Mr. Speaker, it may seem that I was off topic, but if the member was actually here and listening to my speech he would know that what I was talking about was how we got into a surplus situation in this country and what the source of revenue was to put us into that surplus, revenue that we should be spending on the basic needs for families to improve their quality of life. That is how we arrived at that. The member would know that if he was actually in the House to listen.
I will talk about Bill C-71. I will talk about the budget for a minute because everybody knows what a charade it is to bribe people with their own money just before an election. It is leading up to an election year.
First the government takes about $8 billion or $9 billion out of the Canada health and social transfer, and then it puts $1.5 billion back and it expects thanks from everybody. We talked about trickle down economics. We are getting trickled on again on that issue. We are getting hosed in that respect. It is not a trickle, it is a flood.
Nobody bought that. That is why Canadians are disappointed. There was an opportunity to correct some of the historic imbalances in our social fabric.
We could use the tax system for the redistribution of wealth. It is one of the most effective tools. In fact I think the parliamentary secretary pointed out in his speech that one of the most effective tools we have to deal with the growing gap between the rich and the poor is a fair taxation system. However, there has been no effort to do that. Instead, the only real reference to taxes has been to give millionaires an $8,000 tax break.
In this budget millionaires now get an $8,000 tax break. The woman standing at the bus stop on the way to her minimum wage job, who does not have adequate day care, is going to take great consolation in that because if we have more millionaires we know that it will trickle down sooner or later. We in the lower classes will get our share. It is a good thing that more people are getting fabulously rich.
The growing gap between the rich and the poor should be the number one concern of this government because the shrinking middle class is a serious problem. Our biggest strength in North America is a burgeoning middle class, a consuming middle class, a middle class that has money and coins in their jeans to buy things. That is disappearing. We are going to have the very rich and we are going to have the very poor, from the day's drudgery to the evening's despair. It is a despair budget.