Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the MP for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise, today, to speak to the Conservative government's latest, and last, budget. It is not a budget without some provisions worthy of support, but it is a budget for the few, not for the many, and the few for whom the budget would make a difference are, by and large, the wealthier few.
The income-splitting provision, for example, would cost $3 billion in lost revenues to the federal government. Singles would be excluded; single-parent families, accounting for one in five Canadian families, would obviously also be excluded from the program; families with partners in the same tax bracket, accounting for another 30% of Canadian families, also would be excluded. In fact, nine of ten Canadian households would receive nothing at all from this program.
The increased limit under the tax-free savings account would also heavily favour higher-income earners. While the immediate cost impact of revenues would be significantly less than the income-splitting provision, the longer-term impact would be significantly greater. At maturity, the cost to the federal government is estimated to be upwards of $15 billion annually. This is not a sustainable way to budget.
These two measures, alone, would continue the long-standing trend in this country of undoing the progressivity of our tax system. Even prior to these measures, our tax system was the fourth least effective among OECD countries in reducing income inequality, with only Israel, the United States, and Chile, having less progressive tax systems. A progressive tax system is but one of the many buttresses against income inequality that successive federal governments have dismantled over almost 30 years. It would leave us with a country not quite as advertized, not as generous as most Canadians would like it to be and think it ought to be, with a level of income inequality by which Canadians are both surprised and disheartened.
The figures are, in fact, quite shocking. The wealthiest 20% of Canadians own 70% of the country's total wealth. The poorest 20% own less than 1%. In fact, the bottom 50% own just 6% of the country's total wealth. The gap is growing, thanks to budgets like this one. In fact, income inequality has become the hallmark of Canadian cities. In some Canadian cities, this is owed, in part, to stubborn, persistent levels of unemployment, but the problem also exists in booming urban economies with low unemployment rates. It is really about the changing labour markets in Canada's global and globalizing cities.
A study released just this month by the Metcalf Foundation, focusing on the working poor in the Toronto region, also looked at nine of Canada's ten larger cities, including Calgary and Edmonton, cities booming with the extraction economy, until recently at least. In only one city, Quebec City, did the percentage of working poor actually decline, and then just marginally. Toronto and Vancouver, Canada's two richest and most globalized cities, are becoming, in the words of the report:
...giant modern-day Downton Abbeys where a well-to-do knowledge class relies on a large cadre of working poor who pour their coffee, serve their food, clean their offices, and relay their messages from one office to another.
With tongue in cheek, I will share the report's good news. The good news is that the population of working poor in Toronto grew by only 11% between 2006 and 2012, which is a far cry from the 39% growth in Toronto's population of working poor for the first five years of this new millennium under a Liberal federal government.
However, while the growth rate has moderated, it is particularly worrying that the number of working poor is growing at all, in the context of a shrinking number of those actually working; that is, in the context of a falling employment rate in Toronto.
It is getting increasingly difficult to make ends meet in Canada's richest city. While workers fall behind, costs continue to rise. While the percentage of working poor has increased by 11% in Toronto, child care costs have gone up by about 30%, rent by about 15%, and the cost of public transit by about a third.
A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives sets the living wage in Toronto for a two-parent family of four at $18.50 per hour, with full-time work weeks for both parents—no money left over for TFSAs there, no return on the tax form for a split income. That is just paying the basics and getting by.
In Toronto we are seeing the suburbanization of working poverty in cities that are having the highest growth rates of working poverty, such as Markham, with a 27% increase, and Ajax, with a 25% increase. People are moving out of Toronto to escape high housing costs but are moving to places farther from employment centres and public transit. This is Canada's richest city, and there is nothing in the budget that acknowledges this as a reality. After 10 years, the current government still does not understand cities. It does not understand that, with 80% of Canadians living in cities, a federal budget must address the realities of urban life in Canada.
This year there will be $3 billion given back to the wealthier few in the form of income splitting and nothing to address the pressing need for public transit. In fact, there will be more than $6 billion given back in income-splitting tax returns before a single new federal penny gets invested in public transit. Even then, in the third year out, the Conservative government proposes that we start up the gentlest of inclines to meaningful dollars, dollars caught up in the red tape and bureaucracy of their mandatory P3 scheme.
However, on the issue of housing, there is not even a recognition of need. Long-term operating agreements that provide housing subsidies to more than 600,000 households in Canada will continue to expire. In Toronto, where 45% of renters cannot afford the homes they live in, there has been virtually no growth in new purpose-built rental housing since 2006. In Toronto, while 90,000 households, which is about 200,000 or so people, sit on a waiting list for affordable housing, only 260 new units opened up in 2013. There is nothing in this budget to remedy or ameliorate this situation.
If this budget were worthy of being called an economic action plan, it would surely address the set of economic circumstances at the heart of my riding in Beaches—East York, where a Target store has shut down leaving nearly 200 workers without jobs. The history of that site tells a story about the neglect of urban economies by not just the current government but by successive federal governments over a long period of time. The Target store started its life out as a Ford auto plant. Its workers were the highest paid factory workers in the British empire. A prosperous east end of Toronto was built on jobs like that. However, over time we have seen those kinds of jobs slip away. The auto plant gave way to high-end, unionized retail, an Eaton's store, then to a Zellers store, but still with a unionized staff, and finally to a Target store, a foreign-owned, non-union discount retailer that has now picked up stakes, leaving an enormous hole in the centre of this community, a community where over a third live below the poverty line, with an unemployment rate that is double Toronto's, and with an expansive shadow economy as people desperately seek survival jobs in Canada's richest city.
The finance minister promised every assistance to those who lost their jobs in the Target chain. However, he could not write a budget that would make a meaningful difference to circumstances like these. He could not write a budget that even hinted at some hope for change. This is a government for the very few, for the wealthier few. It writes budgets, as it always has, for its own electoral constituency and leaves the rest of Canada out. What is most troubling is that it is a government that is blind to urban Canada, to the communities in which 80% of Canadians live. It fails to see and address the challenges of Canadian cities, and it fails to see and harness the great potential of Canadian cities and the people who live in them. It fails as a government, and this document fails as an economic action plan for Canada.
