Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Winnipeg North.
I rise today to speak to budget 2014, which fails to acknowledge the genuine needs of middle class Canadians, like the good and hard-working people of my riding of Etobicoke North, and provides nothing to make the economy grow.
A new internal Conservative report shows that Canada's middle class is in fact mortgaging its future to stay afloat and making the Canadian dream “a myth more than a reality”. This straightforward report reveals the plight of middle income Canadian families and stands in marked contrast to the brighter economic picture presented in this month's budget.
Why did the government prepare and review research over three years and then present a different picture to Canadians? Canadians expect openness and transparency from their government. That is why the Liberal leader rightly opened up the books of Liberal members of Parliament to public scrutiny. Transparency is not a slogan or a tactic for our leader. Rather, it is a way of doing day-to-day business.
This new Conservative government report shows that “Middle-income families are increasingly vulnerable to financial shocks”. It also shows that the market does not reward middle income families well, and as a result they get an increasingly smaller share of the earnings pie.
The Conservative government report further shows that, “many in the middle spend more than they earn, mortgaging their future to sustain their current consumption”.
As our leader and now the Conservative government report has said, “middle-income Canadians are unlikely to move to higher income brackets, i.e., the 'Canadian dream' is a myth more than a reality”.
Our Liberal leader is focused on the middle class and on making a real difference to middle class Canadians. Research from the Library of Parliament shows that since January 1, 2013, our leader explicitly acknowledged the middle class 52 times in the House of Commons. The NDP leader and the Prime Minister did so only nine times and twice respectively.
What Canada urgently requires is an action plan for growth to build a solid economic foundation. Instead, the Conservative government failed to fix its so-called jobs grant, which still does not even exist. There is still no consensus among the partners who will be expected to pay for it. The government is still planning to claw back funding that provinces currently devote to the disabled. There is still not a single penny of new federal investment, and it remains a total arbitrary mess.
From my daily work in our constituency office this summer and during constituency weeks, I know that the people of Etobicoke North need jobs. I have worked hard to get them jobs. I obtained funding for a completing the circle program, a $500,000 jobs program in our community in remembrance of Loyan Gilao, a young Somali Canadian man, a York University student with a bright future who was shot and killed in 2005.
There was not a day in these past constituency break weeks that my office did not have a student, a graduate, a parent, or even a grandparent come asking for help to find a job. They came and continue to come because we do help them find jobs. I personally review and edit resumes late into the night, sometimes doing two and three drafts. We get our people into jobs programs. We follow up with them to make sure their job searches are going in the right direction. While they search, we help them with food, clothing, and whatever other supports they might need.
At critical times I have personally bought medicine. We had a lady looking for help who was in agony due to an ear infection that had raged for three weeks. She had pus and blood running down her face. The sad reality is she could not afford antibiotics because she could not find a job. How many more stories are there like hers?
I repeatedly have bright, ambitious, and qualified university graduates come to get help after being out of school and out of work for two years. What are their pathways into the middle class? What has the government done to help them get there? I have numerous disappointed graduate students, international doctors, and teachers who struggle to find work. I have grandparents who come on behalf of their grandchildren—the first in the family to graduate from university and college—who had fled their country of origin to come to Canada, the land of promise, so that their children could have education. Now the children have education and they still do not have a job and cannot contribute to Canada's economy.
Besides working constructively with provincial partners to get a jobs grant that works and a larger infrastructure plan to drive growth, the Conservative government could also have taken some meaningful action on affordable housing. It could have enhanced a refundable accelerated capital cost allowance to encourage business investments in productivity and competitiveness. It could have torn down some of the barriers blocking access to all forms of post-secondary learning and skills. However, the government did not do any of that.
The economic reality under the Conservative government is the following: Economic growth in Canada has been sliding downward in each of the last three years. It is the worst growth record of any prime minister since R.B. Bennett, and there is stubbornly high unemployment, with 262,000 fewer jobs for young Canadians than before the recession. The government should have used last week's budget to implement a real plan for jobs, growth, and prosperity. However, for reasons that escape us, it chose not to.
The Conservative government squandered the opportunity, just as it squandered all the financial strength it inherited from its Liberal predecessors back in 2006. It was handed a decade of balanced budgets and the best fiscal position in the western world, but it blew it in less than three years. The Conservative government turned a record surplus into a record deficit in record time.
What about economic growth? Unfortunately, the government is running a chronic trade deficit, which became $1 billion worse at the end of last year. Where is the business investment in Canada? Businesses are piling up retained earnings, not having the confidence to invest in new ventures, staff, training, or technology.
Perhaps this is why a new Ipsos Reid poll shows that most Canadians simply shrugged off the federal budget. In fact, a majority of Canadians, or 76%, think the budget does not impact them at all and 20% of Canadians say the budget is “bad and they'd symbolically give it 'two thumbs down'...”.
The people of my riding of Etobicoke North told me that, in addition to a jobs program that actually exists, they would have liked to have seen more support for better access to all forms of post-secondary education and better and new infrastructure. The reality is that some 70% of all future jobs will require post-secondary qualifications and only 50% of Canadian workers have those qualifications today. We must boost our achievement level.
Finally, in closing, the people of Etobicoke North want to know the government's position on income splitting. In the 2011 election, the Prime Minister announced in no uncertain terms that once he could claim a balanced budget, he would implement income splitting for couples with children under age 18. Now he is being contradicted by none other than his own finance minister on the wisdom of that commitment to income splitting.
The budget amounts to little to do about nothing, and my community of Etobicoke North and Canadians across this country deserve much better.