Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak on the budget implementation bill. I am following the member for Markham—Unionville, who took an awful lot of good arguments, so I will try to scrape together what is left.
I think that this particular time at which we are debating this bill we have the most attractive economy in the history of Canada. We can recall headlines in the Globe and Mail not too long ago which said that Ottawa is “awash in...cash”.
That cash is the cash of the people of Canada and it is the fiscal dividend of a decade of effective financial management. It was not an easy time in Canadian history. Canadians made sacrifices. In Atlantic Canada, we saw many sacrifices. The employment insurance system was changed. In my own community of Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, the Shearwater base was closed.
There were a lot of cuts. There were reductions in the CHST, health care, social services and post-secondary education, which were necessary in order to preserve those very things. Would we even have a publicly funded health care system today if we had continued in the ways of the Conservative government that we took over from in 1993?
Since we got the economy under control, the Liberal government has reduced taxes. We reduced the deficit prudently. We balanced our priorities, much like the previous speaker said we should. We in fact did that, bringing in things like the child tax benefit, which economists have attributed with actually having had an impact in reducing childhood poverty, although there is much that we need to do.
When the economy improved, we put money into post-secondary education, health care, the child tax benefit and a host of other things. Today we have an unprecedented opportunity and I believe it has been wasted. It is an unequalled opportunity to invest in the social infrastructure that makes Canada unique, to close the gap between the rich and the poor, between those who have and those who have not. This budget does not do it. In fact, it does not even speak to the millions of Canadians who need a hand up.
The major priorities of this government do not make sense. The GST cut from 7% to 6%, and perhaps eventually to 5%, has been called the “triumph of politics over policy”. No serious unbiased economist in Canada thinks it was a sensible thing to do, particularly from a productivity point of view. It does nothing to help low income Canadians.
In fact, the government could have put the money into the child tax benefit. We hear, and the government seems to believe it, that the GST is good for lowest income Canadians because they do not benefit from personal income tax reductions, but there are other ways of helping the lowest income people in Canada. There are many others who would benefit from lower marginal income tax on the lowest rate and increasing the basic personal exemption to where it was in the economic update that we introduced last year.
Even business groups said this. My colleague from Markham—Unionville indicated his survey. He mentioned St. John's and Vancouver. I know he did it in Halifax and I know it was unanimous. I do not believe that in Halifax anybody even dissented or abstained. They all said it does not make any sense. They said that we have all these priorities in Canada, such as regional development and child care, and that there all kinds of things we could put the money into instead of wasting billions of dollars giving it to people who buy expensive cars and furniture.
And there are other priorities. We all would like to have low income tax and we would all like to have a lower GST, but the job of government is to make priorities. Surely when a government is awash in cash those who most need the help should be at the top of the list. It did not happen.
As for child care, in our finance committee travels, which my colleague mentioned, we met with dozens of groups to talk about child care. I am not sure of the exact number. It could have been 25, 35 or 40. Overwhelmingly they preferred a plan similar to the previous Liberal government plan of putting the infrastructure in place, because money on a monthly basis does nothing if one cannot find a space.
Even with the government bringing in the universal child care benefit, the $1,200 a year, it should have been done in such a way that it actually went to the people who needed help, not the way the government did it, where in many cases it actually favours people with higher incomes versus low income families who are struggling to get along.
In the budget, the cut for the GST and the child care plan are flops. They do not help Canadians who need help the most.
What is missing in the budget? I would have to say, first of all, that regional development is missing. We heard all the time from ministers of regional development agencies that they would not in fact be hurt, and then we saw the cuts of a couple of weeks ago, cuts that take the social economy initiative out of budgets like ACOA's, for example, which means $7 million to $10 million for worthy organizations. Co-ops, for example, came before us and said it was crazy and did not make any sense, and they are right.
Next let us talk about post-secondary education, which is a particular interest of mine. This has to be if not the most pressing need for Canada, then certainly one of them. How can any government in Canada have five priorities but not have one of them include education? I think it is the biggest issue facing Canada.
We have an educated population. We have done a good job of educating Canadians, including in post-secondary education, but other countries are catching up. We all know the story of the emerging economies and how they are investing. Countries in the European Union are putting money into education as well.
We need to keep up the strength on the research side, as an example, which the Liberal government invested in once we controlled the economy. We have put in some $13 billion since 1998, taking Canada from the bottom of the G-7 to the absolute top in terms of publicly funded research.
That is an amazing accomplishment. It has reversed the brain drain. That is what we heard all over the place five years ago. Now we do not hear about it. In fact, there is a reverse brain drain. Universities across Canada will tell us about accomplished scholars, researchers and graduate students coming back to Canada, choosing Canada because of our investments in the granting councils and CFI, Genome Canada and others. It is a significant contribution.
In fact, the government's own budget books indicate that the federal government contribution to post-secondary education has stayed constant over the past 10 years. We often hear that it has been gutted. In fact, the contribution has stayed constant and, although it has not been in the direct transfer, in the CHST, it has gone into research and to students in forms like the millennium scholarship, the learning bond or the Canada access grants at 25%.
However, I would argue that is the challenge of Canada because of the changing nature of the world. Although enrolments have not declined, we do know that there are three areas in which Canadians are not getting to post-secondary education, be it university, community college, apprenticeships, advanced training or catch-up training. We know there are three areas of Canadians who are not accessing it: low income Canadians, aboriginal Canadians, and persons with disabilities.
Last fall, the member for Wascana, who was the minister of finance, introduced an economic update that addressed these needs in a huge way, but budget 2006 did nothing. Tax tinkering assists those who are already in university or community college; it does not help those who are not there to get there. I believe that should be a role of the federal government, both from a social justice point of view because we want all Canadians to have equal opportunity, and also in an economic argument, in that it is good for the county.
Canada is a unique nation. It is a nation that we are all proud of. There are many things that symbolize Canada, both to Canadians and to the world: this great geography of a vast land; our cultural diversity, Canada being the first nation on earth to proclaim multiculturalism as a national policy; and our linguistic duality.
I also think Canadians take pride in the belief that we believe government has a role to play in bridging the opportunity gap between the richest and those most in need. Even some Progressive Conservative governments in the past have stated that as a goal and have done some things to try to make it better.
The budget does not even pretend to help those who need help. The government is neither progressive nor fair. The government speaks to a narrow constituency with narrow views. Canada is a wide country, of huge dimensions, huge dreams and huge visions, and Canadians reject the government's view of their land.