Madam Speaker, there are several things that can be done. Let me list them quickly.
First, we should be changing the basic personal exemption. It is simply unacceptable in a country like ours that low income Canadians earning around $7,000 a year have to pay tax. We propose to take them and others like them completely off the tax rolls in a staged process of raising the basic exemption to $12,000 a year.
We cannot just help the rich, as the Liberal Party always does. We need to have concern for low income Canadians who are trying to make their way and trying to improve their communities where they live.
The hon. member mentioned the issue of agriculture. I have just come back from western Canada, a region that has been doubly devastated. It has been devastated by nature, but it has also been devastated by the absolute refusal of either the government or the party now in official opposition to take any serious interest in the plight of agriculture.
We had a statistic last year from my native region showing that some 22,000 farmers have stopped farming in the last year and have moved off the land. That is a 10% drop in the number of people taking part in one of the basic industries in western Canada. That is a terrible thing to have happen. If it had happened in Ontario, the Liberal government would have responded very quickly, but it did not. It happened in the west so it gets ignored. However, it cuts into our capacity to be a competitive country, building upon the multiple strengths that agriculture can bring us if agriculture had the kind of support today that it had when a Progressive Conservative government was in office.
Finally, let me speak to the question of students. There is a tiny little measure in this budget for students now in school. This budget does nothing at all to help students who are leaving school with a massive debt, a debt averaging $25,000 per year.
What the government does in the name of Liberal values is say that education in Canada is for the rich, and if one is smart and able but not rich then one cannot get into our education system. That is not the kind of Canada we believe in. That is not a value worthy of the name.