Mr. Speaker, what would this budget do for everyday Canadians?
For families, it would mean dealing with lengthy wait times for surgery or not being able to find a family doctor. For young Canadians, it would mean not being able to find a job or get the training they need to get a job. For commuters, it would mean being stuck in traffic gridlock or on overcrowded buses.
The Conservatives promised to focus on jobs, but instead they are pushing ahead with their job-killing austerity cuts. They are maintaining their fatally flawed temporary foreign workers program that takes jobs away from Canadians and they are hiking taxes on Canadians.
This budget introduced no new measures to create jobs and plays a shell game on infrastructure and skills training funding.
The Conservatives are pushing ahead with $36 billion in reckless cuts to health care funding. For Canadians who cannot afford home care to begin with, this budget would not help them, nor would it improve caregiver support for families who are struggling to provide personal care service for their loved ones.
There are 240,000 more young people unemployed today than before the recession. All this budget does for youth job creation is reannounce funding for internships. This is hardly an adequate strategy for addressing the very real problem of youth unemployment.
The government would scrap the $300 million in skills training funding to the provinces in order to give the money to companies on a matching fund basis. It is a shell game, plain and simple.
Instead of addressing Canada's skilled labour shortage, the government has close to half a million temporary foreign workers in Canada while 1.4 million Canadians are out of work. With this fatally flawed immigration policy, the federal government is undermining the labour market, signalling to companies to hire cheap labour overseas to replace Canadian workers.
Banks and insurance companies do so by outsourcing their IT jobs. Airlines lay off Canadian pilots to hire foreign workers. Mining companies bring in workers from overseas, even though there are unemployed miners in Canada. Construction companies do exactly the same. Such short-sighted immigration policy eliminates all incentive for companies to train and hire talent permanently.
This policy also depresses wages, making it harder for working families to get by. Immigrants are nation builders, not just economic units. Canada is built by immigrants, and the way to deal with a labour shortage is to train our young people and bring in immigrants as permanent residents so they can build a future in Canada, establish a family and set down roots in this country, just as many generations of immigrants did before them.
The Conservatives have failed to deliver a comprehensive strategy to deal with our growing skills gap. They have failed to deliver greater educational opportunities to first nations, newcomers, youth and the aging workforce. This budget would provide no additional funding to close the 30% funding gap for students in first nations communities.
On the pension front, Canadians have to wait two years longer to receive benefits under old age security. They now have to wait until age 67, up from 65.
Investing in health care, skills training and opportunities for youth is crucial to the well-being of ordinary Canadians and our economy. We need to do better.
I am splitting my time with the member for York South—Weston.
This budget is a disappointment, not only for Canadians who want reliable and accessible health care and job opportunities but also for those who rely on a car or on public transit to get to work. Canada's cities continue to be mired in gridlock. We are losing $10 billion in economic productivity every year. The average commute time in the Toronto area is 82 minutes. That is almost as long as a soccer game or preparing and having dinner at home.
Our cities are overwhelmed. They only get 8¢ on every tax dollar collected in Canada and they are experiencing a whopping $171 billion infrastructure deficit. What does the government do about traffic gridlock, the lack of proper transit and crumbling infrastructure? The answer is, not much.
When it comes to federal investments in roads, bridges and public transit, the budget is a disappointment. Instead of giving communities predictable, long-term and non-partisan funding, they get a net cut in infrastructure investments. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has determined that municipalities will be in fact receiving $2 billion less each year in 2014 and 2015. This is the hard truth when we compare current federal funding on infrastructure with what is planned going forward. Ten billion dollars less in 10 years is a lot of buses and streetcars not being purchased or replaced, a lot of roads and bridges not fixed and a lot of commuters waiting for subways and light rail in vain.
A slew of programs got cut completely, such as the green infrastructure fund. The government believes there is no need to invest in green technology and no need to make our communities more energy efficient.
The same goes for small-town Canada. There will be no more designated infrastructure money for small towns or rural communities. They will now have to compete with the big cities over less money.
What a deep disappointment it is. For 2014, grant-based infrastructure spending is going down from $3 billion to $2 billion. The building Canada fund will be 10% of the size it was last year, from $1.2 billion a year to $210 million. Canada's commuters will pay the price for this cut. They will pay for the lack of federal leadership on breaking the gridlock.
However, I am happy that the government also listened somewhat and changed its way, in a small way, after much encouragement from both the New Democrats and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. For years we have been calling for indexing of the gas tax transfer. This vital fund gives cities across Canada a minimum of stable, long-term funding. However, until now, it shrank every year in real terms because of inflation.
Partially indexing the fund to inflation would give cities slightly more secure funding, at least from this source. However, the municipalities would not be getting a nickel more in the next three years because of a very regressive formula.
Let me provide details. For 2013, 2014 and 2015, the municipalities would continue to get only $2 billion across Canada. It is only in 2016 that the indexing would go up somewhat and an extra $100 million would kick in.
However, indexing is only the first step. Now the government needs to get serious about long-term, predictable funding that closes the gap. We need gas tax fund no. 2.
There are some promising signs in the budget, but we need to make it concrete and deliver results to Canada's unemployed youth. Infrastructure spending has to be tied to apprenticeships and training so that a new generation can get good-paying jobs in skilled trades and we can get young Canadians the training and jobs that they need to succeed while we fix our cities.
Much work needs to be done, but if the government gets serious about fixing Canada's crumbling infrastructure and creating jobs, we can turn the budget from a disappointment to an opportunity.
