His $450 million child tax credit in 1999 and 2000 is praiseworthy, but insufficient to meet the needs of the 1.4 million poor children in the country and the 5 million Canadians living below the poverty line.
It is extremely disappointing to see that the government is presenting no job creation measures whatsoever and is continuing to pocket the employment insurance surplus, which will hit $30 billion by the year 2000. Instead of using the contributions as a tax in disguise, the government could have stimulated job creation by reducing workers' and employers' contributions or by using the surplus for job creation projects.
The main initiative of this budget is the creation of the famous millennium scholarships at a cost of $2.5 billion. Those 100,000 scholarships will be handed out only in the year 2000. It is curious to see the government's sudden interest in education, when we know that it will have cut over $10 billion in that sector between 1993 and 2003, $3 billion of that in Quebec.
This government, which has thus contributed to weakening the education system, to tuition fee hikes, to the increased debt load of a generation of students, wants to come off as a benefactor and, as the Prime Minister has admitted, to gain visibility by handing out the flag-emblazoned cheques itself.