Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak on behalf of the New Democratic Party to Bill C-49, an act to implement the budget that was presented to parliament on December 10, 2001.
In speaking to the bill, I want to respond to what was said by my colleague on the government side. He said that the budget and the bill were as a result of the government listening to Canadians. I think that has to be rephrased slightly. The government listened to some Canadians. It listened to its friends.
When people in my riding of Vancouver East, working people, low income Canadians, look at the provisions in the budget, they see nothing that will help them in terms of improving the quality of their lives.
One of the main features of the budget is to establish the Canadian air transport security authority, CATSA. As my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois said, this is nothing more than a tax grab. Why on earth would Canadians want to write a blank cheque for $2.2 billion to the federal government without knowing where that money was going?
We need to point out to Canadians that the establishment of this new air transport security authority is nothing more than a new agency of Liberal appointees and that it will have very little to do with providing security at airports. In reality, of the $24 that will be charged to people for a round trip, only about $2 per flight will actually go to fund the new agency and for security measures. When one looks at the bill there is something like 56 pages devoted to the administration of the new tax and not a word about how security will actually be improved.
It is an incredible situation that under the guise and illusion of providing security, something for which people are legitimately concerned when they are travelling, that a $2.2 billion cheque will be handed over to a new agency with no credibility or legitimacy, and without the assurance that security will actually be improved. We in the New Democratic Party have serious problems with that proposition and we will fight it tooth and nail all the way.
Another provision in the bill has to with the $2 billion infrastructure fund. Originally this was set up as a separate foundation. I think many of us had serious concerns about how a Liberal appointed foundation would operate and what accountability there would be. Now we have a situation where the Deputy Prime Minister will be in charge of the $2 billion fund.
I do want to say that setting up an infrastructure fund is something that is critically important. I come from a municipal background. Today members of the NDP caucus met with the president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Mr. Jack Layton, who laid out for us the serious situation facing municipalities where they are grappling with huge infrastructure costs around public transportation, bridges, roads, water plants, treatment plants and so on. The issue is very important because many of our municipalities, particularly in the larger urban centres, are at a critical point where they do not have the financial resources to meet the growing infrastructure demands.
Mr. Layton pointed out that the cost for municipal government was actually increasing through the property tax revenue. If we look at the European and American experiences, we see it is a much more direct relationship between the federal government and the municipalities in terms of a financial arrangement that provides direct infrastructure support to municipalities.
While $2 billion sounds like a lot of money, when it is put in the context of what is actually required by municipalities, it is actually a very minor amount in terms of what they actually need. While the NDP supports the idea of creating an infrastructure fund, we feel that the establishment of a $2 billion fund without a clear sense of how municipalities will be involved in a direct way, is of very serious concern to us.
I also want to comment on what the act fails to do. Yesterday, students in dozens of communities across the country took to the streets in the tens of thousands because they were fed up with higher and higher costs for education. Their student loans and debtloads were getting worse and worse, and they were basically graduating into poverty.
In my home province of British Columbia, where tuition fees have been frozen for four years and were actually rolled back by 5%, we are now facing the prospect of a massive tuition fee increase. Thousands of students demonstrated at Queen's Park, in Halifax, in Vancouver, in Victoria and even Carleton University students here in Ottawa protesting the fact that education was becoming less and less accessible.
Studies show that the chance of a young person from a low income family actually getting a post-secondary education is less than half of what it is for someone who comes from an affluent family. I point this out because I heard the hon. member say that the Liberal government was doing a wonderful job when it came to post-secondary education and that it had 2,000 research chairs. Although that may be well and good, when it comes to direct support to students who are struggling with high tuition, we have seen absolutely zip from the government.
What we need to see is a national grants program, not the millennium fund which my colleague mentions. The millennium fund helps less than 12% of students. In some provinces it is a slight decrease in the amount of assistance that they actually get. The millennium fund is not a grants program. The millennium fund does not improve or increase accessibility for students who want to go to post-secondary education.
I think the assessment of any student in this country or an organization like the Canadian Federation of Students, would be that this budget has failed on that score.
I also want to touch briefly on the question of housing. A couple of days ago the National Council of Welfare, which is a federally appointed advisory body, produced a very excellent report called “The Cost of Poverty”. It received some attention but very little attention for the very significant and dramatic information contained in it.
The report showed us that neglecting our social policy, our social fabric and our social safety network has produced a growing inequality in incomes. The cost to our health care and judicial systems, and to our young kids who need to get a good start in life, to have equal opportunity and to have a future, has taken a terrible human toll as well as an economic and a social toll on society.
The budget and the act before us today is about a big tax grab. It is not about helping Canadians improve their quality of life. It is not about helping unemployed Canadians. It is also not about changing inequalities that exist in Canada.