Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the opportunity this afternoon to share a few thoughts with the House and with the people of Canada who are watching on why it is that I, as a member of the New Democratic Party caucus in Ottawa, cannot support the budget that is being supported by the Conservatives and Liberals.
I will do that by sharing just a small piece of my own story because sometimes it is in telling that story that we are able to more completely or fulsomely understand why a person might take a position which, at first glance, might not seem in the interests of one's home community.
In spite of the fact that the government has packed the budget with investments in communities like my own that will be helpful in the short term, and of course all of us will be thankful for that, it does not move us away from an approach to our economy that got us into the mess that we experienced in the last part of last year in the first place.
It was an approach that saw a government continually and ever more generously give tax breaks to large corporations, which in turn diminished the ability of government to play a constructive and positive role in the protection of communities and the development of opportunities. It diminished the ability of government, without running tremendously large deficits, to help our communities and the economy, and to protect the jobs of working men and women across this country.
I believe that we have a wonderful opportunity in this country at this point in time, if we would only read the signs to understand what is fundamentally happening, to make a significant and fundamental shift that would serve us all better in the long run.
Back in 1959 my father and mother sold everything they had in Ireland and bet that money on a dream. That dream was Canada. They brought their seven children, I was the eldest of seven children, to Canada to give them a future. It was not very complicated. They were not really looking for much. As I sat with my father in his last few years, he explained to me that really, what he was looking for was a good job that would help him put food on the table, provide a home for himself, his wife and his children, and would put some money aside so that we, his children, might go to school one day and have a life for ourselves. That was all. It really was not complicated.
We ended up in the small town of Wawa in northern Ontario, where he got a job mining iron ore. He was paid a decent wage for doing that work, enough so that we were a very happy family. We discovered a community that was very supportive. It was a mix of races, cultures, religions and languages. Because we were fairly isolated, people would get together on occasion for weddings, funerals, and to celebrate with each other in a way that we had not experienced in such a fulsome fashion where we had come from.
We learned as we went along that the iron ore that we were mining in that little town, and 1,200 people worked in those mines, was sent to the big city a couple of hours down the road or by train to Sault Ste. Marie where yet another 12,000 people took the sinter that we produced and turned it into steel. That steel was sent to communities across Canada, to Saint John, New Brunswick, to British Columbia and to Windsor where it was used to make cars, build ships and make buses. It was sent to Quebec for the industries that province had going at that particular time.
Those industries were providing jobs for people, jobs that paid decent wages and allowed families, like my own, to put bread on the table, have a decent home and expect that at some point in the future they would be able to send their children to school so they might have a future for themselves.
We also discovered, in that little town of Wawa in the 1960s and 1970s, that government actually cared about us as well. We watched as the Canadian government, in partnership with the Ontario government, began to put in place programs like health care. If my mother, father or siblings got sick, we had access to a doctor or we could go to a hospital without it being a tremendous financial burden on us. We thought it was wonderful. What a country. What a place to live. What a wonderful way of life that my father and mother had adopted for themselves and us.
We brought in a program called unemployment insurance so that if people lost their job or got hurt on the job, workmen's compensation ensured that they would not be devastated. They would have some money to carry them through a difficult period until they found another job or were able to get back to the same job after they had fixed whatever it was they had hurt on the job. The federal government brought in the Canada assistance plan, a program that was delivered by the province, to ensure that those in our community who were most at risk and vulnerable were also looked after.
What a concept. What a wonderful country, where nobody would be left behind. Those programs, even though never as generous as some of us would have liked them to have been, were certainly more generous than they are today. For the most part, a number of the important programs that were put in place back in those days no longer exist. They were taken out of commission in order to pay down the deficit and the debt and to do a number of other things that I will speak to in a minute.
I was able to go to university with the benefit of a loan and grant program. I was the oldest of seven kids. It was difficult for my parents to put together the kind of money that would have seen them able to pay for my education and then the six coming after me. With the use of student loans and the grants that were available at that time, I was able to go to university and get a degree. Universities and colleges in Ontario in those days were growing. After I got out of university, my first job was with Sault College. It was part of a new introduction for training and retraining in the province at that time, and those colleges were growing in almost every community across the province.
My job with the college was to go out and promote the value of further education and lifelong learning. In every community, from Elliot Lake to Chapleau to Wawa, I promoted further education, training, retraining and lifelong learning.
As we moved into the 1980s and 1990s, we began to see government pull back from that kind of involvement with communities, families, people and workers. We began to see a reduction in the presence of government in our communities. It began with the giving away of taxes by way of tax breaks, particularly to big corporations, which reduced the capacity of government to be as generous as they were with these programs that provided support for families and communities. We moved into a regime that saw us reduce the capacity of government by giving away the revenue that government collected.
My father had very simple dreams and modest expectations of getting up every morning, going to work and getting paid. If the family should get sick or if I wanted to go to university, he expected to get some help from government. However, we began to see that government help became less and less the reality for families.
We saw the giving away of government revenue through tax breaks. We saw--
