Thank you very much. I'm the economist for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Our new national president, Mark Hancock, is out of town and sends his regrets.
CUPE is Canada's largest union, with 635,000 members. We deliver front-line services for municipalities, health care, social services, education, and many other sectors in communities across Canada. Our members take pride in delivering quality public services, and with incomes close to the Canadian average of $40,000 to $50,000 a year, they depend crucially on quality public services to maintain their standard of living, as do all Canadians.
As we all know, Ottawa experienced a record snowfall yesterday. I and many others spent hours shovelling snow for neighbours and pushing cars stuck on the road. I was happy to help, but I was also happy to see the snowplows arrive, operated by CUPE members. That's what we Canadians do. We shovel snow, but we also help each other. We help each other in our communities and as a country. We help each other out because it's in our nature, and if there's a car stuck on the road, or someone in poverty, in sickness, or without decent education, it holds us all back as a nation.
As a nation, our progress has been held back by inequality and an increasingly unbalanced economy. We need increased stimulus and infrastructure investment, but we also need more fundamental changes. We won't achieve sustained economic growth unless we work together to diversify and grow our economy, improve public services, generate good quality jobs, reduce inequality, and make the transition to a more sustainable economy.
To these ends, our recommendations for this budget are that the federal government increase infrastructure spending, particularly in public transit, green and social infrastructure, and particularly for those most in need, including through affordable housing, transition homes, child care centres, seniors facilities, and community and cultural facilities.
Federal infrastructure funding should support a long-term plan to reduce our emissions and generate good quality jobs. The federal government and other levels of government should demonstrate leadership by ensuring that all public buildings and facilities are constructed or retrofitted to high environmental standards.
All federal infrastructure funding should be tied to environmental, climate change, and social requirements. In the short term, we support the government providing more than a third share of the funding for these investments, tied to achieving environmental and broader social objectives, including decent wages, labour rights, pay equity, and opportunities for apprentices and equity-seeking groups.
The federal government should establish a dedicated fund to support public waste-water infrastructure investments required to meet the new national waste-water regulations. It should also increase funding for first nations water and waste water.
We commend the government for removing requirements that recipients of federal funding use or consider P3s, but urge it to go further and eliminate PPP Canada, and redirect the P3 fund to public infrastructure projects. It should also introduce comprehensive P3 accountability and transparency legislation.
The Canada infrastructure bank shouldn't be another vehicle to subsidize high cost private finance.
With unemployment rising rapidly, we urge the government to accelerate planned changes to EI in this budget.
In training and labour force development, funding should be restored with an emphasis put on literacy and essential skills development. As a priority, we agree that the federal government should work with the provinces and territories to establish and fund a national, affordable, and public non-profit early childhood care and education system with a distinct system for indigenous communities. We also support reducing and ultimately eliminating undergraduate university and college tuition fees.
We welcome the commitment to enhance the Canada pension plan, and urge the federal government to demonstrate leadership in achieving a universal expansion of the CPP, instead of deferring to piecemeal and provincial measures.
A new health accord should provide significant annual funding increases strictly tied to enforcement of the Canada Health Act, as well as improvements and expansion of the public health care system, including a national pharmacare plan.
We urge the federal government to commit to a 10-year timetable to increase our international development assistance budget and to dedicate at least half to the least developed countries. We're opposed to the ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, CETA, and other deals that expand corporate power at the expense of jobs, wages, the environment, and our democratic sovereignty.
Finally, we need increased tax fairness. Priorities in this budget should be to broaden the base by eliminating regressive tax loopholes, such as the stock option deduction, to tackle tax evasion, and to move toward higher taxation of both corporate and capital income. After many lost years, we look forward to working with the new government and parliamentarians to rebuild a more prosperous, diversified, equitable, and sustainable Canada.
Thank you.