Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak in response to the budget and provide the views of the New Democratic Party. I will be sharing my time with the member for Acadie—Bathurst.
We have heard a lot today and in other responses to the budget that this budget is an education budget. It is a budget for youth. We heard today in debate that it is a budget for equity, a budget for women. More recently we heard it is a remarkable budget and a sensible budget.
I want to tell the members of this House that having been in my riding, like many other members, for the past week and speaking with many of my constituents, this budget has been a huge disappointment.
In my riding of Vancouver East people are asking a very key and a very legitimate question. How will this budget improve the lives of people in east Vancouver? The response I got was that this budget is a failure.
It is a failure because if we look behind the fine lines and fancy words it is a failure because it does not address the issues of people who are unemployed. We have heard today in the House in question period of the number of people who are unemployed and because of the drastic changes to our EI program the number of people who are now ending up on welfare.
The budget failed those people. It is a failure for people who are living at and below the poverty line and who are working at minimum wage jobs or in part time work and found nothing in this budget to improve their standard of living.
This budget has failed women and we have heard a lot of discussion today about international women's day and international women's week but there is nothing in this budget about pay equity or child care, for example.
This budget also fails people who are sick and who look to our health care system and find there are enormous waiting lists or lack of service and accessibility. This budget has also failed aboriginal people who live in the urban environment. In my riding I have a very large number of urban aboriginal people who saw nothing in this budget that will address their very real concerns of unemployment, poverty, lack of access to services.
This budget also failed children who live in poor families and it fails students who are still facing massive cuts and skyrocketing tuition fees.
The plain reality is the total program spending delivered in this budget will decline to $104.5 billion in 1998-1999 from $106 billion in 1997-1998. That is a real decline in program spending despite the promises made by the finance minister that 50% of the surplus would go toward programs spending. The Liberals failed to meet even their own promise and the other reality is that not a single dollar of the cash transfers to provinces eliminated over the past three years will be restored.
I would like to focus on two issues that involve my critic areas. One is education and one deals with the child tax benefit.
The first is education. We have heard so much hype about the $2.5 billion going into the millennium fund. First of all, we have to understand that this fund will not even begin until the year 2000. Students need help today, not in the year 2000.
By the time we get to the year 2000 and this millennium fund begins with its $250 million a year, we will have seen $3.1 billion taken out of post-secondary education. That is devastating to our institutions, our universities, our community colleges and our places of higher learning.
The finance minister had a choice to restore the funding to the provinces so we could strengthen post-secondary educational facilities and ensure tuition fees would not continue to go up and up. The government did not make that choice. The choice it made was to set up a private foundation so it could hand out little cheques every now and again to 7% of students, which means that 93% of students will not be assisted by the millennium fund.
In a most cynical ploy the finance minister in all of his background papers told us there were plans to change the bankruptcy laws to ensure students are not able to declare bankruptcy until 10 years after they complete their studies, which is a change from the current two years. If the government believes so strongly that it is helping students, why has it so cynically changed the bankruptcy laws?
In British Columbia, Premier Clark announced a few days ago that for the third year in a row tuition fees would be frozen. That is the kind of leadership we wanted to see from the Liberal government. It would say to students that we understand their debt loads are too high, that tuition fees must be frozen and that we are willing to support provincial transfers to increase post-secondary educational facilities.
The child tax benefit is another issue. Every time the question of unemployment and poverty comes up in the House we hear the minister crow about the child tax benefit and what a glorious program it is. I heard the minister say that it is the most significant social policy since the 1960s.
I will explain what the reality is. This is not an anti-poverty measure. We are talking about a program where the additional $425 million will not even begin until July 1999. So much for helping poor kids who live in poor families. What will that help be? It will be a measly 80 cents a day. That is what we are saying to kids. The child tax benefit is not indexed and does not apply to people on welfare. There is not one mention in the budget about a national child care program.
If the government truly cares about poverty, about helping unemployed people and about equality as we heard today in glowing terms, why does the budget fail to address any of these measures? The reality is that the budget that was announced and debated will not close the gap between the wealthy and five million Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet and who are living below the poverty line.
The Reform Party says that it wants tax cuts. I will read from an article by Seth Klein of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published in the Canadian Review of Social Policy . The key goal is job creation. That should be the government's priority. The paper points out very eloquently that tax cuts are an inefficient way to create jobs. The tax cut theory rests on the unsubstantiated hope that consumers will spend more, that this in turn will translate into companies hiring more people, and that the evidence suggests direct government hiring and spending would create substantially more jobs than tax cuts.
If we pursue this information further we see from the latest information from Informetrica that directing $1 billion toward new government hiring would create 25,000 jobs in the first year. In contrast $1 billion toward personal income tax would create only 9,000 jobs.
There is a very real issue about what course the government has chosen. After four years of a slash and burn approach, of cutting the transfers to the provinces, not one new dollar was included in the budget in terms of restoring and reinvesting in education and social programs. It is the height of cynicism and hypocrisy that even the measures around the child tax benefit will do nothing to seriously alleviate poverty.
Did the budget speak to a progressive taxation system? Absolutely not. There was silence on that measure.
Did the budget deal with the $7.5 billion that the banks are racking up in profits? Did it speak to reinvesting that money so that ordinary Canadians could benefit? There was not a word about that.
In closing, according to my constituents and other people across Canada the budget failed miserably to address the growing inequality in Canada. It lacked the leadership, the vision and the courage to tackle head on the crisis of unemployment and the lack of jobs.
The reality is that this was a banker's budget, not a people's budget.