Mr. Speaker, I am very happy this afternoon to have an opportunity to address at third reading stage Bill C-28, the budget implementation act.
I am particularly delighted to have an opportunity to follow my colleague from Winnipeg Centre in addressing Bill C-28. I do so for two reasons. One is that it allows me to pay tribute to the member for Winnipeg Centre for the Herculean, heartfelt effort he has put forward in standing together with first nations people to oppose the insulting, disrespectful, so-called first nations governance bill that is being rammed through by the government. It has several connections with the misplaced budget priorities we are here debating at this moment.
Second, I am very pleased to follow the member for Winnipeg Centre to simply echo my total support for the two issues he has yet again brought to the floor of the House of Commons. Let me just repeat them, because it bears repeating until the government finally addresses both of these anomalies, the first being the absolute obscenity of the lowest income seniors in this country finding themselves in the highest tax bracket, the 76% tax bracket, because of absurdities in the tax act. This is a form of tax unfairness that exceeds almost any other obscenity or absurdity that the government has sponsored in its 10 years in office. Surely it is time to remedy this obscenity.
Second, and equally absurd, is the reality that it continues to be available for corporations in some instances to write off as legitimate business expenses fines that have been imposed upon them for breaking the law. Whether it has to do with environmental issues, with environmental irresponsibility for which they have been convicted, or whether it has to do with labour practices that are completely unacceptable for which they are fined, such as violations of health and safety provisions, for example, or other forms of irresponsible, anti-social behaviour, it remains the law of the land, laws continuing to be supported by the government, that such offences can in some instances be written off by corporations.
Surely members of the Liberal government can understand the connection between the obscenity and the absurdity of those continuing practices of the federal Liberal government. The fact is that the member for Winnipeg Centre speaks from his heart about the high incidence of poverty in his riding and still in far too many communities throughout this country, because there is a connection. It is what budgets are about. We are here debating the budget implementation act.
What budgets are about are priorities. What budgets are about are what kinds of spending priorities a government adopts and what kinds of spending priorities the government ignores, priorities that ought to come to the fore. It cannot be an accident that we see juxtaposed here the kind of absurd tax unfairness and tax write-offs about which the member for Winnipeg Centre has spoken yet again. It is not just the continuing incidence of poverty in this country, but the growing gap. We have the growing gap between the rich and the poor in this country and the increasing squeeze on middle income Canadians.
I know that one of the things already addressed by my colleagues in the NDP caucus is the new provisions for the Canada social transfer. I do not want to use up my short amount of time to talk about the unhappy history of how we got to this point where now we have the government scrambling to try to repair the damage done when this government made a decision to effectively tear up or, perhaps a more appropriate image, smash the Canada assistance plan, toss the established program funding out the window and replace it with the Canada health and social transfer.
We know what has happened as a result of that. The increase in poverty, especially among the poorest Canadians, has been alarming, because the reality is that before the government tore up and threw away the Canada assistance plan, there was at least in place in the country a protection literally encoded in our laws which said that “as a citizen you will not go hungry and homeless”. That was the purpose of the Canada assistance plan.
Yes, the level of support under the Canada assistance plan often fell short of real needs, and yes, the adequacy of housing supplied often fell short, partly because the funds were inadequate from the federal government and also in many cases because the funds from provincial governments in the cost sharing of that were inadequate. But at least there was an assurance that people had a remedy in law if they were refused the basic subsistence requirements to put food on the table and to have a roof over their heads.
Has that been a priority of the government? No. We have seen the damage. Now the government brings in what is supposed to fix up the mess it created. The government has removed health so that we have a separate health transfer. That is some progress, because at least there was more accountability and it was clearer what dollars were going where for Canadians to see, to understand and to try to influence if they wanted to see change. But we still have in a kind of unaccountable lump together the remaining aspects of post-secondary education, income support and early childhood education and child care.
Again the government has not really learned its lessons and has not begun to address what is needed here. Let me say that I think this is an occasion on which we should be willing to recognize that one of the really important elements of the Romanow commission, the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, was that there was a broad process of consultation around future health priorities. Although I think the government has fallen far short, and this is another criticism of the budget, of giving the resources recommended by the Romanow commission to repair the damage to our health care system and extend it as it needs to be extended to deal with unmet needs, at least there was a broad public consultation. There is no assurance whatsoever that the same kind of consultation is going to go on around the desperate problems created by the government's lumping together in an unaccountable way health, social welfare, post-secondary education and child care, and I think it is one of the flawed aspects of the legislation that it fails to do that.
Finally, I just want to say that it is very important for us to learn from our history. For that reason, I say and acknowledge that museums are important. It is also absolutely beyond the comprehension of most thinking Canadians how the government reached the decision to spend close to $100 million to create what I think we all fear is a history of political thought in the Liberal tradition in a political history museum here in Ottawa.
Instead of fictionalizing the flawed legacy of this Prime Minister's government, surely what it should be doing is fixing the misplaced priorities. That starts with adequate funding for existing museums struggling to keep the roofs from leaking and struggling to protect their exhibits, instead of creating what is surely going to become the ugliest part of the Prime Minister's legacy of all and will stand out there for all to see as a monument to the misplaced priorities of the Prime Minister's era in this political history museum, one hundred million dollars' worth.