Mr. Speaker, I was present in the House when the finance minister addressed this bill. I noted a couple of things that he commented on and one important thing that he did not and I was wondering why. I thought I would rise to make sure that members are aware of it.
The government inherited a very healthy financial situation. In fact, the Auditor General reported in September that the surplus for the year ended March 31, 2006 was $32.2 billion.
It reminds me of the discussion we had in 1997 when we had the first balanced budget in a very long time. People were asking what we were going to spend the surplus on, but that really was not the right question. We have to determine the benefit to Canadians. Ultimately the experts, the economists who consulted with parliamentarians, basically came to the conclusion that the real fiscal dividend to Canadians was not the surplus itself, which is a one time thing, but it was the ongoing savings, that is, the savings on interest on our national debt.
Over the last number of years we have had surpluses each and every year and have paid down about $89 billion worth of debt. If we look at it in its totality, the national debt today is just a little smaller than it was when the Liberal government took office in 1993 because the previous Conservative government had left a fiscal situation which had us at a $43 billion deficit in one year. There was almost another $100 billion of debt created by the time we could balance the budget. Canadians should know that the national debt still is an important issue and that the real fiscal dividend is the savings in interest. The savings estimated from the surplus for the last fiscal year is about $600 million a year. That is $600 million in interest savings that will be available each and every year to take care of the priorities of Canadians. I certainly wanted to make that point.
In the budget the government delivered a 1% decrease in the GST. Canadians were aware that that was an undertaking and it was done. If a Canadian spends $1,000 that means a savings of $10, 1%. Canadians ought to keep it in perspective that the GST cut is not very significant unless they are large spenders. A person would have to spend $30,000 a year approximately to save $300 in taxes. When we consider the fact that the government increased income taxes by a half of one per cent on the first marginal rate, one breaks even if one spends $30,000 on GST taxable goods. There is a very false economy here.
In addition to the budget items, the finance minister also boasted of a billion dollars in cuts to program spending. Canadians would generally understand that cutting unnecessary spending or fat within the system is a good thing, but the cuts include a $5 million cut out of the status of women, $45 million from CMHC housing support, $18 million from the literacy skills program, $55 million from youth employment initiatives, $6 million from the court challenges program, $39 million from regional economic development and more. When we consider there was a $600 million savings in interest on the national debt each and every year, was it really necessary to make these cuts?
With respect to the cuts to literacy specifically, I looked at some of the information. It is hard to believe but 22% of adult Canadians struggle throughout the day with ordinary tasks because they simply cannot read. Approximately 5.8 million Canadians cannot cope with the demands of a typical workplace. Further, about 3.2 million Canadians cannot read the label on a medicine bottle, deal with a job application or read their child's report card. These are fundamental things. Why would the government attack the adult literacy program?
The President of the Treasury Board told us exactly why. He said in this place that in his view it is already too late to deal with those people; they cannot read, that is it and we cannot remediate adult literacy. That is nonsense. In fact, there are adult literacy programs in conjunction with all of the provinces and territories across this land and they are working. We had a partnership with them and these cuts mean that the partnership in many cases has been damaged and in some cases has been broken.
It is not good enough just to say in a macro sense that $1 billion in program spending was cut. Where did it come from? Why did we touch the court challenges program? Why did we touch the status of women where we are talking about important issues affecting Canadian women in society? The equality provisions and other things, to ignore them is simply irresponsible.
The minister talked about things like the transit pass tax credits. Experts have told us that 90% of that tax credit is going to go to existing transit riders and the rest to people who try to get on transit, but there are very few public transit systems in Canada today that have excess capacity to take on enough people to make this credit worthwhile. It is really spending $9 to try to save $1. It makes no sense.
If we look at many of the items, in totality the budget has no streaming. It has no vision, no plan, no integration. It is just a mishmash of one-off issues to buy votes and on which the finance minister had to deliver because that is how the election was run.
I have often said that the success of a country is not an economic measure; it is a measure of the health and well-being of its people. It is not good enough to balance a budget to make a surplus. We have to take the savings and efficiencies that were built in and invest them in ways to help the people who are most in need, such as seniors, youth, the disabled, the illiterate, women who are disadvantaged in the workplace. Those are the kinds of things that Canadians are looking to be addressed.
Canadians are not just looking to be given $100 to go away and take care of things themselves. This is a fend for oneself type budget. I always used to say that $1 in the hands of a taxpayer is better than $1 in the hands of the government because the government does not know how to spend it.
When we consider even the $100 a month so-called child care benefit, that is not going to create child care spaces. It is not going to take care of early learning and child care so that our children get a good head start. It is going to do nothing. It was put there as a proxy for the government to say, “We have done our job. Here is your $1,200 for your child for the year. Take care of it yourself”. Everyone knows that it costs $1,200 a month to care for a child in third party child care, not $1,200 a year.
What is worse, and the government does not say this very often, but it had better start reminding Canadians not to spend that money too quickly because when people file their income tax returns, they will find that the $1,200 they were given is taxable. Depending on people's marginal tax rates, some people are going to have to pay back a lot of that money, especially employees who usually have the precise amount taken off during the year and upon filing their returns either owe or get back $1. They are going to be faced with owing hundreds of dollars. That is when they will realize just how bad this is.
I want to raise what this budget does not include. It does not include one of the election promises that was number five in the throne speech, the guaranteed wait times on health care. There is not $1 in this budget for guaranteed wait times. Health care remains the number one priority of Canadians. This is totally irresponsible. How is the government going to explain to Canadians after promising that if people could not get services in their own communities it would pick up the cost to get them in another province or even in the United States? This is a promise broken. This is totally irresponsible.
