Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity, brief as it is, to enter into the debate on Bill C-9, the budget implementation bill, this massive tome that I hold before me today. My only regret is that I will not have the time to adequately go through many of my strongly-held views on the inadequacy of this particular document.
Let me begin my remarks by sharing with the House the content of a speech that I once heard by a civil rights leader in the United States. He began by saying that if there are five children and only three pork chops, the solution is not to kill two of the children and neither is it the solution to divide those three pork chops into five equal pieces because then all of the children go to bed hungry and none of them have enough to eat.
The social democratic point of view, as well as my own, is to challenge the whole idea that there are only three pork chops and to challenge the whole myth or lie, as it were, that in the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world, we cannot provide for the basic needs of a family to not only survive but to flourish.
This introduces the theme, in the few minutes that I have today, that Bill C-9, the budget implementation bill, fails Canadians in the most fundamental ways because a budget implementation bill is an opportunity for the redistribution of wealth in this country and speaks volumes about the priorities of the ruling party that crafted the budget and the implementation bill.
I am trying not to overstate things, but there has been an undeniable and recognized trend in recent years of the shift of wealth from the middle and working classes to a smaller and smaller elite of the very wealthy. This budget document does nothing to ameliorate this shift of wealth, what I argue is the redistribution of wealth, against the best interests of ordinary Canadians. In fact, it exacerbates the problem. It compounds that trend.
I will perhaps only have time to dwell on what I believe is an obvious argument to make my case. Within this document is found the argument that dealing with poverty or bringing seniors out of poverty through dealing with inadequate pensions, et cetera, is somehow a structural deficit and, therefore, the government cannot go there. Yet, giving permanent corporate tax cuts to the extent of $15 billion is viewed as a necessary investment in the economy.
How did we ever come to such a perverse view of the distribution of wealth in this country that lifting seniors out of poverty is viewed as a structural deficit that we cannot allow ourselves to enter into and yet, in fact, going even further, borrowing money to give permanent tax cuts to corporations is viewed as an investment in the economy? Nowhere can anyone find a single study that proves beyond doubt that giving corporate tax cuts leads to job creation. It simply does not exist. I challenge and defy people to show me the direct evidence that giving yet another corporate tax cut will create jobs in Canada and can, therefore, be viewed as an investment.
This is all an elaborate hoax, in my view. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I accuse the neo-conservative mindset of perpetrating an elaborate, deliberate hoax on the Canadian people to further what I believe is a nonsensical argument that corporate tax cuts will produce the results claimed. It is a leap of faith that is not warranted. It was not even warranted when there was a budgetary surplus and now we have to borrow money to give another $15 billion away.
I will give one example of how wrong-headed this is. It is a point made by the leader of my party, the member for Toronto—Danforth, to our recent NDP convention in Manitoba. He and our party costed out what it would cost to lift every Canadian senior citizen up to the poverty line. There are approximately 450,000 Canadian seniors living below the poverty line. The cost of elevating every one of those seniors just to the poverty line would be $700 million. That is less than one-fifteenth of the corporate tax cuts that are inherent within this budget.
The leader of the NDP went to the Prime Minister with this very argument, suggesting the government put the brakes on these tax cuts for a year or two. Given that we are in an economic recession and we want to get money out there quickly, one way that we can stimulate the economy and achieve a secondary objective as well is to put more money in the hands of poor seniors. They would spend the money immediately and they would spend it in the right places, in the local economy. It would be in circulation the very next day at a cost of $700 million, not an insignificant amount of money but it pales in comparison to the $15 billion that the government contemplates giving in corporate tax cuts.
That is how wrong-headed it is, and one of the reasons that so many of these Conservative absurdities actually become government policy is the intellectual veneer that is applied to them by right-wing think-tanks that, in fact, are bought and paid for by the same people whose special interests are being served by this reasoning and this logic.
Again, I challenge the reasoning. I challenge the logic behind this spending. I am frustrated in my tone perhaps, but somebody has to sound the alarm. Somebody has to blow the whistle on this trend.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day on a car that said, “At least the war on the middle class is going well”. In fact, working people, or those from the middle class on down in the economic spectrum, are feeling the pinch. It is not their imagination. Canadians should be comforted to know that it is not their imagination that it is harder and harder to make ends meet. It is true, and this is the predictable consequence of economic policies and economic trends that, in fact, leave less money in the pockets, transferring this wealth, once again concentrating this wealth, in the hands of people who do not even necessarily have the best interests of the country at heart, who do not even reinvest in Canada.
When given the opportunity, again I challenge anyone to show me the empirical evidence that these tax cuts create jobs in Canada. More often than not, that money is transferred to these corporations in the form of tax cuts and there are no strings attached. They could invest in an offshore plant. They could actually lay off 1,000 workers in the same year that we are giving them money. The irony is that these tax cuts are not going to the very businesses that do need some help and support. Because of its nature as an income tax break, it is only businesses that are showing profits that are benefiting from these particular tax breaks.
It is just wrong-headed and the leader of my party was right to appeal to the Prime Minister, to urge him, even if he cannot see fit to cancel this round of even further corporate tax cuts, to delay them or cut them in half, reduce them, use some of that money for something more strategic that would, in fact, elevate the living standards of the people who gave us their confidence, who sent us here to advocate on their behalf.
I was shocked to learn that 450,000 seniors are living below the poverty line in this country. I believe that if we had used $700 million to address their specific needs, it would have put more money into circulation and it would have been the moral thing to do.
Let me perhaps spend the last minute that I have to comment on the last article of this 450-some-odd page tome, which is the final straw in the wholesale theft of the $57 billion surplus of the EI fund.
I have been speaking on this for the better part of 10 years. When someone deducts money from workers' paycheques for a specific purpose and then uses it for something entirely different and denies them the benefits they were guaranteed when it was taken off their cheques, that is wholesale fraud. It is not only misleading; it is fundamentally wrong. That is $57 billion that would have given us the fiscal capacity to address our social programs. It has been eliminated and gobbled up and used for different things—
