Some contest of values my colleague says. He would want to say that again.
Liberals together with the other party are boasting about the size of their tax cuts. It is as if they are caught up in a game of one-upmanship; my tax cuts are bigger than your tax cuts. Meanwhile the federal Liberal government turns its back on Canadian families who are struggling to make ends meet, who are struggling to pay for their own home care and who are struggling to pay for the prescription drugs they need.
Canadians have paid dearly so that Liberals could flaunt around and boast about their big surplus and the big tax cuts they are making. But for the vast majority of Canadians, the government has tragically replaced the fiscal deficit with a social deficit.
We see that social deficit around us every day. We see it in the unacceptable waiting lists for vital health services, like radiation therapy for women with breast cancer.
We see the social deficit among our students. Tuition has risen by 126% over the past decade. Graduating students from last year faced average debt loads of $25,000 and we know it continues to rise. The debt load continues to rise in every province except the NDP provinces.
We see the social deficit on the streets of our largest cities. For example in the city of Toronto 5,000 children are homeless every night.
We see the social deficit on farms. Families are trying for the third straight year to make ends meet in the face of falling commodity prices, high input costs and reluctant and inadequate federal support.
We see the tragic social deficit in regions where work is seasonal, unemployment is chronic and workers are scrambling to scrape by on woefully inadequate insurance benefits.
We see it in communities where families can no longer turn on their tap and be assured that their water is safe for their kids to drink or to brush their teeth. They cannot be assured that the water is safe to make a cup of tea for their grandmother, for heaven's sake.
We see the social deficit at food banks where a quarter of a million Canadians are now forced to go just to be able to put food on the table for their families.
Today we see none of these crucial deficits count with the government. It is too busy figuring out its tax cuts for its elite friends.
That is the real record of the Liberal government. It has a great deal of answering to do to the people of Canada.
Over the past five years the government has taken $50 billion out of social spending, $30 billion out of unemployment insurance, and another $25 billion from health care, education and basic social welfare services.
The Liberal government has chosen to give the banks a $500 million annual tax cut instead of reducing child poverty. The Liberal government has chosen to eliminate regulations instead of standing up to polluters with new tougher national standards. The Liberal government has worked harder to stall the loophole case, which my colleague raised again this afternoon in the House, than it has at ensuring Canada's tax system is fair for everyone, not just the country's wealthiest families.
The government has slashed funding and retreated to the sidelines while some provinces welcome in private hospitals instead of working with the provinces to build up our health care system so that it is there when people need it; there when people need it regardless of their financial circumstances and regardless of where they happen to live.
The recent deal with the provinces fails to restore the level of federal funding for medicare even to its pre-Liberal cutback level of 1994-95. It fails to restore the level of funding for medicare to what it was under the Mulroney government when the Liberals took office.
There is another vision of what Canada can be. Canadians know that Canada could be so much better. There is another vision to which the vast majority of Canadians aspire. It is a vision where governments are on the side of working families, where government is committed to the services that ordinary Canadians need, where the hopes and dreams of ordinary Canadians can be put first.
Canadians need a federal government that shows the kind of leadership that truly restores funding to our health care system, the kind of leadership that halts the growth of for profit medicine, the kind of leadership that extends medicare so that it includes the home care that people need and includes the basic prescription drug that people in many cases need to stay alive or maintain some kind of quality of life.
Canadians need leadership that sets tough national standards to stop pollution and to protect people's health. They need leadership that attacks the shame, the national disgrace of child poverty and attacks it head on by reinvesting in our children and in our young people through increased child tax benefits and a national child care program, a national child care program promised by the Liberal government from the day it came to office.
We need leadership that makes sure our young people have the skills that they need to succeed in today's knowledge based economy. We need to roll back tuition fees because if not, we are graduating students into poverty and making it impossible for them to get on with their lives.
We need leadership that creates training programs to make full, meaningful employment a reality so that people do not have to work longer and harder for less. That is what is happening to Canadian families. We need leadership that fights for a new approach to global trade, that puts the interests of ordinary Canadians ahead of the interests of global corporations.
Canadians know that Canada can be a better place.
We can do better in Canada. The federal government can afford to invest in the future, in our children, our families and our communities. It can do it without adding to the debt. It is a matter of choice and priorities.
It is a matter of political will, the political will to invest in the priorities that we share in common as Canadians: medicare, education and training, housing, community development and environmental protections. We need the political will to say no to the dictates of the banks and the wealthiest Canadians, to re-establish the role of the federal government as the true guardian of medicare and national standards for other social programs as well.
The finance minister has shown us today that the government and the Prime Minister simply do not have the political will to do any of those things.
Canadians have clearly indicated what their priorities are. Today the Liberals have clearly shown that so-called Liberal values mean very little to most Canadians because the fact is that capital gains cuts will not pay for nurses. Corporate tax cuts will not shorten waiting lists for hospital beds or cancer treatment. Despite our aging population and rising health care costs, the Liberal government still has not restored health funding to the 1993 Mulroney level. Let us remember Liberal commitments on pharmacare and home care. They have been shoved right off the Liberal agenda.
It is a great budget for a homeless person who has a big, fat stock portfolio. The Liberal's notion of what the reality is for most Canadians is that they all have big, fat stock portfolios. This budget will be great for them because they will enjoy tax benefits of $25,000, $30,000, $35,000 from the government's tax measures. There are $100 billion in tax cuts while over one million children grow up in poverty in this country.
I say shame and the vast majority of Canadians say shame as well to a government that puts tax cuts for the wealthy ahead of dealing with the reality that we have one million children in the country growing up in poverty. By medical assessment, 57,000 children go to bed hungry and are considered to be suffering the effects of malnutrition because of hunger.
Liberals just do not seem to understand what it does to our young people to tell them that they absolutely have to have higher education in order to participate in the knowledge based economy and then turn around and saddle them with debt loads of $25,000 and $30,000 on average, and that is just for students getting an undergraduate education.
Hon. members should think about that. The average student debt that our students have had heaped on their shoulders is larger than the per capita share of the national debt. Yet what we see in this mini-budget today is $10 billion a year for the national debt and not one single red cent for student debt.
I could not believe my ears when the Prime Minister said yesterday that the biggest problem the government faces is that it has too much money. Then I thought about it. I thought maybe that was a promising sign of what we would see in the mini-budget. When we look at the size of the social deficit, the health deficit, the education deficit, the environmental deficit and the infrastructure deficit that have been run up by the Liberal government over the last seven years, heaven knows there are some real priorities for which that bundle of too much money the Prime Minister talked about yesterday is desperately needed.
The tragedy is that today we saw a mini-budget that completely fails to address the hardship and the heartache that have been suffered by a great many Canadians as a result of the priority choices the government has been making over the last seven years.
The reality is that not only are there individuals and families in many corners of the country suffering from these misplaced Liberal priorities, but whole communities are paying the price. Whole regions of the country are paying the price. In the process a lot of division and tension has been created in this country of ours.
The sense of pride that we have in ourselves in the kind of country we are has been eroded. The only thing I can say is what I said at the beginning, that I receive this mini-budget with a heavy heart but also with a sense of optimism. The fact that the federal Liberals will have to start accounting for themselves in an upcoming election is a good thing.
The Liberal government thinks the most important thing to do is to brag and to congratulate itself for the big bucks that are available because of the surplus that has been created by the social deficits the Liberals have heaped on people. But Canadians have a very different set of values. I am absolutely optimistic that Canadians will understand the cynicism, the crassness, the self-serving nature of the choices the government has made in the budget it has introduced today. It is a reminder of why we should be grateful for the fact that we do live in a democratic country.
Perhaps the government does not care about the hungry and the homeless and the people who suffer from the lack of health care and education because they do not have the private bucks the government is pumping up with its tax cuts for the wealthy. However, Canadians do care about those things. On election day Canadians will have their say. They understand how important it is that the values, the social democratic values of the New Democratic Party be well represented in the House. A lot more New Democrats are needed in the House to push back against this meanspirited, cynical, crass approach to governing.