Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be able to comment on yesterday's budget on behalf of the New Democratic Party.
I want to start by saying that by all accounts this was a lacklustre budget, a lacklustre budget presented by the finance minister renowned for his ability to smother the many flames and fires of controversy that have previously annoyed and now threatened to burn down the Liberal homestead.
The Liberals have taken every opportunity over the past several months to lower Canadians' expectations to zero and yesterday they delivered. After all, exposed in the storm of controversy around the sponsorship scandal, the government's intention was clearly to make no waves. As a result, a lot of the commentary around the budget has been a shrug.
Although disappointed, many Canadians have been so primed to expect nothing from this budget that they are more stunned than angry. Reaction from the corporate community has been muted, with a quiet nod of approval, I think we could say, at debt reduction. I think there has been only the occasional grumble about insufficient tax cuts. The head of one business lobby even called this budget “boring”. Imagine that.
All quiet on the budget front? It may have been quiet around Ottawa last night, but I have a feeling it was not so quiet in the corporate boardrooms around the country and in fact around the world. I would bet there was quite a racket as corporations hammered together Trojan horses, gifts of corporate assistance and partnerships to offer to Canadians to help us out of the health and infrastructure crises that the government has chosen to neglect in this budget. The din was deafening from the sharpening of corporate knives in readiness to come after public services like health, education and infrastructure.
This budget offered no solutions to the major problems confronting Canadians, serious and life-changing or even life-threatening problems such as a public health system still eroding away because of inaction on the Romanow report, or young people burdened by skyrocketing tuition fees and huge debt loads. Then let us not forget the deteriorating infrastructure, threatening not only individuals wanting basics like safe drinking water, but businesses as well, which rely on public roads and power. Then there is the lack of affordable housing, and of course, still and again, the appalling conditions faced by first nations and aboriginal Canadians.
This budget not only does not offer new solutions on its own, but it also fails to deliver on the Liberal government's own throne speech of just a few weeks ago. How is that for Liberal credibility? We can go back 10 years and talk about the broken promises from the red book. We can talk about the 1993 promise for a national child care program. As we know, that is the longest running broken political promise in the history of this country; it has been 11 years or more. I think even Brian Mulroney promised a national child care program. There is still nothing. There is nothing in this budget.
We can go back 10 years, but that would be sort of pointless, especially since we only have to go back a couple of weeks to the throne speech, that supposed trademark indicator for this so-called new Liberal government.
This play it safe Liberal budget gamble may divert attention from scandals and mismanagement, but it serves to actually focus attention on the bankruptcy of this government's agenda and leadership vision.
For many Canadians who had been holding on, waiting for help from their national government, their disappointment and despair is only heightened by the obvious lost opportunity.
The only plan in the budget? The only national vision in the budget? Pay down the debt. That is all, folks. That vision, if we can call it that, is clearly set out in the budget by the government formally setting the debt to GDP ratio target at 25% within 10 years.
The Liberal plan is the same as it has been all along: keep spending at rock bottom, underestimate surpluses, and then pour every cent that is left into debt reduction. Never mind what Canadians want and never mind putting it on the table and having a debate: lowball the surplus and when the money comes in sock it away against the debt.
Budgets are supposed to be about choices. They are a road map for the future. Spending money to speed up debt repayment instead of on social need is a clear indication of just how lacking in vision and leadership this new Liberal government really is. This decision to spend money to speed up debt repayment is the Liberal choice again this year. This is a choice that is made in full knowledge of all the facts on what Canadians are faced with and what their needs are.
Let me list them: hospital halls still filled with patients; an unemployment rate that has not dropped below 6% in 20 years; student debt averaging $25,000; an estimated one-quarter of a million Canadians experiencing homelessness over the course of a year; aboriginal Canadians with a poverty rate above 50%; women forced to live with violent spouses for lack of alternatives; and a child poverty rate that is still hovering around 20%.
Given all those facts, that reality, the Liberal choice was to spend money on paying down the debt faster. The Liberal choice was to spend a minimum of $30 billion over 10 years on debt reduction to get to a target that would have happened anyway just one year later.
Human need is stagnating in a pool of Liberal inertia. Would Canadians make this choice? They certainly do not seem to favour this direction when asked in the polls. It certainly has not been my experience in talking to constituents. In fact it is like deciding to speed up one's mortgage payments when one's mother is sick, one's son needs tuition and one's roof is falling in. Nobody would make that choice.
But the Liberals just did, and it becomes even worse knowing that the debt to GDP ratio will fall on its own with a strong economy, and as I just said a moment ago, an economy that would be made even stronger by putting budget resources into these other urgent priorities.
New Democrats, like other Canadians, want to deal with the national debt. I do not want my colleagues across the way in the Liberal Party to assume otherwise and to pretend that we are not paying attention to the need to always be vigilant in terms of reducing the debt. But New Democrats want to do so in an appropriate and reasonable way, not as this Liberal government has chosen, not driven by a right wing corporate ideology.
Is this totally a budget to save the government's reputation? I do not think so. I think there is more to it than that.
The Prime Minister, on the day he took office, created a new cabinet position of parliamentary secretary for public-private partnerships, with the specific task of fostering and overseeing the development of public-private partnerships to privatize what have been public services. I do not know why the Liberals are so proud of that sell off of what is so valuable to Canadians.
Let us look at it this way. Given the Liberal's new found zeal for not wasting money, my colleagues are confident that they do not want this parliamentary secretary sitting idol. That is what we have today. We have given that person some work to do because this privatization budget will give that person lots to do.
Of course, we are all aware of the budget's opportunistic privatization of the government's remaining shares in Petro-Canada. However, that is privatization through the front door. That is finishing off what Brian Mulroney started to do. The Liberals are much better at privatizing through the back door. That is what this budget sets up because it is the classic pattern in the Conservative neo-Liberal strategy to starve public services to the crisis point and then welcome the corporate for profit sector in on the pretext of helping out.
The Conservatives tried it with public education in Ontario and with health care in Alberta. The public then ends up adding corporate profits to its costs, but the government does not show big short term investment spending and can keep corporate taxes lower.
Nowhere is this more evident than in health care. Short of a long overdue investment in public health, almost half of which is just a reallocation of Health Canada's resources, this budget does nothing to help stabilize, sustain or save public health care. There is not one new penny for new provincial transfers for health.
Just like the Liberals' throne speech before it, there is not a mention of the Romanow commission on health care. It is really quite incredible. Canadians have been telling the government for years that health care is the number one priority. Finally, after a lot of pushing, prodding and pulling, the government responded with the Romanow commission. Canadians spoke, they expressed their wishes to preserve medicare, a public not for profit health care system.
A year and a half after that report was completed the blueprint is still on the shelf. The system is still wallowing in disorganization because Romanow reforms have not been made. Privatization continues to erode every bit it can, and the provinces are outraged and threatening to privatize even more.
Thankfully, I come from a province where the government has no intention of falling to the lowest common denominator and following this obvious direction that the Liberals have set out, which is to privatize health care. In fact the NDP government in Manitoba, under Premier Gary Doer, has been a leader in the country in trying to convince the federal government to finally, once and for all, live up to a fundamental commitment of a basic 25% share of health care, so the provinces do not have to come begging for money, and we can ensure that patients get the services they need.
I want to quote from Gary Doer's comments to the press yesterday in response to the federal budget. As the news report said, he tore into the Prime Minister's first budget as Prime Minister, warning that the provinces would be unable to deliver the kind of health care Manitobans expect with the dollars Ottawa is offering. He said:
If this was spring training for the federal election on where people stand on health care, I think we as Canadians have struck out.
Premier Gary Doer has said it all. Canadians are the losers, when all is said and done, when it comes to this Liberal budget.
What has been the government's response. Nothing, not a cent, There is no strategic investment raising the federal contribution to 25% of total government spending; a $2 billion one time payment that Liberals took credit for last year on budget day. They have now announced this five times, the same $2 billion.
What the budget provided was just another quiet step along the path to the parliamentary secretary for public private partnership's door.
What a blow to Canadians. What a catastrophic failure of government responsibility. What does it matter that the numbers add up properly if the total still falls way short of what is needed? The government's new accountability budget is small comfort to patients stuck in a hospital hallway.
The president of the Canadian Medical Association said yesterday of the budget, “This says again that Canadians will continue to wait for timely access to care and Canada's position vis-à-vis OECD countries continues to drop. We are now slowly eroding our medicare”.
When asked about the absence of money to alleviate the doctor and nursing shortage, he said that Canadians had identified that Canada had a serious “shortage and doctors”, something the Prime Minister said in the throne speech. Unfortunately, there has been no money to follow up on those words. Words are easy to give, but hard to deliver upon. It is if one is a Liberal.
However, if Canadians on the whole are upset about the government's abandonment of their treasured public health system, most of us can only imagine the disappointment and disillusionment in the aboriginal community. To quote the Liberal government from last month's Speech from the Throne, it said:
There is one aspect of Canadian society, one aspect of our history, that casts a shadow over all that we have achieved. The continuing gap in life conditions between aboriginal and other Canadians is intolerable. It offends our values and we cannot remain on our current path.
Those are noble words. They are absolutely accurate in terms of the reality with which we are faced. Noble words, though probably are all too familiar words to on and off reserve aboriginal communities. Although the budget extended existing programs, there is no sight of the significant investment needed to show any meaningful commitment to back up those words.
The Assembly of First Nations which spent two months working intensively with the government leading up to this budget called the lack of substantive resources disappointing. We could probably think of some other words, the AFN is being a little polite.
Chief Phil Fontaine stated that while the resources proposed were clearly needed, they were not enough. He said, “I am disappointed with the lack of action on urgent priorities like housing, health, economic development and education”. The Speech from the Throne recognized the shameful conditions facing his people. He asked what more compelling reason did we need to take immediate action?
There are alternatives. We presented alternatives in the House on behalf of the New Democratic Party. I also want to reference the alternative federal budget, which presents an annual budget with the needs of Canadians as its priorities. It was able to do so using the government's own economic projections, and it did so to: allocate $20 million over two years on jobs and youth strategies; $500 million over three years on a strategy to improve aboriginal education; $375 million over three years for aboriginal housing; and $200 million over three years on the backlog of land claims cases.
The alternative budget presented just a couple of weeks ago was a balanced budget and it also included a much needed $1 billion into building up the stock of affordable housing, plus an additional sum of money as part of an infrastructure financing program to fund infrastructure capital investment.
What does this government's budget offer in terms of housing dollars? Zero dollars to a problem that even the TD Bank has identified as one of Canada's most pressing public policy issues. One-quarter of Canadians say that they have trouble paying housing costs and that jumps to 40% for renters. An estimated one-quarter million Canadians will experience homelessness this year.
The Prime Minister, when finance minister, pulled the government out of social housing. He appears to pick up where he left off by squeezing public financing for housing completely dry. Why? Let us go back to the privatization budget again. Housing is one of the two primary examples that the parliamentary secretary for public-private partnerships gives as his new mandate.
Canadians are capable of achieving great national goals starting with a national railway to unite the country, a national old age security plan to enable seniors to survive and survive with dignity and our national public health care system to provide care based on need, not income, just to name a few.
Canadians have shown that they are ready to put our collective shoulders to new projects: a national childcare program; a national housing strategy; and social justice for aboriginal Canadians. However, we need a government with vision and commitment, a government to provide leadership. The budget clearly shows that the Liberal government, however honest it may eventually become, is not capable of that leadership. It has had 10 years to prove otherwise and has failed.
Some have said the budget is boring. I do not think it is boring at all. It may be dull, but it is also deceptive and dangerous.