Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond today to the Minister of Finance's budget speech.
I might be tempted to congratulate the minister on his balanced budget, but I have at least two good reasons for not doing so.
First, the public has made heavy sacrifices over the past four years at least to enable the minister to balance his budget.
People have faced huge cuts to health, education and social assistance. Workers and the unemployed had their employment insurance benefits cut or no longer received them because certain eligibility criteria were tightened. All these sacrifices created a surplus of billions of dollars in the employment insurance fund, which was used in the fight against the deficit.
Second, with a balanced budget in hand, the minister is hiding budget surpluses and preparing a new series of federal expenditures instead of going after pressing objectives such as job creation, the fight against poverty and a reorganization of the social programs they dismantled.
Now a word about the budget itself.
The minister talks about his strategy for equal opportunity, but he seems to forget that, for the past half century, one of the aims of the government has been to redistribute wealth through social programs. He seems to have abdicated this role and to consider unemployment and the rise in poverty to be spectator sports.
The minister neglected in his budget to point out the cuts of $30 billion still to come in the next few years.
His $450 million child tax credit in 1999 and 2000 is praiseworthy—