Mr. Speaker, the 2008 budget reveals a lack of vision, and these are not my words. These are the words of Victoria's major daily newspaper editorial the morning after the budget was released. In fact, budget 2008 is just a lot more of the same, with winners and losers, a lot for the Conservatives' corporate friends and crumbs for the rest of us.
There is so much that could have been done to better balance tax cuts with social investments. Here is what we could do.
If the new Liberal-Conservative alliance had not squandered $14.8 billion to big corporations and big polluters last fall, we could have made significant strategic investments in the social, environment and economic priorities of Canadians.
If we invest just half of the $10 billion surplus, for example, we could restore a national affordable housing strategy, provide access to quality public child care and early learning for every Canadian family who needs it, retrofit hundreds of thousands of homes and start on the path to become a global environmental leader.
We could breath new life into our treasured health care system and get millions of Canadians family doctors, which they lack now. We could drastically reduce wait times. We notice in the budget that the Conservatives have abandoned their commitment to reducing those times. We could vastly improve home care, long term care and support for family caregivers.
We could tackle the real debt crisis in Canada that plagues a million students and graduates by reducing student fees and giving a huge boost to research and teaching capacity of our universities and colleges and create a thriving system of apprenticeship and training.
We could dramatically boost our economic and social well-being with a lifelong learning strategy for everyone, including the 12 million Canadians with literacy needs, making Canada the most literate and learned country in the world.
Our individual and collective well-being is not enhanced with corporate tax cuts. I believe the people of Victoria could not have been more clear in articulating our priorities for the budget, which have been ignored yet again.
For the first time in three years, the word “homelessness” is in the budget. However, it spends $110 million on demonstration projects in five cities and none in Victoria. Yet Victoria's task force on mental illness, addictions and homelessness has been hailed as the definitive report by homelessness experts across the country.
Our local chamber of commerce and then the national chamber of commerce has strongly advocated for federal action and funding for homelessness in this time of record surpluses. We do not need more studies. We have examined the best practices. We have a blueprint, but Conservatives are big on studies instead of action.
In the budget there is nothing, for example, for building affordable and rental housing. We know the high costs of housing are chasing away young people from our urban areas.
I realize the finance minister thinks that cities do nothing but fix potholes. However, while making permanent the federal gas tax to cities is a hard fought victory, it is an inadequate first step without the acceleration of additional revenue sharing or long term transit funding, for example, called by municipal leaders.
The Conservatives' idea of cost sharing forces cities to raise one-third of the money with only 8% of the revenue. Therefore, now our property taxes are bound to go up while corporate taxes go down.
The only budget item for seniors is getting them to work longer. The GIS exemption is insignificant compared to increasing the amount of GIS on which seniors rely. There is no core funding for struggling Victoria senior groups that have been pleading for more stable funding for years to provide services to seniors.
There is no fix for the government's CPP error. For example, it short-changed the pension of millions of seniors across Canada. There is nothing for long term care, home care or support for caregivers.
I want to talk a bit about heritage. Cities like mine have offered tax breaks for the restoration of heritage buildings. BC Heritage asked for the renewal of the commercial heritage properties incentive fund to support those efforts and to continue to support the conversion of heritage buildings into affordable rental housing. Its requests were ignored as were many other excellent ideas. Yet the Conservatives and Liberals can find $14.8 billion by 2012-13 for the big polluting and big gas industries. I cannot accept that.
As the post-secondary education critic, I see nothing in the budget to address soaring student fees or debt. The new Canada student grant program is, I will acknowledge, a step in the right direction, but it is grossly underfunded and filled with gaps that risk leaving many more students even further behind.
Despite the year long campaign to fix the student loan system, the budget does not reduce student loan interest, create a student loan ombudsperson, amend the flawed lifetime limit or create standards for the conduct of private loan collectors to rein them in.
The added support for the indirect cost of university is laughably short of the commonly accepted 40% target. Research for the social sciences and humanities is again disproportionately underfunded. Worse still, Canada's independent research granting councils are now being told what research they must support.
On the environment, I will leave it to Toronto Star business and technology columnist Tyler Hamilton, who wrote the following this week:
New subsidies for the coal, oil and nuclear industries and new handouts to major automakers. No mention of climate change. No extension of incentives for renewables. The cancelling of incentives for buying energy efficient vehicles....We're so focused on keeping dinosaurs alive...
I want to issue a word of warning for Canadians listening and for those in the gallery today and challenge every elected representative here. My local daily used the word “humdrum” to describe this year's budget. I caution all Canadians to take a closer look at what appears to be an insipid and meaningless budget. I ask Canadians to see the careful and deliberate pursuit of the corporate ideological agenda that the Liberals began and the Conservatives have accelerated.
It is appalling that the Conservatives are asking Canadians to pay the big oil companies to clean up their own pollution. It is the institutionalization of public-private partnerships without any objective analysis of the value or whether they work in the public interest that is particularly worrisome.
Canadians may not have seen the $29 million allocated to pursue the corporate-led security and prosperity partnership, those secret negotiations that are irreversibly tying Canada's regulatory sovereignty to the United States. What little we know about SPP reveals a subversion of the public interest to private profit at the risk of losing control of our water, our resources and our collective ability to protect our own health and safety.
If all members of the House like the road that the Conservatives are taking us down, then they will support the budget. I do not support the Prime Minister's agenda and I cannot support the budget.
