Mr. Speaker, this budget is a profound disappointment, particularly to anyone who voted for the Liberals based on the lie that they share New Democrat values. That is what the Prime Minister pretended that he stood for in the election. He asked Canadians to choose their Canada.
Here is the Canada that he has chosen instead. Our pollution will rise. Tuition is going to continue to be a burden and become more expensive. More people are going to live on the streets. Workers will keep paying EI premiums for an insurance that they will never collect. Aboriginal squalor will grow; however, corporations will get billions of dollars in tax cuts.
That is not the vision that was promised by the Prime Minister when he went to Canadians and asked for their support. It is not the fundamental change that he promised Canadians. This budget is a betrayal of the progressive votes that he sought in the campaign's dying days. The only vision that the Prime Minister seems to have had was of the opposite side of the House. The budget is a set of broken promises.
This budget breaks Canada's promises to the world on foreign aid and the Kyoto protocol and reveals that the consultations were only a farce, a piece of theatre.
Our finance critic had exactly one meeting with the minister. After that, nothing. I take this opportunity to congratulate the hon. member for Winnipeg North on her excellent work, despite the finance minister's refusal to listen.
The relationship between the finance minister and the Conservative leader leaves one wondering what the member for Calgary Southeast would have to say about it, the same sect relationship.
My party had hoped that the Conservatives would not be quite so enthusiastic about this budget. My party had hoped that there would be the ability to perhaps make changes to honour the promises that the Liberals made to so many Canadians, and promises that they made time and time again over the years and broken.
I am speaking of their promises to cut pollution, to make education affordable, to build affordable housing, and to play a role in the world that makes us proud. It did not. The budget did not honour the Liberal promises to Canadians, pure and simple. Our party cannot vote for this betrayal.
Our country faces grave challenges. We are behind the world on environment. We have squandered a decade of unprecedented resources. We are neither educating nor training the workforce the way we should be. We are not investing in our economic engines and cities. Our economy is ill-prepared for the sustainability revolution that is to come and that other countries are embracing. We ignore demographic shifts and leave immigrant professionals driving cabs. We leave our first nations living in squalor.
We have more obligations to our children than simply reducing the debt. But let us be clear: a reduced debt is a good thing, but our obligation to the next generation goes much further than that. It must include clean and healthy air, accessible education, non-profit child care. This budget does not achieve that.
Canadians did not vote for these choices. Liberals did not even campaign on these choices. If Canadians want balanced budgets in every sense, they need to vote NDP. We now see once again that voting Liberal means voting money for Bay Street while forcing people on to the streets because there is no affordable housing and we are not building it the way we should.
Dumping billions of dollars into unaccountable foundations and eviscerating federal leadership and social policy does not build the country we want.
I want to address some of the key betrayals in the budget because far from “delivering commitments”, the title the Prime Minister chose for this document, the budget should be entitled “dithering on commitments”, or worse, “betrayal of commitments”, because that is the truth of the matter.
I do want to acknowledge there were some positive first steps made on child care. After 12 years of broken promises to do something about child care, it is about time there was some reference and some dollars put aside. We welcome the fact that there has finally been some movement, but we will be vigilant in ensuring that kids are protected through non-profit child care in a public system. We must invest in our children, but it must be in a framework that has been proven to work. We do not want to see big box Wal-Mart child care centres peppering this country.
Without a firm commitment to fight poverty, a child care program is insufficient. This budget gives billions of dollars in gifts and tax reductions to big businesses, while their profits are bigger than ever. And yet there is no increase in the child tax credit. Child poverty will continue, once again because of Liberal broken promises.
There is not one penny for building social housing. That is completely unreasonable. We are still travelling on the path laid out by the Liberals, a path from which we can see the gap between rich and poor growing wider every day.
This is not the Canada for which the people voted a few months ago. Yesterday, they were betrayed.
It is a budget that rewards wealth, instead of rewarding work. Canadians did not vote for dirtier air and more pollution but that is what they will get. In this budget we did not even hear in the speech a reference to Kyoto, the most important international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions that has ever been put together. There was no commitment to mandatory emissions standards. In fact, the Liberals voted against our proposals to do something about pollution in that sector. There is nothing on transferring subsidies from the polluting forms of energy, like oil and coal, over to the renewable forms of energy, the clean energy of the future. There is no vision whatsoever for the future when it comes to energy and pollution.
We did more at the City of Toronto in embracing efficiency than the Prime Minister has provided for in his budget. Cities and communities are also doing much more without much help from the federal government.
The fact is that the government has no plan, no commitment and very few ideas with regard to dealing with this issue. It is simply impossible now for Canada to keep its promise to the world and to its citizens to meet the greenhouse gas reduction objectives that we signed onto. We have broken our promise to the world on pollution and we can look forward to more smog days next summer. In fact, we even have them now in the wintertime, where people cannot breathe and they have to head off to the emergency rooms. They can thank the Prime Minister for the lack of action on that.
I want to thank the leader of the Bloc Québécois for including our concern about this in his excellent subamendment to the speech on the budget.
If the short-sightedness on the environment is staggering, and it is, then the continued choice to put education out of reach is nothing short of despicable. Not one penny was invested in lowering costs for students. Students and their families are facing a crushing debt burden, and worse than that, they are having to decide not to go to school. What a waste of our resources. We have all these young people, with their talents available and wanting to invest their lives in an educational future so they can make a contribution to the economy of this next century, and we deny them that possibility by putting education out of reach. It is not acceptable.
The budget does provide, however, for students only when they die. It is absolutely absurd. They are going to write off student debt if the student is dead. Who is supposed to celebrate that? It also refuses to train workers or to educate young people. It is simply an asinine public policy and the Liberals should be ashamed of themselves.
What about our place in the world in the global community? We expected some real action in this area. In fact, the leaders of the opposition parties made a proposal with regard to foreign aid. However our foreign aid levels will not rise to the level that Canada has long promised the world. We have put it off. We welcome the investment in peacekeeping but foreign aid prevents conflicts that peacekeeping is then later required to solve. They go hand in hand. Given the generosity of Canadians in response to the tsunami, we want to help those in need and keep this long broken Liberal promise to the world, but again we will not see it in this budget.
We have the opportunity to make a choice about our place in the world and whether we are going to respond to Canadians' moral imperative that they demonstrated with their generosity, which was that Canada should be behind the investment all around the world that is needed in order to lift millions and millions of people out of poverty and disease. Instead, we stand at the back of the pack and do virtually nothing. There are many other issues that we should discuss in this budget and our members will be raising them in the debate days to come.
As for employment insurance, it is incredible to see the government's lack of action, after the good work that was done in the standing committee. On this topic, I want to thank the hon. member for Acadie—Bathurst for his hard work as the NDP's representative on that committee.
With respect to the aboriginal people, they are stuck in absolutely incredible poverty because of the government' s lack of action.
We can also talk about pensions. No action was taken to help those who are older now and remain poor. This budget is a failure when it comes to pensions. The Liberals have not even attempted to address these chronic problems affecting average Canadians.
My party cannot, in conscience, support this budget, because it simply does not deliver the goods, and that is that.
My party cannot vote for this budget. We wanted to engage with the government to improve the budget after it was delivered, which is what should be happening in a minority House of Commons to honour the progressive votes that were given to both of our parties. However it is clear again that the Liberals do not deliver on NDP values, despite what the Prime Minister says at election time.
If people want to see NDP values in action, they will have to vote NDP and then they will see balanced and pragmatic approaches to dealing with their concerns based on their values.
We are deeply disappointed that the Prime Minister has broken his word, not for ourselves, but for the people who are living on the streets, the people who are trying to go to school, the people who need to receive assistance from EI, even though they have paid into it for years and are unable to get that assistance, and for the people who are choking on smog.
The budget is a betrayal, which is why we will be voting against it.
