Mr. Speaker, budgets are all about choices and, with this budget, the Conservatives have chosen winners and losers.
The winners are those who promote Canada as a fossil fuel centre; those who rid environmental assessment of its substance; those who do not stand up for communities that want to protect the wilderness in western Canada and the fragile coastal waters; and those who work to increase oil exports as quickly as possibly.
The losers are the ones the government is willing to leave behind.
Our environment and those working to protecting it are losers in this budget. The Conservatives have tried to dismiss their critics as radicals. However, it is their dogged promotion of disastrous environmental policy that is truly outrageous. The Conservatives want to gut Environment Canada and National Resource Canada, along with the environmental assessment process. They want to send hundreds of supertankers through some of the world's most dangerous waters off some of the world's most fragile coastline. The oil sands pipeline is a real threat to our environment, fisheries and first nations. The risk for supertanker oil spills is enormous.
The government must listen to everyone who is affected, not just the oil industry.
Environmental assessment processes are not just red tape. They are an essential tool in the protection of our environment and in the promotion of sustainable development practices.
The government claims to be focused on economic growth but it has no plan to take advantage of the enormous economic opportunity of the green economy. Instead, it is shutting down the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.
While it continues to provide generous subsidies to its friends in the oil industry, it has no direct funding to support renewable energy, and it has abandoned the ecoenergy home retrofit program.
Central Canada and Ontario are also big losers in this budget, along with any company that relies on manufacturing.
At a time when governments in Germany and the U.S. are recognizing the importance of manufacturing, the Conservative government has turned its back on the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing has a powerful spillover effect on the rest of the economy, including on innovation. In other words, the outsourcing of our manufacturing jobs leads to the outsourcing of our innovative edge as well.
Some other losers in this Conservative budget are Canadian artists. This sector is especially important in my riding of Parkdale—High Park, where a great many artists live and work. The arts play an important role, not only in the vitality of our communities, but also in economic recovery.
We appreciate the fact that the Canada Council for the Arts is not affected by the cuts, but I am deeply concerned about the cuts to Telefilm Canada and the NFB and the major cuts to the CBC.
The CBC is not only one of the country's vital cultural institutions. A study in 2010 shows that the Canadian public broadcaster generated economic spinoffs to the tune of $3.7 billion on expenditures of $1.7 billion.
My voters are strong supporters of the CBC and they are not alone. In fact, 74% of Canadians want the government to provide more support to the CBC. The major cuts in the budget will have tangible repercussions on the CBC's capacity to develop or even maintain its regional and cultural programming.
Of course, those are not the only losers in the budget. Canadian cities, like my home of Toronto, have been completely left out of this budget. There is nothing for affordable housing, nothing for transit, nothing for immigrant settlement services and there is no new money for infrastructure.
A big issue In my riding of Parkdale—High Park has been the building of the Union-Pearson air-rail link. People want clean, electric trains to be built prior to the opening of the service, not years down the road. The budget contains nothing to support the electrification of this important infrastructure project. In fact, there is no mention of it at all.
The budget contains nothing for young people. Not only are there no new jobs but the Katimavik project is being cancelled. A young person just contacted me yesterday to say that she had been accepted to the program for this summer, and now it has been cancelled. That is outrageous for young people in this country.
Canadian retailers will also continue to feel the squeeze from lower prices across the border, forcing them to lower their own prices and decrease their profitability.
The growing income gap is one of the biggest challenges that our country must tackle. In fact, we are now reaching levels of inequality not seen since the 1929 crash. However, the Conservative budget does not address this problem.
In fact, this budget makes the problem worse by forcing our seniors to work two years longer to make ends meet. This budget should have been used to strengthen retirement security for Canadians, not to undermine it. Despite what the Conservatives have said, the OAS is entirely sustainable, a fact confirmed by many pension experts and the PBO. They should try listening to him once in a while. This program keeps tens of thousands of seniors out of poverty and the changes proposed by Conservatives will hit the most vulnerable seniors the hardest.
This government has made things worse by trying to balance the budget at the expense of the provinces. The budget unilaterally alters the formula for calculating health transfers, which will deprive provinces of $31 billion and create a two-tier system.
The Conservatives have made provincial finances less stable and imposed significant costs, for instance, millions of dollars for their prison plans.
The government has made the problem worse by making deep cuts to the public services Canadians rely on. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that cutting 19,000 jobs will have a major impact on services. The $5.2 billion in cuts in this budget will result in significant job losses in the private sector as well.
This budget has nine times more in cuts than in job creation measures and no mention of any strategy to deal with the stalled labour market, no strategy to deal with the 1.4 million Canadians out of work and no strategy to deal with the lowest labour force participation in a decade. In fact, the Conservative budget plans for unemployment to rise.
Yes, budgets are all about choices and priorities but it is clear that the priorities of the government are out of line with the priorities of Canadians. With this budget, we all lose. Of course, it our job here on this side of the House to also propose solutions.
What would an NDP government do differently? We would have a balanced approach and a long-term vision for the sustainable development of the energy sector. Instead of shipping more crude oil overseas, we would focus on value added jobs in the processing sector and tomorrow's clean, renewable energies. We would strengthen our manufacturing sector, maintain its quality and support jobs here at home. We would provide our arts community with stable funding, and we would support our public broadcaster in promoting Canadian culture, linguistic identity and regional diversity both at home and abroad.
An NDP government would work with our provincial, territorial and municipal partners to strengthen our communities with strategic investments in public transit, in affordable housing and in critical infrastructure. We would renew this country's commitment to family reunification and strengthen immigrant settlement services. We would retain the age of eligibility for OAS at age 65 and strengthen the CPP-QPP to ensure that our seniors' retirement is secure.
We would work with the provinces and territories to ensure that families have access to the services they need. Unlike the Conservative government, picking winners and losers, an NDP government would work with Canadians from coast to coast to coast to build a Canada where no one is left behind.
