Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by dealing with the budget implementation bill under three specific headings: general; what would happen to British Columbia, which is where I come from; and what it would do or not do for health.
The first thing I want to talk about is the budget in general.
I think this is the eighth budget tabled by a government that inherited a strong surplus of $15 billion. When it came into office in 2006, it inherited the 10 balanced budgets posted by the Liberal governments before it. However, we are now seeing the current Conservative government posting its seventh deficit budget. I want to show where we came from and where we are today to defuse the talk about how wonderful things are.
How wonderful things are is based on not going down in the 2008 global recession because we had some very strong economic pillars that had been left behind by the previous Liberal government. It was also because the strong regulatory measures that had been put on banks protected us from going the way of the international community. I might add that the Conservatives opposed these measures when they were put in place under the Liberal government, but they are now taking enormous credit for them.
We should be doing much better than we are now. We should not be talking about deficits or about how all of the strong indicators and the strong system that was left behind were frittered away by the current government with very poor fiscal management measures.
I remember when the Minister of Finance tabled the budget bill. Everyone said that it was such a boring budget, and he said that was a compliment. One might say that the budget's flaw was not that it was uninteresting but that it was unclear, uncaring, and unhelpful.
There were a lot of vague promises in the budget. There were a lot of self-congratulatory parts in which the Conservatives talked about how well they had done. As I said, they cannot really take credit for any of that.
There are some things I want to talk about specifically with reference to my province of British Columbia.
I suppose we must all feel very relieved that the government plans to fix the Trans-Canada Highway running through Glacier National Park. However, it is a small consolation for those who care about British Columbia's natural landscape, since the Conservatives are also responsible for cutting regulations that once guarded 30,000 lakes and rivers and for reducing the number of protected waterways nationwide to fewer than 200. So much for building a piece of the Trans-Canada Highway, when there has been an absolute reduction of all of the measures to protect the wonderful ecosystem in British Columbia.
On the Conservative government's idea of conservation, let us look at fisheries, which are a big deal for my province. The government plans to protect recreational fishing, which is a good thing, because about 80% of our commercial fishing is recreational in B.C. However, there is little in the way of safeguarding our province's ecosystems as a whole or putting in place measures that came through the Cohen commission to protect the B.C. salmon population. When people say we are having massive salmon runs in B.C. this year, it means that they do not understand this is something that happens occasionally. The overall protection of B.C. salmon is still a big question. I wonder why the government did not use this budget and the budget implementation bill to put in place some of the Cohen commission's recommendations.
We can talk about ensuring public safety, which is something the Conservative government loves to talk about.
We are thankful for all of the volunteers who have contributed to the safety and security of the people in this country and who help the vulnerable. In fact, people who offer a minimum of 200 hours of volunteer service for search and rescue will get a nice little tax credit, but the fact is that a lot of people who volunteer are semi-retired or not working full time, and that tax credit would do little to help them unless it is a refundable tax credit.
To continue on public safety, it is interesting that while we are thankful for the volunteers, there is a lack of concrete action to increase the number of Canadian Coast Guard professionals and improve safety measures for both workers and ordinary Canadian citizens following last year's abrupt closure of the Kitsilano Coast Guard station.
The federal government is continuing its policy of soundly ignoring the professionals who work in maritime safety as well as the wishes of the Province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver. It is also ignoring the petitions that I have tabled here almost every week from British Columbians who are asking for this search and rescue station in Kitsilano to be reopened at a cost of $70,000 a year. We are not talking about a lot of money here.
Those are the generic things I wanted to talk about.
I also want to talk about the fact that very little has been done in the budget to address the real challenges facing middle-class Canadians. It does not do very much to help Canadian youth find jobs at a time of consistently high youth unemployment and underemployment. Today there are still 264,000 fewer jobs for young Canadians than before the downturn.
I want to go back in time to 1993. When the Liberal government came in, there was 24% youth unemployment. In three years, the Liberal government took steps to improve that and to give young people a chance at their first job. None of this has been happening.
There is very little to help middle-class parents and grandparents make ends meet and to tackle Canadians' record high levels of personal debt, which is now at $1.66 for every dollar of disposable income.
The new Minister of Finance had an opportunity in the bill to chart a new democratic path that addressed some of these issues. Instead, what we see is another mammoth omnibus bill with everything but the kitchen sink in it, doing very little to deal with some of the issues we are talking about.
I want to congratulate the government on a couple of things it did do right in health care. It proposes to increase the support for service dogs to assist individuals with severe diabetes. That is very good. Also, there is the design of eligible individualized therapy plans. All of that is good.
However, what about post-traumatic stress disorder? Evidence now shows that persons with post-traumatic stress disorder benefit from having pets such as dogs. That has not been included. It was not included under veterans affairs, it was not included under defence, and it certainly was not included here among people who require dogs to help them work with their disabilities, mental or otherwise. I just wanted to point out some of the things the government had an opportunity to do and did not.
Also in relation to health, acupuncture and naturopathy would be exempt from GST-HST when practised by a qualified professional. That is very nice. There is the design of training plans for individuals with a disorder or disability. Some of these things are good, but they make one wonder about why there was this cherry-picking. Why is the government doing some things for some groups and not for others? We could look at issues like adding the GST-HST to parking that is provided by charities. I wonder why that happened? That was such a punitive little thing to do. It was not going to give the government a lot of money, but it did discriminate against the non-profit sector.
It is a puzzling budget, to say the least. The budget implementation bill does not deal with a lot of things that we think should have been there.
I also want to talk about something some of my constituents are complaining about a great deal, something that we very much oppose.
It is a fact that the government signed an agreement with the United States that will require U.S. citizens living in Canada to regularly file U.S. tax returns and report their property and income to the IRS. Also, Canadian banks must report to the IRS on accounts held by clients with U.S. citizenship. We are creating a problem here. As we heard from other people, this measure brings up concerns about privacy and sovereignty. Constitutional law experts have been saying that this agreement violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, yet no one was consulted.
It is interesting that the government goes ahead patting itself on the back but not having discussed it with anyone who should know and therefore making mistakes. I would be generous and kind and say it is with unintended consequences, although I wonder if the government even understands consequences.
There is a very important piece I want to wind up with. That is the transfer of payments. Transfer payments have now been changed on a unilateral formula that would impose a per capita payment on provinces. We need demographic data if we are going to look at helping provinces. Now we have provinces with higher levels of seniors than anywhere else getting less money under the new formula than they ever had. This is going to create a huge problem in the future for these provinces, and they are beginning to complain about it.