Mr. Speaker, I would like to welcome the member for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour back to this session. However, I would like to put things in perspective. Despite some of what he says, we are not talking about what we might be doing. We are taking a number of steps. Even though we have come through a global recession, our Conservative government has made huge strides in helping working Canadians and their families.
The best way to fight poverty is for Canadians to be working in good jobs. Getting workers the skills they need to get back into the workforce and helping those workers find jobs have been the main focus points of our government's actions.
In 2009-10 we invested over $4 billion in skills training, helping over 1.2 million Canadians. We have provided extra weeks of EI benefits and extended work-sharing measures to keep Canadians working and help employers. Over 255,000 jobs were protected by these changes to work-sharing alone. We extended EI special benefits to the self-employed on a voluntary basis.
Canadians are getting back to work. Well over 400,000 jobs have been created in the last year alone. As a result of our actions, Canada is leading the G20 out of the recession. Every action we have taken is meant to help Canadians and their families, our society's building blocks, become independent and help them contribute to the economy and to their communities.
We have introduced the working income tax benefit, or WITB as it is commonly referred to, to make work pay for low-income Canadians. The economic action plan doubled the tax relief provided through WITB. WITB helped over 900,000 Canadians just in the first year and it continues to help Canadians get over the welfare wall. We have increased the amount families in the two lowest personal income tax brackets can earn before paying taxes, meaning over one million low-income Canadians do not pay taxes at all anymore.
We have enhanced the national child benefit, the child tax benefit and introduced the child tax credit. All of these amount to thousands of dollars of assistance. We have introduced and strengthened the universal child care benefit, which alone has lifted 56,000 children out of low income.
We have also made record investments in affordable housing. Due to our economic action plan investments alone, thousands of projects are completed or under way, which are creating tens of thousands of jobs. In total, we are providing $7.8 billion in investments and tax relief to help stimulate the housing sector, improve housing and create jobs across Canada.
The Liberal record and the record of that member does not stand up. They voted against enhancements to WITB, even though the member told our committee he thought it was a very positive thing.
In its time in government, the then Liberal government cut social transfers to the provinces by $25 billion, leaving the provinces and many Canadians to fend for themselves. It tried to balance the books on the backs of ordinary Canadians. We did not do that.
Back in 2002, the Liberal finance critic said that the Liberal government made the wrong choices, slashed transfers to the provinces. The provinces are still scrambling to catch up to the lost Martin years of inadequate funding.
As the Liberal leader has said, their plans, simply put, are to add more taxes, higher taxes and billions and billions of dollars of increased spending and debt. The opposition's plans to raise taxes would halt our recovery in its tracks and, according to experts, kill about 400,000 jobs.
Unlike the opposition, our record is strong. In our time of government, we have helped children, lone parents, persons with disabilities, aboriginals. The seniors' poverty rate is among the lowest in the world. This is fact. We will continue to take actions to help Canadians. We will not talk about plans. We will take positive steps, positive action, that will help Canadians right across our great country of Canada.