moved:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government inherited the best economic and fiscal position of any incoming federal government and has not demonstrated the need, value or wisdom of its announced expenditure cuts which unfairly disadvantage the most vulnerable groups in Canadian society.
Mr. Speaker, I am saddened to have to ask the government how it can be so meanspirited and so blindly ideological that it chooses to cut funding for programs that help the most vulnerable in society. Why does it feel that helping young people to find jobs is not a priority, that volunteering is not worthy of government support, that adult literacy is not important?
I attended a press conference recently where the Minister of Finance and President of the Treasury Board announced that their government was putting an end to programs like these. As the Minister of Finance announced a $13.2 billion surplus and gloated about the strength of the Canadian economy, he turned to the President of the Treasury Board, who moments later explained that our country would no longer support literacy programs or our museums across the country. The sight would have been comical had it not been so distressing.
The image of those two former Mike Harris cabinet ministers, standing side by side, grinning like two bullies watching each other's back, is a perfect snapshot of the government. The cuts it has made and the way it has announced them let all Canadians see that this is a petty government, a government driven by ideology rather than a good sense of the country, a government that lacks the sense of fairness that so many of our citizens hold dear and a government, as well, that is blind to economics.
In short, these meanspirited cuts have shown us all exactly what the government is all about, and it accepts no counter views. Anything that does not fit into its ideological point of view is quite simply discarded with vitriolic politic rhetoric. I am sure that after yesterday the member for Halton will agree.
The government did not need to punish a member of its own caucus for simply confirming to Canadians what these cuts plainly show. They show that the government is out of touch with the majority of Canadians and, as polls show, it is alienating more and more Canadians week by week. The government needs to be reminded that it had the support of a minority of Canadians in the last federal election. That support is sinking even lower because of the callous way it approaches nearly every issue.
I will back up this general argument now by talking about a few of the cuts in more detail.
As one who spent most of my career in education, the worst move of the lot was the decision to slash $17.7 million from national literacy programs. For a government that is starting to talk a lot about productivity, after having tabled one of the least productivity oriented budgets in recent memory, this is truly a horrible decision, not only socially meanspirited but economically stupid as well.
As a relatively small country in a world of emerging giants like India and China, it is obvious that Canada cannot compete on the basis of low wages, nor would we want to. We can only compete on the strength of educated, smart, innovative people. That does not mean just high-end smarts with world-class Ph.D.s, it begins with basic literacy skills for all Canadians.
Sadly, statistics show that there are roughly nine million Canadians who share some degree of difficulty with literacy. Of course, a $17.7 million, 30% cut to our literacy programs is meanspirited. Given the central role of education and training in today's economy, it is also economically foolish.
The Movement for Canadian Literacy has said:
The cuts will decimate the infrastructure built co-operatively by all levels of government and the literacy community and will set us back years.
That is the definition of a meanspirited cut.
What about the museums assistance program? In their campaign, the Conservatives promised to fund our museums and the Prime Minister himself wrote to the Canadian Museums Association and stated that:
The Conservative Party of Canada is in favour of stable and long-term funding for the museums of Canada.
Had the ink even dried before the Prime Minister decided to renege on his promise? That is but one example of dozens of drastic, meanspirited and spiteful cuts.
Let us now turn to the decision to eliminate the court challenges program. The Canadian Bar Association asked that funding for this program be restored as it is vital to the protection of the constitutional rights of Canadians, not all of whom may necessarily have deep pockets. The current government seems to be interested only in those with deep pockets. Why would a progressive government try to make it more difficult for its own citizens to challenge laws that curtail their individual freedoms? That is quite simply meanspirited.
And what about funding for Status of Women Canada? Yesterday was Persons Day, on which we pay tribute to the five courageous women who won the right for women to be recognized as persons by Canadian law in 1929. It is almost inconceivable that some of the women with us today were not considered persons in their youth by their own government.
Our society has made tremendous progress towards the socio-economic equality of men and women. However, there remains work to be done. Just look around you and you will see that, despite the efforts of all parties to increase the number of women in Parliament, we are far short of the target.
I believe that the adjective “meanspirited” applies to a situation where drastic cuts are made to the funding of an organization that continues to fight for the equality of men and women.
As a result of these cuts, Canadians from coast to coast are getting a strong picture of just how ideological the government can be. Newfoundland and Labrador's Premier, Danny Williams, has been trying to distance himself from the federal Conservative government by reminding his voters that he is a progressive Conservative premier and that he would never even dream of cutting literacy programs.
There does not seem to have been any consultation process by the government. It simply took aim at programs that did not sit with its ideological beliefs and cut them, without even consulting the people who deliver the programs or the Canadians who use them.
I keep hearing from those in the tourism industry. They were not even consulted about the elimination of the GST visitor rebate program. The government did not bother to ask those people if they found the program useful in attracting tourists to Canada. Now, after the fact, we are hearing from groups, like the Hotel Associations of Canada, that are saying the resulting loss in tourism will cost the government more than three times the tax revenue that it will save by eliminating the program. It is hardly smart economics or good economics to attack the tourism industry when it is suffering extremely difficult times for other reasons, such as the high value of the Canadian dollar and possible difficulties at the border.
Yet the government has the audacity to call moves like this smart. I think it is high time that the government stopped treating Canadians as though we were stupid. These cuts are not smart. They are blunt, economically unsound and ideologically driven.
The only gauge by which one could conceivably call them smart is that maybe they are good for the Conservative Party. For instance, the government has eliminated the court challenges program at exactly the same time as it has tabled several bills that some experts believe to be unconstitutional. Maybe it was just trying to head off legal challenges. This is just another example of the government doing what is right for the Conservative Party, not what is right for Canadians.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. The Conservatives have admitted that they had a $23 billion hole in their election platform that would need to be paid for by future spending cuts. In fact, budget 2006 has called for far more cuts than the ones recently announced. The 2007-08 column of the budget's ledgers calls for an additional $2.4 billion in cuts.
The Liberal government was not opposed at all to the principle of reallocation. In fact, we reallocated $11 billion over five years, substantially more than has been so far achieved by the government. However, we went to great lengths to ensure that our cuts did not hurt the vulnerable. We examined all possible actions through a regional lens to ensure that the cuts did not disproportionately hit the regions of the country rather than the national capital region. We also examined them through a gender lens and gender based analysis to ensure that our cuts did not disproportionately hurt women. Also, perhaps most fundamentally, we examined them through a fairness lens to ensure that those savings that we made did not unduly impact the most vulnerable in society.
It seems that the Conservatives also used these lenses, but they inverted them. They used a gender lens, but they focused their cuts in areas that were particularly damaging to women. They used a fairness lens, but rather than exempting the most vulnerable, they focused their cuts on the most vulnerable in Canadian society.
When the Conservatives come to identify the additional cuts that they will need, according to their budget and certainly according to their election platform, I certainly hope they will remember the lessons from this fall, that they will apply a gender lens, not to hurt women but to help women and that they will apply a fairness lens, not to punish the most vulnerable but to spare the most vulnerable.
I do not have great expectations in that regard, but I hope the Conservative minority government has learned a lesson from this round of cuts. I believe Canadians expect their government to govern on behalf of all Canadians and not just on behalf of the narrow interests and the narrow base of the Conservative Party.