Mr. Speaker, what is before us today is not just Bill C-28, but specifically, a motion to amend Bill C-28 and to delete clause 181, the enormous tax giveaways to large corporations in this country. We are attempting to put some rationality into our budgetary process.
This year, as last year and so many years before, because of poor planning and because of the abandonment of our responsibility to a number of sectors of our society, there are substantial surpluses in the budget. If people are on the right wing ideological bent, they would think that Canadians are being over-taxed because of all the money left over at the end of the year. That was a constant complaint from the Conservatives when they were the official opposition.
In spite of their rhetoric, when they became government, they showed substantial surpluses for two years in a row. They have also done the same things as the Liberals and over-taxed Canadians. From our perspective, it is a question of not properly allocating the revenues that are derived from taxpayers across this country and from other revenue in the form of fees and services.
We are looking this year again at a very substantial surplus primarily because of how well the resource industry is doing and even more specifically, how well the oil and gas industry is doing in exporting its product, mainly to the United States but generally around the globe.
We have a very large surplus which reflects, on a smaller scale, very large profit levels in a number of sectors of the economy, primarily in the financial services sector and the oil and gas sector, and to a lesser degree in the mining and natural resources sector as well.
Clause 181 in the present legislation substantially lowers the corporate tax rate. In fact, a double lowering because in the budget earlier in 2007, the corporate tax rate would be lowered from 22% to 18% by 2011. In clause 181 of this piece of legislation, the corporate tax rate would be lowered even more to 15% by 2012. In both cases, these tax breaks would provide a substantial benefit to large corporations, particularly the banking sector, the finance sector in general, and the oil and gas sector.
These sectors were given a substantial break earlier this year with the budget and now that break is coupling with an even more substantial tax break. Something in the range of 50% or 60% of these tax breaks will end up in the pockets of large banks, large financial corporations, and the oil and gas industry.
Does this make sense? Is this a good budgeting process? Is this good public policy? The NDP says it is not. What would the alternative be if we did not have this? The surplus would be larger if this tax break were not given. That surplus could be used to simply pay down our national debt. The tax breaks in clause 181, if Bill C-28 is passed in the House, could be used in this year's budget for any number of social programs. I would argue today that in fact it should be used in the sector of the economy that is in crisis and that is the manufacturing sector.
I come from Windsor, Ontario. The unemployment rates came out on Friday. In spite of the fact that the unemployment rate went down marginally in Windsor, we continue to lead the country with the highest unemployment rate of any substantial city of our size, which is over 50,000 people. That is because my community, both the city and the county that surrounds it, is primarily based on the automotive sector as the engine that drives our share of the economy and to a great extent drives the economy across the country, particularly in Ontario and Quebec.
Therefore, we continue to have the highest unemployment rate. As an aside, because I did a lot of work on this over my career in trying to help deal with unemployment circumstances during the major recessions we had back in the early eighties and again a minor one in the early nineties. On each occasion, and it has happened again now, the unemployment rate calculation substantially underestimates the real unemployment rate.
Because of the methodology that StatsCan uses to calculate the unemployment rate, the real unemployment rate in Windsor is probably approaching 15% at this point. The trauma that families and individuals are going through reflects that reality.
We have heard that these corporate tax rates are going to benefit the economy. As I have said earlier, that is true only to the extent of parts of the economy, in particular the financial sector, the oil and gas sector and natural resources sector.
These corporate tax breaks will do absolutely nothing to assist the manufacturing sector. There are all sorts of manufacturers, not just in the auto sector but in any number of other sectors, that have no profit. In fact, they are in a situation where they are suffering losses. They are suffering deficits on their balance sheets this year and in a number of cases for several years before that.
To give them a corporate tax break is absolutely useless in terms of it having any impact on helping them deal with the crisis that we are faced with in the manufacturing sector.
If the government were really serious about aiding that sector of the economy, it would be looking at other programs. In particular, we have seen both the provincial governments of Ontario and Quebec step forward to provide direct assistance to not just the auto but the manufacturing sector generally.
They both established large fairly substantial funds, pools of money, to provide a methodology where the manufacturers who need to update their equipment, update technological endeavours within their sector, would have the ability to tap into these pools of funds from the governments and make them more competitive. Hopefully, as they are doing that, we would see unemployment rates begin to drop and people get back to work in that sector. Both of those two provinces have provide those pools of funds.
They have also called on the federal government to play its part, to get involved, and to establish a similar pool. If we were to actually do the calculations on the tax break for just those two sectors, finance and natural resources, oil and gas in particular, if the government were to not grant that tax break in this bill and made enough funds available to establish that pool of money, it would cost anywhere from $.5 billion to $1 billion which is what is needed for our manufacturing sector to get back on its feet.