It took a while, that is for sure, and it took a lot of Canadians suffering and bringing their pain to the attention of this government to finally get the Liberals to admit that their policies had put our health care system on the critical list.
This was not always the case. Four years ago when this government began to hack and slash away at health care funding, the Prime Minister and the finance minister were busy telling Canadians that even with an aging population, even with the rapidly changing medical technology, even with the escalation in the cost of prescription drugs, somehow we could spend less on health care without any real consequences. Regrettably every Canadian knows today that there were consequences. There were severe consequences.
Now we have to start repairing the damage done by that hacking and slashing by a government with no vision whatsoever for the future of our health care system and no regard for the damage that it was doing to the health care system of today and tomorrow.
As the Liberal government took over $20 billion out of the money that it was transferring to the provinces, emergency wards were growing more and more crowded. As the federal share of health care funding fell to just 11%, and let us remember that the federal share of health care spending was once 50%, and as the government dragged it down to 11%, the waiting lists grew longer and longer. More sick patients were sent home from hospital before they were ready and without a home care program there to look after their needs.
The Liberals began to blame the provinces. Again this afternoon in question period we saw the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health blame the provinces for the inadequacy of home care. Then of course some of premiers, like Mike Harris, blamed the hospitals. For all I know some of the harried hospital administrators in this country tried to blame the patients for being sick. Blame everybody, blame anybody, but do not accept the responsibility yourself. That has been the federal government's position.
If nothing else can be said about yesterday's budget, this government has finally admitted that it has been a major cause of the health care crisis across this country today. Canadians have been accusing this government of wilful neglect of our health care system, of tearing down health care, and yesterday the finance minister finally pleaded guilty. That is the good news in this budget and we agree with those who say that is welcome news.
I propose that as part of the finance minister's penalty, as part of his penance as my clergy colleague would say, the Minister of Finance should be required to perform some community service. Surely that is a reasonable proposition. Surely he should be required to serve some time. Serve time in an emergency ward. Go and help the families and help the staff cope with the overcrowded waiting rooms his policies have created. Surely that is a reasonable sentence. For the real test of this so-called health budget will take place in the emergency wards, in the surgical wards and the chronic care facilities around this country.
Once the budget day dust settles and Canadians see how health funding figures have been inflated and exaggerated by this government, they will be looking to see if this health budget makes a real difference in the quality of care they and their families actually receive from the health care system. I honestly hope it will make a difference. We all hope it will make a difference because Canadians really deserve a break after so many years of such devastating cuts to our health care system.
I fear that the crisis is not over. I think most Canadians know in their hearts that the health care crisis is not over. The Liberal government has let the problems get so bad and it has been so slow to respond to that crisis, so slow to offer the needed injection of money, that I fear it will be a very long time before Canadians will see any really significant improvement in the health care system.
The Liberals have inflated the appearance of the new money by announcing five years of spending in advance. Announcing five years of spending at one time seems like a neat trick on the face of it, but at the end of the day this budget will only get us back to where we were four years ago. That is with no accounting for inflation, no accounting for the continuing escalation in drug costs, no accounting for the increased cost of caring for an aging population or any of the other additional costs associated with new treatments and new medical technologies.
Canadians do not want their health care system going backward. They do not want us being dragged backward and they do not want us just to be stuck in repairing the damage this government has caused. They want some vision for the future. They want some leadership in how we are going to implement a vision for health care in the future.
Canadians are desperate for some action on home care and pharmacare. They know from experience that the practice of medicine is changing and that patients are being sent home from hospitals earlier and earlier after surgery and other treatments. In theory that is a welcome development. We all know some patients are better off at home earlier if—and it is an if that this government seems not to understand or to be willing to take any responsibility for—the home supports are in place to ensure people are safe and on the road to recovery.
Right now the reality is quite different. Today and for some time to come, and this government has provided no assurance that it is not going to continue for a very long time, countless numbers of people, mainly women, daughters, mothers and wives, are pitching in. Another layer of responsibility is being added to their family responsibilities and to their work lives, to bear the burden of providing care in the home for which they are not trained and for which the support is not present.
Early hospital release and outpatient treatment also mean—and this is sometimes lost and apparently this government does not understand—that many more prescription drug costs are passed on to the patient and the patient's family. Before those costs would have been covered as part of the hospital stay. As a result of rushing patients out of hospital and placing them in their own homes, a double burden is being heaped on those families because with very few exceptions, the costs of those drugs are borne by the out of hospital patients and their families.
Developing a health care system where Canadians all across the country can count on publicly provided home care and where all Canadians have a drug plan must be a top priority for our health care system. The Liberal Party promised home care and prescription pharmacare during the last election. There was no talk then about how this is of no concern to the federal government. “This is not our responsibility; it is the responsibility exclusively of the provinces” is the explanation we heard today when we raised the concerns again about home care.
We would have thought that in a budget which the government itself trumpeted as the health budget, it would have proposed some initiatives on home care and pharmacare. But no, not a hint that the federal government will offer any leadership or any initiatives in these critical areas. It is this absence of forward looking vision that is the budget's biggest disappointment. If the government is not going to take action on home care and on prescription drugs in what the government itself calls the health care budget, then when will the government ever take action on home care and pharmacare?
The second theme of the budget was tax reduction. At the outset the finance minister appeared to strike the right note on tax reform. In his opening statement he said “Most importantly we must always be fair. If at the end of the day the books of the country are better and the lives of Canadians are not, we will not have succeeded”. These are fine words and it is a darn shame that the finance minister did not act on those words when he brought forward his budget.
For a budget supposedly designed to improve the lives of Canadians, the Liberal government gave the biggest breaks of all to those with the biggest incomes. Those are the facts. That is not Liberal spin. That is not opposition rhetoric. Those are the facts of this budget.
The Liberal government gave most of the tax breaks to those least in need of them.
With the elimination of the surtax to those earning over $50,000, the budget delivered over $1 billion of the $2.8 billion tax package, or 35%, to 17% of the highest earning taxpayers. I guess that is Liberal tax fairness. What that means is taking advice from the Reform Party to our right; what that means in terms of fairness is that the millionaire gets a tax break of $8,000 while anyone earning less than $50,000 does not get one red cent of a tax break in this budget.
Surely that $1 billion could have been better and more fairly spent on people who desperately need help in this country: the one million kids living in poverty who will get no help from this budget; the 800,000 unemployed who are no longer eligible to receive unemployment insurance because the government has gutted the unemployment insurance program; the 1,000 workers at Devco who are losing their jobs, their source of income and their pension entitlement after 20 or more years on the job sacrificing, as we were reminded this weekend by a coal miner's wife, their health, their limbs and in too many instances their lives; and the hundreds of thousands of homeless people crowding the streets and relying on food banks and shelters for sustenance.
The child tax benefit was boosted by $300 million in order to raise the floor at which the benefit is phased out. This change is to be welcomed, but it will only provide very modest additional relief to families with incomes over $26,000 and about $184 a year for families between $40,000 and $60,000 with two children.
The major problem with this measure, with the federal government's child tax benefit break, is that it fails to do anything for the poorest of poor children, for the poorest of poor families.
Those families on social assistance who have been struggling to get into the paid workforce or who are at home raising their young children without the benefit of the oft promised child care program from the government, another broken promise, will continue to go with no benefits whatsoever from the so-called child tax benefit extension.
Three years ago the finance minister sold this child benefit as the answer to child poverty. Since the unanimous adoption in parliament of former NDP leader Ed Broadbent's motion in 1989 to eliminate child poverty in this country by the year 2000, the number of poor kids in Canada has actually risen by over 500,000. It has not declined but has risen under this government's policy by 500,000. Today one child in five in the country lives in poverty. Over one million of them are in families on social assistance. These children will receive no help whatsoever from the budget. Not a single cent.
How does the Minister of Finance measure this breach of fairness? How does the finance minister explain this breach of fairness? He has balanced his books but the lives of the most destitute of Canadians remain untouched.
The finance minister has provided some general assistance to all taxpayers by raising the basic personal exemption to $7,131 from $6,456. This gives about $124 more to individuals. That is 40 cents a day. The government likes to point out how many people have been taken off the income tax rolls by this measure. However they will still be forced to pay the GST. They receive no break there at all.
Our priority would have been to implement a 1% reduction in the GST? In that way all Canadians would have benefited and it would not have depended on their earnings level. That surely would have been a fairer way to bring in tax relief and would have been a job generator.
The most eloquent and most telling part of the budget, however, is in its silences. Health care is not the only emergency we face. Indeed, many cities across the country have officially declared homelessness a national emergency. Not in living memory have so many Canadians found themselves living on the street and without adequate shelter.
They understand that homelessness can be a complex problem including poverty, unemployment, mental health, addiction, family breakdown and many other problems, but surely complex problems require extra effort and special attention.
The Liberal government has done exactly the opposite. Faced with this complex problem it has simply walked away from its responsibilities. It is in the process of getting out of any responsibility for social housing at a time when its participation was never more needed.
The Liberal government's approach to homelessness has been to simply walk on the other side of the street.
There are many other evidences of silences in the budget: silence on child care, silence on support for parents, silence on helping young people finance their education or get the training they need, and silence on eliminating wage discrimination and pay inequities. These silences speak volumes about the extent to which the government is out of touch with the lives of ordinary Canadians.
If the government were in tune with the lives and the values of ordinary Canadians, it would not engage in the endless self-congratulations that we have seen in the last 24 hours. It would accept that in a democratic society we have a responsibility to provide for the most vulnerable.
It is clear that the government lacks the sensitivity and the humility to acknowledge that it has failed to provide for the most vulnerable Canadians. That is why we on this side of the House have our work cut out for us.