Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for this opportunity to speak to the budget.
I profoundly believe that government budgets should tell Canadians much more than just dollars and cents. Budgets should also articulate and echo a nation's vision and values. We should spend and save according to our priorities as a country and as a people.
I must say at the outset how profoundly disappointing this budget is as a document for stating the priorities for a Canada that was built on rights and opportunities for all.
The Conservative budget has actually reminded me why I am a New Democrat. New Democrats believe in an ethic of care, compassion and justice for all. The Conservative spin doctors said that their budget was a family budget for the kitchen table, not the boardroom table. They certainly were not talking about most families or kitchen tables I visited in Sault Ste. Marie and Algoma.
Both in the last Parliament and in this Parliament, it has been my privilege, first as my party's child care critic and now as social policy and poverty critic, to travel across Canada and listen to people. In this past year I travelled across Canada to conduct a series of poverty forums that shine a light on the growing prosperity gap that divides our society and our people.
On a positive note, I have been impressed in communities by the deep level of compassion and caring that exists. However, people are increasingly uneasy about the disparity they see around them and their own tenuous grip on some security for themselves and for their families. Too many hard-working people and their families find themselves only one or two paycheques away from poverty.
People tell me they remember a time when community mattered and government could and did make a difference. People are looking for a vision consistent with the Canadian story where we together wove a safety net of basic income, health care, education, unemployment insurance and pensions for all.
Frankly, we will need more from the government than its tinkering here and there to fix our problems. We need more than the budget's baby steps forward on a working tax benefit that will not offer one cent to people on minimum wage who work full time.
We in my party are calling for a national anti-poverty strategy. I want to speak today about what the elements are for such a strategy. It would require the challenge heard by the Newfoundland and Labrador government in its poverty reduction consultation, a challenge to produce money and guts from elected officials.
We will not have to reinvent the wheel here. Jurisdictions in the European Union and elsewhere are proposing national plans to combat poverty. They are doing this with noticeable early success. In Ireland, for example--and there was a wonderful article in the weekend Toronto Star--the rate of people experiencing consistent poverty dropped from 15.1% in 1994 to 5.2% in 2001. The United Kingdom has taken a million pensioners and 800,000 children out of relative poverty since 1999.
Here in Canada there are promising initiatives in Quebec's anti-poverty law with a goal to achieve one of the lowest levels of poverty among industrialized societies by the year 2013.
Newfoundland and Labrador's poverty reduction strategy has a goal to have the least number of people in poverty in the country. In Newfoundland, a recognition that a poverty reduction strategy included but meant much more than just creating jobs. They looked at three key outcome areas: general well-being, employment and economic security and community stability.
For well-being, we are looking at health status in a the family: adequate nutrition; economic security; safety; access to early childhood programs, services and schools; post-secondary education and education status; and literacy. They will look at the redesign of policies and programs deliveries. They will look at income support; drug cards and who gets them; disincentives to work; coordination with federal policies; discrimination facing specific groups: women, persons with disabilities, seniors, immigrants, youth and aboriginals; and poverty influenced by the broad policy framework of government, federal, provincial and municipal governments.
The current framework creates disconnects in the continuum of supports as well as an imbalance of effort directed toward fixing problems rather than focusing on poverty prevention.
In Newfoundland there will be a new commitment to review every new piece of legislation or policy from a poverty reduction strategy lens to identify what works; sustained, stable, multi-year funding; universal access to programming; policy changes that remove barriers to support; accountability frameworks in federal-provincial-territorial agreements so policy intent is achieved to take in development and sustainability of rural communities; and disability related supports.
Even the World Bank has articulated a poverty methodology. Its major components are to explore individual and community well-being, to give priority to the poor in policy, to include institutional analysis and to always include a gender analysis.
In Canada there is a new movement across the country called “the vibrant community initiative” which has undertaken a significant poverty reduction strategy to create and grow a movement of diverse leaders and communities from across Canada who are committed to exploring, challenging and testing ways to unleash the potential of communities to substantially reduce poverty and ensure a good quality of life for all citizens. It is engaging business, citizens, groups and governments to examine alternative approaches to conceiving poverty and poverty reduction in order to strengthen the capacity of communities to make choices about how best to frame, unfold, measure and communicate about local poverty reduction efforts.
We as New Democrats have been looking at this issue of an anti-poverty strategy for quite some time. In partnership with the work that I am doing crossing the country and talking to people, we have a number of my colleagues in caucus who have critic responsibility in areas of housing, employment insurance, child care, post-secondary education, seniors, and the list goes on. Each one of those individuals are working with their communities and within their communities of interest to devise strategies that we can bring forward to the House, and we do that on a regular basis.
A skeleton for a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy, according to our caucus and the New Democratic Party in Canada, is already well on the road toward this with some of the following initiatives that we have laid out here in the House. We introduced private member's bills to begin the discussion. I myself led the discussion here on an opposition day only a month ago talking about the need for a national anti-poverty strategy beginning with the raising of the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour.
We are talking about EI reform, something that my colleague from Bathurst has talked about so passionately since he came here in the late nineties. We are talking about income security and the federal minimum wage. We are talking about child and family poverty initiatives. We are talking about seniors and a caregivers campaign.
We are talking about affordable housing and confronting homelessness, a problem that is becoming more and more alarming across this country and in places we would never expect, places like Calgary and Victoria for example, where the economy is doing well, where business is booming. We have a growing underbelly of homelessness that is alarming and it is creating great difficulty and challenge for those communities as they try to tackle it with little or no help from the federal government.
We are talking about affordable post-secondary education. We are talking about gender equality. We are talking about helping our veterans and their families. We are talking about persons with disabilities and introducing initiatives that will be helpful to them.
We are talking about our first nations, a group of people who we must fundamentally right our relationship with if we are going to develop a vision for this country. We need to honour our obligations to the Métis and Inuit.
We are talking about immigrants and overcoming the low income gaps that exist in our country. In that speech that I made about a month ago, I asked the House to entertain and to drive the development of an anti-poverty strategy and that we need to work together on this.
Too many of our friends and neighbours, too many of our fellow citizens out there, are counting on us to give leadership and to drop some of the partisan wrangling that has been heard here this afternoon and that so often takes over this place. We must work in concert as a team, together, as a government, to eradicate once and for all this terrible blight on our society, the blight of poverty.