Mr. Speaker, I am glad to see the Conservatives are awake in the House now. Hopefully, they will actually read the bill and exercise their due diligence by voting against it.
It is important for Canadians to know where these tax gifts are going. I do not think any Conservative member would be opposed to that because they believe in accountability.
The EnCana Corporation saw $6.4 billion in profit in 2006 and the Conservatives want to give it more. Shell Canada saw $1.7 billion in profit. Suncor Energy saw $2.9 billion in profit. Husky Energy had $2.7 billion in profit. Talisman saw $2 billion in profit. That is the list of Conservative beneficence and generosity. The Conservatives just shovel it out of the back of a truck to the corporate sector.
Bill C-28 contains nothing for poor Canadians, nothing to deal with the housing crisis or the income crisis, and nothing to deal with the post-secondary education crisis and the crisis on aboriginal reserves. It contains nothing to deal with the crisis among Canadians with disabilities. We simply see no reference to any of that. Why? The Conservative government is so profoundly out of touch that it thinks the greatest priority for Canadians right now is to shovel tens of billions of dollars to the corporate sector.
The government does not take care of veterans or aboriginal people. It does not take care of poor working families that have been working their fingers to the bone over the last 20 years and average over 200 hours more of work as commuting times increase and as the overall quality of services deteriorates given how irresponsible the Liberals were when they were in government. The Conservatives are not addressing any of that.
They will say that Bill C-28 has a slight adjustment in the lower levels for income tax payers. However, it is important for Canadians to know that there is one thing that will help them in terms of income tax and that is a net benefit of $15 a month for average families earning less than $30,000 a year. The government is giving tens of billions of dollars to the corporate sector but it is giving families $15 a month.
I come from British Columbia and I have seen this kind of hocus-pocus with tax cuts under the Gordon Campbell government. It did the same thing. It gave massive gifts to its buddies in the corporate sector while lower income families were given $15 or $20 a month. It turns out that all families earning less than $80,000 a year, which is the vast majority of Canadian families, actually ended up paying more user fees than they received from that small tax break.
As I mentioned earlier, the massive cuts that the Conservative government is making in all the services I just mentioned from the Library of Parliament documentation, essentially gives poor working families $15 a month to adjust for the user fees or the deterioration of services that they will see right across the spectrum of federal government services.
That is not what Canadians want. Canadians want an effective federal government. They want an activist federal government that will use money wisely but put it where it counts the most. They do not want a government that fritters away, in this appalling irresponsible way, tens of billions of dollars to the corporate sector.
The government had a choice. It could have taken a different direction from the failed, corrupt Liberal government but it chose to take exactly the same route, which is why we oppose Bill C-28.