Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-50, the budget implementation act. I would like to speak on two aspects of the bill. One is the significant changes to the immigration system that are included in this bill and the other is the priorities of the bill that we are debating today.
I represent Vancouver East, a riding that certainly reflects the multiculturalism of Canada. It is a community that is built on immigration. Vancouver East would not exist in terms of its economic vitality and the people who live there, if it were not for many waves of immigration beginning in Strathcona and moving throughout all of Vancouver East and indeed Vancouver as a whole. Immigration is a very important part of our community. Immigrants and new Canadians are people we welcome into our community.
It is very alarming to me to see that the budget bill we are debating these days in the House contains such dramatic and significant changes to our immigration system. It concerns me that those changes are in a budget bill. One would expect that changes to the immigration system would be contained in legislation pertaining to immigration and that the legislation would then go to the immigration committee.
The Conservative government has brought in very significant changes to the system through the back door. The Conservatives are trying to hide them under the cover of the budget bill and hope that no one notices. Luckily, there is a growing debate in my community and across the country about the impact that these immigration changes would have if the budget bill is approved.
The immigration changes that are contemplated would give major new powers to the minister to control the types of applications she accepts. It would impose quotas. It would dispose of current immigration applications and would even allow queue jumping. There would be new limits put on the humanitarian and compassionate grounds category which often is used by many families for the purpose of family reunification. It would even give the minister the power to deny visas to those who meet all of the immigration criteria. This would confer enormous, and I would say very dangerous, powers on an individual, a powerful minister and it is being done through the back door.
The most significant change is that it is supporting what has already been a policy shift wherein our immigration system is increasingly being understood as a system that looks at immigrants as economic units. For example, these changes would allow applications to be disposed of and put aside, but it would allow a further dramatic increase in what is called the foreign worker program or the guest worker program, where people are treated as cheap labour from foreign countries. We have seen it in Alberta and in B.C. where there has been a massive influx of foreign workers who are often exploited and abused by employers. It is very hard to track what is going on and whether or not they are able to avail themselves of their rights as workers.
This is something that is incredibly alarming in this budget bill. We are seeing this dramatic policy shift in our immigration system that would displace families. It would do nothing further in terms of reunification and would place a greater and greater emphasis on foreign workers who come to this country on a temporary basis. They have no adequate rights. They are not treated as permanent residents. They do not have an opportunity to become citizens.
It is something that we have seen in Europe. We have seen the kind of instability, both politically and culturally that it fosters, where there are two tiers of people. There are citizens and workers who have no real status, who are never protected in the society to which they are major contributors. That is the kind of thing we absolutely should not be accepting in Canada. I am very afraid that is what would happen under these changes.
There are other very concerning things in the bill.
A couple of days ago the homelessness count in metro Vancouver was released. This count is done every few years. It was conducted by over 700 volunteers who literally go block by block, alley by alley, shelter by shelter and endeavour to get, and indeed do get, a very accurate count of people who are homeless, whether they are in shelters or on the street.
That count was done on March 11 and the results were released on April 8. It showed that overall there has been a 19% increase in the number of homeless individuals found in metro Vancouver. That is a 19% increase since 2005 when the last count was done. It is a 131% increase since the one previous to that was done, which was in 2002. This should cause enormous concern.
In my community of Vancouver East, particularly in places like the downtown eastside, the visibility of homelessness, the number of people on the street, those who are destitute and those living so far below the poverty line with no resources or hope for the future, causes enormous distress. It causes illness and mental distress not only to the individuals who are in that predicament but also to the community at large.
The latest figures from the homeless count should be setting off alarm bells. One would think that over the years there would have been a concerted effort to address this as a grave human tragedy. In a country as wealthy as Canada, nobody should be sleeping on the street. Nobody should be without shelter. Everybody is entitled to a living wage and decent, safe, appropriate and affordable housing.
Yet, when we look at the budget, there was no new money for housing. A number of local advocacy groups in the downtown east side, including Pivot, United Native Nations, DERA, the Carnegie Community Action Project and Streams of Justice, recently released a report that showed there were 10 new low income housing facilities that have either closed or will be closing for a further loss of 448 units.
My community is facing a very grave situation where people are either already homeless or are on the verge of becoming homeless. Yet there was nothing in this budget to address those issues.
I read a quote from the minister allegedly responsible for housing, where he dismissed the idea that we needed a national housing program. I have heard the minister say that the government is spending more money on housing than any other government in the history of Canada. He is talking about mortgages. He is talking about existing projects, some of which were built 20 years ago. No new co-ops or social housing units have been built. Even the homelessness programs that exist are in jeopardy because it is not yet clear whether they will continue.
All of this creates incredible anxiety both for the organizations that seek to assist those who are homeless and certainly the people on the street and in shelters who wonder whether they will ever have a roof over their heads or have a place they can call home.
To me, this budget is about priorities. I find it shameful. When we look at the $50 billion in corporate income tax cuts that are contained in this budget and the former economic and fiscal update that was presented last October, when we look at the corporate tax cuts that are laid out from 2007 all the way to 2013, we are talking about $50 billion that has been lost from public revenue.
Let us think about what could have been done with that amount of money. It could have provided 1.14 million child care spaces. It could have provided 74,000 hybrid transit buses. It could have provided 12 million units of non-profit affordable housing. It could have assisted 11 million students with their undergraduate tuition, or another two million graduates with their student loans. It could have put a much greater emphasis on dealing with climate change. None of these priorities were addressed in the budget.
To add insult to injury, when people in my community read that VANOC, the Olympic committee, received another $45 million yet housing receiving nothing, they knew that they were at the bottom of the list.
This is a very bad budget and it is the reason—