Mr. Speaker, as I said before question period, I am obviously not supporting the bill because of the cuts the government has made. Some of those are the elimination of the child care agreement and cuts to the Status of Women program, the literacy program, affordable housing and many others. Also, budget 2006 increased income taxes to Canada's lowest income earners and slashed important social programs.
Canadians will get a chance to cast judgment on this meanspirited government and they will see that the Conservatives are prepared to compromise the economic status that Canadians have worked so hard to achieve. The Conservative government had the opportunity to bolster productivity and lift Canada's capacity to generate long term growth and prosperity, but it threw that out the window for immediate growth of the Conservative Party instead.
As we have said before, the tax provisions outlined in the budget only benefit small segments of the population and when examined more closely, put more strain on students, low income families and the environment, among countless others.
Again, the Canada employment tax credit increases the basic personal exemption, but it only applies to employed taxpayers and not to all Canadians. To make matters worse, the government decreased the basic personal exemption for all Canadians, therefore raising their income tax. Especially for seniors and people on fixed income, this is absolutely appalling. We were raising the personal exemption up to $10,000 from $9,800. Now it has gone down to $9,300. Our system would have at least taken about 250,000 or more seniors off income tax rolls altogether. Therefore, this has hurt people because it is actually a tax increase.
Also the Conservatives are essentially giving only $77.50 per year to students who spend $500 on books. The Liberal government had proposed to pay 50% of the first and last years of the post-secondary program.
The program the Conservatives have does not create access for students to post-secondary education, who are struggling and pay little taxes to begin with. By cancelling $3.11 billion over five years and replacing that with $175 million tax credit is shameful. It is so paltry and absolutely embarrassing.
Again, the government obviously does not have a plan for prosperity. Education is a major part of prosperity and that does not seem to be part of its program. As far as I am concerned, it has a plan for disaster. Education, prosperity, innovation, research, students, universities and partnerships with the provinces are all gone. There seems to be no need for the government to invest in Canadians and to work with provinces.
Again, the transit credit that the government has put in is a joke. It leaves rural Canadians scratching their heads as to how this will benefit them. It does not increase in any way the ridership or take cars off the road. Environmental groups have no idea where the Minister of the Environment gets the idea that 56,000 cars have come off the road. Maybe she just thinks it is a good number. There is no way to verify any of that until well into next summer.
We all know that transit is not feasible for many Canadians. Money needs to be invested in better access and improved transit. A dollar per month tax credit will not do it. Nor will it do it with the environment, nor for people who need the investment, nor for the investment that the previous government was making with municipalities. The partnership that existed between the Government of Canada and the municipalities of this countries on many levels, housing, transportation, environment and green environmental programs is gone. That kind of partnership does not seem to exist.
I am not quite sure if the Prime Minister has even met with the mayor of Toronto. If he has, I am not sure what came of it. At this point I suspect that has not even happened, not in any meaningful way.
The fitness tax credit is the perfect example of another selective tax measure that effectively does nothing but support those few families that have children already enrolled in sports. Anyone paying the bill for sports knows that the final value of $77.50 for a year is no real help to anyone. It is a bit of candy in the window like the Conservatives have done in many other things, but there is no real value behind it. Actually, if we eat too much, it will give us a toothache. Added to that, the parents who pay for children to take acting classes or piano lessons or anything such as arts or culture related are left with no help from the government. This is no surprise. A carton of yogurt has more culture than the Conservative Party as far as I am concerned.
To top it off, all these tax credits are washed away with the half point income tax hike the government introduced. By raising income tax, the government is cancelling out any of these tax credits and putting low income Canadians at even more risk. They try to give it with one hand, then they hike the taxes on the other side and we realize at the end of the day we really do not have it. It is like “now you see it, now you don't”.
Again, the much touted GST cut does little for the poorest of all Canadians. It does not benefit all Canadians as the Conservatives claim, it only benefits the rich. People need a lot of money to spend before they can benefit from the GST reduction. The GST is not charged on basics such as food and housing, which are most of the expenditures of low income households and we all know that. There is nothing in this budget for the 1.2 million children and families living in poverty.
The government has to be concerned with the most vulnerable and all citizens of our country, which the budget and the Conservative Party do not do. As far as I am concerned, the recent budget cuts are meanspirited and expose a direct attack on Canada's most vulnerable. The average Canadian citizen is going to feel those cuts very badly.
All Canadians have to live with the cuts aimed at a very narrow spectrum of Conservative supporters. Ontarians remember the Harris tax cuts that left Ontario with no services and a massive budget deficit, something that the current government is still trying to fix. It is taking a long time and it is going to take much longer. Now we have the main player in that, the now Minister of Finance, who will do the same thing to all Canadians as he did to Ontario, no services and a deficit to boot.
The minority Conservative government is poised to cut even more. This “fend for yourself” society will leave our most vulnerable behind as we all know. I cannot support this direct attack on our citizens and the most vulnerable of them, and therefore cannot support the bill.
The current Minister of Finance in Ottawa was very much involved with creating the mess that we have in Ontario. Most Ontarians remember that there were constant tax cuts and constant service cuts. Welfare recipients were cut by 20%. All of the services at the municipal level are now fee for service so children who need the services have to pay a fee for them. For fixed income families and low income families, this means children cannot use sports and recreational facilities.
However, Mr. Harris, like the current government, had a lot of ideas about how to put those children in jail. We have an increase for building the jail system in the budget. This seems to be the current government's same pattern because it has the same bright lights guiding it too, the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Finance.
I look forward to the next election when the people of Canada will pass judgment on these outrageous cuts and meanspiritedness. A Liberal government can work to cleaning up the mess the Conservatives are making of our great country. As I said, it is rather sad. The Liberals came in 1993 and had to clean up the mess that was created by the previous Conservative government. We had a deficit of over $40 billion, high interest rates, high unemployment and an economy that was in the tank. There had been huge cuts in services. There was the brain drain, which we all talked about for so long. There were no research funds of which to speak. Canada was nowhere when it came to research, investment in education and so on.
The Conservative government also cut the court challenges program and the women's program. It was forced to reinstate it at one point. We had to fix it and it was hard to fix. That hurt Canadians.
We moved beyond that. We moved to the point of reinvesting so the brain drain became the brain gain. We provided 1,000 research chairs for all the universities across Canada. The Liberal government established centres of excellence: the centres of excellence for women's health and the CIHR. We made investments in high technology and science to increase investment in this country to help our economy and our productivity.
Just before the last election, universities and colleges in this country said the brain drain had become a brain gain. More people were coming back to Canada. More young people were staying here because of the investments that the Liberal government made in our economy and our people. This included the investment in early education and child care, another major investment for our future productivity.
The Governor of the Bank of Canada, testifying at the finance committee, said very clearly that if he had $1 to invest, he would invest it in children and early education and child care. This is where the returns are in terms of our health as well as our productivity and economy in the future.
We were able to increase the guaranteed income supplement for seniors and invested $1 billion to look at a national program for caregivers.
The Conservative government does not seem to think that any of that is important. What did it do in the last budget? It eliminated the child supplement. Imagine taking away the child tax credit, which goes to modest income families in this country, and the child supplement, which goes to the poorest of families, while at the same time raising their taxes by .5% and lowering their personal exemptions.
The Conservative government lowered the GST, which these families cannot benefit from, and then taxed the little $1,200 it gave them for day care, which is not worth very much. There was no mention of child care or early education to speak of. These people have not gained anything. They have lost all the way through.
That is why I say the budget is meanspirited. It hurts people. It is absolutely unbelievable that a government with a $13.2 billion surplus would cut social programs. I understand there is even more money in the kitty of some additional billions of dollars. The government had this $13 billion surplus thanks to the management of the Liberal government.
What did the Conservatives do with all this money? They cut services. They cut literacy. They seem to have something against people who have not been able to get proper reading and writing skills and are not able to fill out their own application forms for employment or read the safety standards in their places of employment. They are not able to get the kind of quality jobs our economy is producing. An economy is competitive only if there is a modern well-skilled labour force. This again goes to competitiveness. The Conservatives talk about this only in terms of text facts, but they do not invest in people and literacy is about investing in people.
Then there is the court challenges program. The government is afraid of being challenged by the citizens of Canada. The court challenges program was established to allow the citizens of Canada to be able to challenge all levels of government policies and laws if they abrogated citizens' rights. Other countries have lauded us for having the strength and the respect to give that kind of control to our citizens. It strengthens our democracy. The previous Conservative government cancelled this program. We came in to clean up and reinstated it. Now the government has cancelled it again.
In addition to that, and this is not following the budget but nonetheless the cuts continue, the Conservatives have now cut money to Status of Women Canada and they have changed the criteria. Women in this country, according to the Minister of Status of Women, are equal because it says so in the Constitution and therefore they no longer need anything else.
Women fought so hard for their equality in this country. The only reason women have equality in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is because of Status of Women Canada which was established in 1971. When women were not in the charter when it was presented to Canada, they marched on Parliament with the assistance of women's organizations and fought for their rights. That is why they are in the Constitution in the first place.
The funding for those organizations that helped us to get our rights in the Constitution is going to be eliminated, so they will not be able to advocate, to research, and to fight for equality and social justice in this country. I cannot imagine a government eliminating the words social justice and equality by cutting funding to the women of Canada.
I will conclude by saying that quite frankly, I see very little in this budget to support. I am saddened by the fact that this is where we have arrived on this day.
