Mr. Speaker, politics is about choices. In fact, one classic definition of politics defines it simply as deciding who gets what, when, where and how. When the government has made its choices, it lays them out in the single most important document that comes before Parliament, and that is the federal budget. It is essentially the blueprint for the government's plan between elections.
As an opposition MP, it is my role to hold the government to account for the choices it has made. It is a debate about competing visions and priorities. I acknowledge that things are not always black and white in politics, but I have never before seen such a huge disconnect between the priorities of the government and the priorities of my constituents. Whether we are talking about children, adults or seniors, the government simply is not reflecting the priorities of hard-working families on the Mountain. The Conservative government is making the wrong choices.
Let us look at children first. As policy makers, we know that for children to succeed in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, they must get off to the very best start. That is hard to do when far too many still go to school hungry. In 1989 the House of Commons unanimously passed an NDP motion to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000, but successive Liberal and Conservative governments have chosen not to implement it. An entire generation of children has paid the price for their misguided priorities.
In fact, under the tenure of the Conservative government, the child poverty rate has actually increased from 9.5% to 12%. It is a case of Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Instead of taking concrete actions to help the most vulnerable Canadians, the government is obsessing about providing additional tax cuts. However, tax cuts do not help the poor because their incomes are so low that they do not pay income taxes in the first place, so there is no tax rate to cut.
For middle-income Canadians, the benefit of their modest income tax decreases have been swallowed up by higher user fees, the rising cost of everything from gasoline to electricity and, of course, the HST, which is now costing the average Ontario family an extra $1,200 a year.
However, then the kinds of tax cuts that the Conservatives were proposing were not really intended to level the playing field for individuals anyway. On the contrary, the vast majority of cuts were corporate tax cuts, cuts that were specifically designed to benefit the Conservatives' friends in big business.
The Conservatives made a choice. They chose to put the interests of corporations ahead of the interests of kids. They are recklessly mortgaging our children's future by borrowing $20 billion for additional tax cuts to corporations, corporations that are already taxed less than their main competitors south of the border. It is just plain wrong.
There is a different choice that the government could and should have made. Imagine how far that money would go if we invested it in our children's early education. While the Conservatives would like us to think of child care as mere babysitting, all the evidence, from the groundbreaking Fraser Mustard report on, makes it clear that it is a critical investment in the future success of our children.
Parents understand that. That is why they are spending between $200 and $1,000 a month on child care, per child, to ensure their children get the very best start. The Conservatives ought to listen to these parents. Instead of providing their measly child care benefit, they should invest in universal, regulated public child care. That way they would be helping struggling families and giving children the best chance to succeed.
Make no mistake, families are struggling and are worried. They are worried because they do not know how they are going to make ends meet. They have a mortgage and they are barely able to make payments now. They are afraid of what is going to happen as interest rates rise. They are struggling to save for their retirement. They are struggling with the costs of higher education for their children. As part of the sandwich generation, they are struggling to take care of both their children and elderly parents.
In these difficult economic times, families are looking to the government for a little help just to ride out the storm, but the Prime Minister does not even acknowledge the challenges that hard-working Canadians face. He simply points to soaring bank profits and says that the recession is over. For him, if his banking friends are out of trouble, everyone is out of trouble. I see things differently.
There are 1.5 million Canadians still out of work. Six out of every ten Canadians live paycheque to paycheque. Household debt is at record highs. Life is more expensive than ever, and the HST has only made things worse. For me, the recession is not over until middle-class families are back on their feet. Canadians are in this together and a true recovery cannot leave anyone behind.
Bringing about that middle-class recovery is not just about spending money. There are a number of urgent, concrete steps that the government could have taken without spending a dime.
The government can and must protect Canadian jobs from foreign takeovers before they approve such buyouts. Once the purchase is approved, there is little the government can do to ensure that job and production levels are maintained. Due diligence must happen at the front-end. U.S. Steel's purchase of Stelco is a poignant example of what happens when the government fails to take job protection seriously.
Second, the government can and must help the innocent victims of this recession by ensuring that EI is expanded and extended. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments stole $57 billion out of the EI fund and used it to pay down their deficits. It was not their money. It accumulated solely from contributions made by workers and their employers. Workers have a right to the insurance they paid for and it is time for the government to do right by unemployed Canadians.
Third, the government can and must take on the big banks to halt the outrageous credit card interest rates. Canada is experiencing record numbers for household debt, $1.41 trillion, or $41,740 per person. That is the highest level of debt-to-financial assets ratio in the OECD, surpassing even Greece and the United States. The government can, and must, ease that burden and it would not cost a dime.
However then, the Conservatives are much more concerned about their friends in the banking sector than they are about hard-working Canadians. How else could one possibly explain that the very banks that posted profits in excess of $15 billion in the first three-quarters of 2010 received an additional tax cut of $645 million from their Conservative friends? Surely that money would have been better spent on supporting decent family-sustaining jobs, investing in blue/green industries and extending the stimulus commitments that were made to cities so that desperately needed urban infrastructure renewal would not end up on property tax bills. That would require the government to choose people over profits, and that just is not in the Conservatives' DNA.
Despite all the rhetoric, elderly Canadians are not on the government's priority list either. In fact, the Conservatives consistently put shameless self-promotion ahead of seniors.
The Conservatives spent $1.3 billion for a 72-hour photo op at the G8-G20 summits. That included $1 million for a fake lake, $300,000 for a gazebo and bathrooms that were 20 kilometres away from the summit site, $400,000 for bug spray and sunscreen, over $300,000 for luxury furniture and $14,000 for glow sticks. The Conservatives would want us to believe that such is the price of hosting events on the world stage, but the security cost of the G8 in Italy was $124 million in 2009. The year before it cost $280 million in Japan. It cost $124 million in Germany.
Once again, it is about choices. For just over half of what it cost to host the G8-G20 in Canada this summer, we could have improved the guaranteed income supplement so no Canadian senior would have to live in poverty. The remaining $600 million would still have been higher than the expenditures on any other summit. Clearly, the Conservatives' claim of being fiscally responsible is not borne out by reality.
There are dozens of other examples, but just let me conclude with one other.
Out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs in our country is now more than 70% higher than it was in 1992. Canadian households are spending over $3 billion a year on prescribed medications. Seniors, in particular, are enduring financial hardship because of soaring drug costs. That means our health care system is no longer truly universal.
Instead of investing in a national pharmacare program, the Conservatives chose to spend $5.6 billion on bribing Ontario and B.C. to implement the HST. That just adds insult to injury. Not only do seniors still carry the growing cost of their medications, but they now have to come up with additional money to pay the HST on everything from haircuts to home heating. Even funerals are no longer exempt. How does the government expect seniors to make ends meet when everything goes up except their incomes?
The Conservatives have made their choices and acted on their priorities, but they are not choices that seniors can afford. For me, that makes them the wrong choices. It is time to say “enough is enough”. It is time to put seniors first.