Mr. Speaker, I am pleased and honoured to rise in this debate. I was also honoured to table earlier this month the report from the Standing Committee on Finance, as its chair, called “Canada: People, Places and Priorities”.
The report gained its substance from Canadians from coast to coast to coast who submitted evidence before the committee as it travelled. I would like to thank the 18 committee members from the five parties of the House who worked very hard and other members of Parliament who participated in our hearings throughout the country, as well as those who held prebudget consultations in their home ridings. All that information helped us build a report. The report is reflective of the ideas, the concerns and the input by Canadians as the committee did its work.
We heard from 437 witnesses, which included 279 national organizations. We sat many hours and worked in a very tight timeframe at the end to put the report together. I am very proud of the work members of the House did together. We hope it impacts on the budget. That is important. These are the words but the ideas must come to fruition in the budget document that will be tabled in the House, hopefully late February or early March. That is where we want to see the results of this type of input because just writing about it is not enough.
Canadians come before us year after year. The Standing Orders of the House demand that the finance committee table the report before the end of the Christmas hearings, before we go home for our Christmas break. We have done our job. What we ask, and why we have these types of consultations, that the actions be followed through.
In the report there are six priority areas about which Canadians are very concerned. They want prosperity and growth, tax reduction, healthy, sustainable communities, health care priorities, assistance to vulnerable people and productivity and innovation.
These are not disparate areas. In fact, social and economic policy merge. This is a discussion of the people's wishes and the people come from very disparate regions. The concerns of rural Canada are different than the urban economic engines of the country. We can have economic development in our northern and remote communities but the government has to focus the priorities and the investments. They have to be strategic. They cannot be sprinkled little sums all over the country.
At the same time, we are not a bottom line business, we are a government concerned with people. That is why we have a priority to help vulnerable Canadians. We have segments of our population, whether it be recent immigrants to Canada or aboriginal communities, that need different types infrastructure and levels of assistance to catch up to a quality of life enjoyed others.
We want a Canada that is prosperous but we want that prosperity shared. We want an inclusive Canada that speaks to the aspirations of not only the newcomer but the founding peoples and to all age groups.
All of us want to make a contribution to society. All people share the desire to be productive in their lives. This includes people with disabilities and those who have greater challenges. When new immigrants comes to Canada, they will need education and second language training. Our students and young people need access to higher education. For our economy to be as productive as it must be, we need increased research and development.
On that point, I come from London, Ontario, where we have medical and industrial research. It is about time our granting councils not only get further increases to their research budgets. The indirect costs of research, which were made as part of a one-time allocation last year in the budget, need to be a permanent part of our assistance. This would allow our granting councils and researchers to do the work that would help our economy to grow. They would not have to steal from undergraduate students who suffer when the infrastructure at our universities or hospitals have to share those soft costs.
It is important that we be responsible in the way that we manage our finances. We cannot go back into deficit. We have worked too hard, individual Canadians, corporate Canada and everyone, to get to where we are now. We are very pleased that we have the contingency reserve and that $3 billion per annum will be used to pay down the market debt.
Paying down the debt is an aggressive policy recommendation in this document. There are 49 recommendations. Not all of them are monetary. Some of them cannot be accomplished tomorrow. Some of them may take a couple of budgets to accommodate them. However we have to be strategic with our dollar investments.
We cannot build up increased spending. One recommendation suggest that we should look at increasing our spending as a combination of population growth and inflation which is roughly 3%. In the past couple of years spending increases have gone up, even though overall expenditures have gone down as a percentage.
It is important that we have debt reduction, tax reduction and expenditures in balanced budgets over time with a continuing decrease on the debt to GDP. When we started we were at 70% debt to GDP. Now we are 49.1%. That is wonderful. However the members of the committee believe that we should even be more aggressive. We even looked as far ahead as 2011 and thought a debt to GDP of 30% would be attainable.
Members of the committee brought forward this idea, debated it and we included it with our discussion in the report because we felt that it would be attainable through a reallocation of resources that would be available to the government. As we know, just under $170 billion worth of spending goes on by all the various departments.
Health care is a huge priority, let there be no mistake on that. Time and time again Canadians came to us with their vision. As we held our consultations, we were very conscious of the fact that the Romanow consultations were also being held. We were also conscious of the urban agenda and the needs of infrastructure in our urban and rural landscapes. We were also very conscious that those processes had to be put in place. Sometimes they were very small suggestions like establishing a commercialization group inside Industry Canada so the research being done would make it to market, that people would not spend a lot of time going through the wrong channels and that we could help, whether it be in patent areas or by smart regulation.
The government has to work in a number of fields. Even though the actual spending will be done in an incremental manner over time, we have to know where we are going. We should not just spend for spending's sake. We know we will have greenhouse gases and we know that there are alternate sources of energy. However we also know we have productive current sources of energy which help for instance with the capital cost allowance in many of our industries.
That was an important recommendation. It is something that has to be looked at by the Department of Finance. The capital cost allowance regime is out of date because of the increase and rampant change, whether in information technology, or in machinery or in the needs of our railways.
I encourage Canadians to either go on the finance committee's website or to get a copy of the report entitled “Canada: People, Places and Priorities”. I was honoured to work with the colleagues in the House who worked hard to bring these ideas before Parliament.