Mr. Speaker, I want to start my remarks by focusing on one of the most egregious parts of the budget, the notion of the $1,200 child care allowance, which I do not consider to be a child care allowance at all.
The government keeps calling the $1,200 allowance universal child care and that it is giving choices to parents, but we should look at the facts and make a proper distinction between income support and child care. The reality is that the $1,200 is a family allowance, not a child care plan. As a family allowance it is fine, but it is not a child care plan.
The most effective weapon to fight child poverty in this country is the child tax benefit. Experts believe that the benefit has reduced child poverty by approximately 26%. If we were to apply the $1,200 to the base of the child tax credit, families would receive the full $1,200 on a net income of up to and including $112,000, after which there would be a clawback up to and including a net income of $172,000. This is what the allowance should be, income support through the child tax credit. It would address the incomes of modest families as well as middle income families and even higher.
Instead, the Conservative government is cutting the young child supplement portion of the child tax benefit. This means that most families with low or modest incomes will lose $249 right off the top, reducing the child care benefit to $951. Taxes are increased at the same time by .5% at this level, which of course means that families will lose even more.
Further, the child care allowance treats some families better than others, even though they have the same net income and the same number of children of the same age. Because the benefit is taxable in the hands of the lowest income earner, single parents and two earner families are going to lose out. Two earner couples will lose a significant portion of the benefit to income taxes, but still not as much as single parents will lose.
Single parents in the $30,000 to $40,000 income range will lose on average close to $400 of the benefit in taxes. If this is added to the $249 that they will lose because of the elimination of the young child supplement, these families will be left with only about $550 of the $1,200 benefit, less than half the benefit that some of the other families will be receiving, and they will have a tax increase on top of that. This is not a plan for all families. This is punitive to some families and chooses others. Nor is it an early learning and child care plan, so it does neither.
This is unacceptable because the government is basically choosing which types of families it prefers and which types of families it does not. Not giving the same choice to all families and penalizing choices that families actually make about themselves is dastardly. I have never seen anything like it. This plan is neither an income support plan nor an early child care plan. It does neither and helps no one.
In addition to the national child care plan and the child tax credit which the Liberals started in this country, the early years program, or the best start program, was started in 2000. In my riding of Beaches—East York stay at home parents have told me many times that this is a wonderful program for their children, that they are quite happy with it and use it often.
Again I go back to choice. I keep hearing from the government side that the $1,200 gives choice. If there are no spaces to choose from, there is no choice whatsoever and the money parents receive is not enough to pay for the full amount of child care. There are really no choices. as there is nothing there to buy.
The government says that businesses will create spaces. Again, this has been tried in Ontario. The Minister of Finance knows it, as does the Minister of Health and the President of the Treasury Board, all of whom were in the Ontario government. They know it does not work. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has said its membership is not interested. Again, it is a vague plan and there is no child care plan in this country.
The finance minister was part of the Ontario cabinet that cut funding to schools. It cut sports programs, music programs, all kinds of programs in schools and many other services and ended up with a huge deficit, which is why Ontario now has an income problem, which is really where it is at. Now that same minister is the Minister of Finance for the Government of Canada. Guess what he is going to do to Canada. Exactly the same thing that he did to Ontario, nothing more, nothing less.
The city of Toronto alone will lose 6,000 child care spaces this year. This means the families in my riding of Beaches—East York will be suffering badly. This is not acceptable.
I want to move on to the issue of post-secondary education. The previous Liberal government had proposed $550 million over five years for grants for post-secondary education to an additional 55,000 students over four years of study; $2.2 billion over five years to improve the student financial assistance system; $210 million over five years for graduate scholarships; $150 million over five years for scholarships to study abroad; and $1 billion in 2005-06 for the provinces to invest in post-secondary infrastructure. That is all gone. It has been cancelled, except for the commitment in the budget to spend $1 billion for provinces to invest in post-secondary infrastructure, but that is it.
The Conservatives offer tax credits and not improved access. The $125 million per year tax credit for the cost of textbooks does not do it, nor does the $50 million per year for the elimination of taxation on scholarships. This budget cancelled funding worth $3.11 billion over five years. This is a huge chunk. This is 50% of the first and last year of tuition as well as grants for all low income students and other supports.
All of those funds were going directly to improve access to post-secondary education. This funding has since been replaced with $175 million in tax incentives which do little for access considering that students who struggle most for access pay little tax in the first place.
The budget does spend on apprentices. The budget offers three tax incentives for apprentices totalling about $380 million per year. The government is very proud of all of these itsy-bitsy amounts, but this pales in comparison to $3.5 billion over five years in the November update for the workplace skills strategy with the provinces. The strategy was cancelled in the budget and is now included in the fiscal imbalance discussions. That was settled. That was a lot of money in a partnership with the provinces to address that issue.
The budget cancels more than $2.1 billion over five years to increase support for the granting councils, the indirect costs of research program of the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research and again $200 million over five years for up to 3,500 R and D internships in the natural and health sciences and for engineering graduates as well as up to 100 scholarships each year to engineering and natural and health sciences graduate students seeking a masters in business administration.
This is not a plan for prosperity. This is a disaster. Everyone talked for such a long time about brain drain in this country. We now have a brain gain because of the investment that we have made in innovation and research. We have been attracting people from other countries to come to this country. The Conservative government has turned it around. It has dropped it all. It is gone. For what, I ask. There is nothing in its place.
Education, prosperity, innovation, research, students, universities, partnerships with provinces are all gone. It means nothing. An agreement is signed but it is absolutely meaningless.
On the environment, again it is a very sad situation. The government has cut all the programs, the EnerGuide program for families, the high efficiency home system. Most of the investment is gone.
The only one that the government really hangs its hat on is the public transit credit, which by the way, as other members have said, costs $2,000 per tonne, 10 times more than our plan. Environment Canada had advised the current government that this action would not increase the number of public transit users, would not effectively lower greenhouse gas emissions and would not help reduce pollution.
The government seems to have decided to hitch its hat to the United States and China and has dropped Kyoto completely. The minister now chairs the Kyoto process, but basically is a chair only in name because in essence it is really a shame for Canada. We are no longer leaders working with our partners.
There is lots more that I could say, but I see that I have run out of time.