Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for sharing his time with me.
I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to congratulate all of the people who were elected yesterday evening in our great country of Quebec, as well as those who had the courage to run in what promised to be a difficult election and who nevertheless conducted an outstanding campaign.
I would like to offer my sincere sympathy to the members of the Parti Québécois—which I support—who were not re-elected. I am sure that we will still succeed in doing what we must do for Quebec.
I have risen today to discuss the budget not because we do not support it—everyone already knows that we will support it. However, over the past few weeks, my colleague from Laurentides—Labelle and I have toured the regions in Quebec to find out what women think of the cuts to Status of Women Canada, and to better understand how women view this budget overall, how they view these cuts and how concerned they are about the rise of the right in Quebec and in Canada.
We have met with 47 groups but we have not finished. We are going to continue meeting with women's groups over the coming weeks. Those 47 groups represent more than 100,000 people in Quebec. In all of those groups, the women we met told us the same thing.
In this budget, we are solving part of the fiscal imbalance, but we are not solving all of it. There will still be a lot of things to do before that happens. We know that the government has promised us that it will continue to put a major effort into this. We hope that it will keep its word. However, we see that it is still continuing to invest in areas that are under provincial jurisdiction, and we are not all happy about this.
When the Minister for the Status of Women decided to cut her budget, she told us that she wanted to reinvest that money to meet the needs of more women. However, women have seen that the way these cuts and these reinvestments were made means that women now have to look for charity.
There is no longer a desire to give women the tools to liberate themselves and get out of the rut we have been in for many years, with families, single parent heads of household—mostly women, older women, and a large number of people in Quebec and Canada, all getting poorer. That means that we are increasingly needing federal transfers to be able to meet the needs of our people. The federal government is not meeting those needs, and it is not the job of the federal government to do that.
When it comes to the needs of women in general, in Quebec and in Canada, I would in fact say that, in this budget, the federal government is neglecting certain women for whom it is actually responsible. Obviously, I am talking about first nations women, aboriginal women, women in the north, the Inuit, and so on.
Those women fall within the direct jurisdiction of the federal government, and there is absolutely nothing for them in the budget that has been presented to us. I am very disappointed to see this, and extremely concerned. We know that it is even harder for women in aboriginal communities to have a decent life. Housing is virtually nonexistent. There is no waste water treatment. There are problems with education. Some Status of Women Canada programs were designed specifically to enable women to pass on the aboriginal communities' values and way of life to the children, so that they could have a better life and feel better about themselves. We are familiar with the many problems faced by young people in those communities.
But the minister and the government were not concerned about solving those problems.
They spread the money around various programs— not the kind of programs that communities had asked for—but the kind of programs that give the government visibility. When governing you must respond to the needs of the people and not do what will keep you visible or popular, as the current government has done.
Unfortunately, since having become an MP, this is the first government that I have seen act in this way. I am troubled because people are not aware of the dangers that await when they elect such a government, even though it is a minority. Several issues are still on the table and the government will go to any length to pass bills that we, as a democratic society and a social democratic society, hope will not see the light of day.
I have been reading quite a bit about the budget and also the views of several groups about it. I would like to share some of what I read regarding the budget in a FAFIA summary:
Women in Canada are affected differently than men by tax and spending policies of governments as a result of their varying labour market opportunities, family and community responsibilities, and levels of economic security. This budget demonstrates how little these facts are acknowledged. Some of the measures in this budget continue a trend that was documented in FAFIA's ten year retrospective budget analysis...authored by Armine Yalnizyan.
They also speak about aboriginal women, as I mentioned, as well as immigrant women. FAFIA states:
While this year’s federal budget invests an additional $342 million per year for language instruction and employment-related support, the federal government has backed away from its commitment to establish a federal agency to assess and to recognize credentials at the federal level. It has instead directed resources to providing immigrants with path-finding and referral services to identify and connect with the appropriate assessment bodies. However, the difficult question of how foreign credentials will be assessed has yet to be resolved.
In addition, many groups have called for the elimination of the live-in requirement of the Live-In Care-Giver and Domestic Program, which attracts skilled and almost exclusively female professionals to work as full time care-givers while residing in their employer’s home. Groups have also demanded that these workers be granted landed status upon arrival.
This has not yet happened. I find that unfortunate because we know of situations where these women, these people, have been abused and used as slaves in the homes of people who have the means to pay for slaves in modern times. These are modern-day slaves.
The Standing Committee on the Status of Women has often discussed human trafficking in terms of sexual abuse, but it has not discussed these women even though this is a major issue because there are so many of them. There are thousands of them living in people's homes. They are hidden. They are forced to keep quiet because often, they do not even have an opportunity to learn a language that would enable them to communicate with the outside world. This is a very dangerous situation.
Earlier, we talked about social housing. The budget does not mention social housing even though we know that the CMHC is making astronomical profits—over $11 billion. I think they might even be making $15 or $16 billion.
When drafting a budget, the government must consider the people it represents. Even though it was elected by 36% of the population, it should meet the needs of more than 36% of the population. When a government is elected, it is elected for everyone and it must meet everyone's needs.
That is why the Bloc Québécois will continue to demand that the government do better, that the government do more and that the government do a better job of meeting the needs of Quebeckers and Canadians.