A skeleton is right, as my friend in the Alliance Party has just said.
We are very disappointed and we join with many Canadians in expressing that disappointment. Despite the billions of dollars in economic and health costs the Liberals have acknowledged are coming from climate change, the budget commits less to Kyoto implementation than the amount pledged to ongoing tax cuts. Any serious plan to meet Kyoto has to include public transit, passenger rail and freight rail, but not a penny was dedicated specifically to those solutions.
By the most generous definition possible, there is $300 million a year available for transportation infrastructure. Again, solutions were within their reach, but the Liberals opted to shortchange Canadians.
Moving on to health, I know that this is a matter in which my colleagues across the way will be interested. We have serious concerns about the way in which the government failed to close the Romanow gap. Can members believe it? Here we have an opportunity like never before in terms of surplus revenue, in terms of a fabulous blueprint from Roy Romanow, and the government cannot figure out how to at least adopt the bare minimum.
Close the Romanow gap. Ensure that the government is somewhere close or on the path to achieving a 25% share of the financing of our health care system.
With this budget we are ending up with a share of health care financing that is below the Brian Mulroney and Conservative share of health care. Some legacy. The legacy of this Prime Minister and these Liberals is to be lower than Brian Mulroney on funding of health care.
After seeing the federal share of health funding drop like a stone to around 12% from previous radical Liberal budget cuts, Canadians sent a clear message to the Liberals, through Roy Romanow, to move as quickly as possible to a system that had the federal government involved as a partner, at least on a 25% basis, that ensured accountability measures to prevent money going to for profit investor owned health care services and to ensure that we moved our system from an institutional based, costly, illness focused system to a community based, holistic, preventive health care model.
We had a great opportunity. According to all estimates and reliable sources, all that it would have taken to close the Romanow gap would have been about $5 billion or $6 billion. It is interesting that the government is prepared to put its surplus, about $4 billion, into a contingency fund or what it would call a prudence fund, otherwise probably known as a slush fund, instead of putting it into the number one priority facing Canadians and ensuring that we did everything possible as a nation, as a federal government, to address those pressing concerns in terms of quality care, waiting lists and access to trained professionals and services.
On a related issue, Roy Romanow called for a rural and remote access fund with an immediate injection of $1.5 billion over the next two years. Why did he do that? Because he recognized that Canadians living in the north in our three territories were particularly vulnerable and had particular challenges to overcome because of long distances.
Premiers joined in calling for a similar proposal at the last first ministers conference in January by asking for an additional .5% of the total new health funding, per territory. It was thought that it would take $60 million per year as a minimum to address that fundamental concern of the premiers and the territories. It would help deal with the challenges being faced. Did the government find $60 million to deal with the issues and challenges facing northerners? No. Instead it found millions of dollars in tax relief for big businesses. It has found all kinds of tax relief for the wealthy, who are able to put more into RRSPs, which provides no benefit to 95% of Canadians. Talk about misplaced priorities. I think that says it all.
I know I have to wrap up. We see no vision for our nation in this budget. Spending for spending's sake seems to be the only plan. Just like the previous Liberal Alliance plan of blindly cutting government services and cutting taxes proved no plan to meet the real bread and butter needs of Canadians, this too will fail.
The new finance minister seems to think that randomly scattering a handful of seeds far and wide in the hope that something will grow is the best approach to budgeting. Well, he is wrong. He should take a lesson from the alternative federal budget that carefully crafts economic strategies to invest in Canadians and it does so without running up a financial deficit or especially a social deficit.
By way of concluding, this is the legacy budget of the Prime Minister. To the Liberals and the Alliance it may seem like a positive legacy. However the vast majority of Canadians still see the path of destruction this Liberal government has cut through our social fabric. This budget is not an answer. It is nothing more than a damage report.