Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to follow my colleague, the member for Dartmouth, in speaking to report stage of Bill C-28. The bill implements the last federal budget. It is a very important debate because the bill lays out the priorities of the government in terms of where it is spending money and where it is also giving tax cuts. That is the issue at hand today.
From the NDP's perspective I will be speaking to Motions Nos. 17, 18 and 19. Two of the motions have to do with the elimination of the capital tax as outlined in the budget. One of them has to do with clause 84 regarding an increase in allowable contributions to RRSPs.
Clauses 85 and 86 on the capital tax are amendments that were brought forward by the government in the budget which would allow a huge tax break under the capital tax to Canadian businesses and corporations. The elimination of this tax would cost $695 million over three years.
We have to look at this in the context of the rest of the budget. We have to recognize that $1.2 billion was spent in new tax cuts in this budget over and above the $100 billion that was announced in the 2000 budget. This is yet another massive tax cut that is being awarded by the government to the country's corporate elite.
What this means if we want to look at this in terms of priorities of where our real needs are, it will be low income and middle income Canadians who will really feel the brunt of this. They will not receive any benefits from the tax cuts in this budget.
On the other side of the coin, we can see that the Liberal government's budget bill will spend five times as much scrapping the capital tax for businesses than it invested, for example, in affordable housing. I am the housing critic for our party and I have been one person in this house with a few friends, but not very many, who have been championing the critical need for a national affordable housing strategy.
We have been talking about the 1% solution for housing. We need to invest a further 1% in the provision of affordable, not for profit social housing. The government has put a paltry few hundred million dollars into the so-called national housing strategy. There is always the suggestion that is all it can afford. When we stack up the housing need against the tax cut of $1.2 billion just in this budget coupled with a $100 million, we begin to see there is a very different priority emerging.
We also are not in support of the government's plans to increase the RRSP limit from $13,500 to $18,000 by 2005. This will clearly favour about 5% of Canadians who are wealthy. It will again be to the detriment of low and middle income Canadians, particularly seniors who, in receiving the GIS, if they earn anything over the GIS supplement are taxed at a rate of 75%. Again, we can compare that in terms of who this budget is helping and who it is not helping.
Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left?