Yes. Good morning.
I want to start by saying I will pick through a submission I made earlier this summer and try to highlight a few points in the interest of time.
I will start by saying that from a certain perspective it is the best of times. We have record low unemployment, a 30-year high for our dollar, and yet another in a series of balanced federal budgets. But when we look up from the ground directly in front of us, we see the enormous challenges facing us: climate change, rising health care costs, growing inequality, and conflict and extremism on the world stage. So it's disappointing to me that the finance committee has adopted what appears to be such a narrow theme for its pre-budget consultations: the tax system the country needs for a prosperous future.
This theme ties our thinking about the budget to a narrow perspective that ignores the urgency and the immensity of the challenges we face. In the end it ignores the fact that a federal budget is obviously about much more than just taxes. A budget is about what we want to accomplish together through our federal government.
I would argue there is a basic consensus among Canadians that there are several essential ingredients to a prosperous future. Canadians believe a sustainable environment, healthy individuals living in healthy communities, and a stable world free from the scourge of violence and war are necessary to any kind of meaningful and durable prosperity.
If we are going to avoid climate change on a catastrophic level, we need a tax system that produces enough revenue to support a rigorous attack on global warming and one that creates incentives to act now. If we are going to have healthy individuals, we need a tax system that will help the provinces reform and expand our public health care system.
Make no mistake. The growing prosperity gap that has begun to divide us into a nation of haves and have-nots is one of the most serious threats to our future prosperity. If we are going to live in a stable world, we also need a tax system that will allow us to attack the yawning prosperity gap at the international level and the resulting hopelessness that fuels conflicts and extremism.
Let me suggest a couple of priority areas where we could save money and where we must spend.
On the environment, we must end the more than $1.4 billion annual subsidies now provided to the oil and gas industry, including those for further development of the tar sands. It will save us billions of dollars and begin to wean us away from our dangerous addiction to burning fossil fuels. Let's also reduce federal infrastructure spending for new roads and new highways and shift that money into spending on rail, mass transit, and repairing the crumbling infrastructure we have now.
Yes, I am from Vancouver, and I say yes to an Asia–Pacific gateway strategy, but no to $1 billion of federal contributions to build new roads and twin bridges. We need a strategy to take goods and people off the roads and put them on the rails. We need to create incentives that will reduce our individual and collective environmental footprint. We also need revenues to support a transition program to help make sure workers don't pay with their jobs for this transition to a green future. When Canadians have good choices, they will make the right choices, but my neighbours can't ride the full buses that pass them regularly on Broadway. Only collective investment can help push the skytrain through a tunnel out to UBC. Most of all, what residents in my neighbourhood need is fewer cars in their neighbourhood.
Do we need new taxes to meet the environmental challenge, and particularly, do we need a carbon tax? I don't think so. I can't help thinking a carbon tax would do little more than make ordinary people walk, as gas prices skyrocket, while the privileged continue to drive.
In the area of health care, we need to expand our national health care program into the areas where we have significant opportunities for cost savings. A national home care program could reduce the cost of care for seniors by up to 50% and allow seniors to remain in their own homes and communities. A national pharmacare program could make sure all Canadians get the prescription medicine they need and reduce our overall health care costs by allowing us to bulk-buy important drugs. Most importantly, given the fact that we've just come through another World AIDS Day, we need a renewed national commitment to public education on the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic and other preventive health measures.
What we need is a budget and tax system driven by a system of who we are and where we want to go, which reflects the urgent needs and priorities of ordinary Canadians. It's time for the federal government to take the lead on global warming, protecting public health care, and closing the prosperity gap.
My message today, therefore, is a simple one: no more tax cuts. While no one begrudges the small relief a cut in the GST will bring, it's not too late to stop the enormous tax giveaways to the most profitable corporations in the country that were recently passed in the last mini-budget. And there's still time to turn away from the kind of thinking the Minister of Finance was illustrating when he began musing about higher-income Canadians needing further tax breaks.
The residents of Vancouver Centre don't need further tax cuts. Right now, we need more federal money for urban transit. We need more federal funding for non-market housing to tackle the problem of homelessness and to make sure that ordinary people can continue to live in our community. We need a national pharmacare program to help seniors and others with high drug bills, and we need funding for home care and renewed HIV/AIDS prevention work.
If we don't want Canada to be engulfed by the rising tide of conflict and extremism in the world, then let's invest some of that surplus and meet our promise to hike Canada's foreign aid spending. The next federal budget should be about much more than taxes. It should be about our collective national priorities. The next federal budget must be about tackling climate change, building healthy communities, and ensuring we all live in a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.
Thank you.