Mr. Speaker, I think that the Conservatives and the Liberals should stop and listen just for a moment. I did not heckle during their speeches. If I struck a raw nerve, maybe that will cause them to listen a bit more, because this is a serious problem. There are one million children today in unregulated child care spaces.
I ask, which member in this House is prepared to place his or her child in an unregulated child care space without knowing whether the child care professionals have been trained appropriately, without knowing that there are certain safety standards, without ensuring the best quality care? I did not do it. I would not do it. I do not think anyone else in this House would do it.
It is time the Conservatives recognized that we have to invest in child care spaces. They did not do that in this budget. What did they do? They gave some money for a child care allowance, for a baby allowance. That is fine. I am not quarrelling with that. They could have done both. They could have ensured families had an allowance and they could have put money into child care spaces. They had two choices.
The Conservatives could have taken it away from the $7 billion that went to corporate tax breaks, despite the fact that we have the highest profits ever in our corporate sector, and despite the fact that we have shifted the burden away from individuals in terms of paying taxes to corporations. That would be one choice. I think that is reasonable. Let us give to families for a change, ordinary Canadians, working women, children. Why do we have to squander our future by neglecting our children on the backs of corporate profits? Why does the government insist on sacrificing our children because it is so shortsighted and so close-minded about the fact that working women are here to stay?
There is a second option that the Conservatives had. If they had wanted to keep their corporate tax cuts, fine. Canadians disagree. We disagree. But if they are that focused on that, then so be it. But they had another choice. They decided to put $5 billion in additional money beyond the norm against the debt because of their incredible surplus they had going into this budget process.
If we look at the books, $8 billion went against the debt. That is $5 billion more than the normal $3 billion in prudence and contingency funds. Five billion dollars more to bring down the debt from $494 billion to $486 billion, which means we are not paying off the debt hardly one second sooner than if we did not do that.
That $5 billion would have created one million child care spaces, one million spaces to ensure that children are properly cared for in a nurturing environment, so that women can work and feel confident that their children are cared for and people can feel that they are doing their best as parents. They are not listening to this nonsense from the Conservatives that somehow women are bad mothers if they put their children in child care. That is the essence of what the Conservatives are saying. There is so much more we need to be saying. That was the first point I wanted to make.
The second point has to do with the failure by the Conservatives to keep their commitment to Canadians in terms of their election platform. We hear them boast and brag a lot about their five priorities, five issues that they want to accomplish. Interestingly enough, there is one that is hardly mentioned at all in the budget, yet it is the most important issue facing Canadians. It causes the most grief and agony. It is the most difficult matter in real, personal, human terms and that is the quality of our health care system and the length of the waiting lists.
The Conservatives clearly promised a reduction in wait times. It was a big to-do, a big fanfare in the last election. They said, “This budget will accomplish all five of those priorities, including the reduction in wait times”. What have we got in the budget on health care? There are some words about the government working on it with the provinces. The Conservatives will enforce the money that the Liberals put in, even though that was not working and the Conservatives were the first to criticize it. They were the first to jump all over the Liberals for suggesting the money was not going to where it should in terms of reduced wait times.
There is nothing else. There is not one penny toward the hiring of more nurses, even though there is a looming shortage of 78,000 in this country, or soon to be. There is not a penny in terms of developing primary health care to take the burden off the institutional expensive side of the system. There is not a mention of alternative remedies and natural herbal medicines. There is not a mention of anything in terms of building a health care system where people do not have to wait for agonizing weeks and months and years to get the help they need.
There is so much more to be said. I want to talk about the absolute betrayal of aboriginal people in this country. I want to talk about the impact on my own constituency of Winnipeg North where the average individual income is $21,000. People will not benefit from the GST cut. Really, just as the newspaper said, the rich benefit the most. People in my constituency will be hurt and will not benefit from the budget.
We believe there has to be investment in very serious areas that affect working families. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I move:
That the amendment be amended by adding the following after “for over a decade”:
And that this House further condemns the government for the continuation of the last government's obsession with corporate tax reductions as opposed to spending to help working families, specifically condemning the higher priority given to physical infrastructure while ignoring direct financial assistance for students at our post-secondary institutions, the lack of spending to reform our inadequate employment insurance system, and the ongoing lack of commitment to create not for profit child care spaces with multi-year funding.