Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity contribute to the debate on Bill C-60, which is a budget implementation bill, and to provide my comments.
It is difficult, really, in the time available to do justice to a bill like this, because once again we have a bill that has a huge variety of measures. Some of them are new policy measures and some of them are not even in the budget speech. To actually do justice is very difficult.
What I would like to do is think about how this bill contributes to a sustainable future for our country and the opportunities and freedoms that we enjoy today. How does this bill help our children and their children in the future to enjoy those same kinds of opportunities and freedoms?
I want to start by saying that one of the things that is important for the health and well-being of society over time is transparency and honesty in government policy and government measures. One of the reasons the Liberals will not be supporting this bill is the tax increases, but beyond that, it is because of the lack of transparency in terms of these tax increases.
We call them “stealth tax increases” because the government continues to deny that it is increasing taxes, while it is absolutely clear that with this budget implementation bill the government is actually increasing net taxes over the coming five years.
In fact, in each and every year, the net impact on middle-class Canadians would be higher taxes. By the end of five years, $3.3 billion more would be coming out of Canadians' pockets through this net increase in taxes. We cannot support a budget that would do that.
I want to focus initially on the impact on small business. Like the speaker before me, I am from a small business background. In fact, I spent 25 years building a business into another category, as a mid-sized business. I know the challenges of small business, especially in securing capital for their growth and in securing investment to upgrade and update their equipment.
What small businesses do is utilize the retained earnings of that business itself, and in many cases they utilize the paycheques or savings of the business owners. That is why this dividend tax credit was so important to small business owners: they could use those funds to help grow their businesses when the market was not available as it is to public corporations.
That is why it is so mystifying to me that a government that claims to be pro-business and that claims it wants to make a healthier economy is side-swiping the very people—small business owners and their employees—who are so critical to achieving that goal.
This change to the dividend tax credit for small business is only one of many ways in which small businesses are paying for some of the Conservative government's mismanagement of budgets and unaccountable spending.
It is also surprising to me that large corporations have enjoyed an approximately 7% reduction in their corporate taxes under the current government, yet the small business rate has only dropped one percentage point in that time. In the meantime, $600 million a year, each and every year for the past three years and going forward, is loaded onto businesses for an EI payroll tax increase.
Small businesses account for 42% of private sector GDP. That is an enormous part of our economy, yet we are undermining those enterprises' ability to invest and grow their businesses.
Between 2001 and 2005, Canada's small and medium-sized enterprises created 467,708 jobs. That is almost half a million jobs.
What is the comparable figure under the current Conservative government? Between 2006 and 2010, under the Conservatives, the overall net number of jobs created by small and medium enterprises was negative 10,831. We are seeing a government that is failing the small and medium business community.
Here is a snapshot. In 2005, Liberals helped small businesses create almost 40,000 net jobs. In 2011, small businesses created 21,000 net jobs.
It is the government that has been failing small businesses, and this particular bill, Bill C-60, this budget, is a huge extra hit on small businesses. Certainly, that is not something we can possibly support.
Let us take a look at some of the other impacts of this bill on sustainability.
However, before I do that, I do want to acknowledge that there are elements of the bill that I think are positive and that I support, and certainly the Liberals support.
With respect to social sustainability, we support enhanced allocations for our veterans by putting an end to the deduction of disability payments, and we are indexing the gas tax fund by 2% a year.
Indexing the gas tax would certainly be helpful in my community of Vancouver and my riding of Vancouver Quadra.
As for economic sustainability, I support the measures to fight tax evasion, because no one likes cheaters. It is important to have measures in place to stop people from cheating.
Furthermore, the tax credits for mineral exploration will be very important to my province, British Columbia. As for the environment, the bill includes a $20 million investment in the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
That $20 million to Nature Conservancy of Canada is one small amount of funds. It is so woefully small.
In terms of sustainability, that is $20 million to one organization, when the government has cut hundreds of millions from Environment Canada, Parks Canada and climate change. The Experimental Lakes Area is just one example of so many program cuts. This is a government that, unfortunately, is untruly claiming that it is at a certain level of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, whereas it is on track to actually having higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions than in 2005, while the Conservatives' target is 17% below.
I think everyone should take notice of what the Keeling curve is telling us today. Now, the Keeling curve is the world's longest unbroken record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. This record, which is from a facility operated at the Mauna Loa Observatory near the top of a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, shows that carbon dioxide has been increasing steadily from values around 317 parts per million, when Dr. Charles D. Keeling began measurements in 1958, to nearly 400 parts per million today. That means that we are coming close to the level that this world saw in the Pleistocene era, at a time when the Arctic was 10° hotter than it is today and the rest of Canada was 6° to 8°.
We have an emergency with respect to climate warming, and the government is not only ignoring that, not only not funding anything to deal with that, but is in fact pretending it is accomplishing advances that it simply is not.
In conclusion, some of the important elements of social, democratic and environmental sustainability, as well as business sustainability, that I would like to see are not in the bill. In fact, the key measure that jumps out from the bill is a woeful attack on small businesses through a massive increase in their costs. That is money taken out of their pockets that they need to expand and update their enterprises.
