Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Hamilton Mountain.
Two days after reopening the doors of the House of Commons, here we are debating a budget that leaves out millions more people.
This budget contains nothing new in terms of creating jobs or helping seniors who are living in poverty.
This budget will give billions of dollars to the most profitable corporations, which clearly do not need any help.
We cannot support this budget, not as it is currently written.
I would like to talk about some of the changes that would make it possible for the NDP to support the Conservative budget, a budget that would open doors for Canadians instead of slamming them in their faces.
Opening doors starts with a strategy to get 1.5 million jobless Canadians back working again. That way they can spend their paycheques and contribute to growing the economy. It is not a “can't do” approach that projects an increase in unemployment this year, which is what the budget before us predicts. It is shameful.
The stimulus plan of the government created photo opportunities for ministers, no question about that, but precious few full-time, well paid jobs for Canadians. Now we learn that more a billion of these dollars that were announced in the last budget never even left the federal coffers to be sent out to create work. Renewing that stalled plan is not going to cut it. It is time to retool it to get these funds flowing with a razor sharp focus on creating family-supporting jobs.
Therefore, extend the home renovation tax credit with a new emphasis on energy efficiency. Retrofit and build affordable housing for Canadians across the land. Do something to create the green jobs of the future, rather than the do-nothing approach that we see here.
This budget includes a boost for skills training, and that is something New Democrats can support. What we cannot support is a budget that blames workers' skill levels for its own failure to create quality jobs.
This year, the doors will close on hundreds of thousands of jobless Canadians. Their employment insurance benefits will run out while they search for jobs that do not exist. Jobs that this government and the companies cashing in on this budget failed to create.
Yesterday's budget extends employment insurance benefits for job sharing. The NDP can support that measure.
What we cannot support is a budget that will not extend employment insurance benefits for the nearly one million workers who are unemployed because of the recession.
This budget will not extend benefits. Instead, it will hit all workers and employers with a new tax by increasing employment insurance contributions by $19 billion.
Instead of putting working Canadians first, this budget literally squanders billions of dollars on more tax cuts for banks and big oil companies.
Now do not tell us about competitiveness. Our corporate tax rates are now well below those of our competitors in the U.S. and the G8. Hence, we are now talking about ideology, not about good sense.
More corporate handouts are not going to spark our economy. These have not done so in the past and they are not going to do it now. Building infrastructure produces ten times the stimulus effect on employment as a corporate tax cut. More corporate handouts will not spark innovation. After 10 years of these corporate tax cuts, big business now invests less in innovation, not more. More corporate handouts will not save good manufacturing and forestry jobs. Those employers will not see a cent, because they are not making profits.
What more corporate handouts will do is to pad the profits of the wealthy corporations, as several banks revealed once again yesterday, the same banks that are going to dole out $8.3 billion this fiscal year in executive bonuses. We need to make better choices in this country.
We need to make better choices. By closing the door on tax breaks for big corporations, we can open other doors for Canadians.
Eliminating the next two rounds of tax breaks will save $6 billion per year, which is enough to invest in the creation of a lot of long-term jobs. It is enough to extend employment insurance benefits. It is enough to put women and children first, to improve our health care and education systems, or to make pension funds more secure. It is enough to do what ought to have been done long ago: whatever it takes to get our seniors out of poverty. It can be done.
More than a quarter of a million seniors, who helped build this country and raised our families and fed us and built our communities, are living in poverty now, locked out of the wealth they helped to create. It does not have to be this way.
The Prime Minister could seize this very moment to lift every single senior in Canada out of poverty. He could do it this year by expanding the guaranteed income supplement.
However, instead of investing the $700 million that would be required to do this and bring dignity to seniors, the government is handing out $6 billion more, almost 10 times as much, to profitable corporations that are not going to do anything productive with it. We cannot support choices like that.
The unfettered faith of this budget in unfettered markets shows how little the government has really learned from the economic crisis.
New Democrats have faith too. We have faith in the single mom in Regina who is juggling three part-time positions. We have faith in the auto worker who just lost a job competition at Tim's to his daughter. We have faith in the senior in Shelburne who should not have to go to bed hungry. We have faith that everyday Canadians, the ones who build this country through co-operation and hard work, if given support, will deliver if we have faith in them, faith rooted in our respect for our elders who built this country in the first place.
Let us create these quality jobs and protect jobless workers until then, and give seniors some dignity and shelve the corporate handouts that stand in the way of achieving these worthwhile objectives. Then we will have a budget New Democrats can support.