Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the 2006-07 federal budget. I thought I would be speaking to it at third reading, but I am even more pleased to speak to it during this take note debate.
Coming from the riding of St. Catharines, or more commonly known as “The Garden City”, this year's budget theme, “Turning a New Leaf”, along with the budget, is perfectly suited for my community.
Four weeks ago, I participated in a Canada-Ontario affordable housing announcement in my riding entitled “Bethlehem Projects”. Federal, provincial and municipal officials were there along with 200 members of the public. We attended the groundbreaking. The event was an excellent one. It is a good partnership and project for my community. It will provide the needed affordable housing in St. Catharines, in the Niagara region.
After the event, middle class folks literally lined up to speak to me about the positive aspects of the budget. That is who the budget addresses. The budget presents example after example of benefits for my community and our country.
Let us take child care, for example. An investment of over $3.7 billion over two years for the universal child care benefit will provide all families with $1,200 per year for each child under the age of six. In St. Catharines that means over 8,700 children and their parents will get a benefit from that.
We will invest in creating new child care spaces. The budget allocates $250 million, beginning in 2007, to create real child care spaces as part of Canada's universal child care program.
We will provide a physical fitness tax credit of up $500 to cover registration fees for children's sports. One might wonder how many children are under the age of 16 in St. Catherines. Twenty-three thousand five hundred children and their parents will benefit from this.
The previous member spoke about post-secondary education. Let me inform him in a little more detail what exactly that means. The budget provides $370 million in new investments to foster excellence and accessibility in our colleges and universities. Here are some numbers.
At Brock University in the Niagara region, right up on the hill from the St. Catharines riding, 17,000 students have the potential to benefit from this. At McMaster University, 20,000 students will benefit. At the University of Toronto, 73,000 will benefit. In Quebec, 2,200 students at Bishop's, 31,000 at Concordia, 33,000 at McGill and 36,000 at Laval will benefit. The numbers keep adding up.
There is also a new textbook tax credit which will benefit approximately 1.9 million Canadian students. It may seem small, but it is the right intent and it will provide over $260 million over two years to these students.
We are going to expand the eligibility for the Canada student loans program by reducing the parental contribution required. It is estimated that such an improvement will allow over 30,000 additional students to gain access to student assistance. That is two or three universities when we look at the numbers. It will also allow 25,000 current student borrowers the opportunity to increase the amount of loan they receive. That is not to say they will not have to pay it back, but it will ensure they have the opportunity to attend post-secondary education.
We also address security for our borders in the budget. We have said that we will provide over 1,000 new RCMP officers and federal prosecutors to enhance law enforcement priorities such as drugs, corruption and border security. That is especially important from my perspective. I live very close to the border. A number of border communities surround St. Catharines: Niagara Falls, New York, Lewiston, Buffalo.
It is about security. It is about saying that we are ready and willing to make the investment that was not made over the past 13 years. This speaks to exactly why we should be moving forward on this issue with respect to the budget.
The budget deals with two very specific issues on crime. The first is a $20 million commitment to communities to prevent youth crime. This is about prevention. Ideally, we need to put tools and textbooks into the hands of our young people, not guns and not gangs; tools that will help them realize that they can grow up to lead productive lives and participate in the democracy of this country.
We have also set aside $26 million in this budget to implement programs and to provide better services for victims of crime. They should not be last on the list when it comes to crime and the results of criminal activity. They should be first. We will ensure they have the money necessary to attend court proceedings. No matter what happens in court, we do not want it to cost the victims of those crimes money to attend. We want to ensure they are not shunned, that they are listened to and that their testimony is acted upon.
We are committed to implementing a 10 year plan to strengthen health care. Transfers for health care will rise by 6% this year and 6% next year. As part of that plan, the government has already provided $5.5 billion for the wait time reduction transfer to help ensure that Canadians will receive the health care they need when they need it. We will invest over $52 million per year for the next five years to improve screening, for prevention and research activities and to help coordinate efforts with the provinces and with cancer care advocacy groups throughout the country.
We will encourage more charitable giving from within each and every community in the country. We will eliminate the capital gains tax on donations of publicly listed securities to charities effective immediately. This will help create a donations pool of about $300 million annually.
I would like to quote from a letter I received almost immediately after the budget was introduced. It was written by Liz Palmieri, the executive director of the Niagara Community Foundation. She says:
On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Niagara Community Foundation I want to thank your government for including in the budget the announcement regarding gifts of securities to charities.
The charitable community across Canada has been advocating, for a number of years for a change in the treatment of these types of donations. In the recent election, the platforms of...your party...included provisions for a change and we were pleased to see this change being implemented on June 2.
We said that we would do it in our platform and we did it in the budget.
I want to mention a few charities: the John Howard Society of Niagara; the Niagara Ina Grafton Gage Foundation; the Niagara Peninsula Children's Centre; and, the Rotary Club of St. Catharines, Lakeshore, Charitable Trust are all thankful and will all benefit from the ability that this announcement in the budget makes.
Yes, there are tax reductions in this budget, a permanent legislative reduction in the lowest tax rate to 15.5% from 16% as of July 1, 2006. The budget also confirms that, starting on January 1, 2005 until June 2006, the lowest tax rate will be 15%.
The new Canada employment credit will provide relief on the first $1,000 of employment income in recognition of expenses incurred by employees across the country. It means that millions of employees will now have a reduction they did not have prior to this budget.
The apprentices will benefit from the budget. The tool deduction and the Canada employment credit will provide tax relief to about 700,000 employed trades people. Our government has pledged to invest more than $500 million over the next two years in the apprenticeship job creation tax credit and apprenticeship incentive grant, which will benefit over 100,000 apprentices.
I have enjoyed my experience on the finance committee thus far in the 39th Parliament. Although we have had our discussions to and fro, as the member for Markham—Unionville knows, we have, on a regular basis, debated the issue of tax reduction.
We have been sitting for a couple of months. We have gone through the estimates clause by clause to see what benefits the budget contains for Canadians. It was interesting to find, after a question was posed by the member for Markham—Unionville, that if we had not had the 16% to 15.5% in this budget, which was unanimously agreed to at the third reading stage this morning because, I am happy to say, the Liberals finally understood that if they did not agree with the budget and if the budget had not passed then they would be voting against their 16% to 15% reduction, on which they so proudly campaigned in the last election. My hat is off to the Liberals for supporting the budget this morning because they supported their budget cuts.
We could talk this afternoon about non-legislated boondoggles, sponsorship, gun registry and those cost overruns but we need to talk about the point my colleague, the member for Peterborough, made at committee when he said that the burden of tax on the people needs to go down, not up. The budget actually does that. It provides $20 billion for middle class, for lower middle class folks and for those in the lower income brackets who need tax relief. They will get it in spades because it is more tax relief than we saw in the last four budgets combined.
While I applaud the efforts across the way to reduce taxes in 2005, those reductions were not included in the 2005 budget. They were done through a ways and means motion that never carried into anything that was in legislation. It came a year too late and, I might say, a dollar short from what this budget actually provides for the people of this country and the people in my community.
The budget, when implemented, will see 655,000 individuals freed from the chains of paying federal income tax. This will be seniors, low income earners, middle class earners and anyone who actually pays GST. Anyone who picks up a product anywhere that is taxed by GST will, after July 1, pay less than they are paying today.
I want to reinforce to the House that the budget is good for Canadians and it is good for the folks in my community of St. Catharines.
I want to take a page out of what has happened over the past, let us say since the end of November until today. Leading up to the last election we made commitments to Canadians, as I made commitments to the people in my community, and we told Canadians that if we were to become government we would actually follow through on our commitments. This budget proves that we have done that.
If we were to put the campaign document and this year's federal budget side by side, we would find they agree with each other. The budget enforces our campaign commitment. This sets the stage for a renewed relationship with the 308 ridings that we represent here in Ottawa. It tells Canadians that we do what we say we will do, that we will be accountable and that we will implement the commitments we made before we were elected.
