the cuts to the Law Commission and the cuts to the court challenges program.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, let me begin with the court challenges program.

There have been a lot of charter challenges that have gone to the Supreme Court which had to do with equality. I will start with one, the rape shield law. As the hon. member knows, women were pretty much put on the stand and raped all over again at times during those cases, and that was a charter challenge which assisted women in this country.

I myself was involved personally with a charter challenge to the Supreme Court to defend immigrant women. In 1986 the government was not providing them with English as a second language classes when they arrived in this country. Only men received them. The assumption was that women did not go to work, therefore they did not need English as a second language. If they did go to work, they did not need the language anyway because they went to factories, I guess, so the government did not give them subsidized language training. We actually had to start a charter challenge, a class action on behalf of immigrant women.

Aboriginal women who were working were not allowed to receive the Canada pension plan and again that was another challenge that went to court. It was upheld and of course today they do.

There were also other challenges for the disabled and so on. I could give long lists. That is no longer possible because the court challenges program has now been eliminated.

There are a lot of other equality issues and challenges that need to be addressed, but there will be no assistance because the government is too afraid to have its own policies and its own laws challenged by its citizens. That is what the program was for.

The hon. member asked about the changes of criteria with respect to the women's programs. The changes mean that organizations that are out there, as they were before, doing research and identifying areas where women do not have equality, such as pay equity, cannot get funded. They are out there informing Canadian women of the areas they need to know about where there is no equality, and then are advocating for them on their behalf to governments at all levels. They cannot get funded, so inequality is not funded. If they are fighting for social justice, again they cannot be funded.

It seems to me that the government is not interested in hearing from anybody who has anything to say about any problems that they may have with any policy the government presents because as far as the government concerned, it is all perfect which of course it is not.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am always intrigued with a debate on whether or not things can happen if the government does not pay for them. I am of the belief that they could happen.

When I was a youngster, which was many years ago, decades ago, there was very little government programming. Yet, when there was a need in our community, it pulled together. We helped voluntarily, sometimes at an expense and sometimes only the expense of time. I know I learned from my father and my mother that when someone was in need, we reached out and helped them. I believe in that principle. That is why I personally get involved as much as I can in the lives of individuals who are in need.

I think there is a difference in philosophy here. That is, for example, if one says if we do not fund the women's group, which the hon. member mentioned, then somehow the government is against them. That is a false assumption.

Also, I distinctly remember that the Liberal government, when it was in power, denied women's groups. I will mention specifically REAL Women. That group was not eligible for funding. Why were the Liberals against those women?

Personally, I would not even lay the accusation that the Liberals were against women with the kinds of ideas that that particular group showed. However, the Liberals did not fund them.

Why does the opposition now lay the charges at us that somehow because the government does not fund a particular group, that the government is against them? That is a false assumption.

I would also like to say that if it is true that the National Action Committee on the Status of Women represents, as it claims, all the women in this country, then all that group would have to do, and I think there must be at least 8 million adult women in this country, that would be my estimate, is have each woman donate a dollar. Then the group would have $8 million. This would be more money than the group could ever spend.

I think if people really believe in the Status of Women then they would fund it. I have had a number of women on different occasions say that the Status of Women does not represent them. I say that is their choice. Why should these women through their taxes be obliged to support a group that does not represent them?

I know I have gone on a rambling scheme here. I want to assure the member that simply because the government does not think the taxpayers should be funding a certain segment of any group, that the government is automatically against that group. We feel that the taxpayers should not be funding that group.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there is quite a lot there to chew, and some of it, I have to say, I find somewhat offensive. I will tell the House why.

The philosophy of seeing someone in need and handing out a bit money is charity. Why should people be subjected to charity? They pay taxes. They have rights. There is dignity involved. I am sorry, but I think the member's philosophy is offensive.

I have seen people who work for a minimum wage which is so low. It is not acceptable. I find that offensive. If only we would increase the minimum wage, they would have a decent income.

I do not come from a wealthy family. My parents worked hard. I went to work long before I was able to go to university to help myself out. I do not expect that children today should have to live on alms. To think that the poor children of Canada should have to wait for charity before we help them out is offensive.

On the issue with respect to women, the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women was established purposely as an agency to assist women to achieve equality. With respect, REAL Women is not an organization that works to help women to achieve equality.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

They sure do.