Mr. Speaker, I am sorry if I lapsed into anything unparliamentary in my language.
The point I am trying to make is that we are faced with competing visions. Let us talk about this in more detail. It is the tale of two countries that are in economic crisis in North America, at least the two countries that are the greatest trading partners. The United States and Canada have found themselves in this global economic turmoil. There are competing visions and competing approaches taken in the two countries.
The President of the United States has put forward a stimulus package that is absolutely transformative. It is inspirational. It is going to change the old carbon based economy to one which the current president acknowledges is necessary to move forward into the next century, a green economy, a sustainable economy, and all the job creation and growth that can come out of that new sustainable economy. In our country we have a budget, a stimulus package which, by comparison, is narrow, small, without direction, without substance and tainted by politics and ideology.
Barrack Obama worked real magic in revitalizing not only his economy, but the sagging morale of his nation. His message of hope is sweeping the land and elevating the hearts and minds of the people he represents. Obama is a sorcerer working real magic.
By comparison, the Minister of Finance is like some road weary carnival magician, pulling sedated bunnies out of a tattered old top hat and saying, “Ta-dah and voilà, another magic trick”, and all it really is is a tired old tweaking of program spending. There is nothing inspirational or transformative about what he has shown us. In fact, it is inadequate and fails the test.
Canadians are not inspired by this budget. Canadians across the country are pointing out the shortfalls of the budget. Canadians, even members of the Liberal Party, are standing up and objecting to the point where the Liberal Party leader announced today that six of his Newfoundland and Labrador MPs are being permitted to vote against the budget in a “symbolic” protest. It has to be asked, what about the other 71 members of the Liberal caucus?
In the last Parliament the former leader of the Liberal Party kicked Joe Comuzzi out of the Liberal caucus just for saying he would vote against party lines on the budget. The current leader of the Liberal Party has not taken any such leadership, maybe because if he kicked out all those who object to the budget, there would be very little left of his caucus.
There are some women members of the Liberal caucus who have long defended women's right to equal pay for work of equal value. Will they be allowed to vote against the budget? That is a question that comes to mind.
The Liberal MP for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour has been standing on his feet in the House complaining about the shortcomings in the budget on the EI fund. Will he be allowed to vote against the budget?
What about Quebec which has 14 Liberal MPs? It is losing $770 million in the budget.
Prince Edward Island with three Liberal MPs is losing $12 million in health funding. Will they have the same permission as their counterparts from Newfoundland to vote against the budget?
Manitoba is losing $13 million in health care by virtue of this budget. No self-respecting member of Parliament from my home province of Manitoba should be voting for this budget and endorsing those millions of dollars of cuts.
The mayor of Toronto, the city that includes the Liberal leader's own riding, has openly condemned the budget as not protecting the most vulnerable. Will the 21 GTA Liberal MPs be allowed to show their disapproval?
This is the frustration Canadians have with the Liberal Party generally. They are chameleons. They are contortionists. They use pretzel logic to rationalize virtually anything, so we never know what they stand for. We cannot take anything to the bank.
As for our coalition, it is a good thing we did not shake hands on it because that lasted for a couple of weeks until at the very first sign of pressure the Liberals folded like a cheap suit.
We are pointing out shortcomings in the budget to the Canadian public so they will know who is standing up for Canadians, so they will know who is standing up as the real opposition to the budget. One simply cannot simultaneously oppose the budget and then vote for it in the same breath. There is a saying that one cannot suck and blow at the same time, but we are about to see a graphic illustration of how this is possible, if we stick around for another couple of minutes and watch the vote on the budget.
Time does not permit me to go through technical details of the budget, nor do we really need to, so I will restrict my remarks to two areas that I find to be abject failures.
The first is with respect to the employment insurance program. In my home province of Manitoba, 67.5% of unemployed people are ineligible for any EI benefits. This program is a catastrophic failure. An insurance program is supposed to provide income maintenance in times of crisis. When someone loses his or her job, he or she should be able to apply for EI and draw from it. It is mandatory to pay into it, but less than 40% of Canadians can get anything out of it when they are in need. That is a cash cow for the government. It is a licence to print money.
EI is no longer an insurance policy. It is a tax on every paycheque. What if it was house insurance and it was mandatory to pay into it and on the day the house burns down there is less than a 40% chance of being able to collect anything? We would say we had been ripped off. That has been the history of the EI system for decades. When the Liberals gutted the EI program, they took $20.8 million per year out of my riding alone in income maintenance benefits. No one has ever corrected this.
Now that we are in a genuine economic crisis, we expect the government of the day to fix the eligibility criteria of the EI program so that more people qualify. I was honestly amazed when the government chose not to deal with the eligibility criteria and only added five weeks to the benefits for those who are already collecting. That is not good enough.
Let me speak about the apprenticeship system. I am a journeyman carpenter by trade. I represented carpenters through the carpenters union throughout my working life. Apprentices are penalized a waiting period when they leave their job to do the school component of their apprenticeship. They are not unemployed. Why do they have a two week waiting period? Part of the deal was that they would leave their job and go to school for six weeks and then return to the job.
Those things could have been fixed and could have been addressed easily in this budget without a great deal of cost because the money is in the EI fund. It is not the government's money. It is the money of the employer and the employee.
The only other specific detail that I will address in the short time I have is the energy retrofit program for housing. I raise the Barack Obama model for the U.S. recovery and stimulus program. I will point out the glaring inadequacies of our program as contemplated by the Minister of Finance compared to the one in the United States.
Let me put it this way. A unit of energy harvested from the existing system through energy retrofit, or demand side management, is indistinguishable from a unit of energy produced at a generating station, except for four important facts: one, it is available at about one-third the cost; two, it creates between three and seven times the number of person years of jobs; three, it is available and online immediately instead of the time it takes to build another generating station, et cetera; and four, it is environmentally friendly and does not create any greenhouse gas emissions. Those four elements make demand side management a far more common sense proposal than the supply side management of building new generating stations in an energy star province like the province of Ontario.
From a stimulus point of view there is no more single important thing we could do because we would get the immediate stimulation of the energy retrofit of the home, which would be the renovation money spent, but also in time, after that renovation was paid for, the energy savings would mean more disposable income in the pocket of the homeowner. There would be a second wave of stimulation 18 months to two or two and a half years down the road. Those homeowners could save up to 40% of their energy costs and they would have a couple hundred bucks more in their pockets. They would surely go out and spend that money in the local economy.
This is an idea that we proposed to the Minister of Finance when he did his consultations with the parties. There is some contradiction here. I certainly submitted it to the representatives of the NDP to present to the Minister of Finance. If that did not happen, I will take the minister's word for it. However, let me suggest that the $10,000 maximum renovation deduction available in the proposal contemplated in the budget would yield a $1,350 rebate. I know it would be welcomed by some, but I do not believe that is enough of an incentive to make people do an energy retrofit to their home that they were not otherwise contemplating doing already. It means one has to have $10,000 to spend before one gets any rebate.
The proposal that we put forward was a revolving fund where there would be no upfront costs to the homeowner or the taxpayer. The energy retrofit would be paid for out of this revolving fund and then homeowners would pay that fund back through the energy savings until such time as the renovation was paid for and then they would get to keep the energy savings from that day on.
That is the kind of proposal that most homeowners would avail themselves of and that is the type of proposal that is going on in the United States. It is a revolving fund concept where Barack Obama and his administration intend to renovate 2 million homes within the parameters of this one program. That is transformative. That generates new technology and manufacturing in energy efficient innovation technology. We believe that is a lost opportunity because part of the message of hope and inspiration that we are hearing from the United States is this idea that we have to wean ourselves off the way we use energy today and that the future lies in a sustainable green economy.
The two things almost complement each other. There are two things we need to do. We need to stimulate the economy and we need to save the planet from global warming and harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The very work that needs to be done to save the planet is, in fact, the work that will shepherd us through these difficult economic times. There is a lot of work that needs to be done and now is the time to do it. If there was ever a justification for going into deficit again, it would be to do the work necessary to lead us into a sustainable economy and a new green environment.
Those are the kinds of transformational messages we are hearing south of the border. Here, it is frankly a void. It is almost the polar opposite, as if in this country we are somehow devoid of ideas of how to stimulate the economy with progressive action that will create meaningful jobs.
The books we are reading on this subject about the new blue-green alliance, the green collar economy, make the point that there is work for everyone in this new economy. The carbon-based economy left too many people behind. There were no roles to play for too many unskilled people. We argue that the work that needs to be done to save the planet offers work for everyone, from the unskilled labourers to the tradespeople, the installation people, and the people who design and manufacture the new technology. The advantage is that Canada could be at the forefront. We could show the world. We would be a centre of excellence for how to survive in a relatively harsh northern climate using less energy and using it smarter and better. Those are the messages of hope and inspiration that we were hoping to see and that were noticeably absent during the budget debate throughout this whole period of time.
I said that I would only deal with two of the shortcomings of this budget in what little time I had. I think it is important to address some of the other issues, one of which I dealt with a group over the lunch period just today. One of the public service unions, PIPSC, came to me to make a representation on behalf of their members.
I suspect it is appalled really at why the government would use this economic crisis as an opportunity to advance some of its own political ideology as it pertains to pay equity, to the civil service and the compensation of the civil service. It is confusing to many of us when the November fiscal update was introduced how freezing the wages of civil servants is going to stimulate the economy. That was a big of a mystery to all of us and I think one of the key things that threw the opposition parties into each other's arms to form a coalition.
As well, we are confused as to how balking on pay equity and removing the right of women to challenge pay equity, and making it a bargaining issue instead would somehow stimulate the economy. These things read like a neo-conservative wish list. Instead of legitimate economic measures to stimulate the economy, we had a wish list of outdated Conservative ideology, I might add, that was being foisted on Canadians.
It makes me wonder if the reluctance of the Conservatives to invite President Obama to address both houses of Parliament might be--