Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-52, the Conservative government's budget. I am unfortunately the first person to rise after the tawdry, cheap events of last Friday in the House, the unparalleled, unprecedented, tawdry events of a government that is so desperate now to get its budget through it had to go down into the bowels of the House of Commons to look through dusty books, looking back to the 1960s and the 1970s, to find some sort of procedural trick that would allow it to pass the budget when it knew that most Canadians are opposing it. In the last few days we have seen the budget self-destruct, as many of the Atlantic provinces, Saskatchewan and many Canadians from coast to coast to coast have said very clearly that the budget is manifestly not in the interests of Canada.
Last Friday, with two minutes to go in private members' business, the House leader stood to try to conjure a trick out of his pocket and try to force through, what he called “a national emergency”, the budget, without a vote, not complete the debate only to force it through.
As members well know, the House refused that. However, the fact that the Conservatives would use such a cheap and tawdry trick to try to get their budget through I think belies the reality. The Conservatives acknowledge now that their budget does not have the popular support of Canadians. As a result of that, they had to resort to this trick.
What they used was a procedural trick to try to declare this a national emergency. The only emergency is the rapid and constant fall of the Conservatives in public opinion polls. We have seen in places like British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia that the Conservative vote continues to erode. Why does it continue to erode? Not only because of tricks like that, the trick of last Friday, a trick that manifestly failed, but also because their budget simply does not have credibility.
I will talk a bit about the situation that Canadians are really living through while the Conservatives are playing their little political games here in Ottawa. From there, I will talk about how the budget does not address what are very clear concerns, crises that are occurring in main streets across the country.
Instead, very clearly what we have is a Conservative budget, a Bay Street budget, the same as the Liberal budgets were, oriented toward corporate tax cuts and huge handouts, shovelling money off the back of a truck through the oil and gas sector. That seems to be the Conservative priorities. Canadians are living a much different reality.
Let us talk about the reality of most Canadians. Let us talk about average family incomes. Since 1989, Statistics Canada tells us, since the signing of the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, most Canadian families have seen their income fall. They are earning less money now than they were then.
What we have seen under now more than 15 years of Conservative and Liberal economic policies is the wealthy are fabulously so. They are able to buy their 15th or 16th Lamborghini without any problem. However, most Canadian families are earning less. It is not just that they are working harder and longer weeks, and I will come back to those statistics, the bottom line is Conservative and Liberal economic policies have manifestly failed.
Let us look at the figures. The poorest of Canadians, the family with an income of less than $20,000 a year, those below the poverty line, have seen over this 15 year period the loss of about a month's income. What they used to earn in 12 months, they are living on 11 months' worth of income. We have seen a 10% fall in real income for the poorest of Canadian families.
The Conservative budget does absolutely nothing to address that catastrophic fall in Canadian income levels for the poorest of Canadian families. It is no secret, 300,000 Canadians will be sleeping in the parks and main streets of our country tonight, 300,000 Canadians who no longer even have the resources to have a roof over their heads. The Conservative budget does absolutely nothing to address the crisis in homelessness and the catastrophic fall in the incomes of the poorest of Canadians.
Let us go to the next group. Another 20% of Canadians, and let us call them the working class, are families earning less than $36,000 a year. They are now earning two weeks' less income than they were in 1989.
In other words, after 15 years of Liberal and Conservative economic policies, they have seen their incomes fall so that they are now living on 50 weeks of income, whereas they used to live on 52 weeks of income. They have actually lost two weeks of income and are trying to make ends meet with far fewer financial resources.
Let us continue on to the middle class. It is the same thing for families earning less than $56,000 year. They are now earning two weeks' less income than they were in 1989.
We now are talking about 60% of Canadian families who are struggling to get by on fewer and fewer financial resources. The Liberals did absolutely nothing to address this. They simply shovelled money at the wealthiest of Canadians. The Conservatives now are doing exactly the same thing.
Even higher income earners, the upper middle class, have actually seen no income improvement since 1989.
That is 80% of Canadian families who see stagnation or who have seen increasing impoverishment under the watch of those parties over the last more than 15 years.
Who has profited from the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement and NAFTA and from the Conservative and Liberal economic policies shovelling money at the corporate sector? There are unbelievable amounts of resources to give to the oil and gas industry and the banks, and to give in corporate tax cuts, but who has profited? Only one sector has: the wealthiest of Canadians. In fact, Statistics Canada tells us that it is the wealthiest 5% of Canadians who have seen their incomes skyrocket over this period.
What the people who are listening to us today or who read these remarks in Hansard say, what the people say certainly as we knock on doors in my neighbourhoods, is that they cannot understand why Ottawa does not get it. Why it is harder and harder to make ends meet, they say, and yet the government seems to want to favour the wealthiest of Canadians with corporate tax cuts? They say that the government does not seem concerned about ordinary, hard-working Canadian families. They ask that question.
We have seen the Conservative response. The Conservatives' response was a cheap conjuring trick to try to get their budget through before Canadians wake up to what an appallingly negative impact it will have on them.
The Conservative government erodes resources in health care. It does not do anything to open up doors to post-secondary education and training. It throws a few dollars here and there but does not address the underlying systemic problems in this Confederation, which has led to the fact that most Canadian families are falling further behind and most Conservative and Liberal economic policies are favouring that small proportion of Canadians who have everything they could possibly want.
What is wrong with this picture when the top 5% of Canadian income earners receive most of the attention of Conservative and Liberal governments? Those governments simply shovel money at them. What is wrong with this picture when ordinary working families are forgotten?
I have talked about the fact that income levels are actually falling while the Conservatives have this delusion that everything is just peachy-keen. They say that because they look at the job figures. The job figures from Statistics Canada actually prove the point: the jobs that are created today are not sustainable manufacturing jobs or family-sustaining jobs. They are part time and temporary jobs. They are jobs paying the minimum wage.
Every time the finance minister stands up and says that we have full employment, what he is actually saying is that we have full employment like most third world countries have full employment. Canadians are scraping to get by on minimum wage, part time jobs and whatever temporary contracts they can get. They are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. The finance minister does not recognize that the economic policy of the past 15 years has actually led to a steady impoverishment.
It is not because Canadians are not working harder and harder. The Community Social Planning Council of Toronto produced a study just a few weeks ago which indicates that for the average family raising children the annual number of hours worked went up by 200 hours, that is, the average family worked 200 hours more in 2004 than in 1996.
What this means is that the average Canadian working family is working five weeks more. Those families are trying to jam another five weeks of work into a working year. They are struggling. They are putting in an unprecedented number of overtime hours, yet their revenue levels are lower than they were in 1989. What a destruction of our quality of life. What a failure on the bottom line.
Canadian families have seen their incomes tank, yet they are putting in five weeks more of labour in a 52 week year. It is an annual average of 200 hours more worked in 2004 than in 1996. It would be even higher today. Overtime hours have gone up by over 30% and yet most Canadian families are earning less now than in 1989.
That is what is fundamentally wrong with how the Liberals and Conservatives have addressed economic policy for the past more than 15 and nearly 20 years. They simply do not understand the impact of their policies. They are economic illiterates. They cannot check the bottom line to see if the economic policies have actually made sense. They are shovelling money at the corporate sector with more and more corporate tax cuts when we already subsidize the corporate sector to an unparalleled extent through the subsidies we provide to medicare.
Our medical system now in place offers a competitive advantage that no American corporation can match, yet the corporate sector is continuing to request lower and lower tax rates when our subsidies already give them a very clear competitive advantage. What is wrong with this picture when the corporate sector fails to acknowledge that the hard work of Canadians from coast to coast to coast gives the sector a competitive advantage but that corporations have to pay their fair share of taxes in order for that competitive advantage to be sustained?
They cannot have their cake and eat it too. Corporate leaders need to be told that. They need to be told that they have to be responsible, and that since we are already subsidizing them to an unparalleled extent, with study after study showing that medicare is a huge competitive advantage when Canadian companies compete with American ones, they cannot at the same time have lower corporate tax levels than they have in the United States. They cannot have both. They have to make clear and responsible choices.
We have not seen those responsible choices from the Liberals. We certainly have not seen them from the Conservatives, and last Friday in particular attests to that, but things have to change and that is certainly why more and more Canadians are looking to park their votes with another political entity. We certainly are seeing a greater interest in new ideas. The NDP, of course, since its inception, has always been the birthplace of new and responsible ideas, whether they are economic or financial in nature or in terms of social policies.
Before I move on to the next portion of my presentation, I do want to say one thing. The ministry of finance actually charted NDP, Liberal, Conservative and even the Parti Québécois governments over a 20 year period. It charted and compared the actual year-end fiscal returns to the budgetary promises of each of those governments.
This was done by the federal ministry of finance, which we certainly could not say is an NDP ally in any way, but that long term study, the only long term study that has ever been undertaken on this phenomenon of what the actual fiscal period returns show, clearly proved that the NDP as a party and NDP elected officials as individuals are the best fiscal managers. The worst were the Liberals. No matter what their promises are, 86% of the time the Liberals actually run a deficit. The Conservatives were a little better, actually running deficits 66% of the time over that 20 year period.
The NDP projected surplus or balanced budgets most of the time, and most of the time we actually achieved that. There is no difference between the spin and the results, between the rhetoric and the reality. We actually perform better in terms of fiscal management than Conservatives or Liberals. No wonder Canadians are looking around now and taking a hard look at what political parties promise and what they actually deliver.
The NDP is the only party that actually addresses the economic reality of most Canadian working families and we are the best financial managers. Those are two reasons why we are seeing increasing interest in our party.
Before I move on to B.C. issues, I want to mention the catastrophic collapse of our manufacturing sector. We have trade policies from the government, like we did from the previous government, which do not address the fact that value added and manufacturing production is collapsing across this country. A quarter of a million family-sustaining jobs have been lost in the last few years under the Liberal watch and under the Conservative watch.
Let us look at some of the impacts of that manufacturing loss. In Nova Scotia, 20% of manufacturing jobs have been lost. In Quebec, 18% of manufacturing jobs have been lost. In Windsor, and we have had very eloquent testimony to this effect from the member for Windsor—Tecumseh and the member for Windsor West, we have actually seen 35% of manufacturing jobs lost.
Windsor is in crisis. Southern Ontario is in crisis. The minimum wage, part time jobs that the finance minister is offering do not in any way compensate for this hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs.
In Toronto, over 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost. That is 21% of manufacturing jobs in Toronto. In Oshawa, it is 21%. In Thunder Bay, it is over 20%. We are seeing a hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs across this country and there is nothing in the budget that addresses this crisis.
We have a variety of crises that have developed over the past 15 years under the Liberal watch. The Conservatives said they would take a completely new approach. Instead, they have taken exactly the same do nothing approach, a shovel money at the corporate sector approach, which has not addressed the catastrophic fall in manufacturing jobs. It has not addressed the very real erosion of family income since 1989 and the signing of the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement.
This approach does not address the homelessness crisis. It does not address the inability of most families to have their kids or adults move on to post-secondary education, apprenticeship and training. It does not address that crisis. It does not address the health care crisis. Instead of dealing with the underfunding of our public health care system, we have seen the Conservatives take exactly the same road as the Liberals and look to more privatization.
We know that in the United States more privatization means more costs and fewer benefits. The United States health care system costs twice the amount per capita that the Canadian system does and yet 60 million Americans at any point in one year will have absolutely no health care coverage whatsoever. It is a failed American model that the Conservatives are pushing, as the Liberals did before them.
As I come from British Columbia, I would like to move on now to the budget and what it does not do for British Columbia. The finance minister rose in this House and said that his Canada went from the Alberta Rockies to Newfoundland and Labrador. He completely excluded British Columbia.
I admire his honesty, because there is nothing in the budget that addresses clear Conservative promises to B.C. The Conservatives said they would deal with the leaky condo crisis. The Conservatives promised they would take action on that. Instead, they have left 60,000 British Columbia families with absolutely no support in the leaky condo crisis.
With softwood lumber, we have seen the complete disregard for softwood communities in British Columbia and elsewhere.
Regarding the pine beetle issue, the Conservatives promised and spun but they did not provide the funding. The Kamloops Daily News said the following just last Friday on the pine beetle, “When will [the government] come to the table and be a part of the solution?” For whatever reason, the feds just do not get it on the pine beetle. We have seen devastation throughout the interior of British Columbia. The government has done absolutely nothing to address that.
I could go on, with the World Police & Fire Games and a whole host of other issues such as the flooding in the Fraser River and the Skeena district of British Columbia. We have seen only $16 million offered up for the flooding even though we know that $22 million is required just to protect the city of Chilliwack alone.
I could go on and on but the reality is that the Conservative government just does not get it, which is why it tried to force this budget through by a conjuring trick last Friday.
