Does the member think the Minister of Finance did not consult Canadians? He did. I was part of the consultation process. It is called prebudget consultations. I will tell my Liberal friend that the finance committee went into every province asking Canadians to come forward and tell us what they thought should be done with the surplus. That was their task. Not a single individual said that the priorities should be major tax cuts. We talked to hundreds of people. Nobody said ignore the homeless, ignore the unemployed, ignore students with huge debtloads. They did not say that. They said address these serious issues, including health care.
When I went out to consult Canadians from coast to coast to coast and asked them what should be in the budget, none of them said this stuff. None of them said they wanted this budget. They said they wanted a whole bunch of advances on important fronts. What did this Minister of Finance do? He ignored people. If we go out on the streets of Canada today and ask people what they think of this budget they will say that there is nothing in it for them. They did not get anything out of it. Their family did not get anything out of it. They are unemployed. There is nothing in it for them. There are students $40,000 in debt. There is nothing in it for them. There are single moms on social assistance trying to raise three kids. There is nothing in it for them.
I know one guy who is really happy. Mr. Cleghorn, the CEO of the Royal Bank, made a tax break of $30,000 on that announcement. He is $30,000 richer today because of this budget. Bob Cleghorn is a happy camper.
I will tell the House who is not a happy camper. The hundreds of thousands of single moms and single dads raising children on social assistance. They did not get a single cent from this budget. What kind of a government is that? What kind of a government alienates and ignores Canadians? For political scientists watching this, this is the classic liberalism. It is the Darwinian approach to social policy where the weak die and the strong survive. It is survival of the fittest. It is based on the key role of the individual in society.
The Minister of Finance in his budget actually said that the marketplace cannot deal with the social issues of the country. It requires a government. We measure the value of a government not by how it treats the Bob Cleghorns of the world, the millionaires. We measure a government by how it treats ordinary citizens, particularly citizens in need. Were the homeless recognized in this budget? No, they were not. Were the people who today are looking for work recognized? No, they were ignored.
Let us identify a single group of young people. This morning 1.5 million children who are living in poverty because their parents are living in poverty woke up still living in poverty. Is there anything in this budget that is going to change their lives to give them hope and optimism? There is nothing for the 1.5 million kids living in poverty. How can my Liberal friends sit there and not do anything about it and applaud and say this is some great budget? It is very sad.
He said this was a health care budget. What does someone who knows about health care say about it? Let us ask the president of the Canadian Medical Association. He said it had moved it from being an emergency situation to a urgent situation.
He acknowledges that over the next number of years the government is to restore funding. Why? Some members will remember back in 1995 the occurrence of the Ottawa chainsaw massacre. The Minister of Finance came in here with a chainsaw and started to hack $1 million, $2 million, $2.5 million out of the health care budget, one of the major symbols of what it means to be a Canadian.
We had a quality health care system. Yes, I know it started with the NDP in the province of Saskatchewan and built up over the years, but it was a showcase that we could show around the world as what one can do as a country. President Clinton tried to emulate it but he lost that battle. He said look at what Canadians have.
To every single Canadian it was a symbol of what differentiated us from others. It was the best of being Canadian. What did this government do? It just followed suit of Brian Mulroney and came here with a chainsaw and started hacking the health care system year after year.
Finally this year the government says “Whoops, we blew it. We made a mistake. We cut too deeply. We have destroyed the system”. If one looks carefully out there one will see the stealth like change occurring to health care as it is being privatized. Thirty per cent of health care funding today is in the private sector. Nobody talks about this because they are embarrassed to talk about it. It is all because of the slashing, hacking and whacking of the health care budget that allowed the private sector to move into the health care system.
Let us take a look at what this will do. The government says it will restore some of the funding and in a few years from now it will be at the same level it was back in 1995. Big bloody deal. In other words, after years of restoration we are going to be at the same level we were back in the middle part of this decade. Is that progress? At the same time inflation is moving along and the population is increasing.
We are supposed to be cheering here today because the funding is to be restored in a few years back to the levels of 1995. This is almost unbelievable. It is pathetic. Somehow this is held up as a health care budget. The reason it is called a health care budget is it did not do a bloody thing to anything else. Nothing else was recognized.
I think we all acknowledge, including the Minister of Finance in his comments the other day, that the small business sector accounts for most of the jobs being created in Canada. One would expect, at a time when we have levels of joblessness in this country that have been for the last decade the highest since the Great Depression, that the government would want to do something significant in terms of creating employment opportunities and grow the economy into meaningful jobs with the recognition that this involves the small business sector.
Would one not expect the Minister of Finance to do the right thing and say he would make the small business sector a priority by finding ways and means of assisting and supporting the small business sector so it can create employment? I will bet most people thought that would happen.
What did the Minister of Finance, the government and the Liberal Party do about small business? Diddly-squat. I do not know if that is a parliamentary term but I think I will use it anyway. I cannot even say zero because they decided to put $50 million in the next little while into the Business Development Bank of Canada.
I did some calculations and asked what that meant for the province of British Columbia. It means that the province of British Columbia will get over the next few years $5 million to assist the small business sector. This is the only initiative taken by this government. It is absolutely incredible that this government would be so insensitive, so uncaring, so unrealistic, so impractical that it would not do anything to help the sector of the economy that is actually creating some employment.
That is not all. Good grief, I wish I had a longer speech today. Let us acknowledge that the one sector of our economy that creates a lot of meaningful employment is the construction sector. We know that the issue of homelessness is a national tragedy. I do not think there is a single MP in this House who would not say we have a housing crisis in this country. We have to work at this. We live in the second largest country in the world. There are trees from one end of this country to the other. We have land everywhere. We have the banks filled with money and we have a housing crisis. To have a housing crisis you have to really work at this. Our government has somehow been able to do that, to create a housing crisis.
A few years ago the government said it had a big deficit and that it could not do much so it was going to get out of the business of social housing, out of the business of assisting in the development of affordable housing for Canadians. People said that is fair enough, they understood that.
Now we are into a situation where we have billions in surplus. We have people who do not have houses to live in. We have many more people who do not have decent houses to live in. They are trying to raise children in substandard housing. I had a moving evening one night speaking with the grand chief of Canada. I asked what crucial issue facing aboriginal people we could begin to address in the House of Commons. He answered that it was obviously housing. He asked me to imagine being a young first nation child growing up and trying to do homework in a two room house with 13 people living in it, no water and no sewage system. Imagine trying to raise children in that type of environment, and for some that is a good place.
We have been waiting and now that we have $10 billion or $15 billion in surplus we think we will see some action. It is not that it was not encouraged. At every single stop as we criss-crossed the country people said we should take a step to confront the housing issue.
The construction consortiums from coast to coast said the following: “The industry wishes to help in the development of housing infrastructure in this country. Housing infrastructure would put tens of thousands of unemployed Canadians back to work at meaningful jobs and do a great deal in addressing this serious problem in our country”. Create jobs and confront a major social issue.
The mayors of all the major cities got together and asked what they could do. They said that it is an emergency and a tragedy. We should put 1% of this year's budget into housing. That is a little over a billion dollars into housing that would really show leadership on this. This is a term that is no longer part of the Liberal vocabulary but I will try it anyway. That would provide leadership on this issue.
If the Minister of Finance had said we are committed to dealing with this issue, we are going to allocate 1% of the national budget to the housing sector, there would have been a standing ovation around this house and a standing ovation from one part of this country to the other. But he did not. He said we are not going to put a single penny into housing, we are not going to take a single step toward resolving social housing and affordable housing in this country.