Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise today to speak about our vision put forward by our Minister of Finance for budget 2018, equality and growth. I want to first acknowledge that we are gathered here on the traditional unceded lands of the Algonquin people. I want to take this opportunity as well to tell our colleague from Scarborough Centre and her husband Salman Zahid and her boys that we are praying for her recovery and that we are confident that she will be back here very soon.
I want to thank the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister and our cabinet for their diligent and hard work in getting this budget out earlier this year than in previous years. There is so much in the budget I am unable to cover many of the aspects I want to cover, but I will focus on a number of key areas.
About six years ago, I had the chance to sit down with the member for Papineau at that time, who was running for leader of the Liberal Party, and we had a very important conversation about the concept of rights. We talked about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and what that means. As part of the conversation, the aspiring leader at that time said that if the 20th century was about defining rights, the 21st century is about giving life to those rights.
As members know, this is the 70th year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we have the 36th year of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We did a fairly good job in defining what those rights were and in fact I would even argue that we are in the process of defining them even further in these last few years, but we have seldom given life to those rights. By giving life, I mean giving substantive fiscal support in order to fulfill those rights. That is exactly what I believe our government has been doing since taking office in 2015, and that is probably the best way I can sum up where we are going.
The two programs that we have seen already, initially in budget 2015 and in our fall economic statement, relate to the Canada child benefit and the Canada workers benefit. They both have profound implications for my riding of Scarborough—Rouge Park. I will give a glimpse of the benefit that the Canada child benefit has for my riding. Last July alone, we had $5.754 million given to our families in Scarborough—Rouge Park. It is in fact $78 million in total last year, which is an astounding number. This benefits families directly in their ability to support their children, to be able to send them to hockey and soccer, to buy food, to buy clothes, and so on. For working people, our policies helped 300,000 Canadian children get out of poverty and that is a very impressive number. The Canada workers benefit has been a very important game-changer. It allows low-income earners while they work to be able to get out of poverty. This budget supports getting 70,000 people out of poverty. Those two benefits are important foundational measures that our government has done.
Let me address three major components of this budget.
First, with respect to women, in 2018 our government recognizes the importance of addressing the issues of gender equality and that it is not only a right but it makes absolute economic sense. We have heard the saying that a country cannot expect to reach its full potential with just half of its population, and that is more true now than ever.
Over the past 40 years, we have increased the participation of women, but they have accounted for only one-third of the economic growth within our country. Canada's women are among the world's most educated. They on average, however, only earn 87¢ on the dollar. This is why we are putting gender at the heart of decision-making in budget 2018. We are working to support women and girls and close the wage gap, policies that will boost economic growth for all Canadians. In budget 2018, we have chosen to lead by example, increasing transparency through pay equity legislation that will ensure all women in federally regulated sectors receive equal pay for work of equal value.
The new “use it or lose it” parental benefits, which provide an additional five weeks of EI parental benefits for primarily men, will again be a very important aspect of our budget.
These benefits will encourage the second parent to share more of the work of raising children and provide greater flexibility for women to return to work sooner, if they so choose.
We have also taken an ambitious step to make Status of Women Canada an official department, with additional funding of $169 million. This move will support our plan to introduce GBA+ legislation to make gender budgeting a permanent part of the federal budget-making process.
The women's entrepreneurship strategy will be coordinated nationally through an approach that will allow women to move up in the marketplace. The expansive program will include $33 million in funding for southern Ontario to support women entrepreneurs through the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario.
This is just the beginning.
I want to address an issue that the House has dealt with a number of times and I have spoken on over the past two and a half years, and that is with respect to indigenous issues.
Recently, the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou introduced UNDRIP, legislation to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into Canadian law. It was augmented by a historic change in attitude and framing of the relationship between indigenous peoples and Canada by the recent announcement of our Prime Minister to move toward a recognition of a rights-based approach.
Our support this year for indigenous issues is in addition to the $11.8 billion that were part of the previous two budgets. In particular, this year we are setting aside $337 million for establishing a new fiscal relationship that will strengthen first nations institutions and community capacity to develop a self-government approach.
The department of indigenous affairs will get an additional $4 billion to address issues such as boil water advisories, first nations child welfare systems, and so on. This is a very important part of our move toward reconciliation, which is long overdue.
Foreign aid is a very important aspect of Canada's footprint in the world. We are known as one of the most humanitarian countries in the world. This past January, I had the opportunity to visit two important areas, where our aid has gone to support a number of initiatives. First I was in Sri Lanka and then Bangladesh to visit the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar.
Sri Lanka has just ended a 26-year war, has 90,000 Tamil women headed households, and there is a lack of opportunities for women to be in public spaces and offices. Our feminist approach toward foreign aid will assist in ensuring we are able to address some of those systemic barriers for women to take part in public offices.
Similarly, the situation in the Rohingya refugee camps is devastating. Women are the most affected by it. There were $37.5 million that came there from our government last year.
I hope the $2 billion historic investment we are making over the next five years toward foreign aid will support additional funding that will go toward women, not only in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, but to other areas where we can have transformational change in societies.
Budget 2018 is about equality and growth, and this is exactly what we are doing. We are reinforcing what the Prime Minister had said, which is to give life to the rights that we have acknowledged exist in our country through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and elsewhere.
Over the next several years, our budget will ensure we build a more just and equitable society in Canada and around the world.