Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to be standing in this place to give my thoughts on the bill that is before us. It is unfortunate that with yet another omnibus bill, one that clocks in at almost 400 pages, we are unfortunately having to debate this bill under the yoke of time allocation, which was moved earlier this morning. I believe this gives us five hours for report stage and five hours for third reading for a bill of this magnitude.
This is the fourth Liberal budget I have had to sit through. I was one of those members who were elected in 2015 and have served the entire duration thus far. I have noticed two things with respect to the Liberals and their budgets. They like to always repeat two things. Number one is that they were the ones who brought in a middle-class tax cut, and number two is that they are lifting all of these children out of poverty with the child benefit. Let me address the first one before the government House leader cheers too loudly on that front.
I want to point out two facts. Number one is that in 2017, according to Statistics Canada, the average income in Canada was $46,700, and the median income was $35,000. Now the Liberals are claiming this as a middle-class tax cut, when in fact it is actually the middle-income tax bracket cut, which they lowered by 1.5%. This is very important, because they keep on perpetuating this basic thing. The middle-income tax bracket starts at $46,000 and goes up to $93,000. This means that this benefit is not going to help the average Canadian. I can also clearly speak for most of my constituents. They do not have incomes that go into that range, or if they do, they are getting maybe the first amount.
What the Liberals did, however, by giving that tax cut for that bracket was give themselves all the maximum tax cut of about $675,000, because a member of Parliament's salary allows the member to command the full benefits of that tax cut, when most Canadians, as evidenced by Statistics Canada, are not in fact benefiting from that tax cut. I have spent almost four years in this place listening to Liberals talk about that, and the evidence does not back them up. It is not the middle class. It is a middle-income tax cut of 1.5%, and the wealthiest of Canadians under $200,000 of income are the ones who benefited the most. Let us get that out of the way.
The other thing is with the child benefit. I will give it to the Liberals that for a lot of families it was absolutely great to see an increase to child benefits. There is a big “however” to that. When I go door knocking in my riding, especially in the south end, in Langford, which is populated by a lot of young families, the biggest concern they have is with the availability and affordability of child care. There are simply not enough spaces. Yes, it is nice to get that bump up in child benefits, but if the primary caregiver, whether it be one partner or the other, wants to go out and get a second job, it is actually the lack of availability of spaces that is really holding that parent back.
Furthermore, I talk to small businesses in the region that have three, four or five employees. When they lose one employee because that person is going on maternity leave, they are losing a huge part of their workforce. If small businesses could have that national child care system the NDP has been advocating, that would help them, because that employee could make a return to work in a timely manner, safe in the knowledge that his or her child has a space to go to. It makes economic sense, which is why we have had chambers of commerce talk about it.
As to this particular bill, I want to talk about some of the things that are missing. In British Columbia we have an opioid crisis, which has absolutely ravaged our province. I believe we lost 4,000 people across the country in 2017. It has been absolutely devastating, yet in this budget we do not see any further resources to help those front-line workers who are dealing with this. We do not see any move by the federal government to match the government of B.C. in declaring this a national emergency under the federal Emergencies Act, which would allow the federal government to deploy more resources.
Pharmacare was a missed opportunity. I brought this up during the Adjournment Proceedings debate last night, when I was following up on a question I had asked in February. It needs to be said again.
The Liberal Party first promised a national pharmacare system in 1997, 22 years ago. The Liberals have had the benefit of having had majority governments in 1993, 1997, 2000 and again in this mandate, the 2015 mandate. Here we are, at the very tail end of the Liberal government's majority mandate, and what do we have? We have an expert panel that will release more recommendations, which are probably going to be a repeat of what we all know, that a national pharmacare system would save Canadians money. We know it has to be comprehensive, universal and fully public. It is the missing part of our national medicare system.
The Liberal government likes to make a great big deal about its national housing strategy, but when we look at the numbers, the lion's share of the money actually starts flowing after the next federal election. I appreciate that the Liberals keep on getting up and talking about all the things that are coming. I have dug into the numbers in my riding. A lot of the funding announcements are actually federal funding that was already in place before the national housing strategy.
If the Liberals want to raise the issue, I have the phone number for Mayor Stew Young of the City of Langford, one of the fastest growing municipalities in all of British Columbia, if not Canada. He could tell them where the federal government has been. MIA is what he will say.
I have a lot of students in my area. My riding is home to Royal Roads University. We have Vancouver Island University, the Cowichan campus. Of course not too far away, we have the great University of Victoria, which is where I attended school.
The price of tuition has gone up considerably since I went to university. I remember I thought it was fairly high back in my day. However, these days I look at the costs that students are paying, the debt they are being saddled with and the fact that the federal government is still collecting interest off that debt.
When a person gets into their late 20s and early 30, those are supposed to be the most productive years of their lives. We are asking them to start a family, start that new job. However, if they are saddled with that crushing debt and having to pay interest on it, interest which the federal government is collecting, that is a missed opportunity. I do not know why we are profiting off this crushing student debt. That opportunity was missed. I certainly hope that the students who are intending to vote take note of that and take note of where the different political parties stand on that issue.
I will end with the total missed opportunity that comes with the federal government's continued subsidies on oil and gas. This was a clear Liberal promise on which they have failed to deliver. We can look at the billions of dollars go into an industry, which we know we have to start levelling off if we are to meet our climate targets. We have a carbon budget. We are not meeting it.
For people who complain about the cost of doing so or the cost of transition, I would ask them to look at the forecast for the wildfire budget in British Columbia for this year. What will the costs be of mitigating and adapting to climate change? What about the billions of dollars we will to have to spend to help people when their homes are flooded out, when their farms are burned or when they cannot even produce a crop because of successive droughts and/or floods.
These costs are coming our way and they are going to be momentous. They are going dwarf to anything. The fact is that the government is continuing to subsidize this industry when the new economy of the future, the renewable energy economy of the future is the one that is growing. It is the one where the jobs are and it is the one demanding the skill sets of many of our oil and gas workers.
We need to stop subsidizing oil and gas. We need to put our money in the economy of the future. This is a missed opportunity to proclaim loudly that in 2019 we understand the science, that we know the deadline we were working against and that we absolutely must honour not only the present but our children's future by making that transition. It will require a Herculean effort. Unfortunately, what I have seen thus far is not matching the reality in which we live.
With that, I will be voting against Bill C-97. Again, it is full of missed opportunities. We could have done so much better.