After 10 years of neglect, as my colleague the member for Halifax has just said.
It was a slap in the face. It was a slap in the face to all of those municipalities that have been struggling day in and day out to improve the quality of life for their citizens.
More than that, it is a sure recipe for all kinds of unacceptable alternatives. We could be looking at user fees, new tariffs, property tax increases and worst of all, privatization of vital public services, such as the water supply and roads.
We were also hopeful that the Liberals would actually start to address housing. We looked forward to a national housing program announcement, a comprehensive budget attack on the shortage of affordable accommodation and decent housing in the country today. We expected this.
In fact, new housing costs have just recorded the highest annual jump in more than 13 years, while Canadians who rent cannot find or afford apartment space. The number of homeless and those who are one paycheque away from homelessness is absolutely intolerable by any standards. It is absolutely shameful for a country whose economy is this strong.
New Democrats along with the housing advocates have been calling for a meagre 1% of program spending to be channelled into a national housing program. Instead what did we get in yesterday's budget? There was no strategy to deal with the housing crisis. There was only the addition of $13 million this year to a previously inadequate five year fund. It is nowhere close to the 1% solution.
The budget utterly fails the many Canadians who cannot afford to put a roof over their heads and feed and raise their children at the same time. Shame on the government for ignoring and neglecting this vital area, this vital need in Canadian society.
With respect to education, funding education is a no brainer. Canada is crying out for highly educated workers. Fully 70% of the labour force growth between 1991 and 2001 was in jobs requiring a university degree or college diploma. Yet the Liberal cuts to post-secondary education have put these opportunities out of reach for more and more young Canadians.
Over the past decade tuition fees have more than doubled. In some courses they are now doubling again over a one or two year period. Students are dragging an average $25,000 in debt when they graduate, yet only one in 24 is able to qualify for debt relief.
We had hoped and believed that there would have been a change yesterday. Instead of the boost to university and college core funding that would keep skyrocketing tuition fees down, the Liberals stuck to their piecemeal millennium scholarship approach.
The same $425 million allocated this year to the Canada education savings grant that does nothing to improve access could have been used to cut tuition fees by close to 15% across the board. That is according to the Canadian Association of University Teachers. Students once again have been left out to dry.
The Liberals could have maintained a balanced budget and still devoted $1.6 billion in 2003-04 to cover need based grants, interest free loans, and to expand and improve debt relief. We had hopes but the Liberals again made the wrong spending choices.
Let me touch briefly on child care. This is an area I have followed for many years. Members will know that when it comes to a national daycare program we are dealing with the longest running broken political promise in the history of the country. We could go back to 1984. Remember the 1988 election with Brian Mulroney and the Conservatives? Then in 1993 there was the red book which said that there was going to be a national daycare program. It was repeated in 1997.
Where are we today? What did we get? Peanuts, barely enough money to pay for 3,000 child care spaces. That is not a daycare program. That is a child care lottery. That is exactly why we raised the question in the House today. It is interesting. At least the Minister of Finance had the honesty to admit that was a piddly amount and hardly up to the task at hand.
What he did not say was that in fact this $25 million in the first year for daycare spaces has to be spread out across the country. Seventy per cent of women who work have children under the age of six and need regulated daycare spaces but only one in ten of those families can access safe, quality, regulated daycare. The rest of those women and families are left to make very worrisome and tough decisions about the safety and care of their kids.
People can understand our frustration today with this budget and our disbelief at a budget that actually would give businesses a benefit by eliminating the capital tax. Let them win the jackpot and make families play the lottery game in terms of basic child care spaces and centres. It is quite unbelievable at a time when there was the fiscal flexibility, the surpluses available to the government to begin to build a national daycare program.
On the environment, as I said earlier today in question period, this budget was supposed to be the showcase for the Liberals. It was to add the muscle to the bones of our Kyoto commitments.