Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-28, the budget implementation act, and to recommend to members in the Chamber the importance of the amendments before the House today.
I want the House to know that with respect to Bill C-28 the New Democratic Party took the process very seriously and made a number of amendments. We recommended those amendments to the House in order to make the budget a better document and ensure that budget 2003 reflected the priorities of Canadians.
As the House will know, from previous speeches on the bill, many members in the Chamber do not believe that the government of the day has truly reflected the priorities of Canadians or done everything in its power to ensure that the pressing needs and concerns of Canadians were addressed in the budget. This is at a time when surplus revenues are significant and when Canadians have a clear sense that social reinvestment is the order of the day and must be the priority for government action.
We have commented before on the budget and have indicated that there were some drops in the bucket that have made the situation better but that they did not actually amount to much when dealing with the poverty facing children, the housing conditions facing our aboriginal people on reserves, the juggling act of working women trying to provide for their children and ensuring quality day care, or when it comes to unemployed workers who are desperately trying to find some security at a time of great flux in the labour force today.
Today we are recommending that the government do more to invest in those priorities of Canadians. We are recommending that the government do that by deferring its tax cut agenda and putting on hold its plans to give tax breaks to big business and wealthy Canadians at a time when there are so many pressing social needs.
I want to quickly reference four or five of those pressing needs. The number one priority of Canadians is health care. We know the budget makes an attempt at reversing a decade of cuts to health care. We know the Liberals today have recognized the errors of their ways and are attempting to deal with a situation that they themselves caused. We acknowledge that there is some additional support for health care in the budget.
However the amount falls far short of what is required and falls far short of what has been recommended by the Liberal appointed commission on health care. Let us not forget that the proposals before us today leave a Romanow gap of some $5.1 billion, money that could have gone to ensure that provincial governments are equipped and able to deal with growing waiting lists, with a demand for community based primary care delivery systems and for action finally on the long awaited, long overdue promised national home care and pharmacare plans.
The first priority of Canadians is health care. The government has failed in that regard by refusing to use all resources at hand to backfill from those years of cuts and from the devastation wreaked upon this system going back to 1995 with the famous budget introduced and engineered by the member for LaSalle—Émard.
The second priority has to do with child care and meeting the needs of working women and families everywhere in our society today. I am glad the Minister responsible for the Status of Women is here. I hope to hear from her in this debate because I think it is acknowledged that while the budget makes a tiny step in terms of meeting a promise that has been the longest running one in the history of Canadian politics for a national day care program, this is not a national day care program.
Working women today, families everywhere, are still struggling to find appropriate licensed, quality, non-profit child care for their children. There is no question that when it comes to women's search for equality and the barriers and obstacles to their full participation in the labour force today, the number one priority is quality child care. The government has failed to ensure resources available to it, through the surplus which has been generated and through deferral around these tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy in Canada. This would have gone a long way to address that issue.
Third, is the question of living conditions for aboriginal peoples and the state of housing on reserves across the country. The government should be embarrassed by the findings of the Auditor General's report which clearly indicated that many members of our first nations communities were living in third world conditions and in deplorable housing conditions. The government has failed to address that long overdue concern in today's budget.
It should also be embarrassing for the government to have to deal with a United Nations envoy which toured first nations communities in Canada and which reported on the deplorable conditions. It must be an eye opener for the government to know that UN officials, touring in Canada, have expressed shock, dismay, surprise and horror that a country as rich and wealthy as Canada has allowed these horrible living and working conditions to continue.
Finally, let me mention the issue of women in general and comment on the United Nations committee report overseeing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. It should be an eye opener as well for the government to recognize that Canada is falling far short of its obligations under that convention and that in fact previous cuts to social programs and inaction by the government over the last 10 years have had a devastating impact on women and their families.
The result is that Canada falls far short of basic obligations under a UN convention requiring the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. Surely, at a time of considerable budget flexibility and significant surplus, the government could find it within its powers to address the concerns of families, of discrimination against women, of children living in poverty and of first nations communities living in third world conditions. This is what we should be about today, and it is the obligation of government to address those concerns.
Today we present one recommendation to make that possible. We call on the government to scrap its proposals to give a tax break to wealthy individuals and big business, which it is doing by way of recommended changes to the RRSP contribution limit and by way of the changes to the capital tax. We are talking about one to two billion dollars in revenue that could be applied to the social priorities of Canadians, to the primary objective of reinvesting in the social fabric of the country and to ensuring that we as a collective, as a House of Commons, once and for all take on the challenge of the human deficit and the social debt in the country.
That is our recommendation today. We hope there is a receptivity to those notions and that members of the House will support our amendments.