Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to participate in the debate on Bill C-52, the budget implementation act. I want to share my time with the hon. member for Parkdale—High Park.
In this corner of the House, NDP members did not support the budget that was presented by the government at the end of March. The main reason we did not support the budget is that we do not believe that it addresses the growing prosperity gap in Canada. We do not believe that it helps ordinary and working class families meet their expectations, see the advancement they had hoped to find. It does not help immigrant and refugee families find their place in Canada and find that new life in Canada they had hoped for when they came to this country.
We do not see the budget as doing anything to end the growing prosperity gap that Canadians face. We could have made some progress on that. The government has a strong surplus at its disposal which it could have used to bring in the kinds of programs that would reduce the growing prosperity gap in Canada.
The government could have chosen to end some of the huge corporate tax giveaways that it has made since coming to power, $9 billion worth of corporate tax cuts that could have been used in other ways that would have been of benefit to Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
This is pointed out very clearly by some of the work the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has been doing on the prosperity gap in Canada. A recent study it put forward demonstrated that most Canadians are not better off in recent years and that in fact most Canadian families are putting in more work time and 80% of them are getting a smaller share of Canada's growing economy. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has shown that over the last 20 years Canadians are working longer hours and for fewer benefits. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing largely because, as it points out, the lion's share of benefits of Canada's economic growth are going to the richest 10% of families. It is not going to the majority, the 80% of families whose income is under $100,000, and that is a huge number of people and a very high threshold.
The income gap is growing. In 2004 the richest 10% of families earned 82 times more than the poorest 10%. That is almost triple the ratio in 1976 when the richest earned only 31 times more; it was significant but it was only 31 times more in 1976. That gap is at a 30 year high.
It is also not just a question of incomes, but people are working longer for those questionable incomes. All but the richest 10% of families are working more weeks and hours in the paid workforce, 200 hours more on average since 1996, and yet only the richest 10% saw any significant increase in their earnings, a 30% increase. Everybody else either stayed the same or actually lost ground. In fact, the poorest Canadians saw their real incomes drop in that period.
We do not see that the budget has done anything to alleviate that situation. That is a pretty hard statistical overview of the situation. It does not look at the real hardships that are caused to families, families who cannot afford the drugs they need when they are ill, families who cannot afford the child care they need, families who cannot afford the education they know will help them realize some of their hopes for life in Canada.
The budget was a huge missed opportunity to address the growing prosperity gap in Canada.
I want to talk specifically about the post-secondary education situation in Canada. There are two major post-secondary institutions in my riding, Simon Fraser University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, one of Canada's leading polytechnic institutions.
We know in my riding that affordability in education is a huge crisis for most families and for students. Students are graduating with huge debts. Families are struggling to ensure that their children can have a decent post-secondary education and build for their own futures.
Working and middle class families and immigrant and refugee families particularly know the importance of a good education. Many of them are struggling to ensure that their children have a good education here in Canada.
In this budget the Conservatives put students last. The measures that are introduced in the budget do not go any way to help reduce the cost of post-secondary education. The budget directly affects only 1,000 students by the graduate student scholarship. That is one-tenth of 1% of all students in Canada. There are one million students in Canada and the Conservatives have chosen to only look out for about 1,000 of them.
In fact, the Conservatives have given more money in the budget to attract students from other countries to Canada, $1 million, than to increase access for prospective Canadians to college, undergraduate, medical or law students. They have tweaked the RESP system, but the benefits disproportionately go to wealthier families. That is something that is completely unfair in this country at a time when ordinary middle class families are struggling to ensure that their children get a decent post-secondary education. With a $9 billion surplus and $8 billion in corporate tax cuts, the investment in post-secondary education is less than $1 billion in the coming years.
There are some marginal increases in core transfers, but the rate is so small that it is going to take years to accomplish anything significant. It is going to take years to even get back to where we were in the 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1983-84 the percentage of GDP for post-secondary education transfers was .56%. That dropped to .41% in 1992-93 and went way down to .19% in 2004-05. It dropped again to .17% in 2007-08 and has come up only very slightly in the projections for 2008-09 to .22%. We are still dramatically behind where things started out before the Liberals made their huge cuts to transfer payments for post-secondary education in Canada. There is nothing that will get us back to the point where there is some real assistance for students to ensure their education in this budget.
Students were explicitly excluded from the working income tax benefit even though hundreds of thousands of students have to work full time to afford their tuition fees and lower their eventual student debt. There is no plan to address student debt in the budget. There is no plan to address the expiry of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation.
That is not where the problems end with this bill for young people. Last week in my riding I attended a conference called Toward Effective Community Practice for High Risk Youth. Youth workers from Burnaby and New Westminster attended. There were many concerns raised about the lack of a coordinated approach to high risk youth and the problems they face in our society. There is no national strategy on youth, no coordinated effort to deal with the problems of high risk youth. There is no attempt to deal with the various boundaries and jurisdictional problems that face young people in difficulty in our country.
Programs for 8 to 12 year olds are particularly important, but they are the ones most dramatically lacking. Teens and those reaching the high end of the age limits of these programs are left without any kind of support whatsoever at a huge cost to Canadian society later on. The question of how we support youth in our society is also something that is very significant.
I hope to talk a bit about the situation of new immigrants and refugees in Canada and what this budget has not done for them. Maybe I will get a chance to do that later, but I want to mention three specific things in Burnaby.
There are three important projects for which the city of Burnaby was looking for support from the federal government and which did not appear in this budget. One is for the establishment of an immigration and refugee services hub in the centre of Burnaby. We need money for infrastructure in Burnaby to deal with the growing population of immigrants and refugees in the community. It is a good thing for our community, but the infrastructure is not there. We need a facility to do that. The city has put aside the land for it, but needs help from the other levels of government.
The city of Burnaby and other communities in the Lower Mainland also need support from the federal government for the World Police & Fire Games in 2009. We need to show support for our police and firefighters by supporting them in this project. The games were recently completed in Adelaide, Australia and the premier of the state of South Australia has indicated what a huge boon they were to the economy of that state and how important they were to its communities.
There is also the question of Burnaby Lake. There was money in this budget to help Lake Winnipeg and Lake Simcoe but there was nothing for Burnaby Lake which is quickly deteriorating from an open water lake into a swamp and marshland. We need to preserve this important habitat for all kinds of wildlife to ensure that Burnaby Lake remains an open water lake.
The city of Burnaby has been seeking a commitment from the federal government for years. It was not forthcoming from the previous government even though the Leader of the Opposition when he was minister of the environment visited and promised to look into it. Nothing was forthcoming and there is still nothing forthcoming from the current government even though the city and the province have committed to this important project.
There are many things missing from this budget, many things that do not address the prosperity gap, many things that do not address the particular needs of the community that I represent. The government could have done a better job.