Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in response to the budget speech.
I guess the bottom line for me is that program spending jumps over 7.5% from last year to a record of over $143 billion. It jumps another 12.7% in the next two years, up another $41 billion over the last seven years.
We are seeing a distinct lack of fiscal discipline coming from the government. We have an EI surplus continuing to feed general revenues. That EI surplus will swell by another $4.3 billion in the next year. We will end up with over $48 billion EI surplus and no premium relief in sight for workers or for employers.
My other major observations on the budget relate to the fact that there is essentially nothing in the budget for non-urban Canada. The budget not only snubs non-urban Canada, it snubs our Department of National Defence and many of our workers who work in that area.
I have already talked about the EI surplus and how that is continuing to be abused. There is a premium freeze in place and no relief in sight. The premiums being collected are much higher than what is required to sustain the program. Therefore, our workers are paying much more than they need to in order to keep the government afloat in terms of the kind of revenues that it is now used to spending.
Canadians are not getting the level of service from their federal government that is appropriate for the level of taxation that is being dedicated to the federal government.
We saw a small amount of relief on the student front. We saw some government moneys dedicated to a learning bond, which is a longer term savings program.
What we did not see is what the priority should be for students and that is a focus on reducing tuition and increasing the ability to access the student loan program. The combination of those two things would do exactly what is right. It would give immediate relief to students so they can carry on with their studies.
There was no delivery on the fuel tax rebate that the Prime Minister has been touting. It will not take very long before our municipal politicians will become quite cynical. They are not used to the kind of treatment that the government has meted out to the provinces and is now planning on meting out to the mayors and councils at the municipal level.
The government will play favourites. We already have a great deal of suspicion that the so-called cities agenda will completely leave out all the smaller communities, the smaller towns, the larger towns and the smaller cities. The so-called cities agenda of the government is going to translate into many municipalities and other municipal levels of government completely left off the agenda. That is certainly where all the signposts are headed right now.
We have had some discussion about the lack of tax relief in the budget. The only people who think there was tax relief in the budget are sitting on the other side of the House. They are on the government side. That is a quick snap when we look at the budget.
I would like to look at the budget in a little more depth and where we sit in non-urban Canada in terms of this budget. For example, in my part of the world, British Columbia is the major softwood producer in the nation with approximately 50% of softwood contribution. We had a government softwood package announced 18 months ago or longer. As of a month ago we had zero dollar delivery in the Province of British Columbia, whereas we have seen that there has been program delivery on a fairly steady basis, for example, in the Province of Quebec because the government was playing politics.
Liberals thought that the best way to play politics in the Province of Quebec was to continue to make announcements month by month and they thought the best way to play politics with the softwood funding in the Province of British Columbia was to throw it all into the hopper just before the election.
We know that between that strategy and the fact that this whole exercise was put into the domain of western economic diversification instead of HRDC, that we then had to go out and hire a whole bunch of new people to run this program. Then we had a series of turf wars as a consequence of that within the bureaucracy. We have had second guessing.
I have had initiatives put into the government that were rejected by one level of the bureaucracy and overridden by another level. These proposals have gone back and forth as many as three times that I am aware of. It is very frustrating at the community level.
Meanwhile, we are marching ahead and we are almost at the government's fiscal year end. That also happens to be the provincial government's fiscal year end. This has complicated the whole equation because some of these are dependent on federal-provincial cooperation as well as private sector financing at times. This has become very problematical.
The frustrations at the rural community level with the softwood package are immense. We have other frustrations as well which are either budget related or government related. Rural coastal British Columbia is so immensely impacted by the downturn in the forest sector, the fishing sector and other sectors. I do not know how to be kind in trying to describe what has happened to rural coastal British Columbia compared to 10 years ago when this government came into power. What I do know is the one very strong light at the end of the tunnel is the proposal that west coast oil and gas be a natural development.
That requires the political will from the federal arena and the provincial arena to take us in that direction. The only strong political will that is coming from the government in terms of west coast oil and gas is coming from the Minister of the Environment and it is negative political will. It has put us at least 12 months behind where we should be in terms of that whole prospect. The government needs to get it and it needs to get it soon.
My time is winding down. There are other issues I would like to speak to, but I will conclude by saying that 10 minutes is hardly enough time to point out the problems associated with the budget and the government's performance in the area that I represent.