Madam Speaker, I am pleased to debate the prebudget motion with respect to the report of the Standing Committee on Finance.
I have had experience with the committee since I sit on it as an associate member and I have attended many of its hearings. I appeared before it in my former capacity as a taxpayer advocate. I know the kinds of people who generally appear before the finance committee tend to be special interest pleaders, people with a particular focus or point to make to the government and legislators. These people are all well intentioned, as are all members of the legislature.
However, it strikes me that all too often the people who appear before the finance committee in its prebudget hearings do not speak about the kind of real economic pain that is being felt by so many Canadians in a very personal and tangible way. Nor is that pain reflected in any way in the actual report of the finance committee which speaks about big issues. It talks about debt, government spending priorities and so forth.
At the end of the day that document and, I would suggest the fiscal and budgetary policies of the government, do not really reflect a compassionate view of the priorities of Canadians.
I have stood many times in this place, even though I am in my first term, to talk about the economic record of this government and to talk about the unemployment rate, the growth and the debt, the record high tax levels and referred to all the statistics. I could do that again but rather than repeat myself I will talk about some absolutely devastating tragic cases of how the fiscal priorities of this government and previous governments have led to so much pain for so many real Canadian families.
For instance, I think of friends of mine, Bernice Lee and her husband Philip, who are relatively recent immigrants to Canada from Hong Kong. Bernice and Philip have four young children and run a small mending and dry cleaning shop in downtown Edmonton in an apartment building where I used to live.
Bernice arrives at work before 6 a.m. North of Edmonton it is often dark until 9 a.m. in the winter days and it can get down to 40 below. She does not have a car. She gets there on public transport, arrives and opens up her shop. By 7 a.m. she is working away. One can walk by her store at 10 p.m. when the wind is howling outside in the winter and she is there alone, working away. Sometimes their children are there late at night, having come there from school because there is no one at home, because neither Bernice nor Philip can afford to stay at home.
Her husband Philip works on the side, I think about a $10 an hour job at a computer plant in Edmonton. He has to work the graveyard shift to add a little more to the family budget just so they can get by.
I asked Bernice one day how their business was going. They bought it the year before. I just noticed that she was working so terribly hard and had nobody there to help her. I asked her how it was going and she looked at me with almost tears in her eyes. I don't think she had really thought about that before. She said they were barely hanging on and she was so disappointed because she said they were working so hard but were hardly able to keep the business going.
The tragedy is this business represents the hopes and dreams and aspirations of this family in coming to Canada. The Canadian dream for them was that by making sacrifices, by working hard, by playing by the rules, they might be able to get ahead and make a better life for their children, but she said to me that she could not understand why a family in their circumstances had the kind of tax burden they had.
She said to me that if it were not for the taxes she had to pay, not just the small business tax and the income taxes and the consumption taxes but also the local property taxes and the provincial taxes, if not for the several thousands of dollars her very small one person business had to pay, she would be able to hire somebody to come in and help her, do the hard manual work of her business. That would allow her, instead of working from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and beyond, six days a week, to maybe take a day off or to go home at a reasonable hour to spend the evening with her children and her husband. But she does not have that ability because her business does not have the disposable income.
There is a reason it does not have the disposable income. They are getting enough business to do that sort of thing, but they are not able to keep the money they are earning because of the fiscal priorities of the federal government. This is the human impact. People like Bernice are working well into the night. What were formally one income families have become two income families. Children who 30 years ago used to be able to go home to a parental home after school are now going home to empty houses. Why? Both parents are out in the workforce trying to run their businesses, trying to do their jobs to pay for the tax bill, to furnish the funds this government thinks are so absolutely necessary for all the programs and bureaucracy it operates.
I ask the members opposite one basic philosophical question. I used to be a Liberal. Liberals love to pride themselves on their sense of compassion.
Their sense of compassion is to take money away from Bernice Lee, transfer it through some hugely expensive Ottawa bureaucracy and spit it out in other things such as over $5 billion in handouts to major corporations like Bombardier, grants to special interest groups so they can plead here in Ottawa for more money to fuel their special interests, and huge programs that create disincentives to work, to save and to invest in parts of the country. That is what they take money away from Bernice Lee to do.
The question I ask in this debate is a very simple question but a profoundly important one. Do the members of the government really believe they know better how to spend a dollar that Bernice Lee earns than she does? Do they believe that what they would with an extra dollar out of her till will produce a greater social benefit for her and her family than that dollar left in her pocketbook?
Do they believe hiring another bureaucrat to administer another distant program in Ottawa is going to do more for Mrs. Lee than her ability to hire somebody to come in and help her take care of her business? Do they believe that another dollar in another grant program is going to do more for the economy and create jobs than Mrs. Lee can do in her own business? That is what this debate is about.
We can talk about the statistics and the numbers, the 9% unemployment, the 16% youth unemployment, the $100 billion they have added to the debt and the 73% debt to GDP ratio. We can talk about all the statistics and numbers we want and the Liberals are wonderful at doing that. However, when it comes to people, real people and the lives they are living in this country, why can we not afford to change our priorities and to let people like Mrs. Lee keep more of what belongs to them? That is ultimately what this debate is about.
It is about who the money belongs to. Does it belong to the government? Does it belong to the Liberal Party of Canada? Does it belong to politicians and bureaucrats who think they know better how to spend that money than the Canadians who earn it? Does it belong to the people who make sacrifices to raise their families and to leave a better life to their children than they had themselves?
I just want to say, in this debate as we prepare for the budget next year, I hope the members of the government will start to listen to people like Mrs. Lee and will start to put their priorities where they belong by letting people keep a little more of their own money. That really would provide the kind of hope that people like Mrs. Lee need to hang on a little longer to help their families get by.