Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West and I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-43, the budget implementation bill.
I would like to start by flagging what is obvious to all of us. The games that were being played around this budget implementation bill have certainly changed in the few weeks since it was introduced. A few weeks ago we were being told that this bill had to be voted on and adopted by Parliament. If not, Liberals threatened to bring us into an election campaign.
We have seen with Gomery that things have changed quite markedly and that threat from Liberal members to bring down the House or to call an election has changed quite a bit now that we have seen the revelations of the continued misuse of public funds by the Liberal Party. As a result of that, it is very clear that the Liberals are approaching this whole question of the budget implementation bill a lot differently now than they were a few weeks ago.
I would like to talk a bit about the situation in Canada. The budget and budget implementation bill do not address the major issues that are out there on main streets across this country.
I would like to talk about 12 years of Liberal government and what that has meant to poverty and homelessness in this country. We have seen in the lower mainland of British Columbia, the area I am from, that homelessness has tripled over the past three years under policies of the federal Liberal Party and also policies of the B.C. Liberal party.
In my constituency of Burnaby—New Westminster we have seen more than 1,000 people a week having to rely on food banks. Food bank lineups are growing across the country as the crisis of poverty and homelessness increases.
We also know that 40% of aboriginal children live in poverty, 30% of children with disabilities now live in poverty, and that there are over 1.1 million poor children in this country. Fifteen years ago the member for Ottawa Centre actually brought forward a motion that was adopted by the House to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Here we are in 2005 and over 1.1 million poor children attest to the fact that this government has done absolutely nothing to address child poverty.
We also have a crisis in credit card health care. We have seen, with the increasing privatization of health care, Canadians increasingly pay out of pocket for health care. That should be a right that the CCF and the NDP pushed forward as fundamental to building Canadian society. We have seen that nothing has been done about that as well.
In terms of post-secondary education, we know that average young adults going into post-secondary education receive a $20,000 debt, a mortgage on their future, when they come out of post-secondary studies. That does not count the thousands of young Canadians who decide that they will not go into post-secondary studies because they simply cannot afford the cost. From the campaign last June, having knocked on over 6,000 doors in Burnaby and New Westminster, there were literally dozens of young people who told me that they could not afford to go to school. Their family could not afford it; they could not afford it. Their dreams and their future were cut off because of a lack of action by the government in the post-secondary sector.
There is also the environment. We had a plan 12 years ago to cut greenhouse gas emissions. We now find, even though the plan called for a cut of 20% in greenhouse gas emissions, in 2005 that we have actually seen an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The budget does very little to address that.
We have seen the number of people with disabilities living in poverty growing. Many people with disabilities have no access to employment programs in order to further enrich their lives.
We talked this week about the situation in Canada and also talked about our fiscal projections. The IMF mentioned just a few weeks ago in its study that we were the least accurate of any of the major countries in the western world. The IMF study showed that Canadian fiscal projections were so far off under the Liberal government that they were the least accurate of any of the western countries studied.
We also have this week a crisis in rural Canada. We have communities struggling across the country due to the lack of support by the government to the agricultural sector and the lack of action by the government in reducing or trying to address some of the crises we face in getting our cattle or our softwood lumber across the border.
Rather than taking a strong line with the Americans to try to address, in tough negotiations, those issues, we have taken a very soft line that has led absolutely nowhere and has led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs as a result of the lack of access of our cattle industry. In British Columbia where I come from, 20,000 jobs in the softwood lumber industry have been lost because of this inaction.
We also see a crisis in our cities. We have seen more boil water alerts. We have seen the underfunding of cities that has led to the lack of renewal of our infrastructure that is so important to the future of our country. We see increasing difficulties for our senior citizens.
We have seen cutbacks to home care in many provinces. For example, in British Columbia home care has been severely slashed and many senior citizens who would love to live independent lives with some support are forced to go into nursing homes, which costs more for the taxpayer and leaves them with a lower quality of life. If we had a home care program and that were effective, those seniors could continue to live independent, quality lives at home.
We also have seen increasing concerns about big box child care. We have had repeated promises over 12 years for a national child care system. What we have seen so far from the government is absolutely no response to the concern and fear about big box companies. Rather than have the money go to quality child care in our neighbourhoods, it will go to profits for big box foreign operators coming into the country.
With jobs, we have also seen a 60¢ loss in real wages per hour for the average Canadian worker over the last 10 years and fewer jobs with benefits and pensions. It used to be most jobs had pensions. The Statistics Canada study that came out in January showed less than 40%.
The government has encouraged more and more outsourcing. I recall getting off the plane in Washington to lobby members of Congress to support quality Canadian products. I was given a T-shirt by the government made in Mexico and a Canadian flag pin made in the People's Republic of China. I was supposed to take these to the members of Congress to say that we did good quality work. Outsourcing has been encouraged by the government and nothing in the budget addresses that.
What we have is a lower and lower quality of life for 90% of Canadians. That is the reality this week, when we look at the budget.
What did we get? The Leader of the Opposition certainly got what he wanted. He said that the major priorities in the budget implementation bill were Conservative priorities. We know the Leader of the Opposition got what he wanted in the budget, despite the fact that the Liberals campaigned saying that NDP values were close to Liberal values. The Liberal budget is a Conservative budget. What that means is the fat cats in the corporate sector got almost $5 billion in corporate tax gifts, a corporate sector that is at its most profitable level in its history.
We see that the wealthy got additional tax cuts of half a billion dollars.
There is nothing in the budget that addresses poverty, homelessness, post-secondary education and the crisis for seniors except for a buck a day that is given to address eroding pensions. There is nothing in it to deal substantially with the environment. The budget does nothing to address the substantive issues that people are having to deal with across the country.
This budget is billions for Bay Street and pennies for Main Streets across the country. For that reason and for so many others, we will vote against it.