Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the prebudget debate.
When I used to sit on the finance committee, I enjoyed travelling the country and going into different communities with my colleagues from Scarborough—Guildwood and Markham—Unionville and other distinguished members of our party. We would listen to Canadians, hear what they had to say and had an opportunity to put that into a report.
I had the chance last year, although I am not a member of the committee, to sit in on one session held in Halifax, in December, in my home community of Dartmouth—Halifax. I found that very useful too. It is important to hear from Canadians.
I remember being on the finance committee the day after the government announced the cuts back in the fall of 2006. At that point in time, pre-scheduled to meet with us that very day was the Canadian Museums Association. The guy had a presentation to give but he decided not to give it because it was irrelevant. He said that the association had been cut to bone and that it did not make sense. He asked why the government had done that. In our consultations that followed, we heard more and more from people who had their programs cut. Those cuts tell us a lot about the government and its ideological approach.
I want to focus my comments on areas for which I now have critic responsibility, which is the human resources area. Some of those cuts included, incredibly, literacy. I believe $17.7 million was cut from literacy programs. That is hard to believe. Literacy Nova Scotia puts programs together on bubble gum and toothpicks. It hardly has any money. What little money it had was cut out from underneath.
I received letters from Learners of Nova Scotia. One learner in the riding of Kings—Hants sent me his story. He never had a chance until he hooked in with a literacy group and now his program was in danger of shutting down. Literacy Nova Scotia had no money and could not continue after the cuts.
I met with the department and the minister at the time. I asked them what they were doing. They told me not to worry about it. Although they had taken $17 million away, they said that they had tens of millions of dollars that would go into literacy. I asked them where it would go and I was told they would let me know.
I then asked the literacy groups if they were receiving any money and they told me no. I asked the department where the money had gone. I was told it had gone to two groups, but the rest of the money would be coming. An awful lot of things are coming, and not particularly fast.
Recently we put a question on the order paper. We asked what the funding was for literacy last year. This is the response we received from the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development. It said, “These amounts of funding were provided to national, provincial and local organizations for literacy in the years as follows: 2005-2006, $33,359,000; 2006-2007, $16,800,000”.
This is half of what had been given the year before. Where is the money for the literacy groups? It is gone.
At the same time, $6.5 million was cut from the Canadian volunteerism initiative, the CVI. Its total budget was $7.5 million of which $6.5 million came from the federal government. It chopped it all. The group puts together the infrastructure for volunteering.
There is not one member in the House of Commons who did not get here because of volunteers. Most of us, on all sides of the House, have been volunteers in many capacities, whether helping the Heart and Stroke Foundation, or the Canadian Cancer Society or maybe simply providing care to loved ones at the end of their lives, or a child who has autism, or a child who has special needs, or an aunt or an uncle who needs help.
If we take the volunteerism out of Canada, we collapse. If we take away the support of voluntary caregivers, for example, and let the system provide the nursing care and the respite care, the full care, the system will be bankrupt virtually overnight. There is not an area in Canadian society where we cannot look to and say that it relies on volunteers.
I was president in Nova Scotia of the Heart and Stroke Foundation. I believe we had 16 paid staff, but thousands of unpaid staff who went knocking on doors on cold February days. Some are out there now, knocking on doors to raise money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Six and half million measly dollars was cut by the government. It is shameful. It is unacceptable.
We recently had an opportunity in my riding. The member for York Centre was touring Canada. He calls it, “It takes the country to fight poverty”. He came to my riding. The member for Halifax West and I co-hosted a meeting in a church basement, expecting some people to come out to talk about poverty. Three hundred people turned out to talk about poverty and to talk about our leader, the leader of the Liberal Party, who came out with his 30:50 plan to tackle poverty, to reduce the number of Canadians living below the poverty line by at least 30% and cut in half the number of children living in poverty over five years.
Poverty is not a vote getter. People who really live in poverty need help the most. The Metro Turning Point Shelter In my community has 60 beds that are full every night. Men come in between 7 o'clock and 11 o'clock in the evening. They sleep in one room in beds that were surplus from a prison, I believe. Eighty per cent of them either have mental health or addiction issues. Imagine what it is like to sleep in that room.
In the morning they get up at 7 o'clock and go to Hope Cottage, which is a multi-denominational church that sponsors a food bank. They go there for their food and they spend their days in the street.
Some of the younger ones may be involved with Phoenix Youth Programs, which deals with troubled young citizens who have issues with mental health and many of them with addictions. The coalition on homelessness does what it can to support the people who do this, the Canadian Mental Association. However, one thing about those folks is they do not generally vote because they spend their time trying to live.
The leader of a national party, who has the opportunity to form a government, has said that he will draw a line in the sand and cut poverty by 30% and child poverty by 50% over five years. People have talked about poverty for many years. Some things that have come along, like the child tax benefit, have made a difference. For a leader to stand up and say that he will stake his government on hitting these goals is pretty inspiring for these people.
I talked to a couple of people. One came to me afterwards and said that he had worked against me the first time I ran. He worked with the NDP. However, he now is working for the Liberal Party because the NDP are not doing this kind of thing in our community.
Somebody else asked to speak to the member for York Centre after the meeting. The person never believed the Liberals could take a big bite out of poverty, that we could have a national early learning and child care plan either, but the Liberal party gave it to the people and because of that, the person was with us. That is pretty powerful stuff.
The leader of the Liberal Party has come out with a plan which would, among other things, create the making work pay benefit to lower the welfare wall and improving the Canada child tax benefit to support working families by making the non-refundable child tax credit into a refundable credit, so even those who do not pay tax get it.
We often hear that the GST is great for people who are poor. The guys staying at Metro Turning Point do not go out to by an Escalade in the afternoon. They are not taking advantage of it. A lot of people simply cannot.
Another part of our plan is to help lift vulnerable seniors out of poverty by increasing the GIS, to honour the Kelowna accord, a plan for aboriginal Canadians, and a number of other things too such as fighting for access to things like affordable housing, child care, public transit.
My recommendation for the government would be to look at some of these things and see if it could not, for once, do something for the people who need help the most.
I want to talk about education. I know I talk about it a lot, but it is an important message. Canada is a nation that is highly educated, and we have done pretty well. We have done well in some ways more by accident than design. We are a big nation, huge in natural resources with a relatively small population, largely spread in central centres. We do not have the kinds of tornados that swept through the United States yesterday. We do not have the kinds of natural disasters we see across many continents. We have not had world wars fought on our soil. We have had things pretty good.
We now face new challenges in the world. We face the emerging economies of China, India and Brazil. They are not our enemies, but they will be competitors for human capital over the next number of years.
We also see huge investments being made by OECD nations, which know they have to increase their skill level. They know they have to increase every citizen's ability not only for their own sake, but so they can contribute to their national economies.
One of the last acts of the previous Liberal government in 2005 was to bring an economic update into the House. We wanted to focus on helping students. We wanted to help all students because we felt it was important, but particularly important was to help those most in need. That update included $550 million over five years to extend Canada access grants to 55,000 students from low income families. The grants would have been extended to all four years of an undergrad education.
The update also included $2.2 billion over five years to improve student financial assistance and make post-secondary education more accessible for low and middle income Canadians. There was money for internships and MBA scholarships. Money for workplace training to enhance participation by aboriginal Canadians was also included. There was money to specifically assist persons with disabilities to get post-secondary education.
Young Canadians, and they may be in their early twenties, have come to me because they are faced with a particular challenge. I am sure other members of Parliament see them as well. Many of these young kids graduated from grade 12 feeling like they belonged. However, other kids, who were part of their graduating class, were heading off to university or community college or getting a job. Those the kids are left at home because there is a black hole once they leave high school.
The kids who come to see me do not look for much. They are looking for some workplace training. They are looking for an opportunity to get a job to do what they can do to provide for themselves and society. Our Liberal government put $165 million in the update to help those kids have a better chance at an equitable life. When the government was defeated and the Conservatives came in, that all went out the window. It is a crying shame because we are not doing all we can to assist children to get the education they need.
Another program was the summer jobs program, which we remember from last year. The Conservative government knew it worked, but it had to put its own stamp on it. The government changed the program from the summer career placement program to the summer jobs program. It reduced the amount of money and changed the criteria.
Organizations across this nation, almost all of them not for profit, relied on the summer jobs program. Students thought this was crazy. There was a big fuss by a lot of members of Parliament on this side of the House. I remember one day last year, eight different Liberal members stood up in question period and asked a question about that summer jobs program. It clearly was broken, but the Conservative government said that things were fine.
We asked if the government was going to put more money into fixing the hole. The answer was no, things were just great. In the fall, the government slipped $45 million into the supplementary estimates to cover its tracks. I will give the present minister credit for going back to the old Liberal program. We will have to see how it unfolds over the next few months.
That clearly showed the government did not respect students or community organizations, made up of volunteers who help us run the country.
There are some good ideas out there. I do not have to give all the answers, but let me talk about a few recommendations on the post-secondary side.
My colleague from Yukon was 100% correct about the millennium scholarship foundation. I was pleased to hear the previous Conservative speaker say that he supported it.
The millennium scholarship foundation was set up in the late 1990s by the Liberal government, and it has been a success. There were some problems early on with respect to it. There were some clawbacks in some of the provinces. There were some issues with getting it organized. It now works very well. Every province and every territory work with the millennium scholarship foundation and want it renewed. The foundation provides about $350 million every year of almost exclusively needs based funding for students. That needs to be replenished. We cannot afford to lose $350 million of funding for students.
Almost everyone wants to see the millennium scholarship replenished, or some of those people who I think have an ideological aversion to the millennium scholarship want to replace it with a needs based granting system. We definitely need to do something.
The Canada student loans program needs to be redone and looked at in a whole new way. We need to open it up to more people. We need to expand its scope. We need to reduce the cost of borrowing so that it makes more sense for students. We need to reduce bankruptcy provisions for students along with it.
Those are my views. I encourage the government to have a look at that. We studied some of this when I was on the finance committee.
Julian Benedict, who heads up the Coalition for Student Loan Fairness, has put together a lot of work on this. This is not new. This is not something the government has to study to death. The solutions exist.
Invest in research and innovation. Build on the great progress of the Liberal government in the late 1990s and early in this century, when the economy was finally on track after that $41 billion annual deficit was turned into a surplus. We started to invest in research and innovation. I would admit that like poverty, it is not a big vote getter, but it may well be the single most important achievement of Canada in the last 10 years in becoming competitive.
Ten years ago we used to hear about the brain drain. In the Globe and Mail we would read about losing researchers to the United States and other parts of the world. It does not happen now. We are repatriating researchers to Canada because of those investments in CFI, CIHR, the granting councils and a whole host of research oriented areas. We are starting to lose that. And what did the government do? It fired Dr. Art Carty, one of the pre-eminent scientists in this country, who was leading the charge on a lot of this and had great respect in the research community. It is pretty scandalous.
Why do we not invest in research? Taking the indirect costs of research was something else from the economic update and we increased it to 40%. The Conservative government turned that over. Invest in the CIHR. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research came to the finance committee, 13 institutes that do unbelievable work. I know about the CIHR not because I am a doctor or because I am particularly scientifically gifted, but because I was involved in the national board of the Heart and Stroke Foundation when the CIHR came along. It changed research in Canada.
Organizations like the Heart and Stroke Foundation redid their governance. I know because I was part of it. I have the scars from that. We redid our governance so that we could pool money to take advantage of the CIHR which now in my view is being marginalized. We are losing another great researcher; Alan Bernstein has left his head position at the CIHR to go to New York. We need to do all of these things.
We should talk about the Atlantic accord. I am sure my colleague from Gander—Grand Falls will tell us. We stood in the House about a year ago when the budget was being read and realized the Conservatives were killing the Atlantic accord, the most important piece of economic development for the province of Nova Scotia and for Newfoundland and Labrador. The right hon. member for LaSalle—Émard signed that deal in 2004 guaranteeing Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia exclusive access to their offshore resources and all of a sudden it was being killed. What could be done?
We know what happened. First the then minister of foreign affairs who is now the minister of defence said, “Nobody is going to be kicked out of our caucus for voting on principle”. That was before he realized there was no one over there who had principles. Then they changed their minds. All Canadians want the Atlantic accord back.
There are a number of things the government could do to improve on the budget it is proposing to bring forward. We know that Tory times are hard times and we see coming down the pike the possibility of a recession. What is troubling is that the misery being inflicted on the poor people in Canada because of a right-wing ideology appears set to continue. Ask women's groups, minority groups which lost the court challenges program, literacy groups, hard-working public servants who are losing their jobs because they were doing their jobs. Ask students what they are going to do with an $80 tax credit, working families who find it tough to get child care. Tory times are tough times and we deserve better.
