Mr. Speaker, Canadian women are tired of being treated like afterthoughts by the Conservative government.
Half the population paying over $42 billion in taxes should have warranted more than a few words in the Conservative budget, and its promise to draft an action plan sometime next year to improve women's economic and social conditions is another slap in the face.
I guess the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages does not know that such a document already exists, and has since 1995, and can be found on the Status of Women website.
This promise to draft a plan and the Conservative budget do virtually nothing for Canadian women struggling to balance work and family life, and its “tax cuts are the answer” to a potential economic downturn means that women must wait even longer for the government to even consider their real and urgent needs.
Women benefit most from investments in vital services such as affordable child care, housing and tuition, but none of these appeared in the budget, despite the availability of huge surpluses.
Instead, the budget hammers home the government's key priorities: tax cuts and debt reduction. However, the bigger question is this: what happened to the surplus?