Madam Speaker, I wish to thank my colleague from Windsor West for his questions. I will try to deal with them as efficiently as I can.
The vote on Bill C-325 last night was a tragedy from the perspective that it lost by only three votes. It was 99 to 96. We were recommending income tax deductions for emergency workers and people who provide emergency services to protect us from fires. Most of them come from rural areas. The government opposed it. Overall there were a number, and I will give them credit for it, of members from the government side who voted in favour. It brought us really close but did not quite get us over.
It is a pittance compared to what we are talking about in Bill C-48. Our estimate is that probably over the first five years of these incentives it will be at least a billion and probably closer to a billion and a half dollars. In terms of those emergency workers, I do not know if we would have got up to a few million in terms of the break we were trying to give them and in effect saying to them that as a government, as a Parliament, as their elected leadership in the country, we prize what they were doing for us. The message they got yesterday was obviously that we do not.
We are going to hear if the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance says that he cannot afford the money that has been promised to the provinces for health care when he makes his financial statement in November.
We look at that and see that we cannot find that $2 billion, but we can find this for a very profitable industry. We then say to the minister that this industry is a polluter and that it should be paying its share. It should not be getting tax breaks. On the other hand, the government will say it cannot find money for health and will stick it to the provinces. They will have to find ways to deal with all the health problems that have been specifically created as the result of the burning of fossil fuels. It is terrible policy making on the part of the government.
As for the consumers getting the money, it is obvious they will not. There have been any number of other times when these tax breaks have been given and incentives provided, but did we see a reduction to our cost at the gas pump or the cost of home heating fuel? The obvious answer was, no. We did not get any of those breaks. The government stayed with the companies with their high-paid executives and money going to the shareholders.
On Kyoto and the marketing issue, I am really happy to hear that question because I have not had the opportunity to raise it in the House. We had the Kyoto announcement of spending about a billion dollars at a press conference attended by the Prime Minister, the Minister of Industry and the Minister of the Environment.
We have this retrofit program. The government has set aside $75 million. Everybody in the country who knows anything about it has told the government it is nowhere near enough. It also set aside $45 million to educate Canadians. That is an insult to Canadians.
Canadians led the fight dragging and kicking the government behind it to finally ratify Kyoto. We had people in the country in the ratio of 65% to 75% saying they were convinced that we had to ratify Kyoto and they finally got the government to do it. Now, is the government going to tell them what they have to do to implement around retrofit programs in their own homes and conservation? They do not need the education.
This is going to be another one of those boondoggles. It is going to be money going to the friends of the government to run absolutely useless education programs, promotional programs for conservation and doing retrofitting. It is not necessary. The dollars that need to be spent on that are probably a small percentage of the $45 million that has been set aside.