Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Bramalea—Gore—Malton.
I stand to speak to this budget bill with some reluctance. I have many concerns that this budget may have come too late and may be too inadequate to deal with a rapidly worsening economic recession.
However, there are some positive elements in this budget, such as the infrastructure programs, the child tax benefit increase, funding for universities, housing for seniors and aboriginal people, and the availability of credit for troubled businesses and for some people who may need to look at home ownership or mortgages, and an investment increase in regional development issues. Those elements, which are Liberal elements, prompt me to swallow hard and hope for positive results.
At the same time, I am concerned. I am concerned about pay equity and the bill that would take away access to justice for those people who seek pay equity. I am concerned about promises to provinces on equalization that have been broken. I am concerned about inadequate changes to employment insurance that would not address the escalating job losses. I am concerned about the lack of a national housing strategy when we know that in every municipality in this country there is a huge housing deficit.
I am concerned that this is a lost opportunity to invest in green investments, in new technologies that would bring about green investments. I am also concerned that there is insufficient money for research and development. In fact, there is a cut to the major granting organizations for R and D in this country.
This is not a time to tip Canada's already precarious balance, and it would be irresponsible for us to play politics and call an election now. Therefore, as I said, I am speaking to this budget with reluctance.
I will discuss some of the things that concern me about this budget. This is why we put the Conservative government on notice and on probation. There are many elements in this budget that we are concerned about simply because they were elements in past budgets which never materialized. In other words, promises were made and there was never any money for implementation and none of the things actually occurred. There is also some smoke and mirrors, which is repetition of old programs that have been rejigged so that they sound like new programs but they have not changed at all.
That is why we are going to keep tabs. That is why we are saying that come March, come June and come December, we will not only look at accountability from the government but we will look at outcomes and results. Did the government achieve what it said it was going to achieve? Was this a good enough stimulus package? Did that money flow? Were the investments actually made?
I will give an example to show why I am concerned. There was an announcement in past budgets of $33 billion in infrastructure over seven years. In year one the money never materialized. In year two we only saw $80 million of that money materialize, and 78% of those infrastructure projects were in Conservative-held ridings.
The question is, do we trust the government not to play patronage games, not to pork-barrel in some of the ridings? Is this really helping? Are they good infrastructure projects? What happened to the $33 billion over seven years? Has that gone? Is it being replaced now by something new? We are waiting to see whether this money will flow.
On EI, up front it looks like there is going to be more money for more people to get EI, but is it going to happen? The government promised that it would deal with maternity benefits for women who are self-employed. Now the government says it is going to study it again. We have been studying these things for quite a while. The question is, what are the results going to be and is it adequate enough?
I come from B.C. The three major sectors that are impacted right now are the manufacturing sector, the automotive sector and the forestry sector. Most of the forestry industry in Canada has been hit hard by an American dollar that was lower than we expected, by a softwood lumber deal that left $1 billion on the table and was completely inadequate, and by a recession in the U.S. where building is not occurring so we cannot sell our wood.
There was one other big thing that happened to make B.C. worse off than any other part of Canada with regard to forestry. That is the pine beetle which we could not stop. It is there eating away at 75% of the pine forest. In 2006, the government promised $200 million toward the pine beetle issue, for restructuring, job retraining and new economies. In 2006, the government promised another $200 million. We are talking about $400 million promised over two years. One hundred million dollars of that has been seen. Where is the other $300 million? Now we see in this budget that there is going to be $85 million a year for two years for the whole of Canada. Is that in addition to the $300 million that is missing?
These are the questions we want to ask. What is happening to that money when whole towns and communities in British Columbia are closing down? People are walking away from their homes. What is happening with the B.C. forestry industry? Are we going to do anything to help British Columbia survive? It is losing more jobs than any other province in Canada at the moment.
These are real people that we are talking about who are walking away from their homes, whose kids cannot finish college. This is a real problem.
There is trade and the gateway coming from British Columbia. We saw Mr. Chrétien and the Liberal government build relationships with China and with Asia because at the moment we do 80% of our trade with the United States. This is nice, but who does good business with only one client? We cannot put all of our eggs in one basket, however, we did. Now that our client is in a recession, and we hear the IMF saying possibly a depression, we are losing business. We are not selling. About 45% of our GDP depends upon trade. What are we doing about this?
We could have continued the relationships that Mr. Chrétien started. We could have built the gateway that Mr. Martin talked about under Liberal governments. That has not happened. Now we find that the relationship has gone backward because the Prime Minister of Canada has instead actually created negative relationships with China.
We are putting money into tourism. The biggest middle class today that is spending money as tourists are the Chinese. Canada is not a most preferred destination because China and Canada have lost a relationship that was so strong dating back to Bethune, and this Prime Minister has created a problem in the relationship.
What are we really going to do here? How are we going to make a difference?
I want to talk about arts and culture. This is an industry that brings $84.6 billion into the gross domestic product. This is an industry that creates 1.1 million jobs. This is an industry with $5 billion worth in trading and cultural products. Instead, we see smoke and mirrors again.
The minister did put in new money. The minister put in money for cultural spaces, which is a one-time boost of $30 million a year. We see him put $25 million into awards, which is a new program, and we see him put new money into festivals, but that is not all that arts and culture is about.
We see him repeat the things that are already there. He called them something new but it is not new money. It is the same thing reiterated in this budget, for instance, $100 million to the Canadian Television Fund. That has been there forever. There is $15 million for magazine publishing. That is what we have been putting into that every year for the past 10 years. There is $15 million for the Canada music fund. That has always been there.
We are wondering about the smoke and mirrors. We are wondering whether the government will do something about the cancelling of the trade routes program because for every dollar lost in those programs, $5 is lost to the GDP in Canada, and thousands of jobs have been lost.
Let us talk about some of the things that will cause an economic stimulus.
Finally, there are jobs, jobs, jobs. This is the saddest cut of all.
I came into politics in 1992 as a physician because I had no pill to help the people who came to see me who had just lost their jobs or their homes. There was the 55-year-old man who had no other job but the one he had worked at for 30 years and did not know what to do. He had to take his kids out of college. There was the young couple who overextended themselves to get a mortgage and now have new baby. One of them lost a job and they do not know what to do.
These are real people. We are told that there were 71,000 jobs lost in December and 129,000 jobs lost in January alone. That is a nice statistic. That is a scary statistic, but real people are hurting. It is real people who have nowhere to go.
It is at this time when government should come to the rescue of its citizens. It is when citizens have to depend upon their government to be there for them. When I came here in 1992, the government had abandoned its people. I am suggesting now that we cannot stand by and watch government abandon its people again. Those real people are somebody's kids and somebody's parents.
This is why this party is putting the government on notice. We are watching it. We are monitoring its results. We are making sure it does what it said it was going to do. We are going to see if it makes a difference. We are going to see if instead of reacting constantly, there is a proactivity, there is a keeping track of what is happening, and there is change made so that we can help real Canadians to get back to work and to move this economy again.