Mr. Speaker, I am happy to speak in the debate on the budget bill.
A little while ago in my riding of Newton--North Delta I had the opportunity to attend the Surrey Children's Festival Breakfast, an annual event organized by Sheila McKinnon, who does such great work in our community. This event gives the people in Surrey and Delta an opportunity to celebrate the most important citizens we have, the future of our families, the future of our communities.
That event was the perfect opportunity to reflect upon all this budget represents and all it denies for those children in the coming years. Many of them are first generation Canadians. Their parents were newcomers to Canada, many of whom qualified to come here as professionals. They had high-paying jobs before they arrived here and were told they met the standards to be qualified professionals here in Canada. Now they are working far below their earning potential and have no hope in finding positions they were educated for before they came to this wonderful country.
The budget scrapped all plans to provide for a one stop agency to deal with the foreign credentials recognition problem that we face day in and day out. That was probably because the government discovered it did not work. If the government members were honest, perhaps they would admit that they knew it would not work all along. Any real consultation with licensing bodies, trade organizations and educational institutions would have told them that a lot earlier, but like most things with this budget, the Conservatives clearly chose not to listen. If they had consulted at all, this would not be the situation.
We see the same thing happening in the Atlantic provinces. The government simply chooses not to listen.
Two budgets later, the parents of these children are no further ahead in getting the jobs they came to Canada for. Even if all those children became doctors, health care professionals and skilled tradespeople, we still would not have enough here in Canada to fill the gap.
By 2020 we will not be able to produce enough tradespeople and professionals here. We will be relying on immigration. Members might think I am talking about immigrants, but this is not an immigration problem. When I talk to the businesses in my riding about the labour shortage in British Columbia, I listen to them. This government is not listening to their concerns about getting recognition of the credentials of those technicians and tradespeople so that they can be productive members of our society. Members might think that this budget would have addressed that problem and would have made it a priority. Once again they would be disappointed to learn that they are wrong.
In fact this is a budget that cares very little about what we are really facing in the future, even though time and time again all the research tells us that the future of our country and of our economy lies in more and better immigration and immigration services than we provide.
People like Mumtaz Khan and Monica Verma in my riding, who run the Self Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Society, SEEDS, not only for new Canadians but for men and women who want to start new small businesses, can tell us that in four short years we are going to run out of professionals and skilled workers. This budget does nothing to address the fact that the answer is in new Canadians. The answer is to deal with the backlog of immigration applications. What does the budget offer? Nothing.
The answer is to deal with family reunification. Extended families can offer some of the child care services that the government is so unwilling to provide. What does the budget offer? Again, the budget offers nothing.
The answer lies in speeding up citizenship processing times and also the refugee applications. Again, the budget offers nothing.
New Canadians now realize they have to work around the government, a government that fails them time and time again. The government fails not only new Canadians. We can see resentment coming from all provinces, starting with Atlantic Canada and going to Saskatchewan and British Columbia. That is why the government is trying to push the budget forward. The government wants the resentment that is coming from different regions to be taken out of the public eye.
We know what it takes to ensure a real future for Canadians. The government's budget is a denial of the realities that hard-working Canadians face every day.
Let me return to the children at that breakfast. We are now two budgets into the government's mandate that denied child care, a mandate that said parents should have the right to choose whether to have child care or not. The first budget gave them a $100 cheque each month and what was supposed to be funding for new spaces. This budget does nothing more.
In my province, a little research will show what this has meant. Not a single new child care space has been created. None of that money has ever been accessed. In fact, many spaces have been closed down in the last year.
After two budgets, parents who have nothing but an extra $100, which is also taxed, could not afford to put their children in these child care places, even if they existed. These same parents, perhaps like myself, would like to bring their parents over to look after their children, and this budget fails on that front too.
We see the vicious circle the budget has put in place with its failures: children without child care; parents who cannot find the jobs in their chosen fields, and who cannot even look to their own families to provide the care the government denies because their family members cannot get into this country sooner and faster.
The government is failing to meet the future, to honour its potential with a budget like this. What is worse, this is only one example of how the impact of this failure is being felt by hard-working Canadian families in my constituency right now.
I have not even gone into the failure of a viable so-called green plan the government is talking about so our children and their children could have a livable environment.
I have not even gone into the budget's failure to address the rising population of young native Canadians and what it will mean for their future.
The point is that with this budget, we are a long way away from the 11% increase in after tax income that working families received under the previous Liberal government. Under the previous Liberal government there was real child care, money for child care spaces and more money for real solutions to foreign credentials recognition, and not the fake solutions of the two Conservative budgets, and not the kind of budget that would look to the one area of funding for our young people to get them into the workforce, the summer jobs program.
With all these cuts, this is a budget that imagines that hard-working Canadian families do not want real vision and leadership. The government is thinking that way in planning for our future. We can only go on with the vision, but not the cheque writing strategy.