Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak on behalf of the New Democratic Party in response to the budget. I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Palliser.
The budget is the most political tool the government has. There are a lot of myths about federal budgets mostly coming from a very right wing agenda. One of the myths is that budgets are bound by economic rules, that there are things we cannot do, that we have to pay down the deficit or the debt, or that it is about tax breaks. All these myths revolve around a budget.
In actual fact a budget is the most political vehicle any government has to make very real choices about who the winners are and who the losers are. That is the perspective with which we have to look at the budget and respond to what we heard yesterday from the finance minister.
In looking at the budget there is no conclusion one can come to except that it is a massive security budget. While Canadians have very serious concerns around security issues, we have to ask whether or not the $7.7 billion being directed toward security measures is going to provide the kind of help, relief and support that ordinary Canadians and average families across the country need. I have some very serious questions about that.
The hon. member across the way said a few moments ago that the budget was about facilitating economic security, but the question is, economic security for whom? Clearly the government's agenda is to continue along a path of providing economic security for huge corporations. Trade is important but we also have to place on the table the economic security of the most vulnerable in our society, poor Canadians who do not have jobs, or the two out of three unemployed workers who have paid into EI but are no longer eligible for EI. Their economic security issues are just as important as the economic security issues of trucking corporations or large trade organizations.
For the constituents whom I represent in my community of East Vancouver, the budget has created a greater number of people who feel that they are at the short end of the stick. Even the Globe and Mail in reporting on the budget reaction has characterized it as last year's pledges barely fulfilled. Even those pledges were so incredibly minimal in terms of grappling with the very real issues facing Canadians that it is really quite pathetic.
We have to be very critical about the budget that was put forward. We have to recognize the reality in the country that the gap between very wealthy people and very poor people has surged to a 25 year high. In some of the European social democratic countries, the real measure of health and security is a decreasing gap between wealthy people and poor people. In our country that gap is widening.
It is regrettable that just a few days ago the co-ordinator of Campaign 2000, Laurel Rothman, remarked “When we look at the latest figures on child poverty, the alarm bells should start ringing”. I would agree with her. She pointed out that governments had the option in the boom years of investing in a long term vision for children but instead, the government chose to cut taxes and dismantle social services. She said “The average family on welfare now receives 12% less than it would have several years ago”.
She went on to point out, and this has been reinforced by the Canadian Labour Congress, that currently two out of three unemployed workers who have paid premiums cannot qualify for benefits while the insurance program scores an $8 billion a year so-called surplus.
This has to be considered one of the biggest rip-offs in the country. Working people are being robbed of their right to use the insurance they paid into when they face hard times or unemployment.
Rather than easing the eligibility rules, doing away with the waiting period and ensuring that benefits are increased so that people have a decent income so they do not have to live below the poverty line, what did the government do? It made a few minor adjustments in terms of the apprenticeship program for people who go off the job and back into the classroom.
In terms of dealing with the fundamental inequities, inequalities and discrimination in this program, the government has again failed to hear what the labour movement, unions and working people have said. That is a real disgrace. It is a real indictment on this budget. On the one hand, the finance minister speaks quite handily about how this is a big security budget and it will help Canadians. On the other hand, the federal government has met the absolute bare minimum in pledges that it has put forward.
Yesterday in the House I raised the issue of students who were struggling with increasing debt loads and finding it more and more difficult to pay tuition fees as fees continued to rise and their debt load continued to go up. I asked the minister responsible for the Canada student loan program how she could defend years of government policies that prompted Statistics Canada to produce a report which made it clear that students who came from affluent families were two and a half times more likely to go to university than a student from a low income family.
The minister's reply to that was very typical of the kinds of responses we have heard from the government. She said:
Our record is clear. We know that higher education is incredibly important to the future of all Canadians and we want to be there to help them in this regard.
When I look at the record of what the government has done to help students in terms of financial accessibility, it is quite appalling. There was nothing in yesterday's budget that would improve the accessibility, particularly for low income students, so that kind of report from Statistics Canada would become something of the past and a piece of history.
I also want to turn my comments to the situation facing people who are in great need of affordable housing. In September I travelled across the country to seven different communities, mostly urban environments but I also went to Iqaluit. I spoke with housing activists to find out whether they believed the initiatives that the government had undertaken since 1998 had impacted on the increasing homelessness in the country.
What I was told was no surprise. It is something that should be very evident to people in local communities. They told me that not only was homelessness on the rise, but we had a situation where over 800,000 Canadian households were paying more than 50% of their income on rent and an estimated quarter of a million Canadians were homeless.
The issue of housing and the need for a fully funded national housing program is something the government has absolutely ignored. We heard the finance minister speak about the framework agreement. I want to be very clear. The agreement that the government has come to is only one-tenth of the 1% solution for which we have been fighting. We may see the provision of about 5,400 units per year. We need closer to 20,000 or 30,000 units. The $136 million a year for five years, which was promised so many times and which was re-announced in yesterday's budget, does not even come close to meeting the huge gap that exists for people who are fighting for affordable housing.
This budget is about choices. The finance minister has chosen to ignore the people who are most at risk; aboriginal people, poor people, kids who are living in poverty and families who are looking for housing. He has chosen to ignore the very real economic security issues facing those families. However I am proud to say that we in the New Democratic Party do not. We choose to make that the priority.
