Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to participate in the debate on Bill C-13, the government's bill to implement the budget.
I had been cautiously optimistic that both this bill and the budget before it might have contained some good news for my community of Hamilton Mountain and, indeed, for all working families across Canada. After all, with this government's fiscal capacity, this budget was a huge opportunity to invest. From its own books, we know that the Conservative government has an $8 billion surplus this year and $83 billion in surplus money over the next five years.
There has never been a better opportunity to invest in child care, education, training, and the environment, yet the government chose instead to squander over $7 billion of that $8 billion on tax cuts and subsidies to oil and gas companies. It is no wonder that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
My colleague from Winnipeg North, who is also our party's finance critic, released information yesterday which clearly indicates that while the rich are getting richer, most Canadian families have seen their real incomes shrink since 1989. The fact is that the average income for the majority of Canadians, before taxes and transfers, is lower today than it was in 1980. Most Canadian families are poorer, and the recent federal budget will not be helpful in fighting this family income crisis.
The Conference Board of Canada reports that while the average CEO experienced record growth in total compensation, at about 20% a year, most Canadians are working longer and harder for less pay and a smaller piece of the pie. It is simplistic, naive and even manipulative of the federal government to tell people that tax cuts will fix the problem.
What Canadians want and deserve is an investment in the things that matter most. Unfortunately, in that regard this budget is a missed opportunity.
The only real investment is a re-announcement by the government of the money that the NDP budget delivered for working families in the last Parliament. We secured $1.6 billion for housing. The Conservatives re-announced that spending by allocating $800 million to affordable housing, $300 million to northern housing and $300 million to off reserve aboriginal housing. Even at that, they are still $200 million short of investing the full amount of the $1.6 billion that the NDP budget delivered.
Similarly, the NDP secured $900 million for public transit and energy retrofit programs and another $400 million under Bill C-66. That totalled $1.3 billion, the exact amount the Conservatives re-announced in their budget.
In yet another re-announcement of NDP money, the government reduced the $1.5 billion commitment to post-secondary education from the NDP budget by 33% to just $1 billion. Even worse, instead of letting that money go to tuition fee reductions, to which it was originally assigned, the Conservatives have redirected the money solely to bricks and mortar instead. Investments in infrastructure will do nothing to protect Canadian students from skyrocketing debts and surely will not ease the barrier to education that rising costs represent.
When it comes to foreign aid, the government has also failed both Canadians and the international community. The Conservatives' budget simply re-announced investments made in the NDP budget. Even at that, it reduced our country's contribution from the $500 million the NDP had secured last year to a mere $332 million. We are falling further and further behind in honouring the millennium development goal and meeting our commitment of committing 0.7% of GDP to foreign aid.
Let us be clear about this. Meeting these commitments is not a matter of altruism. It is the most practical response Canada can offer to reduce global economic inequality, the single most important contributor to international instability and insecurity. It is time that Canada stepped up to the plate and lived up to the commitments we made when we supported the more than 50 United Nations resolutions at the General Assembly, as well as other votes, all of which supported the 0.7% target.
In my riding of Hamilton Mountain, more and more people are joining the campaign to make poverty history. I wear a white bracelet as a symbol of solidarity with all others who are committed to helping the world's poorest and most needy people.
While I am speaking about our international obligations, let me take just a moment to speak about the crisis in Darfur, which the government fails to address altogether in its recent budget. New Democrats are on the record as urging the government to use Canada's influence to insist that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council respect and support the right to protect.
Members of the Security Council, including China, Russia, France and the United States, must put an end to their self-serving delays and their lip service and act now to apply international pressure on the Khartoum regime to end the violence in Darfur by respecting the arms embargo mandated under Security Council resolution 1591. Canada must encourage the UN to consider the deployment of a UN-led peacekeeping force to join the AU in trying to stabilize and improve conditions for the people of Darfur.
Beyond the UN, there are measures the government can take that will have an immediate impact. The first step must be to increase the funding to the world food program for emergency aid. I am sorry to say that funding for this program was slashed by the Liberal government from $20 million in 2005 to just $5 million in 2006. This can be corrected.
Second, Canada must strive to ensure that development is not diverted to the Sudanese government, but rather that it reaches the people in need. This country's record on foreign aid had been one of steady and shameful decline. That is why the NDP ensured the inclusion of half a billion dollars for foreign aid in Bill C-48, our budget amendment of last year, to help those suffering in countries such as Sudan. Those funds are now available and should be used.
Third, Canada must increase its direct aid to the African Union.
Finally, the government can and must take immediate steps to support target sanctions against government leaders.
There certainly is no shortage of international need for Canadian leadership. Unfortunately, such leadership thus far has been sadly lacking. In fact, the government has not demonstrated any better leadership in dealing with domestic issues.
As I said earlier, this budget is one of missed opportunities. Let me give members just a few more examples.
Although I have addressed issues of poverty in a global context, allow me to take just a moment to reflect on the increasing poverty at home. In my hometown of Hamilton, one in five people live below the poverty line. Twenty-five per cent of those are children, but we all know that children are not poor. It is their parents who are poor. Hamilton families need help now.
We need to invest in our manufacturing sector to ensure that we will continue to have decent paying jobs in our community, yet Bill C-13, the budget implementation bill, is silent on this issue. It offers neither a steel industry strategy nor an auto sector strategy.
Nor does Bill C-13 do anything to provide funding for decent paying public sector jobs for professions such as nurses or nurse practitioners, who are so crucial to improving our health care system. Similarly, the doctor shortage remains unaddressed. In fact, as I will return to later, the entire budget is largely silent on one of the top of mind issues for most Canadians, and that is health care.
Continuing on the jobs front for the moment, decent paying jobs also are not being supported by adequate training and retraining opportunities in this bill. Without such support, it is impossible to build and maintain the skilled workforce that is essential to supporting the 21st century economy.
Of course, there is the double-barrelled impact of not supporting our municipalities with money for infrastructure renewal and housing. Not only does this curtail the number of building trade jobs in our communities, but it also adversely impacts the ability of cities like Hamilton to provide residents with the services they deserve.
In short, there is nothing in this bill to offer hope to working families. It is simply a missed opportunity.
What about those whose careers are behind them? This budget offers absolutely nothing to our seniors. They have worked hard all their lives, they have played by the rules, and yet they are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.
Despite a compelling report entitled “Aging and Poverty in Canada”, by the government's own National Advisory Council on Aging, the Conservatives have done nothing to address any of its key recommendations. Instead of offering income tax credits that will do nothing to improve the lives of most Canadian seniors, the government should lift seniors out of poverty by increasing the guaranteed income supplement to at least the low income cut-offs recognized by Statistics Canada.
Instead of proposing to pump $3 billion of taxpayers' money into the CPP for questionable purposes, the government should be using that money to raise the public pension benefits of all seniors. CPP has always been a “pay as you go” plan that does not rely on public money and, by the government's own estimates, CPP is going to be solvent for more than 75 years. It hardly needs a cash infusion. It is seniors who desperately need additional cash, not in the pension fund, but in their pockets.
With so many private pension funds currently in a state of underfunding, it would have been helpful if the government's only statement on this critical issue had not been to address debt servicing, but rather had focused on benefit security for workers and retirees made vulnerable by the solvency issues surrounding their pension plans.
I introduced a bill in the House on Tuesday entitled the workers first bill, which would put workers at the head of the list of creditors in cases of commercial bankruptcies. If the government really wants to do the right thing for seniors, I would encourage the industry minister to work with me so that together we could ensure quick passage of my bill for the protection of workers' wages and benefits.
There is one more pension issue that needs to be addressed immediately, but it is one that only got a promise of review and more study in the government's budget. That is the issue of survivor pensions.
At first blush, the budget documents that the minister tabled on May 2 seem to offer a faint promise of hope for parents and grandparents of children with physical, psychological and developmental disabilities. In fact, on page 105 the budget states:
An important consideration for parents and grandparents of a child with severe disabilities is how best to ensure the financial security of their child, when they are no longer able to provide support. The Minister of Finance will appoint a small group of experts to examine ways to help parents save for the long term security of a child with severe disabilities and provide their recommendations to the Minister within six months.
While the minister indicates a timetable for receiving initial input, he offers absolutely no timetable for action. In the midst of a minority government, that is a huge concern. Families are tired of waiting. They want answers now.
Moreover, I hope the small group of experts is not limited to actuaries only. This issue goes well beyond exploring options for private pensions and trusts and must include a full examination of all public supports, a new way of dealing with other moneys or assets left to survivors and a prohibition on clawbacks.
I look forward to engaging the Minister of Finance in a dialogue on this issue because action is long overdue. Action of course is also long overdue on a number of other issues but again, instead of dealing with these issues head on, Bill C-13 and the budget represent a missed opportunity.
Let me turn first to health care. If health care is one of the government's top five priorities, why is it barely mentioned in the budget? If it is so important, where is the plan? Where are the imperatives? How is the federal government going to work with the provinces? Where is that information? It certainly is not in the budget implementation bill.
As I have said in the House before, people in my riding of Hamilton Mountain remember only too well the last time a Conservative government turned its mind to health care. The last Conservative government in Ontario, of which the current Minister of Finance was then a member, threatened to close the Henderson Hospital, jeopardized access to home care and did nothing to address the unprecedented shortages of family doctors in the community. In fact, it laid the foundation upon which Premier McGuinty is now building his P3 hospitals and justifying the privatization of health care.
I had hoped that the Minister of Finance might have learned from his mistakes in Ontario and not repeated them here. However, his budget did nothing to expand public home care, an issue which not only impacts the most vulnerable families in the community but is directly linked to opening up beds in the acute care system.
The budget did nothing to reduce wait times for surgeries, which could have been done by investing in training and skills upgrading for health providers, particularly nurses and nurse practitioners.
The budget did nothing to act on the recommendation of the provincial premiers by enacting a national drug plan, which could have saved Canadians $2 billion a year.
In short, this budget should have been an opportunity to get serious about implementing the recommendations of the Romanow report so that governments like the McGuinty Liberals in Ontario would have to stop using the federal government as a scapegoat for proceeding with their ideologically based push toward the privatization of health care. However, instead of seizing the opportunity, this budget is just another missed opportunity.
The same is true of the environment. The Conservative budget and the budget implementation bill that is before the House today do absolutely nothing to address the profound environmental challenges that confront Canadians today. The silence is absolutely deafening.
When it comes to climate change, we have essentially lost yet another year on this most critical issue. It is showing up on the pages of Macleans, on the front page of The New York Times and across our communities, but it is not showing up in the budget. Canadians want this issue addressed. They recognize that the environment and wellness are inextricably linked. They know that environmental issues have a positive impact on our economy, but as of May 2 they also know that the Conservatives do not care.
Over many decades, and sometimes not deservedly, Canada has earned itself a reputation as a country that engages the international community in a positive way, whether it was through former prime minister Pearson's work in the UN or eventually through such treaties as Kyoto.
The Liberal Party of Canada as early as 1993 made commitments, Liberal promises if you will, to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but once in power the Liberals went about doing absolutely the opposite. In fact, emissions rose by over 25%, a record worse than that of the Bush administration in the United States.
Successive Liberal governments have not made the investments to improve the productivity and efficiency of the Canadian economy and to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that it promised to do. There was a deathbed conversion as the Liberals were starting to sink in the polls and only then did a plan finally come forward.
As an environmentalist, I can remember day after day the then minister of the environment saying that the Liberals had a plan, that it was coming, to just hang on and have a little patience. It literally took years. The Kyoto accord was signed in 1997 and the government said nothing until 2005. What did Canada end up with: a discussion paper about climate change. There were no targets, no timelines and no strategy whatsoever.
Now there is a Conservative government in power, a government that has only recently come to realize what most of the world has known for years, that climate change caused by humans is in fact happening and is in fact a threat to both our society and our economy. Yet the budget is devoid of a strategy for dealing with climate change. It is a budget that is being declared an absolute disaster by environmental groups across the country.
Instead of offering solutions and a concrete plan, it cut $1 billion from home retrofit programs that benefited both the environment and low income families across our country. When it comes to the environment, there is no more significant tool than the budget to make real progress. The message the government sent through its first budget is that the environment simply does not matter. The budget has failed Canadians both at home and internationally when it comes to the environment and it is yet another missed opportunity.
By this time in my participation in this debate, I have already outlined at least eight opportunities for meaningful action that were missed in both the budget and the budget implementation bill. Since the government was intent on cutting taxes rather than making meaningful investments that would help working families, perhaps that should not surprise me. There were two other missed opportunities that I would now like to identify which fall squarely into the tax cutting agenda and yet they too are nowhere to be found.
The first issue I would like to raise is the elimination of the goods and services tax on literacy materials. Yesterday I had the good fortune of seconding the introduction of Bill C-276, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act, literacy materials. The bill was brought forward by my good friend the NDP finance critic and member for Winnipeg North, who shares my belief that literacy is a necessity and must therefore not be subject to taxes.
For many Canadians the added cost of the GST can be a real impediment and there are far too many barriers to literacy already. Removing the GST on books and audiovisual materials for literacy training in fact complements existing tax relief programs given to organizations that conduct literacy work.
In my view, the GST should never have been imposed on these materials at the outset, but when the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney brought in the GST, they failed to establish an exemption for literacy materials. Despite the fact that the Liberals had 12 years to redress that issue, they failed to seize the opportunity and left the GST in place throughout their term in government.
In this minority Parliament we have the opportunity to do the right thing. Let us act together to remove the GST from all literacy materials. The measure would pay for itself. In our knowledge based economy the bar is being constantly raised higher on the base of skills needed to access decent jobs, to function in daily tasks and to participate in social and political life, and yet despite our technical sophistication, nearly 50% of Canadians still have difficulty working with words and numbers. It is in everyone's interest to raise Canadian literacy rates. As I said earlier, let us act now. It is the right thing to do.
Similarly, if the government is intent on governing through tax cuts, then I have another proposal that would also be the right thing to do. I had the privilege yesterday of seconding the introduction of Bill C-275, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act on feminine hygiene products. The bill was brought forward by my good friend the NDP finance critic and member for Winnipeg North, who shares my belief that taxes on feminine hygiene products are discriminatory.
Charging GST on feminine hygiene products clearly affects women only. It unfairly disadvantages women financially solely because of their reproductive role. Our bill would benefit all Canadian women at some point in their lives and would be of particular value to women with lower incomes. If a proper gender based analysis had been done when the GST was introduced, this discriminatory aspect of the tax would never have been implemented.
I urge all members of the House to support this initiative. I am confident that members of the Conservative government will do so because of their announcement of support last October when they pledged to deal with the tampon tax. Failing to--
