Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to take part in the budget debate this afternoon. I want to indicate at the outset that I will be sharing my time with the member for Vancouver East.
I have been amused to listen to members on the government side say that this must be a good budget because the opposition and Canadians do not want to talk about it. It is kind of like a grey, overcast day. There is really not very much to be said about it. It is a conservative budget that focuses very much on debt reduction and not on urgent social needs, such as health care. I want to focus on some of that during the time that I have available.
At the outset, I recognize and applaud the government for stepping in and providing some additional assistance to farmers who have been so badly affected by the BSE crisis. It has been desperately needed, and it is a good thing the money was provided a week ago Monday, the day before the budget was introduced.
People who I spoke to in my riding and across the country were looking for changes in issues like health care and reducing wait times for elective surgery. As members know, wait times across the country are up to 18 months. These people will get no comfort from the budget of last week. There is no reduction because there is no significant additional money to reduce waiting times. The $2 billion announcement was made yet again, and there was a commitment about first ministers meeting later on this year.
I note that the government of Manitoba expects it will require another $106 million in order to keep abreast of health care issues in that province. The premier of Manitoba, Gary Doer, has said that if the federal government has money, let it spend it now. He has said that the province needs it now, not in August or September. There is a crisis now, and I am sure premiers across the country would echo the statement of the premier of Manitoba.
People are beginning to wonder whether the Prime Minister is starving the health care system in order to create a crisis, allowing him to bring in the corporate side with the public-private privatization plan. It is still on the radar screen.
Yes, there is a bit more money for infrastructure this year, but again it is tied to the P3 investments, the public-private partnerships in water, transit and highways. We think that is basically a licence to print money for those private entrepreneurs.
Yes, there was a GST exemption for the cities, but why was there not one for schools, universities, hospitals and indeed for social services? In the throne speech in February promises were made to patients, parents, students and aboriginal Canadians. We expected, reasonably, to see some of those details rolled out in the budget. We know throne speeches are an opportunity to create a good feeling without needing to put a lot of data to it. However, we saw none of that for those groups in last Tuesday's budget.
What there is, though, is a fixation on the debt. As many other noted economists have indicated, Canadian debt is already among the lowest of any major economy in the world. However, the budget of the newly minted finance minister from Saskatchewan, and kudos to him, focuses on reducing the debt from 42% of gross national product to 25% over a 10 year period. We can remember that there used to be a commitment by the government to have a fifty-fifty arrangement on any surpluses, that 50% of the additional surpluses would go to social spending and 50% would go to debt reduction.