Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague on his comments. He has worked very hard on many of those issues and knows them well. He, myself and others in and out of the House are clearly disappointed in the so-called budget 2013. When I look at it I do not think it is worth the paper it is written on. It is too bad that the money that went into putting out all of the books the government has done, and all of the ads that we know will come, was not put back into helping Canadians. It would have gone a lot further than producing another advertising document, which is what this is all about.
Canadians coast to coast to coast are sending us emails, tweets and the rest of it about their concerns and their disappointment that there is very little in the budget, other than the recycling of a bunch of programs and initiatives.
Andrew Coyne writes critically of the government and the opposition, so he is no friend of anyone except Canadians. He said that the budget is bloated, cynical and incoherent, and that, “So much of what is wrong with this budget...simply amounts to extending previous programs, or implementing past initiatives”.
Even the Prime Minister's favourite friend, Doug Horner, the finance minister for Alberta, said, “We don’t have any new money for these types of programs”, which the Prime Minister put into the budget. Therefore, clearly there will not be new programs because the provinces do not have the money to match them.
I was also struck by the commentary from the National Citizens Coalition, a group the Prime Minister served as president. The current president, Mr. Peter Coleman, stated:
This budget plan seeks to grab headlines for relatively minor initiatives.... [I]t is discouraging that this government was not willing to commit to more far-reaching tariff reform.
There was also an article on the front page of the business section of The Globe and Mail about how the tariffs that were adjusted in this budget would have a significant impact on many other avenues of resources and things that come in that have a tariff on them, to the point where it would seriously hamper many of the retailers here in Canada.
Therefore, it seems that the government missed the mark again.
I want to be fair with respect to a few items, such as the reduction of the tariffs on baby clothes and hockey equipment. However, the government needs to take a much more thorough look. All it does is touch those little things that will get them a bit of positive publicity and those that really needed to be touched, looked at and examined so that Canada would be better off, it did not touch at all.
Canadian families now owe a record $1.67 in debt for every dollar of income. Budget 2013 would not help middle class families that are struggling. Having the minister effect changes to the interest rates would clearly affect a lot of Canadians out there who have huge mortgages and credit card debt. It was the 40-year mortgage commitment that the government made for a short period of time that certainly helped drive up the amount of debt that many Canadians are feeling.
One of the issues that we all talk about here is the employment issue in and among our youth. We are facing the worst youth job market in a generation. That means that for many of our young people getting out of school there will not be jobs out there. We have been talking about this for at least two years now. What does the government suggest? It is going to invest $19 million in an advertising campaign but it will not be creating any new jobs or new skills for youth.
We know how much the government likes to advertise its partisan ideas on the public dime, so I am sure we will be hearing a lot more with respect to that. By 2015, the government will have spent almost $1 billion to advance their economic inaction plan during events such as the Super Bowl. So much for the accountability and transparency that we supposedly were talking about. Everywhere we go we cannot go 50 feet without seeing another one of these economic action plan ads. Most of the people I have talked to know it is their own money that is being invested in more partisan propaganda instead of in people. The Conservatives should be ashamed of themselves every time they see those signs.
Youth employment is being ignored almost as much as the job market in general. Canadians want a real plan to grow the economy and create Canadian jobs. Instead, the Conservatives are repackaging existing programs, taking more money out of the economy and calling it another action plan.
In this budget, the Conservatives have prioritized spending cuts ahead of strengthening the economy and creating new jobs. We all know that the job market is still rebounding from the recession that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance promised would never happen. We were never going to have a deficit or get into a recession. Two months later, the recession was here and they had already blown the $13 billion surplus that they had as a result of the Liberal government.
Despite the assurances, young Canadians now have an employment rate that is five points worse than it was before the recession. We risk creating a lost generation of youth, unable to move out of their parents' homes, saddled with unimaginably high debt and with no meaningful job experience. Budget 2013 should have included a real plan to help young Canadians specifically, but it is not in the budget at all.
Now Conservative henchmen say that budget 2013 announced infrastructure, training and manufacturing programs to kickstart the economy, but what they will not admit is that these are not new programs. The Conservatives are using budget 2013 to rebrand programs that already existed. The Liberal government introduced the gas tax some years back, and I acknowledge the fact that it was indexed and I think that is a good thing. We are always being told who voted for what, but when the Liberal government introduced that in its budget, the Conservatives, not as many as there are now, voted against the gas tax.
Today I have to say I am pleased that they indexed it, except that instead of being $5.5 billion moving forward, it has been reduced to $3.3 billion. It makes it much more difficult for municipalities to move forward. Everywhere one goes, infrastructure pressures exist. The government acknowledged it is a huge thing, but we cannot expect the cities to deal with that. The provinces are under a huge amount of debt. We say we are going to do a variety of things in partnership with them, but they do not have the money either. Nobody wants to have to raise taxes, but it is what we do with the money that we have, where our priorities lie, that matters.
Budget 2013 is a hurry up and wait budget. That is what it is because the government says in five years it is going to create jobs, in five years there will be more money for infrastructure and in five years it will do a variety of things, but not today.
Speaking again of the skills training issue, I am sure the Prime Minister must have been disappointed because he talked so much about how the government was going to resolve these problems and come up with solutions. All he came up with was a whole lot of hot air.
Conservatives have invested a small amount, just over $1 million, to harmonize the recognition of skilled trade credentials across the country, yet they have done nothing to increase the graduation rates of apprenticeships, one of the most critical barriers to improving the supply of highly trained workers needed in Canada. Many young people end up dropping out of the apprenticeship program because they do not have enough money to keep going. Over 40% do not finish the program and investigations indicated that it is because they did not have the money to continue. Inadequate financing is a big issue, which is not addressed in the budget when we talk about the big skills shortage. We all acknowledge that we have one.
Why not put the money into helping people so they can get jobs, move out of their parents' homes, buy their own homes and start investing. They cannot do it if they do not have jobs. While the government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to buy Canadians' votes, it should be thinking about the many young people looking for jobs and looking to the government for some leadership rather than passing down all kinds of ideas and deals where the provinces or companies have to match the money. A lot of them do not have the money, so I do not think these jobs are going to materialize.
I am thankful for being allowed to speak about the nothing budget that I have in front of me. I just wish I could get the money out of this budget so I could put it toward helping Canadians get jobs.