Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Yes, context is everything, so I want to talk about my context. I come from the Social Planning Council of Toronto. It serves the residents of the sixth biggest governmental jurisdiction in the country: 2.5 million people. We deal with about 1,400 agencies that provide human services to residents, that cover hundreds of thousands of residents every day, and that touch literally the lives of all citizens in Toronto.
We're funded by the City of Toronto and the United Way, if you're wondering where our money comes from.
Context is everything for you. You folks are dealing with the daily cut and thrust of politics. The two big contextual issues in which you discuss Bill C-52 are these.
In the last few days there is the remarkable development in Quebec, where a minority government might fall because it's promising to deliver on its promise to cut taxes, because members of Quebec society feel the need for that money to be used to provide health and education is perhaps the more important imperative. That's quite a remarkable development in our political discourse of the last few years.
The second very important political moment for you is this discussion of mergers and acquisitions and foreign takeovers, which is not just an issue of foreign ownership but more an issue of increasing concentration of our corporate resources. This is a theme I'll touch on in a moment.
Our context for discussing Bill C-52 has several features. First of all, the economy is hotter than it's been in 40 years. All the fundamentals are right. Our government at the federal level has run 10 back-to-back fiscal surpluses, a feat that has not been paralleled by any other nation on the surface of the planet. We are literally rolling in money. That's quite a remarkable contextual moment.
Secondly, we are facing the biggest retirement of the labour force of any industrialized nation on the planet. No other nation had as big a baby boom as Canada had. We have been sleepwalking towards this event with no national training strategy. Whereas our governments mandate access to health and education, there is no national strategy to deal with what is about to hit those services, which are considered basic by every Canadian who lives here.
Thirdly, inequality is a growing issue globally: between nations, within nations, within your ridings. There's not one of you who sits here who doesn't know of stories of how inequality—not just growing poverty, but growing prosperity—happens cheek by jowl in your riding, rural or urban, and what the impact of that is on your constituencies and between households.
I would love the opportunity to address any one of your caucuses about the issue of inequality as the other inconvenient truth of our era: that it is unsustainable in Canada. It is growing at a faster rate than it has in the 30 years we have data for it, at a time when precisely economic conditions are ripe for its reversal. And it is happening with a face, a place, and a race—some of those comments that Mr. Jock has referred to. This is completely unacceptable for a country with our prosperity.
We have just returned to the rate of child poverty that unanimously your colleagues in 1989 stood up in Parliament and said was unacceptable. Child poverty had to be eliminated when it was at the 11.7% mark in 1989, and now we should be cheering that it has returned to that after 10 years of economic prosperity.
I would say to you this is not about just poverty, and it's also not about just income, when the rich set the markets for housing, and when we are dealing with a global diaspora because we're not dealing with training but are importing our solution. We're welcoming people into the three major immigrant basements, plus Calgary and Edmonton, where there are housing shortages already, where the rich set the prices for housing markets, where our bankers and our economists tell us that over the course of the next 20 years housing prices are going to double. There's not one economist or banker who will tell you that incomes are going to double.
This is not a poverty issue, though poverty is the worst part of it. We are sitting on a potentially huge problem, when the majority of Canadians are feeling increasingly economically insecure at a time of huge prosperity.
I won't go into the other parts I wanted to touch on. But I want to say that I think you have three revenue-neutral options for adjusting your budget to address some of these realities.
First, you should reconsider the tax cuts promised last year. The second 1% of GST reduction—that one point of GST reduction—should go to where the real fiscal imbalance now lies.
You've done an amazing job of starting the discussion on where the fiscal imbalances are and how to redress them. I think it's very important for you to recognize that the real vertical fiscal imbalance is with the cities: $60 billion to $120 billion of infrastructure deficit that we know of, which is hard infrastructure deficit, primarily occurs in the cities, and they have no capacity to raise the funds for this. The federal government should be playing a role there.
Secondly, you have introduced significant changes to the CST. We are repeating exactly what we did with the CHST and the separation of the CHT, and so on. It's time to separate out those elements of the CST and introduce clear objectives as to what these pots of money are for. This government is the value-for-money government. It's the accountability government. Show us where the money is going and what we're getting for it.
I think we have some precedents in the way we got the four pillars of child care negotiated prior to that. We can separate out the CST so we are clear on what we are sending money to the provinces to achieve, and it surely can't be just to produce tax cuts for their citizens.
Thirdly—can I just make one more point?