Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the motion put forward by the member for London—Fanshawe and in admiration of her commitment to the plight of the approximately one-quarter of a million Canadian seniors living in poverty.
I rise to speak today out of respect for our country's seniors for the motion and the issue it addresses is most fundamentally that of respect. It is about recognizing that our good fortune as Canadians comes to us, not as a matter of chance or inevitability, but as a result of the work and the very many sacrifices of previous generations.
It is our parents and grandparents but mostly, it should be noted, our mothers and grandmothers who are the subject of this motion. We know intimately how hard they worked for what we today enjoy.
This motion proposes that we demonstrate our respect for the seniors of this country in a truly modest way, simply by ensuring that they do not live in poverty. That is all.
Yet, that is a lot because to be lifted out of poverty matters so much to those who live in it. It means enough food to eat, a decent place to live, the ability to pay for some basics and a retirement with a little less worry and perhaps even a little more pleasure. As much as anything, it means a little dignity at a time in life when dignity can be so easily lost and so difficult to recover.
That, one would think, is not much to ask of us, and it is not. The motion before us asks us to confirm that ending seniors' poverty in this country is fiscally feasible. It most certainly is. It is our good fortune that this moral imperative of ending seniors' poverty is also something easily done and easily affordable.
The government budget calls for expenditures of more than $280 billion for the upcoming year. This motion contemplates a tiny fraction of that, something in the range of about one-tenth of 1% of total expenditures. In fact, the expenditure required to lift seniors out of poverty is even just a fraction of the adjustment for risk that the government has built into its planning assumptions. Lifting all seniors out of poverty amounts to about 20% of the $1.5 billion annual planning cushion in this budget.
Further, I would note that since this budget was first tabled in March of this year, the government has revised its deficit projection downward by $4.3 billion in 2010-11 and revised it upward by $2.7 billion in the subsequent year for a net deficit reduction of $1.6 billion. All of which is to say that there are margins of error in this budgeting process, all of which highlight the fiscal modesty of this proposed initiative to lift seniors out of poverty and the fiscal feasibility of doing so.
Now it is not difficult to anticipate a response to this motion, and we have heard it already, that would suggest that this economy, owing to global economic uncertainty, is as of yet fragile, that there are threats to our economic recovery and that therefore we cannot assume that revenues will emerge to cover the cost implied by this motion.
However, the largest threat to both the pace and extent of economic recovery in Canada is the adoption of the kind of economics that informs the government's budget. It is of considerable curiosity that the government, in response to the recession, embraced, however tentatively, the need for fiscal stimulus, yet now, with our economic recovery so far from complete and under constant threat, as the government acknowledges throughout its budget document, the government embraces an economics of fiscal restraint. Service cuts and corresponding public sector job cuts are easily anticipated.
Although we hear members of this House trumpeting job creation numbers almost daily, this motion is a good context for reminding the House and all Canadians that we remain 300,000 jobs short of our pre-recession employment figures.
In the motion we have before us is the opportunity, not only to repay the critically important debt owed to the seniors of this country, but also the opportunity to assist in a very effective way with the economic recovery.
I would urge all those contemplating the fiscal feasibility of this motion to refer to the annex to the government's seventh report to Canadians on the economic action plan. That annex sets out the economic multipliers associated with various forms of fiscal stimulus. Interestingly, it identifies fiscal stimulus targeted at low-income households, such as seniors living in poverty, as having the highest economic multiplier. That is the greatest propensity for creating jobs of all the measures examined.
We, of course, do not need economists to tell us this. We know it is a matter of common sense that if we put money in the hands of people living in poverty it will be spent to ensure that basic needs are met. To reiterate, we are talking today about one-quarter of a million seniors in this country whose basic needs are not being met.
We have in this motion the opportunity to do the right thing by the seniors of this country while, at the same time, adding stimulus to the economy struggling to recover and creating jobs for a Canadian workforce struggling to find work.
We have many options open to us to support fiscally the implementation of this motion. At present, for example, the government seems set to continue with its schedule for corporate tax cuts, dropping the rate to 15% by 2012. These cuts will reduce revenue by billions in this fiscal year, with further revenue losses accumulating annually as we move forward. However, a recent study has demonstrated the impotence of corporate tax cuts in Canada as a means of stimulating domestic economic growth and job creation. The study shows that capital spending in Canada by large corporations has been in decline for about 25 years, irrespective of the drastic cuts to corporate tax rates over the same period of time.
Interestingly, even the annex to the economic action plan that I previously referenced shows the relatively tepid and delayed impacts of corporate tax cuts. The annex makes it clear that corporate tax cuts have but a fraction of the impact of fiscal stimulus measures such as the very one contemplated by the motion we are presently discussing. Moreover, the corporate tax cuts result effectively in the transfer of billions of dollars to the U.S. treasury as a result of the differential in the corporate tax rates of our two countries, billions of dollars that could be used to lift seniors and many more Canadians out of poverty.
However, if it does not please the government to lift seniors out of poverty by eliminating or even delaying its schedule of corporate tax cuts to large and, in many cases, immensely profitable corporations, I would point to the government's military procurement plans as another source for funding poverty relief for seniors in Canada. The Canada first defence strategy contemplates a total of $490 billion of spending over the next 20 years on a wide variety of military infrastructure and hardware, including, of course, the F-35 fighter jets. According to the government's estimates, as controversial and contested as they may be, the 65 F-35 fighter jets that the government intends to purchase will cost taxpayers $9 billion, at an estimated $75 million to $85 million apiece.
It is an incredible understatement to suggest that there is ample room here for lifting seniors out of poverty without compromising our national security. The issue here is clearly one of priorities and not of fiscal feasibility.
It seems to me that every good policy has a sound principle upon which it rests. The principle underlying the motion before us is obvious and compelling. It is about respecting what others have built for us and acknowledging our debt to them for the country we inherit from their efforts. This is not just something we can do. It is something we must do.
I urge, therefore, that the members of this House support this motion before them.