Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Abbotsford. He will remain in our thoughts and prayers as he continues to recover and face other medical interventions in the coming weeks and months. We pray for his full recovery.
We are here to debate the budget, and I have looked carefully at the budget. The reality is that Canadians are waking up to a nightmare of out-of-control spending and no accountability. The government knows what to say, but what it says and what it does are two totally different things.
The media have critiqued the budget. John Ivison said:
Much in the budget appears to be bureaucratic tinkering. A number of Canada's innovation programs are to be “streamlined” into a super-sounding Strategic Innovation Fund, but simply merging the automobile and aerospace funds and giving them a new name is not the cutting edge of innovation.
It is just tinkering.
Andrew Coyne said, “No money, no ideas, but a wealth of bafflegab and buzzwords from the Liberals”.
He went on to say: “But of course it isn’t just that they’ve run out of money: they’ve run out of ideas. Or at least, good ideas.”
Canadians have woken up to the nightmare that the Liberal government, halfway through its term, has not kept its promises and has created a huge mess for Canadians. I am going to focus on the mess the Liberals have created for Canadian seniors.
In the previous Parliament, we had a minister for seniors. I, and in fact the experts, the seniors advocates in our country, the NGOs, have all told the government that people are aging and that we need to prepared for that. Right now in Canada, one in six Canadians is a senior. A year ago we reached the point that there were more seniors in Canada than there were youth.
There is a major shift in the Canadian population. There are more and more Canadian seniors. People are aging, and we need to prepare for that, so we asked the government to please appoint a minister for seniors and begin work on a national seniors strategy. To this point, halfway through its term, there has been nothing. The Liberals have actually refused to appoint a minister for seniors, so it is not surprising to see a budget that continues to ignore seniors. No one is standing up and speaking out within the Liberal cabinet to say, “Wait a minute; we are not properly taking care of seniors.”
What happened in the budget was, again, a little bafflegab, and every once in a while it would mention the word “senior”, but there is nothing new for seniors—well, that is not quite correct: there are a lot of seniors on fixed incomes who ride on public transit, and there had been an arrangement whereby they would pay for 12 months and get two months' credit, so it only cost them 10 months; the Liberal government has now taken that away, and the cost for seniors now in Canada has gone up dramatically, because they have lost that bus pass tax credit.
Why is the government refusing to appoint a minister for seniors? Why is it refusing to listen to seniors and their unique needs? Why is it refusing to prepare for the aging population?
It was a year and a half ago that I introduced at HUMA committee a call for a study on a national seniors strategy. The committee, under the direction of the Prime Minister, refused to do that. He controls everything. We were told we could not study that now.
Conservatives in the committee, along with our NDP colleagues and friends, have continued to ask for a study on a national seniors strategy so that we can get ready to take care of the aging population. Right now, one in six Canadians is a senior. In five and a half years, it will be one in five Canadians, and in 12 years it will be one in four. That is in 12 years. We are not ready for that and we need to get ready for it. Again, the Liberals are totally ignoring their responsibilities in taking care of Canadian seniors.
I had a very good meeting with the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce last week. The president of the chamber, a lawyer, brought to my attention another major problem with this budget. In fact, he wrote a letter to the Canadian Bar Association about it, and I will read it to the House.
He talks about WIP, work in progress. It is one of those little poison pills the Liberals have snuck into this budget, and most Canadians are not aware that the government has done this.
If someone is in a serious car accident and is injured, it may be a number of years before the person gets a settlement for the injuries he or she sustained. The tradition is that the individual would retain a lawyer over the two-year, three-year, five-year process of getting compensation for the injuries. The lawyer would say that he or she would not need to be provided a retainer and would take one-third of the settlement. That is the norm.
The Liberal hungry-for-tax-increases government would tax the work in progress. It would tax the legal firm for every hour that it spends helping the person. The legal office would pay the money up front for MRIs, physiotherapy, or any tests to help the individual and would get paid nothing until the settlement, which may be three, four, or five years down the road. It would be taxed by the Liberal government for WIP, work in progress.
Scott Johnston wrote:
The elimination of the election for billed-based accounting and implementing taxation of work-in-progress will have a deleterious effect on all of our firm's contingency files for personal injury and estate litigation claims. Forcing the payment of tax before a bill is issued and the funds are actually received by the firm causes a colossal cash-flow debacle. Most of our contingency files carry on for years before settlement or judgment meaning that the firm will have to self-finance tax payments on hours recorded for clients over frequently an extended period of duration without actual receipt of the cash to remit such tax payments.
Legal firms across this country are going to have to fund the Liberal government's tax grab.
The letter continues:
This may cause lawyers working under contingency fee agreements generally in the profession to “cherry-pick” cases to select only “quick settlement” files,
—and this is the most important point—
therefore denying access to justice for impecunious litigants with more challenging and protracted matters.
The irony is that the Liberal government has mandated this study on poverty reduction in the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, which it is studying and working on right now. At the same time, the government is saying that people who need the help of lawyers to help them in their impoverished and difficult situations, particularly in state litigations or vehicle crashes, with this change, lawyers will likely not be able to help them, denying justice to the impoverished.
What the Liberal government says on one hand and what it does on the other are totally different. I hope the government will listen to Canadians and reverse this hard-headed, stubborn plan to tax our poor and desperate people.