Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to lead off the New Democratic Party's contribution to the debate on the government's budgetary proposals.
This is my first budget as the finance critic for the New Democratic Party. I am very honoured to hold that position.
I want to pay tribute to my predecessor, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, who served as finance critic for many years. He has taught me a great deal. I will continue to rely on him and all my colleagues for advice as I begin these new responsibilities.
Let me also acknowledge the work of Jack Layton, the recently elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party. He is clearly a voice of reason and hope among political leaders in Canada today. Certainly on the question of the budget, he has given a clear message to Canadians that there is hope, that there is an alternative to the kind of mean-fisted approach by the Liberal government and the kind of acceptance of Alliance ideas in the House today.
This is my first budget as finance critic but I have certainly participated in budget debates before. We have been very observant of every budget presented to the House and have critiqued each one very carefully. I must say the budget is proving to be a most difficult one from the point of view of Canadians.
In the past, with the Prime Minister and the current finance minister applauding, we witnessed the former finance minister deliver budgets that could only be characterized as bare knuckle economic assaults on the country's less well off on behalf of the corporate community and the rich.
There was the 1995 Liberal budget that, to quote the former finance minister, set out to redefine government by the most severe cuts to social programs in memory in the name of deficit fighting. There has been the ongoing Liberal deception about a balanced fifty-fifty approach to surplus spending that over the years since 1997-98 has actually turned out to be 90% for tax cuts and debt reduction with only 10% going to program spending.
There have also been years of lowballing and shell games by the government when it comes to budgetary surpluses, with a cumulative total of unrecognized surpluses of $80 billion since 1993. That is according to the statistics provided by the alternative federal budget on the left, and let us look at the other side of the political spectrum. Let us look at the Conference Board of Canada and the Toronto Dominion Bank.
All these experts have recognized the way in which the government has lowballed the surplus numbers and denied Canadians real choices in terms of what needs to happen in terms of the revenues available to the government.
We have had all that history. For me, the culmination, at least until yesterday, was the 2000 Liberal budget with its massive $100 billion tax cuts and debt reduction at the expense of social program initiatives. That budget was delivered in the very same year the government was supposed to celebrate the end of child poverty in Canada.
I can imagine that the current leader of the Canadian Alliance must have been greatly relieved that the finance minister decided to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party and not the Alliance.
Throughout all of that, the New Democrats strongly opposed those budgets and the American-style survivor economics they represented. We worked with and we voiced the concerns of all those other Canadians whose needs were ignored, whose needs were neglected. We worked to get the Liberal-Alliance juggernaut to change course.
Based on the many leaks we heard leading up to yesterday's budget, we thought that maybe we were making some progress. We thought that there had been one of those epiphanies often experienced by leaders on their political deathbeds that would see the Liberals end their romance with the Alliance and begin to repair some of the damage they have caused to the social fabric of Canada.
We actually looked forward to a budget that might offer Canadians some hope. We were hopeful when we heard that the government might finally listen to municipalities, that it might finally listen to the level of government that is closest to people's lives and that the government might make significant investment in the urban infrastructure that is crumbling around us.
The infrastructure component of the Liberal social deficit amounts to $57 billion. Just to begin addressing this need, Canada's cities had called for $800 million per year, rising to $2 billion annually within five years as a minimum. Imagine our disappointment and shock when the budget came forward and we realized we were dealing with a Liberal offer of $3 billion spread out over 10 years.