Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this budget debate.
I thought the opposition leader nailed it when he said “never has so little been done with so much”. I think he is exactly right.
After years of fiscal prudence by the previous Liberal government, we end up with a so-called new Conservative government that is sitting on tons of cash. However, instead of allocating the money intelligently between debt relief, income tax relief and program spending, we get a huge spending spree with Canadians' hard-earned income tax money.
I thought I would start by quoting Andrew Coyne, hardly a friend of the Liberal Party of Canada:
With this budget, [the Minister of Finance] officially becomes the biggest spending finance minister in the history of Canada.
And that is after inflation and population growth is taken into account. Under this Conservative government, they have now raised spending by $25 billion in two years.
Does that not remind members of another Conservative government?
Is this what the Conservative voters wanted: no sense of priorities and not a nickel in real honest to God tax cuts of any kind? There is a lot of spending programs disguised as tax credits for children, et cetera, which may be fine programs but they are programs, not tax cuts.
John Williamson, again no friend of the Liberal Party, a past president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and of course employed by the Prime Minister when he was between jobs. said:
The fellow working the line or anyone with a salary income and no children will receive no tax relief. That's disappointing. Ottawa is running huge surpluses. This is a good time to cut the rates for all taxpayers up and down the economic ladder. Government decided to broadly target, for example, seniors, not tax relief in this document for all taxpayers.
Those are the Conservative Party's best friends.
It was not supposed to be this way. The so-called new government stood for accountability, honesty, openness and transparency. Instead, what do Canadians get? Spending increases--$25 billion in two years is a pretty serious increase--broken promises, innuendo and drive-by smears.
This is a budget that exemplifies unfairness, divisiveness and incompetence.
A lot has been said about this spending spree and the “peace in our times” speech by the finance minister. Some peace. Six out of the 10 premiers slammed the budget as fundamentally unfair to their province. One premier, however, had a very Cheshire cat like smile as he received a 29% increase in his transfer payments and then passed on a $750 million tax cut to the residents of his province.
The folks in New Brunswick, on the other hand, got a 1.8% increase. The folks in New Brunswick must be wondering why it is that the Prime Minister so dislikes them.
The premier neglected to mention that $750 million would be put into a tax cut when he was arguing that Quebec did not have sufficient revenue to discharge its constitutional responsibilities. The voters were not impressed last night. The voters in all the other provinces were even less impressed. However, this exemplifies the politics of division by the Prime Minister.
I do not know what members think about last night's election, but $2 billion does not seem to get one very far these days. The Prime Minister did pretty well everything he could to intervene in a provincial election to ensure the re-election of the premier of Quebec except possibly knocking in a few lawn signs.
Here is what happens when people get friendly with the Prime Minister.
First, they come within a hair of losing their seat. At one point, the premier had actually lost his seat during the election last night but apparently a recount actually secured it. They also come within a hair of losing their government. The province now has the first minority government in 129 years with a majority of opposition members made up of either separatists or quasi-separatists who believe in some oxymoronic policy called autonomy within Canada.
Mr. Charest must be wondering whether his good friendship with the Prime Minister was such a brilliant idea. With friends like that he does not need too many enemies.
The only question the government had when making up the budget was: What would it take to bribe a sufficient number of voters to get them to vote Conservative? The only question the government ever asked was what is the bribe, to whom and good public policy be hanged, which is why we do not see broad based tax relief.
Instead of taking the base threshold rate down to 15%, which is where it was when the Liberal government left office, the Conservatives actually raised it up to 15.5% in order to pay for this potpourri of incoherent initiatives.
Did Canadians notice the abandonment of the second cut in the GST? It is pushed so far off into the future that we will need field glasses to see it from here to there. The dopey campaign promise about deferring capital gains was abandoned as unworkable, as it should have been, and replaced by a general rise in the capital gains threshold, a good idea and part of the Liberal commitments.
The government chose the budget to remind folks of its broken campaign promise not to tax trusts. Instead of taking up the much more sensible Liberal approach, the Conservatives continue to charge around like bulls in a china shop, ensuring and consolidating the $25 billion destruction of hard-working Canadians' pensions and savings.
Speaking of pensions, did anyone notice the cute little diversionary tactic of offering pension splits to those pensioners who just had their life savings destroyed? If my e-mails are anything to go by, the seniors do not seem to be terribly impressed by this smoke and mirrors budget of “Here is your pension split, sorry about your savings”. The government seems to take people for fools.
Another story that is yet to play out is the fundamental unfairness among various categories of seniors. Single seniors get absolutely nothing out of this budget. I hope for their sake they did not have any money invested in income trusts.
A senior couple gets the split as long as they remain together. However, if death or divorce ends their relationship, the surviving senior is in for a bit of a rude awakening. Now the surviving senior will get a sympathy card from the tax man saying, “We are deeply sorry about your loss. P.S. We have enclosed your adjusted tax bill. Please pay up within 30 days”. This is the new government's idea of grief counselling.
Does the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have anything against all taxpayers? What about the ordinary Joe who goes to work every day and has no kids or the kids are all grown up and he would like to sock a little money away for retirement? He is not old enough to retire so the pension split is useless. Since the kids have moved on the RESP changes are useless and the tax credit is even more useless. However, if his health holds up and he works long enough, he will not need to retire now at 65. He can retire later and with whatever few leftover pennies he has he can put them into his RRSP until he is 71.
If Joe or Josephine were to say, “Thanks for nothing, Prime Minister”, they would be right because nothing is exactly what they got out of this budget.
I am sure someone will get a memo from the Prime Minister saying, “I know you're a little past prime but you could actually start a family over again but if that's not realistic take your meagre savings and get into a pension split early”. If we handle it right we could be broke for a long time.
This budget fails on all kinds of levels. It pits province against province and taxpayer against taxpayer. It is a bad budget for Canada and I will not be supporting it.