What happened to that promise, indeed? It is gone and now the focus is very much on driving that debt down as quickly as possible. That means Canadians will have to wait for spending on some of the social deficit issues that are so important to them.
I do not think Canadians were impressed at all with last Tuesday's budget. They wanted to see recognition of the Romanow report. They wanted money built it into the base for health care. They wanted to see a national drug agency and national home care. Instead, we heard the re-announcement of the $2 billion. There was no increase in the base funding. We now are in a situation where funding from the federal government for health care, instead of the fifty-fifty funding formula which we used to have for health care, is 16% with the remaining 84% to be found by the provinces.
It is interesting to note that virtually every province in Canada, with the sole exception of resource-rich Alberta, is really struggling and having problems coming in with any kind of a balanced budget because of the emphasis that has been placed on health care; the need to find additional funds to ensure that health care is available for all. The federal finance minister has said that sustainability must be our focus, but in my opinion the budget has not done a thing to ensure sustainability in the health care field.
Let me turn to another area that deserves some focus, and that is employment insurance. Prior to the budget, Canadians called for investment of full federal fiscal surplus in programs to create a fairer society. They wanted to see a more productive economy and job creation to offset an economy now struggling with slower growth and rising unemployment. Instead, a budget appeared that was obsessively focussed on fiscal prudence.
The problem with employment insurance is not that the premiums are too high, as the members of the Conservative Party say. The problem is very few people are eligible to receive employment insurance. This is a universal program where every Canadian who works pays into an EI program. Yet according to the numbers, less than 40% of people are actually eligible to receive employment benefits. Some do not work enough hours. It depends where one lives. In some provinces and territories it takes 910 hours of work and in others 410 hours. It is a makeshift operation, and it simply is not meeting the needs of Canadians in a changing work life. People who are adversely affected by being ineligible for employment insurance are woman, younger workers and immigrants.
Something is very askew when only 38% receive employment insurance benefits. Since 1994, the government changed the rules on employment insurance. It used to be that more than 75% of people would apply for EI. That is now down to 38%, and $50 billion has been taken out of the EI surplus. It has essentially paid for all the surpluses that the government has been running for the last several years. The leader of the New Democratic Party, Jack Layton, calls it theft, and he is absolutely right. Employers and employees have paid into that fund, and it has simply been taken over by the government and driven into its bottom line to pay down debt and deficit. It is leaving part time workers, particularly women, seriously shortchanged.
These are two of the areas that I wanted to talk about today; the lack of money for health care as well as for employment insurance. There are a number of other issues, but I am confident that my colleague from Vancouver East will deal with these in the time that is allotted to her.
Suffice it to say, this is not a budget that will gladden the hearts of Canadian working men and women or their families, certainly not in the region of the country where I have the privilege of representing constituents.