Mr. Speaker, since I have just four minutes, I will try to be brief.
I want to start by saying that the Bloc Québécois will not support Bill C-15. This is probably not a surprise to the government, since we have already expressed our opposition to the bill for many reasons, which I will try to summarize.
Before I talk about the negatives, I do want to mention that the budget does have some positive points. For example, the money invested in infrastructure is positive, but we still do not know how the investments will be made. Will an agreement be signed with the Government of Quebec, and will it be signed fast enough for the Government of Quebec and businesses to benefit? We have some serious questions about this.
Another measure I want to highlight is the return of tax credits for labour-sponsored funds. This savings tool is very important and worthwhile for middle-class Quebeckers.
There is also the universal child care benefit, which will be non-taxable from now on. The government is also combining all of the old benefits because they were so confusing. That is very positive. Unfortunately, however, they did not take the opportunity to eliminate the taxation of enhanced benefits imposed by the Conservatives. That could have been done.
I also want to mention the middle-class tax cut, which is not actually going to help the real middle class, just the upper middle class. Those are the people who are doing relatively well financially but who might run into a few financial troubles. They are not the richest segment of the population, so cutting their taxes is not a bad thing, but the government did not cut taxes for the right people.
There are some things that we strongly condemn, such as the fact that health transfers to the Government of Quebec and the provinces will be indexed at just 3% per year even though we all know that health care costs go up by 5% to 6% per year. That represents an $800-million shortfall for the Government of Quebec, and once again, the federal government will benefit from that shortfall.
We could also talk about the changes, and the lack of changes, to the employment insurance fund. We have been fighting for over 20 years to get the government to stop dipping into the EI surplus. Yet again, however, it plans to take $1.7 billion from the EI fund for the 2014-15 fiscal year.
Using money that belongs to workers to top up the government's coffers is unacceptable, especially given that not everyone pays into the program. After a certain income level, people no longer contribute. Money that belongs to the workers should serve the workers.
There is one piece of good news regarding employment insurance: new measures will increase the potential number of weeks of benefits to 20 in certain regions that have seen a huge increase in unemployment numbers. However, the problem lies in the regions that were chosen. According to our information, the regions chosen are in the Northwest Territories, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, and Nunavut.
I am not sure if my colleagues noticed, but Quebec was not included in that list. This is because the unemployment rate was already quite high in Quebec and it did not go up as much as in some other areas. Quebeckers are suffering just as much as everyone else, but they will not benefit from those improvements to EI.