Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.
The theme is the giveaway. The giveaway that happened last Thursday is similar to the giveaway we see in Bill C-28. I know the hon. member does not like to hear that, but the reality is such that he has to understand that shovelling billions of dollars out the door to the corporate sector, which is what is contained in Bill C-28, is entirely inappropriate.
Why? Because of the current economic situation that most Canadians are living through.
When the finance minister rose to give the supplementary budget update, he was talking to Canadians, two-thirds of whom have seen a decline in their real income since 1989. Two-thirds of them have seen their real income fall. The middle class, the lower middle class and the poorest of Canadians have seen their real incomes fall, in most cases catastrophically, yet what we have seen over the past 20 years of economic policy is essentially a giveaway to corporate CEOs and corporate lawyers.
Bill C-28 continues in that theme. We saw it under the former Liberal government and it is continued under the current Conservative government. Is that in Canada's interests? Not at all.
The fact that most Canadian families have seen their debt load double over that same period, the last 20 years, begs the question: what should have been in the economic update? It is a very simple question.
What we have is corporate giveaways on a massive scale to the most profitable companies in Canada. That is the priority of this so-called new government. It certainly mirrors the priorities of the old Liberal government. We see the same old same old. We see the same economic approaches.
What could have happened? We should have seen investments in our industrial sector to protect manufacturing jobs. We have lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs over the past few years. We have had closures of factories in British Columbia, where I come from, and massive job loss in the softwood industry. As a result of the softwood sellout, in the past year we have lost 10,000 jobs in the softwood industry alone. That has devastated and gutted softwood communities from coast to coast.
Essentially we have seen the gutting of the manufacturing sector and the gutting of the softwood industry. We have seen case after case. I know that Conservative members do not want to hear reality. They prefer to hear from corporate lobbyists, but my goodness, it is about time that Conservatives started to listen to main street rather than Bay Street all the time.
We saw that under the Liberal government. The Conservatives said they would be different. We see it with the economic update, this Bill C-28 that we are discussing. It is the same old giveaway of Canada's public resources. There is no attempt to put in place an industrial sector. There is no attempt to actually address what Canadians are living through. Instead, the government just said, “Let us give this money away”.
The Conservatives say they have a surplus, but it is a myth of a surplus. I will point out just one of the key facts that the Conservatives seem to have completely forgotten in this entire debate. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities came forward after years of Liberal cutbacks and has estimated the infrastructure deficit at about $125 billion. What is worse, that deficit increases by nearly $20 billion each and every year.
What is the transportation and infrastructure deficit? It means that our highways become more dangerous, including the highway overpasses. We saw the collapse in Minnesota because appropriate attention was not given to updating the highway overpasses. Many fear that could happen in Canada.
We are seeing the lack of an ability to access fresh water. We have seen that in places such as Walkerton and North Battleford, yet there has been no investment by the federal government to actually improve our access to fresh water across the country.
Let us talk about waste management, with a city such as Victoria continuing to spew raw sewage out into the Juan de Fuca Strait. The Liberals did nothing on it. The Conservatives said they would be different. Instead, it is the same old same old for waste management.
As well, it is the same for the whole range of public transit. We have seen a substantial underfunding of our public transit facilities across the country, which means that Canadians have fewer options in terms of getting to work. We know that commuting times are increasing at the same time as overtime is increasing. People are working harder and longer weeks, yet they are getting less take-home pay.
Bill C-28, the budgetary update, deals with absolutely none of those issues. Instead, the Conservative government has made cutbacks to the justice system, to the environment, to agriculture, to fisheries and oceans, to public security, to Indian affairs, to the health care system, to international trade and industry, and to human resources and skills development.
It is the same old, same old. We went through it all with the Liberals and now, with Bill C-28, we are seeing the fiscal irresponsibility of the Conservative government. It is cutting the essentials. It cuts back on the basics and then says that it has a surplus so it should give it away to the corporate sector.
That reminds me of the little boy who took $3 from his mother and went to the store. He was supposed to buy essentials for his family, for his brothers and sisters, bread and milk, and then to bring those essentials home. Instead, he spent three-quarters of the money on candy and then came back and told his mom that he had a surplus, that he had not bought any of the essentials and that he had frittered the money away.
What we are seeing from the government is that it is frittering the money away on corporate tax cuts on an ongoing basis and not taking care of the essentials, whether we are talking about our basic infrastructure, what our cities and towns need to ensure there is a decent quality of life for citizens, or whether there is an industrial strategy in place that actually provides good, family sustaining jobs. We are not seeing that.
The government says that people can work at Wal-Mart because that is all it will give them as an industrial strategy. After people are laid off from good, family sustaining jobs, because the Conservatives and Liberals have done nothing about this over the last 20 years, they are taking part time and temporary service jobs that pay much less and do not allow them to sustain their families, which is why, for two-thirds of Canadian families, their incomes have declined.
If that is not an income crisis, I do not know what is. However, we will not hear a word about that from the Conservatives, like we did not hear a word about it from the Liberals either. There is just a consistent negation of everything that is happening on the main streets of our country, including, as the member for Sault Ste. Marie mentioned, the fact that tonight, 300,000 Canadians will be sleeping in parks and homeless shelters across the country in the middle of winter. If that is not a source of national shame, I do not know what is.
The Liberals did nothing. They eliminated the housing programs, so they provoked the crisis. All the Conservatives have done is take the NDP money from the NDP budget and told everyone that it had put $1 billion aside. That was NDP money for housing, but it was only a start. We recognize that we are dealing with a housing crisis and that we need more than $1 billion to actually deal with 300,000 Canadians sleeping on the streets of our country tonight, and hundreds of thousands of Canadian families that are just a paycheque or an action away from losing their homes.
We knew that money was only a start in the investments needed, but for the Conservative government that is all it is willing to give. It is just taking the moneys that were put aside by the NDP and that is it.
None of the essentials are taken care of. The NDP has been saying that Bill C-28 should contain a national pharmacare program so that families, that are going into debt and seeing their incomes eroded by escalating drug costs, will actually have some supports.
The NDP is the only party in this House talking about that, in the same way that Tommy Douglas, the greatest Canadian and former NDP leader, put in place a health care program. We are saying that Bill C-28 should have had a national pharmacare program, but it does not.
It has no industrial strategy and no support for post-secondary students who are facing massive debt loads and lower incomes once they get out of university, and, since most jobs created today, the Wal-Mart jobs, do not come with pensions or any sort of supports, we are talking about a life of what is essentially indebtedness.
We take these kids, who worked their way through university, and have them start out life with a $30,000 debt load. As Statistics Canada tells us, they start with lower salaries and then, when they get the jobs that they can get with the laissez-faire government, the same as the Liberals who did not seem to give a darn about the middle class or poorer working Canadians, students simply end up, once they have finally paid off their student loans, facing a life where there are no pensions beyond what is contained in the CPP and the GIS.
We know the government has done nothing to address the underfunding of the GIS, this rip-off of seniors. Nothing in Bill C-28 deals with the fact that the cost of living has gone up faster than the GIS, which means that seniors are being ripped off by the Conservative government, as they were ripped off by the former Liberal government.
Nothing in Bill C-28 addresses any of those concerns. It contains nothing about the farm crisis and agricultural incomes, and nothing about the poverty that first nations are living under, the deplorable state on reserves across the country. It contains nothing to deal with the fact that five million Canadians with disabilities are the poorest of the poor Canadians. Half of the homeless are Canadians with disabilities and 40% of those need to stand in long lineups at the food banks for food, which we never see the Liberals and Conservatives actually addressing. The lineups at the food banks are becoming increasingly longer and 40% of the people who need those food banks just to survive until the end of the month are people with disabilities. Nothing in Bill C-28 addresses that either.
