Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the budget implementation act. However, I am very concerned about the limited time allowed. This act is about three inches thick, 640 pages plus, and the government, after three hours, brings in closure.
We are seeing the same thing at committees. When opposition brings motions before committee, the government goes in camera and basically votes against opposition motions and keeps them out of the public arena. What are we living in, an executive dictatorship in our country? Is this what the country is coming to?
This is a large budget bill with serious issues for Canadians in it, but the government shuts down debate. That is not the kind of country we have always known. We have known Canada to be a country that allowed debate, transparency and talked about issues in a comprehensive way. What we see from the government is closure.
Those on the back bench, although they get up and talk about its government, they seem to sit in fear, afraid to speak out against what cabinet is doing. It is a reckless government with a reckless agenda. It is just as simple as that.
The member for Oak Ridges—Markham can heckle all he likes, but the facts are the facts. This is a reckless government with a reckless agenda. We now have a huge deficit. The government has taken the country that was in a surplus position and drove it into deficit.
The government, to look at its message in the names of its bills, attempts to leave an impression. However, when Canadians listen to the names of government bills, they should not believe the implication in the name of the bill or what it should do is within the pages of that bill. The government is absolutely great at messaging, but it is what it does not tell us that we ought to pay attention to.
In the bill, the Conservatives talk about bringing in a family caregiver tax credit, which is a very important part. Also in the bill are a volunteer firefighter tax credit and a children's arts tax credit. Yes, it sounds good on the surface, but let us really look at it.
I will turn to the budget bill where it explains the volunteer firefighter tax credit.
I had a private member's bill in the House for years that would have done something for all the firefighters. If one serves as a firefighter, one deserves a tax credit. However, the government is denying the low-income earners. For students who may serve as volunteer firefighters, because they do not have a high income, the government would deny them the right to the same kind of credit, recognition and money as those who earn high incomes. In the government's budget implementation bill, this is a non-refundable tax credit. That means the low-income earners would not get the tax credit.
During the election we proposed, and what I proposed in my previous bill, a refundable tax credit. If one served, one deserved to get the money. However, as is the government's way, it has left the low-income people out of the bill.
Canadians should understand that when the government talks about a volunteer firefighter tax credit in the amount of $3,000, it is 15% of that and firefighters really end up with $450. Volunteer firefighters who are low-income earners, who still have to put gas in their vehicles to do the job, to get to the training, get zero, absolutely nothing.
That is the way the government operates. It supports the big corporations with tax credits and really, to a great extent, it throws a little chaff toward the small business sector. The multinational sector, the big corporations get the tax breaks and they get the tax breaks at a time when the income gap between the rich and poor is growing wider and wider. The way the government is moving forward is unacceptable.
As a party, we have asked the Conservatives to remove the minimum income threshold so low-income Canadians can also quality, but the Conservatives have refused. We think it is unconscionable for the Conservatives to deliberately exclude the very people who are most in need of help.
That is not the only area and it is not all in this budget. We can look at other areas where the Conservatives are involved. Let us look at the crime agenda. I was standing outside while the Minister of Public Safety was doing an interview. One of his responses was “A million here, a million there, we don't have the numbers”.
The member for Calgary Centre said in his remarks that the Conservatives wanted to be responsible with the public purse. We have never seen a government, in introducing legislation, as irresponsible as that government. It is bringing in a crime agenda that the Parliamentary Budget Officer claims could cost in the range of $9 billion.
The government does not have the figures. It will not produce the figures. We know what the crime agenda will do. At the end of the day, it will mean more jails, more costs and more than likely, if it goes the same way as the Americans have gone, more crime. What will happen is people will be imprisoned for longer periods of time. Where they go in for a soft crime, they will come out as hardened criminals.
The government will not even look at the facts and produce the figures to tell Canadians how much it will cost for that particular crime agenda. The costs are not just in the jails.
We fought an issue in the House during the last Parliament. It was over the prison farms. Anybody and everybody in the criminal justice system will say that prison farms were perhaps one of the best rehabilitative tools for prisoners in the system. The government did not look at the facts and closed them down. Some of those operations were in fact profitable, but the government did not want to hear it. It just put criminals in jail. That is what this crew does.
Again, it is a reckless expenditure of money that at the end of the day will produce poor results.
Let me go to my area of responsibility, which is international trade critic. There is not a whole lot in the budget, other than the fact that it will increase trade. The Minister of International Trade is going to China next week. He was at the committee today, but the chair of the committee would not let us ask him any questions. He would not let committee members ask any questions on the problem in the United States, the buy America proposal. The minister was only there to talk about the Canada-European trade agreement.
The government has a whole range of ministers in the area of international trade. There is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but we know that most of his time is not spent concentrating on the subject at hand. Most of his time is spent defending the ridiculous expenditures of the President of the Treasury Board in terms of patronizing in his own riding.
My point is this: although it is good to be looking at trade in other areas, while the minister was flitting around the world, the government was caught with its pants down in terms of buy America. President Obama telegraphed on June 28 what he was going to do. There have been five speeches since that time, and the government failed to realize it and to be proactive by talking to the administration to stop him from closing down Canadian jobs with the buy American policy.