Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour for me to rise. Our esteemed House leader just made a suggestion as to what I should do with this first response to the budget as the critic of the official opposition and having unlimited time. He suggested I use 14 hours. I do not think we are going to actually spend that much of the House's time on some of the New Democrats' thoughts about the most recent budget. Yet, it is extensive in terms of some of the things we do want to talk about and some of the things that are important to Canadians that are not in the document that was presented, this so-called plan from the government.

First, I have to place myself in the context of the debate and my comments will come as the representative of Skeena—Bulkley Valley, the great northwest of British Columbia. The riding represents about a third of the province of British Columbia. It is the northwest coast, the northwest corner of our country. It is a beautiful place.

As is often noted, it is also a place that has met with some of the most pressing and important questions facing our country. We are a resource-based economy, primarily. With 40% to 45% first nations representation and some of the longest and strongest traditions of first nations people anywhere in the world, we have had to meet with some of the sometimes difficult questions about how to make decisions, not only for today but for future generations.

Before politics, I was in small business. Therefore, not only the place I come from and who I am from my experience inform the way that I and many in my party try to approach every debate, which is from a place of understanding of what Canadians need and hope for from their government.

In a time of economic uncertainty, as the Conservatives have admitted to, one would have hoped that we would have seen yesterday a balanced, fair approach with some measure of ambition. However, when we look through the many pages of the budget and listen to the many words coming from the Minister of Finance, a lack of ambition was clear from the very outset.

The Conservatives talked more about the past and some of their record than they did about the future. In fact, when asked later about his budget, the finance minister, when approaching the concern about how expensive some of his more outrageous decisions were, said that was not for us to have to worry about that we can simply let future generations worry about the problems of paying for his electoral promises of today. If that is not the very definition of irresponsibility, I do not know what is.

There is short-term thinking in politics, but the Conservatives have taken this to the ridiculous, fully knowing that some of their measures cost a lot today but will be increasingly expensive over years. When that is pointed out to them, Conservatives say, “Well, we're probably not going to be here”. They are not worried about it. All they are worried about is what happens over the next number of months and saving their own political bacon.

Controversies, like what is going on in the Senate, the lack of economic performance, the outrageous and irresponsible presenting of so-called anti-terror legislation that is basically just anti-charter legislation have all combined to put a certain amount of political headwinds against the government. Therefore, instead of thinking of the broader interests of Canadians, Conservatives have narrowcast, focus-grouped, and brought their messaging to the point where even budgets, and nothing but budgets, are now a political document, an electoral platform, rather than what the economy actually needs.

Let us take a look at the Conservative record first because that is where the budget falls. That is the context in which these measures will be applied. For the last almost decade now, we have had a Conservative ideology that has thought that tax cuts to the largest and wealthiest corporations, even in the midst of a recession, were the most important thing. The darkest days of the recession saw many Canadian companies struggling to make a profit and by not making a profit they did not pay taxes. The Conservatives thought that banks and oil companies, in particular, needed tens of billions of dollars in breaks.

That Conservative agenda has actually significantly shifted the tax burden in Canada. This is according to Finance Canada's own statistics. Since the Conservative's took power, personal income taxes rose to the treasury by $15 billion. Fifteen billion dollars more is collected by the Conservatives for personal income taxes, yet $4.4 billion less has come in from large corporations. That is a clear agenda in choice where Conservatives have said that to pay for roads and hospitals and health care they are happy, in fact enthusiastic, to have taxpayers, Canadians, individuals and families pay more of the burden and lessen the responsibilities of the largest corporations. That is a Conservative tax shift of monumental proportions.

We have also seen, in the last number of years since the Conservatives took over, an economy that went through the global recession, as so many western economies did, but has since yet been able to find its feet again. The Governor of the Bank of Canada, when asked about job growth under these Conservatives, said that job growth in Canada was atrocious.

For those who are not familiar with banker language, especially governors of the various banks, they do not tend to use strong language. They use very calm, quiet, coded words to transit their intentions because every word they utter can be parsed and have big impacts on the market.

When a governor of a bank comes in and says that the job performance of this economy, of the government, is atrocious, one should pay attention. He is right. The job growth in Canada right now is estimated at zero. I do not know if that is a concern or even getting through to some of my Conservative colleagues, but the job growth rate in Canada right now is 0%.

I do not know why Conservatives would think that 2014 was what they called a recovery year, a good year. The Canadian population grew at almost twice the rate as job growth did. Let us pause for a moment. This was a good year. This was before oil started to fall from its height of $100 or more per barrel to where it is settling now, around $50 or $55. This was supposed to be a good year.

The Conservatives can spin, but the notion of spin in politics requires at least a kernel of truth somewhere which all the fancy words and big ad campaigns are wrapped around. However, when there is no kernel of truth, spin is turned into what we call, what it is, a lie, not truth. Canadians can tell the difference when someone is trying to make something appear much better than it is and when someone is telling the simple opposite of facts.

Let us get back to the facts. Since the government took office in Canada we have lost more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs. At one point the industry minister, who one could say is responsible for manufacturing, rose in his place in this House and disputed what the NDP was saying about manufacturing. He said that the NDP was making it up because he had read it in a magazine. I guess that is where he got his information. A day later he had to recant, realizing that he was in fact wrong.

Aside from that, who pays the penalty? The real price is paid by Canadian families who can no longer afford the mortgage, rent or putting food on the table because they have lost their jobs at saw mills, auto plants or aerospace across this country.

Over these numbers of years, we have also seen the Conservatives add almost $160 billion of debt to the national debt in Canada. The Conservatives, who say how great they are at managing, have added almost $160 billion on the debt. If we break that down, for every man, woman and child, that is approximately $4,000 for every single living soul in this country. It is a debt that the Conservatives have placed on their backs.

We could ask, “For what?” If the Conservatives are going to borrow that much money, almost $4,000 per person, we should see some results. However, we have an economy that has flatlined, anemic growth. We have 130,000 fewer jobs for young Canadians today than before the recession. That is 130,000 fewer opportunities for young people to get into the workforce. We have 300,000 fewer jobs across the economy than we did before the recession began.

The Conservatives talk about some sort of mythical recovery and how wonderful things are, but again, spin only works if there is a kernel truth in it. How can we have lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs and be creating no jobs right now while the Conservatives are somehow congratulating themselves and pulling a muscle patting themselves on the back so often. Conservatives are so completely out of touch with the realities facing Canadians, the people out in the real world, the people we allegedly work for and that the Conservatives are meant to work for.

We proposed a very sound and reasonable solution to some of the challenges we faced, particularly when it comes to child poverty. It has been almost 20 years since the House of Commons committed to eliminating child poverty in Canada.

We came forward with a solution weeks ago to close a loophole entirely designed for the wealthiest Canadians imaginable: those who receive their pay in stock options. I do not know what kind of jobs members in the House had, but my family and friends have not had the experience of being paid in stock options. Maybe that is a common experience among the Conservatives because they maintained a loophole that was opened up first by the Liberals and it is not cheap by the way.

This loophole costs the treasury about $720 million a year. What it does, it says to CEOs and folks in the corner offices that when they are paid in stock dividends, they will be taxed at a lower rate than if they were paid the way most working-class, middle-class Canadians get paid, which is in salary. However, the government would tax them less, almost three-quarters of a billion dollars less, which is a grand and massive gift to those who already have so much.

We said that we should close this loophole. These folks do not need another Porsche or Maserati going out the door. Let us close this loophole and actually help those who are most disadvantaged, those children and families who are having trouble putting food on the table and going to school hungry. However, the Conservatives, in their budget, refused that opportunity.

We see 1.3 million Canadians today out of work. Actually, we had a moment here in question period today when we asked the minister to take action to help save some jobs on the east coast. She replied that those people are going to be so happy because of a tax cut that the Conservatives put in, which misses the concept that when people lose their job, a tax cut does not do much because they are not paying taxes.

Under the Conservatives, only 30% or 35% of working people who pay into employment insurance are eligible for employment insurance. Previously, under the Liberals, somewhere around $54 billion was stolen out of the EI fund to pay for all manner of things that the Liberals wanted to do. When the Conservatives came in, they said it was a new day and they were going to change that.

However, one of the cynical tricks the Conservatives did was change the qualification rules. They made the rules tighter and harder for Canadians who work seasonal or temporary jobs, such as in the tourism and agriculture sectors. The Conservatives lump them out of the employment insurance program, but are still happy enough to collect the EI remittances from their paycheques. They get to pay in but never actually get to use the insurance. That sounds like some awful insurance scheme or scam in which they can only pay in but never receive any of the insurance benefits.

That sounds like Veterans Affairs. For those in the military, there is a certain amount of support for soldiers who are struggling and have been injured. They come back from Afghanistan, Iraq and other incredibly dangerous places, and the Conservatives thump themselves on the chest and say, “Stand up for our troops, we do”. The Conservatives are always happy with the photo ops. Yet, when the troops come home and when we need to actually stand up for them in a sincere and honest way, we have seen the Conservatives actually claw back $1 billion from our veterans, meanwhile denying them the access to the care and coverage that they are entitled to, that they so bravely fought for.

They do not ask for much, but we have seen the treatment of our vets by this government. There is no other word for it but “shameful”. It is shameful that a hero today, when they have the uniform on, is forgotten tomorrow under the current Prime Minister.

I have sat with families in my constituency who are asking for some basic treatment of fairness. One family came to me just weeks ago. Their son had killed himself not that long ago after returning from several tours in Afghanistan. His family asked for some help from Veterans Affairs for the funeral. They asked for some help to bring in some of his company who had served with him in Afghanistan. In both cases, the Conservative government decided to claw back money out of Veterans Affairs rather than support this member.

This man had sought help for the PTSD that he was suffering under. He had sought help multiple times from the current Conservative government and had been turned down. At the funeral, several of his friends who had flown up on their own dime spoke to us about how this man had saved their lives, and not just in the field of combat but since they had returned because they had similar suicidal thoughts.

What does it say about a country when we treat our veterans this way and when we simply refuse to acknowledge the price and sacrifice they have made and take such glory, as the Conservatives do, in launching yet another war and saying that this is about the identity of this country and that we will stand up for this and stand up for that? Yet when the bill is to be paid to our brave men and women, Conservatives would rather have their balanced budget on the backs of those veterans than actually do them the service and the justice they are entitled to.

There are other choices made in the budget that are most disconcerting. The Prime Minister himself made a sacred promise to first nations. There is a significant gap in the funding for the education of young kids in this country. There is about a 30% to 32% gap between what first nations kids receive on reserves and what everyone else gets when it comes to education. It is a significant gap, as much as $2.3 billion. The Prime Minister said to start a new relationship, because we all know that he has had his problems with basically understanding first nations' realities. He made a commitment of $1.9 billion to start to close that gap so that first nations kids would have the opportunities that all of our children do. Where was that promise in the budget? Conservatives found their way to $40 million. From $1.9 billion to $40 million is what they said.

It is maintaining the status quo, maintaining the gap, maintaining under Conservatives another generation of first nations kids who do not have the same opportunities as the rest of us. The Conservatives' answer to that is to blame first nations, much as the minister did over missing and murdered aboriginal women. Who did he cite as the main culprit for this? It was not the lack of transportation and support for first nations communities or the lack of jobs in first nations communities. He blamed first nations men. He said it is primarily their responsibility; it is their fault.

When a minister of the crown stands in front of a group of first nations leaders, or stands in front of anyone, and has the audacity to blame some of the very same victims of this crisis, then when we look for support for a national inquiry to find the root causes, not the ones the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs claimed in his blatantly, I want to say derogatory or insulting terms, it angers me. When I hear a minister of the crown perpetuate racist stereotypes, it angers me as a Canadian. When we ask for a national inquiry, the government says, as the Prime Minister said, it is not on their radar.

Conservatives were able to launch a national inquiry called the Cohen Commission when some salmon did not come up the Skeena River, which I think was $30-odd million, because we had a bad salmon run and needed to get to the bottom of what was going on with those fish. That was important, because those fish are important to our economy and our way of life. The Conservatives can find money for missing fish but cannot find money for missing and murdered aboriginal women. Where are the government's priorities?

Let us see where the Conservatives' priorities are at in the context of an economy that has flatlined, anemic job growth, young people having an unemployment rate twice the national average, and a government that put all of its economic eggs in one basket. Was $150 oil not going to stay forever? That was the plan. They were going to build pipelines all over the place, east, west, north, and south. They were going to bulldoze them through. They were going to scrap environmental laws and gut the environmental assessment process. Lo and behold, oil goes up and oil goes down. Imagine. It is kind of like the Conservatives.

It is like the goldfish in the goldfish bowl that swims around and sees a castle and says “Ah, there is a castle in here”. It does another turn, and it has such bad a memory that the goldfish says, “There is a castle in here”. It just does it over and over again. The Conservatives put all their eggs in one basket, and then the commodity prices fall, and they say, “Holy cow, I cannot believe commodity prices have fallen. What a shock. It is time to panic and dip into the rainy day fund, because this is a national disaster”. That is what that fund was allegedly for.

Well, $50 a barrel for oil is the 40-year average. I do not know if $50 a barrel is a national crisis for Conservatives, because they placed the whole economy on one peg in their own planning, but it is the reality today. We actually had to delay the budget a couple of months for this shock, this impossible-to-comprehend shock, that oil went down in price. A lot of provinces were able to figure it out and actually deliver budgets, although Alberta did, and I do not know if that is working out so well for its current premier.

Let us look at the other priorities in this budget. The single largest item in this budget, in terms of agendas, is $2.5 billion for income splitting. I did not hear a lot about income splitting from the finance minister yesterday. He has done a lot of interviews with the media, and he never mentioned it in his number one, two, three, or four favourite items in his own budget. However, one would think he would want to take a little more credit for $2.5 billion, and it makes one wonder why.

From the C.D. Howe Institute to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which I think covers the spectrum fairly well in terms of economic thinking in the country, they have all said that this $2.5 billion for income splitting has to be panned because it ultimately goes to only 15% of Canadian families, and 85% of Canadian families get nothing. That 15% skews toward the wealthier groups in this country.

If the Conservatives think that it was those people who needed the most help, then they brought in a budget that met that thinking, because they are not only blowing $2.5 billion on income splitting, they are also going to add a higher ceiling to the tax free savings account, the TFSA. Many millions have one of these accounts, but only 11% have actually maxed out their contributions right now at $5,500. The Conservatives said, “If only 11% maxed out, let us almost double it to $10,000”.

I do not know about anyone else, but when I think of working-class, middle-class Canadians, some of those at the lower end of the economic scale, most of them do not face the predicament that at the end of the year they have $10,000 extra sitting in their pockets that they simply do not know what to do with. “We've paid our rent, we've paid the mortgage, we got the kids braces, we have everything we need. Honey, what do we do with this extra $10,000 I found? Oh, I know, the Conservatives have a solution for me”. That is where their priorities go.

Maybe all of their friends face this challenge every year of having too much money lying around, not attributed to the cost of living, but the people I work for do not actually face this problem each and every year. However, the Conservatives have decided that they are going to fork some cash into this. The amazing thing about this particular scheme is that the price of it starts at just a few hundred million, for wealthier Canadians, but when we start to walk it out over time, it becomes a gorilla. This thing will cost the treasury somewhere in the order of $20 billion a year. It will cost $20 billion a year, for folks who are in the upper scale, the wealthier Canadians.

When the finance minister was asked if this was responsible, prudent, and conservative, he said it was not their problem. I do not get this phrasing and why he chose it, but regardless, he said that it is for the Prime Minister's “granddaughter to solve”. It is not for him. It is for his grandkids to worry about. Therefore, why are they asking him questions about it? It is not his problem. They are just going to kick this one down the road and let them figure out how to pay for it. If it works over the next five months, says the finance minister, then so be it, because that is his time frame.

My goodness, this type of crass political calculation that will cost future generations so much is reminiscent of one other Conservative policy. It is not just fiscal, it is environmental. The former environment minister will know this. We have seen the Conservatives act like The Monkey Wrench Gang when it comes to environmental commitments on the international stage, which is the only way we are going to deal with climate change. We have to act both locally and internationally.

We have seen other countries take these steps. The Danes, the Finns, the Germans, the Brits, the Americans and the Chinese are all making pledges, commitments and promises. More important than that, we have seen it from the private sector. Globally last year investments in clean energy technology and energy production outpaced those of all carbon investments combined.

In fact, in Canada, despite antagonistic policies from the government, never mind not being helpful, as the Conservatives find a way to try to thwart anyone trying to do the right thing, we have seen the cost of solar go down by 83% since 2008. We have seen wind, solar, run-of-river and biomass energy production almost double since 2009. This is despite a Conservative government.

Imagine what we would do with a New Democratic government when it comes to clean energy. Imagine the opportunities we would have for young Canadians who are looking to work in the clean energy sector in jobs that are higher-value jobs, jobs that are often closer to home. They are jobs like retrofitting our homes so that the energy bill for Canadians will be lower because they will consume less energy. The negawatts people talk about are the best types of investments we can make.

The Conservatives actually had a home retrofit program. Do members remember this? I remember it. They created a home retrofit program, and it helped out small businesses. It helped to lower costs for Canadians. That is not bad. It created a whole bunch of new jobs and lowered our impact on the planet. That great idea became oversubscribed. It was so popular and worked so well that the Conservatives blew their first budget, so they did the natural Conservative thing when something is working well; they cancelled it.

The small businesses, the carpenters and folks who work in retrofitting and solar panels, and all of these companies that were starting to thrive and get their foothold had a backlash against the Conservatives, so the Conservatives brought it back. What happened? It was oversubscribed again. It worked too well, and what did the Conservatives do? They cancelled it again, because when something works that well, it is just so hard to imagine that having a clean energy economy in Canada would be good for Canada and that having a diverse economy might be a good idea.

Ask our friends in Alberta right now. Some of them are finding this new religion and saying that we should diversify. This is a really good idea. We should diversify, because the price of one of our major commodities just fell through the floor. Yet we look for the diversification efforts of the Conservative government, and we see the continuance of a $1-billion subsidy to the oil sands sitting in the budget. We see $1 billion more for Exxon and Shell. It is not just the corporate tax cuts they got, the billions there. This is another $1 billion. When we look around for clean energy, green energy, and clean tech, what do we find? We find nothing.

I have to give the Conservatives some credit here, because after almost 10 years of trying this across the board with no strings attached, with big, wealthy corporation tax cuts and an anemic job growth performance, with the results we see today, the Conservatives actually borrowed, stole, or at least endorsed the NDP plan that had been presented by the leader of the New Democrats in the House for a vote just a couple of months ago. What the leader of the NDP said was that small businesses create eight out of 10 new jobs in Canada, so let us drop their rate by almost 20%, from 11% to 9%. In manufacturing, we have lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs in this country since the Conservatives took over, so let us help the manufacturing sector. We need to innovate. Canada needs to be a better country when it comes to research and development and innovation.

We presented it to the House of Commons for a vote. The Conservatives voted against it and said that it was madness. What we suggested, they said, was economic madness. The Liberals voted against it because they said that lowering the small business tax rate is a tax dodge, a tax loophole, because a right-wing economist suggested such a thing. They voted against it for that reason.

We saw the Liberal leader out yesterday. When asked why he is voting against the budget, he said that it is because the budget lowers the tax rate on small businesses. We all know that according to the Liberal leader and his brain trust there that small businesses are tax evaders and tax cheats, so if we lower their tax rate, a bunch of rich guys are going to get away with something. Never mind that when the Liberals were in power, they handed out tens of billions of dollars of corporate giveaways with no strings attached. They created $650 million of dead money, according to the Bank of Canada and the finance department. Dead money is money that is given away and is not reinvested. They do not reinvest in a plant or hire more people. They just sit on it or give dividends to the shareholders, wherever they happen to live. The Liberal leader's first concern was that a cut to the small business rate was a tax loophole.

We presented those three ideas for manufacturing, helping out small businesses, and an innovation fund to the House of Commons for a vote and debate. The Conservatives called it economic madness because it had the colour orange attached to it. Now they have painted it blue and put it in the budget, but not quite. Mimicry never shows up properly the same way. The original is always a little bit better.

We were more aggressive on our small business tax cuts. We were more ambitious on our manufacturing help. We were more expansive on innovation. However, let us give them credit for this at least: the Conservatives have realized that their economic policy is a failure because the facts are in front of them. When we have been calling for manufacturing help, help for small businesses and all the rest for these long years and the Conservatives have dismissed it, I will take some of yesterday as a little endorsement, because imitation is the best form of flattery. If they are imitating our policies, although they did not get them quite right, at least they put something in there. We will fix them.

Where else did they miss on their priorities? They did not bring back the retirement age from 67 to 65. That is a direct hit to every senior in this country. That is two years for which they cannot receive the pension they paid into. It works out on average to about $28,000 for every senior per year, gone, cut by those guys. They come back and say, “Don't worry about it. We're going to let you contribute more because you have so much money when you are working”. For seniors facing that reality right now, far too many live in poverty in this country, and we plan to lift them out of that poverty.

The Conservatives could have helped by allowing more contributions to the Canada pension plan. Every private sector economist has said that this is one of the most stable and secure pension plans in the world and the investment and contribution toward that is a sound and fiscally prudent thing to do. They missed that.

We have talked about climate change. We have talked about their deplorable record on first nations. The Conservatives have gutted the coastal protection that we have in this country, on all coasts, with the Coast Guard, DFO, the ability to respond to accidents when they happen, and we know they happen because humans are involved. Yet, they did not replace that.

In fact, amazingly in this budget, the Conservatives are going to export the spill response model used in British Columbia to other coasts in Canada, because we saw with the spill last week in Vancouver harbour that a twelve and a half hour response to an oil spill beside one of our largest cities is not only acceptable, it is exceptional, according to the transport minister. Twelve and a half hours to get booms out 400 metres near a population of 3.5 million is great. Yet, when we look at what the Conservatives are going to do about coastal protection, they say they are going to take that awful performance and spread it around like a virus.

We have to take a close look at their balanced books and their balanced legislation, because this is important. The Conservatives are going to try to ride this pony on into the next election. It is important to ask how we got there and what choices were made.

My friend from Parkdale—High Park I think had the best analysis of this. It is like the Conservatives pulled out all the change from in between the cushions of the couch and they threw it in, and then they sold the couch because they have to get to this political agenda, which is what this has become. They have clawed back from Veterans Affairs. They have clawed back money from every type of service and protection we have keeping Canadians safe, such as railway safety, food inspection, environmental protection, all the basic stuff that Canadians look to their governments to do. The Conservatives cut all those programs and did not repair them.

They also had to dip into the contingency fund. This is the prudent approach; we set aside $3 billion because every once in a while there is a natural disaster that we cannot predict. The floods in Calgary come to mind. No one could have predicted that. Wait; climate scientists predict those kinds of things, but generally speaking, we do not know when and where these types of things are going to happen and we need to have a bit of a rainy-day fund set up.

The Conservatives have slashed that rainy-day fund by 66% and said that they need it now. The crisis right now is a political crisis. It is not a natural disaster, unless we call the Conservative Party such a thing, and we may, but it is a political crisis. They need to save their bacon and they need to balance the books, so they are going to take $2 billion out of there. They delayed the budget in order to book the sales of GM shares, until those sales came to maturity in April. They are going to bank those billion dollars, as well as rip off and change the employment insurance fund. All of this is what they did in order to achieve this, because in the fall, when they introduced their $2.5 billion income-splitting scheme, they thought they had a surplus of about $7 billion or $8 billion and they spent it. They spent $4.5 billion on these measures and a bunch of others. They spent the surplus before they had it. Then they panicked. They delayed the budget. They did not know what to do because the economy was not performing the way they had hoped. One would think that planning more than praying would be the edict within the finance department, but not under the Conservatives.

We have seen this legislation to balance the books, that outside of extraordinary years, recessionary years, the Conservatives are going to say that the ministers of the crown should take a pay cut. Wow, that is a pretty heavy stick there.

Wait. What have the last five years been? They have not been recession years, have they? No, they have not. In fact, Canada has not been in a recession for the last five years. The Conservatives thought this balanced budget legislation was a good idea for the next government, not for them. We call this hypocrisy because that is what it is. If the Conservatives believed in this, and they said they did because they promised this bill in the last election, one would wonder what they were doing since. They did not have balanced books. They had massive debt.

We have actually been able to add up what each minister owes. We sent them a letter last week to help them do the math of all of their pay packet they need to send back to Canadians. Certainly, if a principle for the Conservatives is that balanced books are so important that it should cost the cabinet if they do not do it, then it should cost the cabinet if they did not do it, and they did not do it. However, it is what it is. It is a stunt. It is something to throw a little at the base who worry that the Conservative Party of Canada added almost $160 billion to the national debt. I did not know they ran on that the last time in 2011. Coming out of the recession, they said they would nail this debt, crank it up so much that it would cost about $4,000 for every living soul in this country to pay back.

Of course it is more than $4,000 to borrow this kind of money. For people who have ever borrowed money for a car or who have ever had a student loan, what they borrowed was not what they paid back. When the Conservatives ratcheted on this debt, we hoped they would have left us a strong economy, but they were not able to do that.

We look through this budget and we see where the priorities lie for the Conservatives. Single moms are not on the Conservatives' radar. The 1.3 million Canadians out of work are not in their target group that they so often talk about. They are not part of the Conservatives' universe. Folks making the same income who have kids are still not going to get any help from income splitting. The Conservatives simply do not care.

I have a quote which I think is an important one. Paulette Senior, the CEO of the YWCA of Canada said:

This budget fails to balance the lives of women in Canada. Women continue to provide the majority of child care, despite comprising half the workforce and being the majority of university graduates. That trifecta is the 21st century reality for families, and affordable child care is the winning ticket. We are sorry to see the federal government's continued disinterest in leading on this issue.

One wonders when one looks at the fundamentals. As the TD Bank senior economist said, there is a lot of things booked in here that are not based on economic fundamentals. No kidding. I would not necessarily call it the healthiest balance. Is it on the strength of the economy and the strength of the revenues? No, it is not. It is a little bit of pixie dust, as one columnist said, and they sprinkle it around liberally and suddenly they get to a Conservative budget.

New Democrats believe that we need to put forward solutions. We do not need to just oppose, but we need to propose. We have proposed $15 child care. We have proposed a $15 federal minimum wage. We have proposed help for small businesses and manufacturing so we could add value to the natural resources, rather than follow the Conservative ideology which is to ship everything out raw and let some other country add value while we pick up the tab. We have proposed solutions time and time again, and we will continue to do so. In the meantime, this is the agenda put forward by the current government. It is an agenda that is not acceptable to the Canadian people because it does not fit the interests of those looking for child care, those looking for a job, those looking for a job that maybe puts them above the poverty line.

There is a lack of ambition in this budget. There is a missed opportunity. The gap that has been growing steadily over previous governments continues to grow. It is not simply an income gap, but it is an opportunity gap, the opportunity to do what we must all do as legislators, which is to look to the future and hopefully leave the next generation something better than what we found.

We see, through the Minister of Finance's crass comments that reveal perhaps too much of the Conservatives' thinking, that any of the big-ticket promises they have made, any of the big bills that are going to have to be paid for Conservative largesse, opportunism and crass politics they will leave for future generations, say Conservatives. It is not a concern to them.

Their only concern happens in October when Canadians will go to the polls. That is a concern also for Canadians. They are going to have a clear choice between more tax giveaways for the wealthiest few, and the New Democratic Party which believes that all ships should be lifted. We should not leave children behind, whether they are first nations or non-first nations, whether they are born wealthy or middle class or poor.

We believe Canada is a place of opportunity. We cannot squander the efforts of our previous generations by dumping on future generations.

It is enough to say what I have said, but there is an important piece that I would add.

I move:

That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:

“this House not approve the budgetary policy of the government as it:

a) Gives billions of dollars in handouts to the wealthy few through income splitting, doubling Tax-Free Savings Accounts, and tax loopholes for CEOs;

b) Fails to help middle class families by creating affordable, quality childcare spaces;

c) Contains no plan to make life more affordable by tackling unfair ATM fees or high credit card rates;

d) Fails to restore the age of retirement to 65 by reversing cuts to Old Age Security;

e) Does nothing to help workers by reinstating the federal minimum wage and raising it to $15 an hour;

f) Fails to fight climate change or grow the economy while protecting the environment; and

g) Relies on one-time asset sales and accounting sleight-of-hand to achieve a balance.

Nathan Cullen

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