Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to speak in the House to what I think ordinary Canadians want to see in a budget and juxtapose that with what we actually get from the government.
The budget is the foundation. It is a critical social contract that any government has with its citizens. What we have seen in this budget is a contract that seems to have been broken.
I listened carefully to one of the government members who asked about supporting the budget because of affordable housing. I am glad my colleague from Vancouver set the record straight. If we had not been here in this place to ensure corporate tax cuts were not put at the front of the line ahead of affordable housing, many of our citizens would not have any supports at all for affordable housing.
When Conservatives say that we should have supported the budget, the last budget or this budget, because of the money for affordable housing, it would be laughable if it were not so serious. The fact is that the government has no interest in investing public dollars in things like affordable housing.
We need to recall that in the last budget at the last hour the government put money into trusts for things like affordable housing for aboriginal peoples and first nations. The government wanted to get a deal from us to support it on the budget if it would commit to keeping the money that was already committed and put it into the next year's budget. Of course we said no because the money was already there. It then put it ahead into the budget.
That is the real story on the government and affordable housing. It is just taking money from Bill C-48 and putting it in place and saying that it has actually done something. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is abandoning people on the issue of affordable housing and that affects all of us.
If we look at what is missing in the budget, it is long term care and home care for seniors. I have spent the last couple of months going door to door in seniors' residences in the downtown area here. It is appalling. We have seniors who are abandoned. They are not getting the care they need when they need it. They get one level of government giving a pittance of support and another level of government taking it away. They are tired of that. They are tired of government not being there for them.
Families are being squeezed. I had a gentleman come into my office just two weeks ago. He is feeling the squeeze on his income as he tries to help his mother. He needs to be there for her because no one else is. He does not begrudge supporting her but he is wondering where his government is, the government to which he pays taxes. He wants the services for the taxes that he pays. I want to be very clear. He does not want another tax cut. What he has been saying to me is that before we start into more tax cuts he wants to see home care, pharmaceutical care and support for his mother. He would like a nurse to see his mother, not for any luxurious kind of visit but for basic primary care. He is not getting that from his government and we are not getting it from the budget, which is why we cannot support it.
When we look at how the government is treating seniors, it is not good enough to say that they have a deduction here and a deduction there when the core services that they need in their community are not there for them now.
With all due respect to the government, before it comes to this place and passes out another tax cut, it should take an inventory of what is going on in the communities. Before it proposes another tax cut, it should take a look at the waiting lists for housing, the waiting lists for long term care and the waiting list for home care and tell my constituents, tell the seniors in my community that it is good enough that they get up to an hour a week. It also should not fob it off on the provinces because that is the politics of shame when it does that.
When we look at what is in it for seniors, the budget fails. When we look at housing, it fails. When we look at students, it is interesting. We need to look at the bookends of our society, those who helped build this country and now need our support. They were there for us when they helped put this country together and built our communities.
Let us look at the other bookend, the students. I paid $1,200 for my tuition. If we were to ask the students in my constituency who are attending Carleton University or the University of Ottawa how much they are paying for tuition, it would blow us away. Tuition is from $5,000 to $6,000.
What are we doing for young people to get post-secondary education, or training for jobs, or just a hand up to help them move along in terms of the next step in their lives, which is education? We are failing them. The budget contains nothing of any substance for them and that is not good enough for them. It is also not good enough for their parents who are being squeezed.
As we have mentioned in our party, the prosperity gap is ever widening. We are talking about people who are on the margins, who are falling off the table, and not only them. What is stunning is that we are seeing our middle class being squeezed so that they are now having to make very difficult choices and often, as members will appreciate in this so-called sandwich generation, are making choices on who to help, their senior parents or their sons or daughters who are trying to make it in university or post-secondary education. That is not right.
When we had a $13 billion surplus without a debate about where that money would go, it was absolutely wrong. We could do better. We should do better and this budget does not do better.
I recall the former government and that party at the time asking where the debate was on where the surplus would go. They were high and they were mighty but where are those words now? They are gone. They have evaporated at the cost of those who are most vulnerable in our society. We can do better.
When we sit around the kitchen table and talk about what is important in our families, do we look at the hole in the roof of our home and say that we should go build a white picket fence? No. We deal with what is important. We deal with the hole in the roof. We have a hole in our roof and it is called the prosperity gap and that hole is getting ever bigger and wider. The government seems to think it is fine so it will put a toll on the road outside, hand us a nickel and say that it is fine. Well it is not fine. It is not good economics and it is not sound investment. It is very poor policy.
I will now turn to where this budget fails, not just for seniors and young people, but on the infrastructure of this country, I will just turn to our cities. It is very clear, from mayors of small towns, big towns and big cities that our government needs to do more. It needs to do more to build the infrastructure to make our cities livable and make them environmentally more sustainable.
We should not have to wait for a health advisory before we send our children out to play but that is what is happening. My colleague from Windsor told me horrific stories about kids not being able to go outside on some days because of the quality of the air. We could have done something about that. We could have had a transportation policy that would have helped all our kids and all our citizens in the long term but hat is not in this budget.
Quite frankly, the fact that people can write off their bus passes, which we had to ensure the government fixed because it messed that up too, is not good enough because these buses are not going far enough. This city does not have a train because the government would not support our the light rail plan.
We need to see more substantive commitments and better commitments, which is why our party cannot support the government's budget.