Mr. Speaker, I too am very pleased to have the opportunity today to participate in the debate on the budget implementation act. I think it is clear, as the name implies, that we are talking about what the government does to put its money where its mouth is.
One has to be very concerned, even when the government mouths from time to time some progressive thoughts and talks about being concerned about the future of Canadians and the future of the country, whether it backs it up with the kind of concrete resources that would translate those expressions of progressive thought into something concrete for the benefit of Canadians and the future of our great country.
As the House knows, many of my colleagues have already spoken. Most recently the member for Burnaby—Douglas, the finance critic from Winnipeg and many other of my colleagues have spoken specifically about some of the gaps, some of the severe shortfalls between words and resources.
I would like today to not so much speak about some of those areas where the disastrous effect of a budget has failed to have a sensible set of priorities. This is quite evident to Canadians where the negative adverse impact for example of the shortfall in health funding has been a major priority for Canadians and continues to be a problem in the budget we are now debating.
We know the government has perfected the art of bringing out statistics that show there is a such and such percentage increase when it comes to health funding. Of course what the government does not say is the base on which that percentage increase is calculated is a disastrously low, a base that was struck by the government in its massive unilateral unprecedented cuts to health funding in the country. Therefore a great deception goes on in the numbers game, in the representation of increases from what was such a disastrously low base. It really means nothing until we look at how it plays itself out in the health care system.
That is concrete and felt in a very direct way by a lot of Canadians. That is why so many have mobilized so widely to try to close the Romanow gap as it has come to be called.
Similarly, in co-op housing, we have a situation in which the government says that it is concerned about homelessness. Every once in a while it trots out a cameo appearance of desperately struggling community based organizations that are trying to address the homelessness problem. They come together to sign an agreement to deal with the very crisis ridden situation of homeless people on the streets. However when it comes to investing in affordable housing that would begin to solve the problem, the money is not there. It clearly is not there in this budget and has not been there with this government from day one.
In the few minutes I have available, I briefly want to speak about three areas in which the budget falls very short of what is needed, the effects of which are not so immediately measurable but of which are every bit as problematic, as disastrous and devastating in their impact. They do not affect all Canadians in the way health care funding does but they absolutely affect Canada as a community and as a nation in terms of who we want to be. They really go to the question of what is the soul of Canada, which does not seem to concern the government very much.
The first is in the area of the disability tax credit. We have had much debate on this in the House. The NDP has worked actively in collaboration with organizations and individuals living with disabilities to try to get the government to understand that the restrictive definition of what constitutes a disability and what determines eligibility for the disability tax credit has caused immense hardship in the lives of a great many Canadians.
It has to be one of the most meanspirited, short-sighted things that the government has launched. There are a lot of others on that list as well, but to go after the most vulnerable of Canadians for whom just meeting the daily requirements of getting through life is demanding and requires Herculean motivation and commitment on the part of people, for the government to say, “Let us save money by creating new, stricter criteria for eligibility for the disability tax credit” has to be just obscene.
We still have the government mouthing words about being concerned and reviewing the situation, but the fact remains that people who were receiving tiny supplements, and that is what we are talking about, tiny supplements, to an already very inadequate monthly and annual income find themselves even more shortchanged and more short-handed when it comes to paying for their daily needs, never mind beginning to be able to pay for some of the costs associated with the disabilities with which people are living.
The second falls into an area that may be even less immediately evident to a lot of Canadians. I want to take us back very briefly to post-9/11 when I introduced a motion in the House in collaboration with a great many Canadians who were concerned already about the signs of how the government was going to respond.
We argued that there needed to be resources placed in fighting the racial discrimination and the religious bigotry that was already evidencing itself in our Canadian family. It was absolutely un-Canadian in terms of the racial profiling that began to affect not just the lives of people crossing borders but of little children in the school ground. There was an alarming, disturbing outburst, a rash, an epidemic of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic sentiment beginning to come to the fore in this country. This remains a very serious problem.
I have to say when it comes to any evidence that the government has really put its money where its mouth is after saying it is concerned about this that what the government has done instead of allocating resources to do genuine community building, to genuinely increase public awareness and sensitization to this problem, is that it has simply expressed its concern and turned its back on this problem that has grown.
In fact, what the government has done is even worse than that. It is not immediately measurable in the budget we are looking at because there is no budget allocation. The government has made the problem worse by introducing one piece of legislation after another that essentially sanctions the quashing of civil liberties, that essentially creates in the public mind that greater security somehow results from curbing the freedoms, rights and the liberties of Canadians.
Whose rights and liberties end up being quashed most severely? The very Canadians who are most evidently discriminated against in the first place and need the understanding, support and protection of having their rights and liberties safeguarded. The government, by virtue of not allocating the necessary resources for public education and community sensitization, has simply made the problem worse.
Finally, I know I have only a minute or two left, so let me say on this very day that it seems to me important that the government take note that increasing numbers of Canadians are very alarmed that it is necessary for the artistic community, particularly those artists who are involved in theatre and in the film industry, to come to this place, to come to Parliament Hill to say for the love of God why can the government not understand that the very soul of Canada, that who we are, who we aspire to be, what matters to us as Canadians is represented best and most dramatically by the voices and the actions of the creative community, of the arts and culture community?
What do we have happening? Not only are a great many jobs being driven out of existence, not only is a whole industry under assault in terms of the film industry and the related cultural industries, but we have a situation where the ability of Canadians to hear themselves, their voices and their aspirations expressed through the creative energy of the artistic community is being quashed.
I am going to say on this occasion that I hope the government is listening and will understand what the members of ACTRA, the film industry, are saying when they say not to kill an important part of the Canadian soul as well as an industry by the slashing of $25 million and to get beyond that to understand that it is about the investment of dollars but also about overhauling CRTC changes that have similarly curbed, quashed and silenced the voices of hope and aspiration in our society through the artistic and cultural community.