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.
