15037 OFFICIAL REPORT (HANSARD) House of Commons Debates VOLUME 147 NUMBER 231 2nd SESSION 41st PARLIAMENT Monday, June 15, 2015 Speaker: The Honourable Andrew Scheer HOUSE OF COMMONS CANADA (Table of Contents appears at back of this issue.) COMMONS DEBATES June 15, 2015 DEBATES Edited Hansard * Table of Contents * Number 231 (Official Version) Official Report * Table of Contents * Number 231 (Official Version) Compte rendu officiel * Table des matières * Numéro 231 (Version officielle) 147 231 15 06 2015 2015/06/15 11:05:00 House of Commons Débats de la Chambre des communes House of Commons Debates 41 2 The House met at 11 a.m.

Prayers PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS Private Members' Business (1105) [ English ] Free Votes Motion The House resumed from May 28 consideration of the motion. Mr. LaVar Payne (Medicine Hat, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour for me to rise today in support of my colleague, the hon. member for Souris—Moose Mountain , and his motion that we are debating today. I think as Canadians we are really very lucky. We have freedom of expression enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and nobody can take that away from each individual Canadian.

It grants us the right to speak our mind, the right to discuss issues that we believe are important not only to our constituents, but to Canadians right across this vast, beautiful land we call home. I believe it is our duty as federal legislators, as federal representatives here in the House of Commons of the Parliament of Canada, to speak out and to speak according to our conscience. This is especially pressing on abortion and end-of-life issues.

I find it concerning and highly irritating when I hear somebody suggest that we cannot as federal legislators discuss an issue that is in the federal jurisdiction as it is not politically correct, or that it will offend some segments of society. Well, it will be no surprise to anybody that I have been a defender of the rights of the unborn and I believe that we must be able to debate this issue freely. I supported previous motions to that effect, and will support any future motions that come before this House.

I constantly receive correspondence and phone calls from constituents who are firmly in favour of defending the right to life, and as it is my duty as their federal representative here to represent their interests in Parliament, I am reinforced in my belief that this is the right thing to do. Another issue that has dominated the national spotlight is that of end-of-life matters. The Supreme Court recently struck down parts of legislation which made assisted suicide illegal in Canada.

I know that our government is carefully crafting a legislative response to this decision, and I pray that the drafters will take into consideration the value of human life when they are making the decisions on what this legislation will look like. Because the end-of-life issue is so pertinent right now, my words will focus mostly on this. To start, I want to say that I receive many comments from constituents, whether they be spoken, by email or regular mail, by phone or by fax.

Most of them urge us to choose a strong, well thought out palliative end-of-life care strategy over the legalization of assisted suicide matters. I support this view, and I believe that every life must be protected. I think we in this country have one of the best medical care systems in the world. It has its problems, but overall we are very blessed to have the best doctors and some of the best medical science out there available for our use. I believe that we can develop a palliative care regime that cares for our citizens until the end of their natural lives.

I believe that when it comes to matters of conscience such as these, it is critical that the democratically elected members of this House be allowed to vote according to their beliefs and to vote on how the majority of their constituents would have them vote. I realize that support for some issues can be different from community to community, province to province, and in our case, electoral district to electoral district.

It is very unfortunate that certain political parties represented in this House today have basically eliminated the ability of their members to decide how they wish to vote based on conscience issues. When it comes to matters of conscience, in an open, transparent, and democratic society such as ours, it is unthinkable that somebody would tell another that on deeply personal moral issues, one has to vote the way the party leadership tells members to vote, or else. Or else could be suspending said person from the caucus, or simply putting them in the penalty box so to speak.

How can we as legislators in a modern democracy believe that this is somehow all right, that this is the way of doing business? How can we, in our quest to cater to what we think is prevailing public opinion, seek to silence democratically elected members of this place on the very important moral issues of conscience? I find this to be absurd. An opposition member recently said that they consider all votes to be matters of conscience. As I understand it, that is what the member said. Well, I wish that would be reflected when it came time to vote.

These votes would not be whipped and these people would not be basically ordered how to vote by their party leadership. We need to all take a collective breath and consider exactly what we will no doubt have to consider sometime in the near future. End-of-life issues are a very emotional subject matter and tend to evoke strong emotions. I understand this and I am willing to bet there are members from every party here today who have reservations about legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

This motion would encourage that the parties represented here today allow their members to vote freely according to their personal beliefs, according to what their conscience is telling them. It is like the old Pinocchio jingle, “always let your conscience be your guide”. That is kind of a gentle way of urging my colleagues here today to carefully consider the motion that is in front of them.

(1110) I know that we will have some emotional debates here regarding other major issues of conscience. Motion No. 312 by the member for Kitchener Centre supported the establishment of a parliamentary committee to study when life begins. I was incredibly proud to stand up and support that motion. However, I am left asking myself how my constituents would want me to vote. Some upcoming questions that we will have to deal with in this place will be questions of conscience. They will also be relevant to what my constituents would have me do as their chosen voice in this place.

I think I have always done my best to vote with their best intentions at heart. Motion No. 312 and others that may have come before the House in the last several Parliaments seek to deal with a very delicate issue. Many people may not realize that there are no laws regulating the right to an abortion in Canada either. Through his motion, the member for Kitchener Centre was essentially trying to get us to start discussing some sort of direction that we as federal legislators should take on this important issue.

It is matters such as the one that Motion No. 312 was trying to deal with that the motion we are discussing today would cover. Let us face reality here. Simply having no law is something I find unfortunate in a modern democracy. This is something of an issue that I and many of my colleagues here today probably have a problem with. Regardless of where one stands on end-of-life issues, I am sure everyone in the House would agree that we absolutely must have a written law on the books that would regulate it one way or another. Are we to expect that we should simply have no laws covering end-of-life issues?

By going down that path we would be opening up a major can of worms, so to speak. I do not believe that pretending there is no issue here is the right course of action. We cannot allow ourselves to get into the same situation, and that is why the government is working on the next steps. Doing nothing is not an option. It is our responsibility as federal legislators to craft laws that will protect vulnerable people in our society. We lose a certain amount of institutional credibility by simply turning a blind eye to these very important issues of conscience.

On the Carter case which recently struck down this country's law on assisted suicide, we must tread very lightly as federal legislators. My personal view I have already mentioned, but I believe that this is one of the great moral issues of conscience that our generation is dealing with. The value of human life must not be put in jeopardy by emotional quick decisions. It is important that we take a thoughtful and careful look at how we as a society are going to deal with these important matters. That is why it is so critical to look at the facts and ensure that we are not rushing into any decisions.

Doing nothing is simply not acceptable. Again, our responsibility as federal legislators is to legislate when it comes to the issues affecting the lives of human beings. We are truly blessed with a very important mandate. It is our responsibility to keep Canadians safe from harm. We must also do our utmost to protect the unborn as well as those who are coming to the end of their natural lives. Let us choose to support and comfort those who are nearing the end with everything in our power.

Let us look at making changes and improving on our palliative care models so that they are always the absolute best and the most compassionate possible. We can work together to deliver this with other levels of government and with stakeholder groups. Let us work together to recognize that the value of life is greater than any of our emotional choices as we humans are often compelled to make. This is a critical issue for our attention. I wholeheartedly support this motion, which speaks to the freedom we elected members should have when voting on issues of conscience.

I urge all members of the House to vote in favour of the motion. Mr. Dave Van Kesteren (Chatham-Kent—Essex, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in the debate on private member's Motion No. 590, presented by the member for Souris—Moose Mountain . The motion deals with the most fundamental means of expression for an individual member of Parliament, the choice of how to vote on a particular issue. The motion reads: That, in the opinion of the House, all Members of Parliament should be allowed to vote freely on all matters of conscience.

The motion speaks to the important representational role that individual members of Parliament play in this institution. Before explaining how it does so, I would first like to turn to examining the motion itself and what it calls on members of this place to support. If we break down the motion, it actually deals with two important concepts. First is the concept of free votes. While I think it is obvious to us all what the meaning of a free vote is, it is interesting to note how little information there is available to explain the concept and what the practice is with regard to free votes.

In the House of Commons' Glossary of Parliamentary Procedure, a free vote is defined as: Non-procedural term, meaning a vote during which party discipline is not imposed on individual Members. Votes on Private Members' Business are usually conducted as free votes. The glossary contrasts the concept of a free vote with that of a party vote. A party vote is defined as: A division on a question during which Members follow the instructions of their respective Whips so as to reflect the official positions of their parties.

Notably, the Standing Orders do not define or provide any guidelines regarding a free vote in the House of Commons. The other concept that is related to this motion in addition to the concept of the free vote is what constitutes a matter of conscience. In the context of this motion, it is important to have some grasp of what a matter of conscience is in order to provide some delineation of what types of scenarios might call for a free vote. Again, there is not a definition of what a matter of conscience is in the motion itself or in the Standing Orders.

We do know that a free vote is often said to be synonymous with a conscience vote, usually referring to issues which tend to be more contentious and of a personal nature for an individual member. In the past, this has included, depending on the party, matters such as same-sex marriage and capital punishment. These are matters for which individual members often have strong personal convictions.

Importantly, they are also issues that tend to raise strong feelings among constituents, who are more likely to pay attention to how their elected member of Parliament represents the prevailing sentiments in the riding in the House of Commons. To sum up, neither of these two core concepts to Motion No. 590 are strictly defined anywhere. However, clearly these are votes where party discipline is relaxed and members may vote according to their own convictions in their individual roles as elected representatives.

In practice, a decision on whether or not to hold a free vote is decided by each party on a case-by-case basis. Party whips provide instructions to individual members regarding the party's position and whether or not party discipline is to be applied to a particular vote. While each party has its own criteria for determining whether or not a free vote will occur, suffice to say that there are cases where all parties will want to ensure that members vote as a bloc on certain issues.

In our system of responsible government, a decision on whether to enforce party discipline on a vote takes on particular importance in relation to the confidence convention, where a loss of confidence can lead to the dissolution of Parliament. In cases where confidence is not an issue, should a government be defeated on a vote, it does not amount to an expression of non-confidence in the government. That is why the glossary cited above observes that free votes are mostly seen for private members' business where confidence is generally not an issue.

(1115) However, even where it is not a matter of confidence per se, matters of fundamental importance to a party may also require party discipline to be applied in a given case. These are matters that relate to fundamental positions that the party has taken on certain issues where the party's position is seen to be irrevocable and important to achieving the party's policy and legislative objectives. Therefore, there are good reasons why a party should apply party discipline for certain votes in the House of Commons. First, it can assist and maintain the balance of responsibility and accountability in the House.

Consistent with the principles of responsible government, the government should be held accountable for its decisions. Second, it can avoid blurring the lines between government and opposition on matters of fundamental importance to a party, thereby making it more difficult for the electorate to hold a party to account. Third, it can assist in respecting democratic outcomes by ensuring that the electoral platform Canadians have voted for is effectively implemented by the party that was chosen to form government.

Of course, changing the key supports of party discipline is certainly not what is being proposed by Motion No. 590. The fact that free votes cannot apply in all cases in no way diminishes the importance and the role that they can play in our parliamentary system. Free votes are an important recognition of the role that members of Parliament play in representing their constituents.

One of the key roles of members of Parliament is the link that they provide between their constituents and Parliament, both through representing the constituency in Parliament and also in keeping their constituents informed about government policies and legislation. Most members are affiliated with a particular party when they are elected, which they have chosen to join because they agree with the party's fundamental policies and objectives. As a result, members tend to support their party's position the majority of the time.

That is one of the important underpinnings of our electoral system which uses political parties to provide distinct options to Canadians, and it is a key element in contributing to the effectiveness of our parliamentary process. However, that does not diminish the representative role of members, and exercising their right to vote is a key feature of that role. I mentioned earlier that there are some natural tensions that arise for individual members as these three features of our parliamentary system interact with each other.

On the one hand, members have their constituents to answer to, and their constituents may be particularly vigilant when it comes to some of the more contentious issues that are sometimes addressed in Parliament. There is a certain amount of pressure on a member to vote in a fashion that reflects their community's wishes or interests. At the same time, members often have their own personal convictions on certain issues. On the other hand, members also belong to a party that represents particular ideals which are fundamental to the party's position on the national interest.

On matters of conscience, the individual member must reconcile the different roles that he or she plays as a key actor in our parliamentary system. Motion No. 590 recognizes the balance that empowers members of Parliament: free votes for members on matters of conscience. Before concluding, I would like to note how appropriate it is that Motion No. 590 has brought this issue to the House as a matter of private members' business. Our system for private members' business provides an important opportunity for individual members to bring forward legislation or motions, as is the case with the motion before us today.

Private members' business is more likely than ordinary legislation to be the subject of a free vote. It is an important expression of an individual member's role in Parliament, and I commend the member for Souris—Moose Mountain for moving the motion. In conclusion, our government has shown a commitment to providing Canadians with the principled and accountable government that the country deserves. We continue to be open to initiatives that strengthen the role of parliamentarians and improve parliamentary procedures.

It is important that we acknowledge all of the important roles that members of Parliament perform in our parliamentary system, including the representational role played by individual members of Parliament in the House of Commons.

(1120) The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin) : Resuming debate with his five minute right of reply, the hon. member for Souris—Moose Mountain. Mr. Ed Komarnicki (Souris—Moose Mountain, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Medicine Hat for his strong personal views, and also the member for Chatham-Kent—Essex , who delicately diced and danced around what is and is not a matter of conscience. In the previous hour of debate, the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent ended her speech by saying that she believed her NDP colleagues should support the motion.

I appreciate that, but she trivializes the debate by saying that in the end, all of us are already free. She said that the motion could just as easily read, “That in the opinion of the House, all members of Parliament should be allowed to vote freely on all matters of beauty”. What nonsense. I would like to see how her and her colleagues would view a free vote on matters that are truly matters of conscience, namely matters relating to life, more particularly to the termination of life at any time from the point of conception to the point of natural death.

She said, “What therefore is the legal definition of a matter of conscience?” She said, “The problem is the abstract notion of conscience”. Let me address that. Conscience, as a concept, is referred to in the recent Carter case, and intervenors were talking about that. On page 132, the court stated: In our view, nothing in the declaration of invalidity which we propose to issue would compel physicians to provide assistance in dying. [...] However, we note—as did Beetz J. in addressing the topic of physician participation in abortion in R. v.

Morgentaler—that a physician's decision to participate in assisted dying is a matter of conscience and, in some cases, of religious belief.... In making this observation, we do not wish to pre-empt the legislative and regulatory response to this judgment. Rather, we underline that the Charter rights of patients and physicians will need to be reconciled. That is precisely the point when it comes to matters of the charter. Charter rights have to be balanced and reconciled. No one right is absolute. In the Morgentaler case, the court made reference that the freedom of conscience is guaranteed in

section 2 of the charter. Wilson B., on page 165, stated: It should [also] be noted, however, that an emphasis on individual conscience and individual judgment [also] lies at the heart of our democratic political tradition. The ability of each citizen to make free and informed decisions is the absolute prerequisite for the legitimacy, acceptability, and efficacy of our system of self-government. This should be even more so in Parliament where members vote on matters of conscience.

On page 176, she refers to a previous Supreme Court case and the comments of Justice Dickson, where he stated: Attempts to compel belief or practice denied the reality of individual conscience and dishonoured the God that had planted it in His creatures. It is from these antecedents that the concepts of freedoms of religion and freedom of conscience became associated, to form, as they do in s. 2(

a) of our Charter, the single integrated concept of “freedom of conscience and religion”. Dickson went on to say: What unites enunciated freedoms in the American First Amendment, s. 2(

a) of the Charter and in the provision of other human rights documents in which they are associated is the notion of the centrality of individual conscience and the inappropriateness of governmental intervention to compel or to constrain its manifestation.

On page 177, he says: The values that underline our political and philosophic traditions demand that every individual be free to hold and to manifest whatever beliefs and opinions his or her conscience dictates, provided inter alia only that such manifestations do not injure his or her neighbours or their parallel rights to hold and manifest beliefs and opinions of their own. This right must not injure one's neighbour, which could include the unborn. That is precisely the point when it comes to matters of the charter. Charter rights have to be balanced and reconciled. No one right is absolute.

The member for Kings—Hants and the member for Kingston and the Islands talked about all kinds of things except real matters of conscience. Why is that? Why have they not come to the defence of their Liberal leader, the member for Papineau ? Could it be because their leader's position is indefensible?

In an open letter from seven former Liberal members of Parliament, they stated: We, the undersigned [...] are concerned about your [recent] pronouncement that people who hold a particular view on a given moral issue, as a matter of conscience, cannot be Liberal candidates for the position of M.P. unless they agree to park their consciences at the entrance to the House of Commons and vote directly opposite to their fundamental beliefs, as directed by you.

This is clearly in reference to the Liberal leader's position that what is commonly referred to as “pro-choice candidates” could only be nominated, or, if elected, would have to vote as the leader directed.

(1125) In my view, the actions of the Liberal leader, the member for Papineau , are indefensible. Either one believes in the charter or one does not. His edict violates the charter without the use of the notwithstanding clause and strikes at the heart of this motion, and indeed at the heart of the charter. Can anyone imagine that the leader of the Liberal Party would sacrifice a right or protection of the charter to be able to enforce his personal views on a particular subject matter? How very wrong that is. The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin) : The question is on the motion.

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin): All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin): All those opposed will please say nay. Some hon. members: Nay. The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin): In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen: Division on Motion No. 590 deferred The Acting Speaker (Mr.

Barry Devolin): Pursuant to Standing Order 93, the recorded division stands deferred until Wednesday, June 17, immediately before the time provided for private members' business.

Suspension of Sitting The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin) : The House stands suspended until 12 p.m. (The sitting of the House was suspended at 11:30 a.m.)

Sitting Resumed (The House resumed at 12 p.m.) Government Orders Government Orders (1200) [ English ] Economic Action Plan 2015 Act, No. 1 Hon. Kevin Sorenson (for the Minister of Finance) Bill C-59. Third reading moved that Bill C-59,

An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 21, 2015 and other measures , be read the third time and passed. He said: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be back here again this week with the opportunity to speak to Bill C-59 after a busy weekend in the riding of Crowfoot, having been in Camrose and Stettler for their art walk, as well as the rodeo and parade, and a number of other events that were held throughout my riding. I know all of us are busy on weekends. A great way to start Monday is debating Bill C-59.

This morning I would like to outline some specific features of the bill that would support families, seniors and rural Canada, as I represent predominantly a rural riding. Let me begin by reaffirming that under the bold leadership of our Prime Minister , our government's top priority has been creating jobs, and focusing on economic growth and long-term prosperity for Canadians.

That is why our government brought forward a number of measures to do that, such as cut taxes for job-creating businesses, invested in research and development, expanded markets for Canadian businesses abroad, committed unprecedented support for job-creating infrastructure, and established the framework for responsible development of our natural resources, despite global economic fragility, geopolitical uncertainty with what was happening in Europe, Ukraine and the Middle East, and also volatile oil prices. Make no mistake that our economic action plan is working.

It is the plan that has steered Canada out of the great recession and created over 1.2 million net new jobs, overwhelmingly in the private sector, full-time and well-paying jobs. According to KPMG, total business tax costs in Canada are the lowest in the G7 countries and 46% lower than our closest ally and trading partner, the United States. Bloomberg has ranked Canada the second best place in the world to do business. However, this success does not just happen. It does not occur overnight. It requires tough decisions, sound judgment and a focus on priorities.

Supporting small business has been one of those priorities. It is also a central element in the budget that we are debating here today, the economic action plan. the budget implementation act. We have delivered substantial ongoing tax savings to small businesses and their owners. This enables them to take those savings and reinvest in their businesses, which helps create more jobs for those businesses. We already reduced the small business tax rate from 12% to 11% earlier, and in 2015 we propose to take it from 11% to 9% by 2019.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has strongly endorsed this measure and agrees with our plan. Many of the small businesses that benefit from our tax relief are from rural Canada. Our government recognizes the important role that farmers play in our economy and communities. Canadian farmers have always been among the best producers, the best farmers in the entire world. For generations, they have fed Canadians around the globe, while providing jobs and opportunities across Canada. My grandfather moved to Canada in 1905-06 with the hope of homesteading, breaking the land and starting a family farm.

That story has been told many times throughout the west and throughout Canada. As someone who has owned and operated a farming business, I can say first-hand that to ensure these operations succeed, it demands hard work, focus and discipline. A farmer's budget does not simply balance itself. Our government firmly believes Canadian farmers should be strong and profitable, and able to capitalize on market opportunities. We believe Canadian farmers deserve support from their elected officials, not the mistreatment and high taxes that Liberal Party elitists imposed for 13 long years.

Those high-tax measures and bloated government policies burden our agricultural sector and set our farmers back.

(1205) By contrast, our Conservative government stands with farmers. We are working to provide them access to millions of new customers. Through our free trade agreements, through expanding our customer base, we have an opportunity to get into countries that we have never been in before, and we have lowered tariffs so we can have trade with many of those countries. Let me remind members that last year we simplified the tax rules relating to the lifetime capital gains exemption and the intergenerational rollover for many Canadian farmers.

To accomplish this, our government passed legislation to generally treat the taxpayer's combined farming business the same as perhaps a separate farming business conducted by the same taxpayer. This will ensure consistent treatment for taxpayers who conduct various farming activities. Economic action plan 2015 would build upon the work we have been doing since 2006 to foster a strong, stable, sustainable and prosperous agriculture sector for all of Canada.

I was pleased to join members of the Saskatchewan farming community and our Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food , the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster , to announce new federal supports for agriculture. What we announced was to allow farmers to maintain more of their capital for retirement. Economic action plan 2015 would bring forward the measures to provide funding to increase lifetime capital gains exemption for farmers and fishermen, but certainly for farmers, up to $1 million. This was welcomed by the Canadian Cattlemen's Association.

It said: The CCA appreciates another measure of practical importance to producers, particularly those wishing to retire or transition from the industry. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture also praised this measure. It said: The Lifetime Capital Gains exemption is an important tool for helping farmers manage the tax burden associated with the transfer of farm assets. The CFA is pleased the increase to $1 million is effective immediately, as it will assist farmers in their transfer of assets to the next generation by providing greater flexibility for both the retirees and new entrants. That answers a lot.

Farmers realize they may be living poor, but they have some savings in their farm assets. When they retire, they need those to help them through their retirement so they may have a secure, dignified retirement. I would like to now turn to parts of the bill which deal with improving the quality of life of Canadians, in particular, the health of Canadians. There are measures in the bill that would continue our government's proud record of being a champion for persons with disabilities. This is an area where the former finance minister was a very strong advocate.

As we shaped economic action plan 2014, I was pleased to witness this commitment by former Minister Flaherty first hand at the budget table. His legacy includes the landmark registered disability savings plan, which helped to ensure the long-term financial security of Canadians with severe disabilities. Since becoming available in 2008, more than 100,000 Canadians have opened a registered disabilities savings plan, and with that has come a great deal of confidence and security.

To ensure this program continues to serve Canadians who need it most, today's bill proposes an extension of the federal temporary measure that allows a qualifying family member to become the plan holder of a registered disability savings plan for an adult individual who might not be able to enter into a contract on his or her own. We are also introducing a new home accessibility tax credit for persons with disabilities and for seniors.

This non-refundable credit will provide tax recognition for the cost of improvements that allow a person who is eligible for the disability tax credit, or is a senior who wants to stay in his or her home to be more mobile, safe and functional within their own home. These measures will assist Canadians who face the daily challenges of living with a disability or who are in their seniors years in leading a much better quality of life.

(1210) Let me also highlight how today's legislation builds on our government's support for families and communities across our great country of Canada. Since Canadians gave us our first mandate in 2006, this government has taken significant action to support and protect Canadian consumers by reducing taxes time and time again, including cutting the GST twice. Keeping taxes low and putting more back into the pockets of hard-working Canadians to spend in the way they decide is essential for jobs and growth.

Today, because of the measures introduced by our government, a typical two-earner family of four will receive up to $6,600 in tax relief and increased benefits in 2015. Economic action plan 2015 builds on the government's record of support for Canadian families by keeping taxes low and helping them save. We are focused on helping 100% of families with children with policies like the family tax cut, and increased and expanded benefits through the universal child care benefit.

Unfortunately, the opposition parties, both the Liberals and the NDP, would scrap the universal child care benefit and cancel income splitting for families. Our government is also providing tax support for seniors and persons with disabilities, as well as measures to help students pay for their education. Whether they want to purchase a new home or a car, start a new business or save for retirement, Canadian families have many reasons to save. That is why our government introduced the groundbreaking tax-free savings account, or TFSA for short.

This savings measure is a flexible, registered, general purpose savings vehicle that allows Canadians to earn tax-free investment income. They can watch compounding interest grow in their favour. That gives them a much more secure, dignified retirement. Canadians get it. Canadians understand. Canadians have embraced the tax-free savings account for their savings needs. It is unfortunate that the members opposite have all but rejected it. Let me remind them of some important facts. Eleven million Canadians have opened a tax-free savings account, and half of those earn less than $42,000 a year.

Sixty percent of those who have contributed to the tax-free savings account and who maximize their account earn less than $60,000. Six hundred thousand seniors, aged 65-plus, with income below $60,000 a year are currently maximizing their tax-free savings account. Due to popular demand, today's legislation proposes to increase the tax-free savings account annual contribution limit from $5,000 to $10,000, effective 2015 and subsequent years.

While we are making it easier for Canadians to save money, at the same time we want seniors to feel confident that their savings will always be there, or that it will be there for them while they are enjoying their golden years. Seniors are already benefiting from important money saving measures, such as pension income splitting and taking advantage of the tax-free savings account. The fact is that Canadians are living longer than ever, and we want to ensure that they have a secure, dignified retirement throughout their most senior years.

That is why the bill that we debate today, Bill C-59 , will reduce the minimum withdrawal rate for registered retirement income funds, or RRIFs.

(1215) As some members may know, the rules concerning registered retirement income funds and registered retirement savings plans dictate that RRSPs must be converted to RRIFs by the end of the year in which the RRSP holder reaches 71 years of age. A minimum amount must then be withdrawn. Alternatively, the RRSP savings may be used to purchase an annuity. Economic action plan 2015 proposes to adjust that RRIF minimum withdrawal rate that applies in respect of ages 71 to 94 to better reflect more recent long-term historical real rates of return and expected inflation.

The seniors advocacy group, CARP, says its members welcome this measure. As a result, the new RRIF factors will be substantially lower than the existing factors. By permitting more capital preservation, the new factors will help reduce the risk of outliving one's savings, while ensuring that the tax deferral provided on RRSP and RRIF savings continues to serve a retirement income purpose. Our government has been consistent in advancing innovative options to allow Canadians to save and manage their finances for a secure and dignified retirement, and our work continues.

Currently, 96% of pension plan assets in Canada are in a defined benefit plan, as compared to 71% in the United Kingdom, 42% in the U.S., and 15% in Australia. That, in part, is why we began consultations on the framework for target benefit plans. These innovative plans would allow businesses to offer a third option, a middle ground between defined benefits and defined contribution models. At the same time, employees would receive a pension with a high degree of retirement income certainty. Let me be clear.

Current pensioners and retirees should be assured that it is not our intention to convert any pensions to target benefit plans without the explicit consent of that individual. A retired person's plan would not be converted unless that individual expressed a desire to convert the pension or agreed to do so. In the interim, those who are retired or saving for retirement will benefit tremendously from targeted tax relief and new optional savings methods, such as the tax-free savings account.

However, while we keep Canada's retirement system strong, I must inform Canada's seniors about a possible new threat to CPP benefits. The Liberal leader has announced that if given the chance, he would fund his favourite infrastructure projects with “...alternative sources of capital, such as pension funds.” I regret to inform the House that it gets even worse than that. The Liberal leader has confirmed that he would implement the Ontario Liberals' dramatic payroll tax increase on every worker and small business in Canada.

For a worker who earns $60,000 a year, the Liberal leader's plan and the Liberals' policy would mean a $1,000 tax hike. It would cost a two-worker family up to $3,200 more per year, whether those workers like it or not. This mandatory payroll tax increase would kill middle-class jobs and force small businesses to cut hours and wages. According to the Meridian Credit Union, the majority of Ontario's small business owners believe this type of payroll tax would the greatest challenge that they have ever faced.

According to a CFIB survey, 69% of employers in Ontario indicated that they would have to freeze or cut salaries. This is even further evidence that now is not the time for untested leadership and Liberal high-tax policies. In closing, while I have touched on only a few of the measures in today's legislation, they are measures that would help create jobs, growth, and long-term prosperity for all Canadians. Through this legislation, we will maintain and strengthen our advantages by continuing to pursue those strategies that made us so resilient in the first place: responsibility, discipline, and determination.

That is what it is going to take. I appreciate this opportunity to serve with a government that has steered our nation out of the great recession and brought Canada back into the black. Our balanced budget and low-tax plan for jobs and security will strengthen businesses, families, and communities across the country. I urge all hon. members to give their support to this bill.

(1220) Mr. Nathan Cullen (Skeena—Bulkley Valley, NDP) : Mr. Speaker, there were a few omissions in my friend's speech, which I will help put in so that he can comment on them. One is that there are 11 million Canadians without a workplace pension right now, and the Minister of Finance has invented this new pension scheme and is going to go out and consult. Why did the government never consult a single Canadian when it decided to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67, costing every single Canadian senior upwards of $24,000 in pensions?

Pensions are now delayed by two years because the Prime Minister stood in front of a bunch of billionaires in Europe to decide what Canadian pension policy would be. More specifically, my friend across the way and all our colleagues in this place enjoy a stable pension plan. It is a defined benefits plan as opposed to a defined contribution plan, and my friend knows the difference.

Since he and all of us collectively enjoy a pension plan of a kind that most Canadians will not have access to and will never have access to, how can he stand in this place and reject the option of allowing Canadians to contribute to the most solid and secure pension plan we have, the CPP? How can the member stand in this place when the Conservatives have broken the promises the Prime Minister made to create 125,000 child care spaces in Canada and they have not created a single one?

Finally, how can the member in any good conscience want to double the TFSA, which will help the top 20% of earners by 180% more than the rest of Canadians combined? Hon. Kevin Sorenson : Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his questions, although I think what he said was more of a statement than a question. Again, our government understands the importance of a secure and dignified retirement for the seniors who have helped build this country. That is why we are bringing forward measures that will give them that kind of retirement.

Currently, many federally regulated pension plans are defined benefit plans, but Canada Post and others are finding that they have a massive pension debt. In fact, the liability is so big that they have taken a rider on even paying back into their pensions. What companies, corporate agencies, and crown companies have asked for is not to get rid of the defined benefit plan and not to get rid of the defined contribution plan, but to have a third option. Indeed, many companies and crown corporations are even now looking at moving all new employees into a defined contribution plan.

We want more security for them than that. The opposition is saying we should have only defined benefit plans for everybody. The truth is that those who are now bringing forward pension plans are moving employees into a defined contribution plan. We want a better target benefit plan so that employees will be able to understand what their retirement will look like. Hon. Mark Eyking (Sydney—Victoria, Lib.) : Mr. Speaker, in the hon. member's speech he mentioned that he represents a lot of farmers in his area.

As a farmer and as the agriculture critic, I will focus on what the Conservatives have done wrong with agriculture and what they are still doing wrong with it. We know what happened with the grain shipping problem. Farmers lost billions of dollars out west because of that. They had a good crop, and the prices were good. However, my concern and my questions are on business risk management. Under the Conservatives' watch, millions of dollars have been cut from business risk management. Let us hope it does not happen, but what will happen if we have a drought this year and prices are low and yields are down?

My questions are these: how much did his party cut from business risk management, and why would the Conservatives make those cuts when farmers need that support when they go through hard times? How are the farmers in his riding and across Canada going to deal with it when they go through that dip and lose money and find that business risk management will not be there for them because the Conservatives have cut over $200 million from it? I want to know exactly how much was cut and what is going to happen to the member's farmers if they have a drought this year and try to get business risk management.

(1225) Hon. Kevin Sorenson : Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member. I know he is an egg producer and a very important farmer in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Out west, in Ontario, through Quebec, and in Atlantic Canada, farmers understand that when there has been a disaster such as a flood or drought, this government has been there. This government has stood with them. This government has brought forward programs and plans, such as Growing Forward and others, that recognize the importance of insurance and of helping farmers and the agriculture sector get through in those times of difficulty.

The member mentioned rail transport for farming. We have had record production, especially in the prairie provinces, over the last three years. The yields have never been higher and the amount of grain has never been greater, yet that has undoubtedly been a frustration as we watched more and more oil come onto the rail lines and sometimes not as much grain as we farmers would have liked to have seen. The NDP and the Green Party are the parties that oppose pipelines for oil, and in reality what they end up saying is that oil should be shipped by rail, which pushes grain out.

We have always been there for the grain producer. We have always been there for the agriculture sector. We will stand with them through thick and thin. Right now in my area we have been dry, but we have not yet lost a crop early in June. However, this government will stand with them come what may. Mr. Jeff Watson (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the Minister of State for Finance , for his speech on retirement income. He raised the appropriate alarm and concern for pensioners and hard-working families.

The Liberal leader would like to impose a $1,000 pay cut with respect to the CPP, which is very similar to what we are now bracing for from Kathleen Wynne's Liberal government in Ontario and what businesses in Ontario are saying they oppose. As well, big unions are out promoting the NDP's plan, which is to double the amount that would be taken off families' paycheques or workers' paycheques for the Canada pension plan. I wonder if the member could comment on that risky scheme and what that take-home pay cut would mean to workers, particularly in Ontario. Hon. Kevin Sorenson : Mr.

Speaker, it is troublesome, I think, to all of us. We are in the midst of a very fragile global recovery. We see Europe with very small growth. Japan is just coming out of a recession. The United States' growth is not to the degree that we had hoped. Everywhere there are geopolitical concerns, such as ISIL, Ukraine, and others, and businesses are struggling to make it. However, the Liberal leader comes forward and confirms that he would impose a $1,000 tax hike on middle-class workers. His plan to enact the Ontario Liberal dramatic payroll increase on every worker across Canada is not good for the economy.

This would eliminate jobs and it would definitely set working families back. More now than ever, I think Canadians understand that it is crystal clear that our Conservative government can be trusted with their tax dollars. We can be trusted to keep taxes low. That is the way to help grow an economy. That is the way to stimulate growth. The high-tax, high-spend plan of the NDP and Liberals would not promote growth in this economy. Ms. Linda Duncan (Edmonton—Strathcona, NDP) : Mr. Speaker, there is nothing in the bill to address climate.

The hon. member speaks of addressing drought and flooding after the fact, yet nothing is included in the bill to try to prevent the growing impacts of climate on Canadians, which were identified decades ago by our natural resources department. Why has the Conservative government not included anything in response to what we are hearing over and over again? Where are the measures to support the clean tech industry and innovation in clean energy? What do we see in the bill to deliver on the Prime Minister's promise of moving toward a carbon-free country?

(1230) Hon. Kevin Sorenson : Mr. Speaker, here we go again. Now that we have seen the volatility in oil prices, the NDP's plan is simply higher taxes. Tax them now. Bring forward a $20-billion carbon tax. What is the NDP's answer to everything? High tax, high spend, and bigger government. Compared to the Liberal government, we have seen greenhouse gases drop. We have brought forward more parks. We have provided more green spaces than ever before. As we approach the environment, Canadians get it. We believe in the responsible development of our oil sands.

That means keeping an eye on our environment and making sure that emissions and environmental controls are there and are some of the strongest in the world. [ Translation ] Mr. Nathan Cullen (Skeena—Bulkley Valley, NDP) : Mr. Speaker, it is really something to hear what the Conservatives are saying. It will come as no surprise when Canadians reject this government's platform and policies, since the economy has been very weak for nearly 10 years now, and the government has done nothing to fight climate change and poverty here in Canada.

This is another omnibus bill that is over 150 pages long and has over 270 clauses. Not only is the Conservatives' lack of leadership affecting their popularity in the polls, but it also represents a wasted opportunity to stimulate our economy and help families. Families need a government that understands the economy and the current reality. [ English ] There are two ironies that exist within this one bill, and in a sense, they are going to be the Conservatives' legacy when Canadians finally throw them from office. The first

part is their shutting down debate. Just last week, we saw the Conservatives more than triple the previous record of any government in any Parliament in Canadian history for shutting down the democratic process in here by shutting down debate on something like the budget bill, as they have done with so many other bills, like Bill C-51 and all the other controversial bills they have brought in. That is the first part of the government's legacy, and that is what it will be remembered for. The second part will be its horrible economic management. More than 1.3 million Canadians are out of work today.

The government has added more than $150 billion in debt to the national debt. That is more than $4,000 for every man, woman, and child. We can ask what we got for it. According to the Governor of the Bank of Canada, who, like most bankers, is hardly one to use such strong language, called this Canadian economy and the circumstances we are in right now “atrocious”. We would have thought that on the eve of an election, with an economy that continues to shed jobs, the government would have brought forward some sort of, dare I say, action plan.

I am not talking about the action plan the Conservatives refer to in the $750 million in self-promoting ads they constantly shower Canadians with. I am talking about an actual action plan. I know that it is hard to imagine that the spin could actually match some reality, but that is what we were hoping for. Canadians, from all the polling the government has done, have grown increasingly cynical about its advertising scheme, because it has met so little with the reality. Canadians are waiting for action, hoping for action, and demanding action.

Let us see what they actually got from the government in the most recent omnibus bill. Again, the government has moved thousands of pages of omnibus legislation through the House. In all of that omnibus legislation, there was virtually not a single amendment or change. What typically happens, and it is true with this bill, is that an omnibus bill goes in to fix the mistakes of the last omnibus bill, which was fixing the mistakes of the omnibus bill before that. If we look up “incompetence” in the dictionary, we will now see a picture of the Prime Minister , and under a subheading, all of his legislation.

Let us look at the Canadian economy right now. It is shedding jobs in retail, manufacturing, and the energy sector. As I said, more than 1.3 million Canadians today are out of work. There was the fiasco of the temporary foreign worker program. The Conservative government created a loophole so big someone could drive a truck through it. It put more than 300,000 Canadians out of work and brought in temporary foreign workers, with absolutely no provisions to protect Canadian jobs or even the temporary foreign workers in the job conditions under which they were going to work.

The Canadian economy has lost more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs since the government took over. That is more than half a million manufacturing jobs since 2000. What is the reaction? What is the response? These are the jobs we built up over generations. We built the Canadian middle class on this. We built the strength of the Canadian economy on this. Meanwhile, these guys are fiddling while Rome burns. We have lost more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs, and the Conservatives pretend that there is no problem and that there is nothing to address.

We have also seen, according to the CIBC, that job quality in Canada is at its lowest level in a generation. It has never been this bad. The work has become more precarious, jobs are becoming more part-time, and there are fewer and fewer benefits, like pensions and true protections through the employment insurance program. That has been under the Conservative and previous Liberal governments' watch, with no addressing of it. Canadians know this experience. Their jobs have become more precarious and less certain.

(1235) This is a strange contradiction for the Conservatives. They continually stand in this place, as my friend just did, and talk about families and family-supporting jobs, yet in their policies, they go about destroying the very jobs that support Canadians and Canadian families. That is the great contradiction of Conservative policy. On the one hand, we get the talking points that say how important it is to build Canada and Canadian communities and Canadian families and all that Leave It to Beaver talk. They would like to go back in time it seems sometimes.

On the other hand, the very jobs that support our homes, our communities, and our families are the very jobs the Conservatives have watched disappear, without any hint of concern whatsoever. Child care one would think would support Canadian families. Does it not seem like something logical to take a step toward? It is so important that this Conservative Prime Minister promised Canadians in the last election that he would create 125,000 child care spaces in Canada, somewhat recognizing that there is an actual need out there. How many have they created? They have created zero spaces.

When we have asked them about it, they seem to have no shame and in fact now call child care spaces institutionalizing children. Is that not a fascinating turn of phrase? Somehow the public contributing to a system like a national child care program would be institutionalizing our kids. Do they refer to our medical system that way or our public school system? When I send my children to public school, are they being institutionalized? This is rhetoric that is unfitting for any government, yet here we have it. On pensions, this is going from bad to the bizarre.

We saw the Conservatives unilaterally raise the retirement age for Canadians from 65 to 67, with no consultation. In fact, the Prime Minister stood in a roomful of billionaires in Europe to make the announcement. He decided that it was the best place to tell Canadians that the entire pension regime was changing. It will cost seniors as much as $24,000 per senior in lost pensions across the board. Low income or high income, it does not matter. For Conservatives, going after pensions was their primary goal.

We said this was a concern, because we thought the provinces would then follow suit and raise the age, thereby costing seniors even more. We found out just this past week that the Government of Quebec has made such an announcement to raise its retirement age in Quebec as well. The consequences of the Prime Minister unilaterally making this policy decision have hurt seniors. The Conservatives know this, but they do not seem to care much for poor folks or the general population at large if they do not happen to vote for them.

However, this is a moment when the Conservatives are now suddenly concerned, because seniors do in fact vote in our country, and lo and behold, there is an election coming soon. What do the Conservatives do? Realizing they are losing support among Canadian seniors, they roll out a scheme, they float a balloon, saying, “Maybe we will have a voluntary system to contribute to the CPP”. This is something the Conservatives themselves looked at not that many years ago and that Jim Flaherty pronounced upon. He said that they had consulted with the experts and the provinces and that such a scheme would not work.

Now the Conservatives are saying they know better than the pension experts and better than their dearly departed friend Jim Flaherty. Now they are going to go to a voluntary system, undermining the basic foundation of what the Canada pension plan is. When we ask Canadians if they would like the ability to contribute more to the CPP, along with their employers, because that is how it works, upwards of 82% of Canadians are in favour of it. Conservatives are not in favour of that. They call contributing to one's pension a tax.

When Canadians take some of their salary, and that contribution is matched by an employer, they call that a tax on Canadians. My goodness. People paying into their own pensions so they can live with some dignity when they retire the Conservatives have somehow morphed into a tax. When the only attack they have is to call everything a tax, then I guess everything starts to look like a tax, whether it is or not.

I wonder if the Conservatives are walking around their ridings asking Canadians if they are contributing to their RRSPs and telling them that they should not do that, because they are self-imposing a tax, and that they should fight to get rid of their CPP contributions at work with their employers, because that must be a job-killing tax as well. That is such stupidity. That is ludicrous. It comes from a government that is desperate, obviously. The Conservatives are getting to the point now where they are starting to cling and grasp.

They will bring up any debate they can to stir up a little more in donations and perhaps a couple of more votes. However, the plan is not working, obviously. We also see a government that is in the midst of global concerns and a lack of job growth in Canada. In fact, in the last 16 months, job growth was at its lowest level in Canada, outside of a recession, in four decades.

(1240) One would think that if the Conservative plan were working, it would be working, but it is not. One would think that the Conservative strategy of giving billions away in corporate tax cuts to the largest, most profitable corporations, without any strings attached, would be creating those jobs, but it is not. The lowest job growth, outside of a recession, in 40 years is the Conservative legacy. The Conservatives are busy pulling muscles patting themselves on the back. They think this has been a job well done, that it is mission accomplished.

Let us look at the new programs the Conservatives are now going to launch. They actually ran a debt on them. Many Canadians do not know that the Conservatives ran a debt of $2 billion is year. The cost of their income-splitting scheme is, lo and behold, about $2 billion. They are going to borrow money to retroactively apply an income-splitting scheme that benefits only 15% of Canadian families. There is nothing for single parent families. That might not sit in the Conservative world view. I was raised by a single mom. Many Canadians are being raised by single parents.

The Conservatives' income-splitting plan does nothing for them or for couples who happen to earn similar amounts of money or for individuals who sit in the middle- or lower-income bracket. Two billion dollars has been rushed out the door by the Conservatives, who say that this will provide great help for Canadian families, yet the bottom 20% of income earners, families who might actually qualify, will get nothing, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. They reject the NDP proposal for up to $15-a-day affordable, quality child care across the country.

We know, from TD Bank and other economists who have studied this, that for every $1 we put in, $1.50 to $1.75 goes back into the economy. This has worked in Quebec, which is largely where our child care model is based. We understand that there is value in helping women, if they choose, to get back into the workforce. Every industrialized country in the world looking to improve its productivity needs to help women in particular get back into the workforce. We need to do that here in Canada. We have the lowest female participation rate in the Canadian economy since 2002.

The Conservatives might think they want to do a little social engineering and turn the clock back to 1950 and that all will be well. However, this is the reality for Canadian women working today: they want access to affordable child care. They want to make the choice. When the average cost in the GTA is $1,600 per child, there are Canadian families going to work today who are spending more on child care than they are on their mortgages. That is a reality, and that reality often keeps incredibly qualified, talented people out of the workforce, because they simply cannot afford child care.

It is no wonder the private sector economists have said that this is an investment, but not in the way the Conservatives use the term when they talk about income splitting being an investment. It is not an investment. It is a scheme. Child care is an investment that would pay back into the economy. The Conservatives also have no evidence that the TFSA shows an increase in investments and retirement security for Canadians. There has been no increase in contributions toward retirement vehicles. It has mostly been an exercise in people taking their retirement money and moving it from one vehicle to another.

That is fine, but the Conservatives should not pretend that this is suddenly going to make retirement security better in Canada, because it will not. The Conservatives now want to double this program. Who has $10,000 burning a hole in his or her pocket at the end of every year? Is it the middle-class families and individuals the Conservatives are talking about? Maybe they are in their world, but they are not the people I deal with.

They are not looking through their books at the end of the year and finding an extra $10,000 sitting around and wondering what they are going to do with it, until they see an ad, which they paid for, on TV to help them figure out what to do with all that extra money. Canadians are having a hard time making ends meet. The current personal debt rate in Canada is at an all-time historic high. Canadians owe more personal debt right now than they ever have before, and there is a reason for that. Job quality and job security have gone down, yet the cost of living has continued to rise.

Every once in a while, the Conservatives have stumbled across, almost by accident, a program that could work and help Canadians and help create jobs. Does anyone remember the home retrofit program? This was an interesting program. The Conservatives announced it once, killed it, announced it again, and killed it again. What did this program do? It helped Canadians deal with the rising cost of heating and cooling their homes. It also created jobs in the small business sector, in the localized sector. It also helped us deal with climate change.

Earlier my friend talked about the drought conditions and the concerns about the weather and the increase in the intensity of storms. It did these three things, the Holy Trinity. There it is. The program helped Canadians reduce costs. It helped small businesses get some work and provide jobs. It helped us deal with our climate change commitments. Conservative and Liberal governments made these promises but had no plan to follow through on them. They killed the program not once but twice.

(1245) We are going to bring it back and actually run the program and let Canadians enjoy the benefits of dealing with climate change, because the Conservatives constantly try to pit the economy versus the environment. However, we know that not to be true. The most productive, most efficient, most prosperous countries on earth right now are doing both.

They do not trade one off for the other, because anyone foolish enough and ignorant enough to think that he or she can simply drive an economy through the environment, through the ecological footprint that we bear, that there is some other virtual reality that he or she can create that is not constrained by our environment is a dinosaur and should do what dinosaurs do and have always done, which is to just go away and move along so that we can actually evolve the Canadian economy into something much more fair and much more prosperous. We on the NDP side believe in clean technology.

We saw last year globally for the first time that contributions into the clean tech sector exceeded all of the investments into the oil and gas and carbon economies. We have seen the globe moving this way, not just the so-called advanced countries, but also China, India and Brazil. Where is Canada? We have a Prime Minister who can barely utter the words “climate change”, who stands up and the only promise he is willing to commit to is something that would happen at the end of this century. When we ask him how we would get there, he says that is not for him to worry about because he will not be around.

That is similar to the Conservatives' commitments on the tax-free savings accounts. When the finance minister was asked how he was going to pay for these things, because it gets expensive really quick, he said that it was not really a problem for him to worry about, that it was a problem for the Prime Minister 's hypothetical granddaughter to worry about.

That was a moment of insight, almost a bit of a Freudian slip, when he said he was not concerned with it, that the Conservatives are not concerned with the huge cost of a program they hope would just maybe get them enough votes in the next election because the real costs would be paid down the line by our grandkids. “So be it and so what,” say the Conservatives, which is so similar to their approach on climate change.

Since the Conservative government's coming to office, how many years have we been promised regulations in the oil and gas sector, which by the way, is the most expensive way to deal with climate change according to the oil and gas sector. It would much rather have a price on carbon that actually meets the reality. That is why the major oil companies in this country are calling for such a thing. Do members think that the Conservatives are running into the offices of Suncor and Syncrude and yelling at them about their carbon tax policy and how they want to kill the economy? Of course they are not.

We understand that businesses need certainty. They also understand that pollution costs and that the polluter pay principle should be based in law and based in science. What do the Conservatives do with science? They muzzle it. We have also seen $14 billion in cuts to government programs, austerity programs in the midst of this fragile economy. What the IMF, the World Bank and the EU all are suggesting right now is that we need to move our economies forward, not try to cut them to some prosperity.

However, we have seen time and again where the Conservatives, and before them the Liberals, try this ideology, which is not new; it is as old as Reaganomics. The ideology is that if they simply cut $650 billion in corporate taxes, which the Conservatives did, as did the Liberals before them, companies would just magically reinvest in hiring more people, in manufacturing, and all of the rest of that. Mark Carney said for years that there was $650 billion of dead money sitting in corporate bank accounts in Canada right now not being invested. Therefore, the philosophy of the Conservatives has failed.

With the Conservatives' recent infrastructure announcements and the announcements for transit, we have seen time and again that all of it is to come years down the road. What the Conservatives most care about is themselves and trying to get themselves somehow re-elected despite all to the contrary. It seems to me that the Canadian people and the Canadian economy have called for real action, not ads, not another scam, not a bit more spin. They want something that will actually help the Canadian economy.

Two suggestions which we made, and the Conservatives voted against, would have helped the manufacturing sector and the small business community. The Conservatives voted against them one month and then put them in the budget. Let us give them a bit of credit at this moment of hypocrisy where they vote against something and then drive it into the budget the next week and suddenly think it is a good idea because it is painted blue.

(1250) Canadians need and deserve a lot more than what they are getting, but the good news is this. There are only a few months to go until this tired and worn-out government will be tossed from office. To that effort, I move: Amendment That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following: “this House decline to give third reading to Bill C-59,

An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 21, 2015 and other measures , because it:

a) introduces income splitting and super-sized Tax-Free Savings Account measures that will primarily benefit the wealthy few while wasting billions of dollars;

b) does not introduce a $15 per hour minimum wage or create a universal, affordable childcare program, both of which would support the working and middle class families who actually need help;

c) leaves Canadian interns without protections against excessive work hours, sexual harassment, and an unending cycle of unpaid work;

d) sets a dangerous precedent for Canadians' right to know by making retroactive changes to absolve the government of its role in potential violations of access-to-information laws; and

e) attacks the right of free and fair collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers. The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barry Devolin) : The amendment is in order. Questions and comments, the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie. Mr. Bernard Trottier (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the rant from the member opposite. It was a very demagogic rant, a bit of stream of consciousness and a laundry list of all of these promises.

The one thing about the budget and the reason I support it is that it is comprehensive, cohesive and fits together. When it comes to this long list of things the hon. member talked about, there is no plan in anything New Democrats say about how they will actually pay for them. After the last election, they had something like $56 billion in increased spending. It sounds as though they are going to outdo themselves this time around and have maybe $100 billion in increased spending by the government.

Would the member like to comment on where the money for all of these things New Democrats want to put forward will come from? Will all the taxes be increased? Carbon tax will get them part of the way there. What about all of the other taxes they will raise? That is what I would like to hear. Mr. Nathan Cullen : Mr. Speaker, being lectured by a Conservative about running debt is like being lectured by a pyromaniac about fire safety. The Conservatives have added $150 billion to the national debt, and 1.3 million Canadians are still out of work with the highest personal debt rate in our history.

I refer him to his own finance department's report. Every year, and it did it again this year, it looks at all the parties in this place to see which party most often balances the books over time, historically, and lo and behold, it is New Democrats who balance the books more than anybody else.

I will give the Conservatives some credit in that they beat the Liberals a little bit, but it is so ironic to hear Conservatives now lecturing everybody, after having just borrowed about $2.5 billion to pay for income splitting that helps 15% predominantly of the wealthiest Canadians, that they somehow think they are entitled to lecture anybody on managing the books. The hard reality for the Conservatives is that we present a fully costed plan to Canadians for infrastructure, for child care, and when we say invest, we actually mean invest, that when we put the money in, we get some money back.

In fact, in most cases like infrastructure and child care, we get more back into the Canadian economy as opposed to shipping it out the door like the Conservatives do, no strings attached, to businesses that do not end up reinvesting. How do we know that? The facts support it. There were 400,000 lost manufacturing jobs in places like Windsor, and the Conservatives have nothing to say for it and no plan to make things better.

(1255) Hon. John McKay (Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.) : Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment the hon. member on his rant. It was one of the finer rants I have heard in a while. The previous question actually went where I wanted to go, which was to the self-congratulatory nonsense the Conservatives continually put forward. They have run up the national debt between $150 billion and $160 billion. That means that over the last 10 years, their average expenses have exceeded their revenues by somewhere in the order of $15 billion on an annual basis, which is hardly a way to run the economy.

Since I have already answered that question, I want to ask a second question which is on the so-called carbon pricing. Clearly, every government in Canada gets it now. B.C. prices carbon. Alberta prices carbon, and certainly the new government will be much more sensitive on pricing carbon. Ontario prices carbon. Quebec prices carbon. About 80% to 85% of the economy already prices carbon. The only place that the pricing of carbon is bad is across the aisle here, where the Conservatives simply want to keep their heads stuck literally in the sand, but I will not describe which kind of sand.

I would be interested in the hon. member's views that as a nation we have actually moved a great deal forward on the pricing of carbon, where the government has actually been a drag on the pricing of carbon. Mr. Nathan Cullen : Mr. Speaker, the debate, while important, around the pricing of carbon and the mechanism that one chooses, and to base that on experiences, of course the Conservatives have been laggards on this.

Any time they show up at any international meeting or any business forum on clean tech and clean energy, the Conservatives are shown to be what they are, laggards, trying to pull the train back, but the train has its own momentum and force. We see the Americans signing a deal with the Chinese. Again and again we are seeing countries coming forward, including less developed countries, all committing to this.

The point is that what little credit the Conservatives can take at any point when they flash a number forward about Canada's performance on climate change is directly and entirely the result of the work of the provinces and our municipalities, which have been leading this conversation from the beginning. As the Toronto Region Board of Trade points out, the number one lag and drag on the Toronto economy, the largest city in Canada, is congestion.

We actually need to invest in infrastructure, such as transit and more affordable ways to get around simply because it is costing the economy billions of dollars every single year with people stuck in traffic. At the most practical levels, and I think this is where we need to take the debate, when we are solving the questions that Canadians have about how to produce energy, how to use it, and how to get to and from home and work, those are questions that are encapsulated in the climate change debate.

Clearly, the days are long gone in which a government like the Conservative government for years now has said that we have to choose, that it is either the economy or the environment. The Conservatives have made their choice. It does not make any sense. It does not make any practical sense. We need practical solutions. One of them is pricing pollution. We believe in it as New Democrats, and lo and behold the global consensus has moved that way as well.

We look forward to working with our provincial partners in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, right across the country, because we know the opportunities are great, not just to battle climate change but also to fix the manufacturing crisis and get Canadians back to work.

(1300) Mr. Dan Harris (Scarborough Southwest, NDP) : Mr. Speaker, I also want to thank my colleague for his fantastic rant. This weekend I was at the peace for Scarborough event at Warden Woods Community Centre. In Scarborough, we have many impoverished neighbourhoods with few economic opportunities. In talking to a group of young people, I asked them about employment. Two of them shot up their hands, saying they had part-time jobs. Then when I asked who wants to have a job, all their hands shot up. There is clearly a lack of opportunity for young people.

Today a report came out showing that in Ontario, the low-wage workforce has skyrocketed by 94% over the past two decades, and that Ontario's workforce has gone from having 3% of the workers making minimum wage to over 12%. This really demonstrates that over the last two decades, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have done a terrible job on improving the living conditions of people in Ontario living in poverty, particularly young people who need opportunities.

I would like to ask the member if he has some ideas on what perhaps should be in this budget implementation bill to actually help young Canadians. Mr. Nathan Cullen : Mr. Speaker, here are the facts. The Conservatives talked this morning about how the Canadian economy has weathered through the last recession. That is not true for the economy writ large, but it is particularly not true for young Canadians and young workers. There are 250,000 fewer jobs for young Canadians now than before the recession. That is according to Finance Canada. There is an important provision in this.

We have also seen job quality, as my friend talked about, drop dramatically across the entire economy, but particularly for young people. There are fewer and fewer entrance jobs. We know from all the evidence that when young people get the training at colleges, polytechnics, and universities, if they do not get into their fields of employment soon after that training, it is called employment scarring. The effects and impacts on their earning power over their entire working lives is dramatically lessened. They have to get into the work that they need. We have seen this in this bill.

This is an important piece that I did not mention before. Right now, under the Canada Labour Code, unpaid interns, the young people looking to get the experience they need, are not protected against sexual harassment or unfair work conditions. One would think that the Conservatives would move that into the Labour Code so that the young people doing the internships in particular would be protected. They said they would, and when we got to the bill they did not.

The Canadian students' associations and the Canadian Intern Association came forward at committee and asked what the government was doing and why any Canadian business taking interns would not want to commit to protecting them against sexual harassment. The Conservatives said not to worry about it, that they would take care of that later, after having promised to put it in this bill. This was something practical that could have been done to protect young Canadian workers entering the workforce. The Conservatives simply made a choice.

That choice was not to take action to protect some of the most vulnerable workers, those seeking internships, particularly unpaid ones, who are trying to get experience. The job market is so lousy for them that they have to do these other things to get the experience they so desperately desire. For the love of Pete, New Democrats moved the amendments and implored the Conservatives to make this change and protect young Canadian workers from unfair work conditions, from extended hours, from sexual harassment, and the tough-on-crime Conservatives said no over and over again. It is shameful.

I have no idea, with all good reason, ethics, and morality, why the Conservatives would not act on this, but they did not. New Democrats obviously will. Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Winnipeg North, Lib.) : Mr. Speaker, I rise with pleasure to address an important piece of legislation that we have before us, which I believe distinguishes the difference between all political parties inside the chamber. It is important for me to recognize right at the beginning that today we hear a lot about Canada's middle class, as well we should.

However, I would suggest that since the leader of the Liberal Party became our leader a couple of years ago, when he first raised the level of debate on the issue of middle class, we have seen other political entities in the House adopt what we believe is a very important issue; that is, the middle class of Canada. Even though the leader of the Liberal Party might have been the first to raise the profile of the issue, today we see that all political parties are trying to come to grips with what they now believe is an important issue also.

The difference is that we truly do believe that the answer to many of Canada's issues and problems we have today is to strengthen Canada's middle class. If we recognize that the greatest asset in terms of potential economic growth for our country is to invest in our middle class, we give strength to our middle class. A healthy, strong middle class equates to opportunities in a strong Canadian economy. This is the 10th budget given by the current government. What we have noticed is that this particular budget gives the most to Canadians who need it the least.

It is time for a better plan, investing in jobs and growth for the middle class and those working very hard to become a part of it. We recognize that under the current government, middle-class Canadians have had to work longer and harder to make ends meet. We would argue that this is just not right. We talk about a plan of fairness. Here today looking at the budget, we see it is all about priorities. I will give a sample of the type of fairness that the Liberal Party of Canada is talking about. A Liberal government would make the tax system fairer, and cut the middle-class tax rate by 7%.

That is a $3 billion tax cut for those who need it the most. The Liberal plan would also provide a bigger, fairer tax-free monthly cheque to help families with the high cost of raising their kids. Let me give a specific example. With the Liberal plan, a typical two-parent family with two kids, earning $90,000 per year, would get $490 tax free every month. With the Prime Minister 's plan, that same family would receive $275 after taxes. We get ministers and members from the government standing up and saying that the Liberals would take away that tax break, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that the Liberal Party's plan compared to the government's plan would see middle-class families with children receiving more dollars every month. That is the truth. We would also ask Canada's wealthiest Canadians to pay a little more so that the middle class can pay less. The Liberal Party would in fact cancel the Prime Minister 's income splitting and other tax breaks for the wealthy. We would introduce a new tax bracket for the top 1%, on incomes over $200,000.

(1305) Members will be no doubt be very much aware of the income splitting plan. This is a $2 billion plan that the Conservative government put into place, where hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be taken out of the middle class every year to support less than 15% of Canada's wealthiest people. It is a very costly plan, which is just not necessary. Even the former minister of finance, the late Jim Flaherty, agreed that it was a bad idea, that it was not fair. Yet, the Prime Minister has seen fit to bring forward an income splitting program at a substantial cost. We believe that is wrong.

It is much like within this very same budget we are seeing the government double the TFSA contribution limits. Who is more likely to benefit from that tax initiative? Again, it is going to be some of Canada's wealthiest people. If I reflect on the residents of Winnipeg North, which I represent, I do not have constituents making between $40,000 and $70,000 as a household income who have an extra $10,000 sitting around so they can invest into the TFSA maximum. That very rarely exists. I would suggest that demonstrates just how unfair the government is in terms of its taxation policy.

Whether it is the TFSA or the income split, there is a significant difference in the way the Liberals would govern compared to what we are seeing in this Conservative budget. The Prime Minister offers tax breaks for the wealthy. Liberals, on the other hand, believe in a country that works for everyone. Our leader has been very clear. We must strengthen those at the heart of our economy, middle-class Canadians, who have not had a decent raise in 30 years. Liberals will continue to present solutions to grow our economy. Growth is very important.

We all benefit when the Government of Canada gets its priorities right within the budget. We have seen that in terms of certain industries in the last number of years. Imagine the manufacturing industry, in particular in a province like Ontario, which has been hit very hard. We are talking about tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs being lost in the province of Ontario alone, good quality jobs in the most part, because we have a national government that has ignored that file. The jobs are not being replaced to the degree that they have been lost. Understandably, Canadians are concerned.

That is why they are looking for leadership from Ottawa in this regard. When the Conservatives say they created 1.3 million jobs, the reality is that the government has fallen short. In the last couple of years, we are maybe talking about a couple of hundred jobs. However, what kinds of jobs are they? They are not of the same nature or value as the jobs we have lost. The government continues to spread information to try to give a false impression, as if it is actually doing a good job on the issue of job creation when nothing could be further from the truth. We see that in terms of the whole trade debate.

Minister after minister will stand to say how wonderful and glorified they are to have signed trade agreements. Yes, they have signed a few trade agreements. However, the EU agreement, which is 28 of the 38 countries that the Conservatives often refer to, has still not been signed off. That agreement is not finalized. Our Prime Minister was just overseas. I suspect that there was very little progress on that file.

(1310) The President of Ukraine in was in this chamber. He made an appeal to all parliamentarians and, through the House, all Canadians for a trade agreement between Ukraine and Canada. However, again, the government has even let us down on that front. It could have been doing more. If we look at what the EU has done with Ukraine on the trade file and compare it with what Canada has done, we will find that Canada has fallen short. The Conservatives might talk a tough line. They might espouse how wonderful we are. However, reality does not reflect what they say from the benches.

In fact, when we talk about trade, the bottom line is whether Canada has a trade surplus or a trade deficit. Under the Liberal administrations, we were always on the positive side. We always had a trade surplus. Not under the Conservative government. I believe it is up to 51 months of trade deficits. In fact, when the Prime Minister replaced Paul Martin, we had a $1 billion dollar-plus trade surplus.

The Prime Minister converted that trade surplus into a trade deficit, and we have had it virtually ever since The Conservatives can talk about how great they are at trade deals, but the bottom line is they have been a total and absolute failure, at a substantial cost. One wonders why we have lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. Maybe we should start looking at the trade balance and the Conservatives' less than impressive performance on this file. When we do that, we start to understand that trade surplus versus trade deficit means thousands of jobs, thousands of opportunities that have been lost.

We can continue on with respect to the economics of this budget when we talk about trade surplus versus trade deficit and how poorly the government has actually done on the issue. Think of what the budget implementation bill would do. It would create what it calls a balanced budget type of legislation. Imagine a government that has failed at getting a balanced budget now preaching as if it knows what it is like to have one. The only time it actually had a balanced budget was the one year that followed then prime minister Paul Martin. Paul Martin and the Liberals provided a multi-billion dollar surplus.

When the Conservatives became government, they actually had a huge surplus. Within two years, they converted that huge surplus, and that was prior to the recession, into a multi-billion dollar deficit, They think they are financial managers. I think not. We are now months away from an election, and the government says that it has balanced the budget. The government cannot fool Canadians. Take a look at the way in which it has achieved this so-called balanced budget.

It sold, at wholesale prices, $2 billion worth of GM shares and then it went into a contingency fund, something some of the ministers said they would never do. They did this to generate a false balanced budget. It tapped into the contingency fund and sold GM sales for a few billion dollars to create a $1 billion surplus. I do not believe this budget will in fact be balanced. I believe we will find out after the next election, when all the numbers start coming in, that this Conservative/Reform, pretend party, or government, failed at delivering a balanced budget in 2015-16 fiscal year.

(1315) It is amazing how the Conservatives can look at the Liberal Party and say that the Liberals do not know how to balance budgets. In fact, the only person in this chamber who has actually balanced a budget as the minister of finance is the member who sits in front of me, the member for Wascana , the deputy leader of the Liberal Party. If we look at the period of governance between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, we will find that there are numerous balanced budgets. However, we know for a fact that it is the Conservatives who have been unable to balance a budget.

They are the ones off in fairyland, pretending or trying to give a false impression that they are good at balancing the books, when reality says that it is the absolute opposite. If there is any party with any credibility whatsoever on this issue of balanced budgets, it is definitely not the Conservative Party. The record clearly shows that the Liberal Party can and does balance its books. At the same time, the Liberal Party knows what is important to Canadians, and we ensure the financing is in fact there. I will give a couple of examples on that. There is the issue of pensions.

A few years back, the Prime Minister , while on the other side of the ocean, announced that the age of retirement would be increased from 65 to 67. The Liberal Party recognizes the cost of that for Canadians. It is a cost that we are not prepared to accept. Through that policy, the Conservative government will put thousands more seniors into poverty. The explanation provided from the Conservatives in justifying increasing the age from 65 to 67 is absolutely bogus. They have tried to create a crisis situation. There is no value to their arguments as to why the government has made that decision.

The independent Parliamentary Budget Officer in essence is saying that, as are outside stakeholders. This is an issue I plan to use at the door for my constituents. The Liberal Party has been very clear that it will revert that and maintain the age 65. We will not allow the Conservative government to get away with increasing the age of retirement from 65 to 67. When we look at CPP, it is very clear the Prime Minister has in the past indicated that he does not support CPP. He would just as soon see CPP disappear. Now the Prime Minister is refusing to meet with premiers to work at improving CPP.

It has become very clear that the Prime Minister does not care about the social safety net of Canada's three pension programs. The facts and the words from him clearly demonstrate that. The Prime Minister does not recognize what Canadians hold close to their hearts and truly believe in, such as our health care system. However, the Liberal Party does believe in CPP. We do believe in health care. We do believe in the importance of a social safety net, which is something with which we cannot trust the Conservatives.

(1320) Mr. Jeff Watson (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, the member spent an awful lot of time on two elements, one less at the end, with respect to protecting social programs, which were a significant part of the budget deficits we ran during the period of the stimulus and beyond, when we were bringing the budget back to balance. We did not cut the transfers to the provinces. I know the member is a rookie in the House and was not here during the great recession, but I want to ask him this question.

In Bloomberg, on March 25, 2009, the headline said, “Canada Needs Second Round of Stimulus, Ignatieff Says”. It goes on to suggest that not only did the Liberals demand larger and bigger deficits of the minority Conservative government at the time, but they threatened to topple the government if they did not produce bigger deficits. I wonder how the member feels about the member for Wascana and his colleagues voting in that fashion, for much bigger deficits during the stimulus period.

(1325) Mr. Kevin Lamoureux : First, Mr. Speaker, if the member wants to challenge what the Liberal Party did on health care, it was the Liberal Party that nationalized the health care program across Canada, recognizing the valuable role it played. It was former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau who, through the Canada Health Act, ensured an ongoing commitment to health care. It was former prime minister Jean Chrétien, during the 1990s, who established ongoing cash as opposed to tax point transfers, which guaranteed cash financial contributions to health care.

It was Paul Martin in 2004 who ultimately signed the health care accord, which led to the highest contributions ever. These record highs that the government likes to brag about can all be attributed to Paul Martin's health care accord signed in 2004, which expired in 2014. The government chose to ignore the importance of the health care accord and did not renew it. With regard to the question, the government has now had 10 budgets and has yet to demonstrate one balanced budget on its own merit. Mr. Ted Hsu (Kingston and the Islands, Lib.) : Mr.

Speaker, would my colleague comment on health care and housing with respect to this bill? Mr. Kevin Lamoureux : Mr. Speaker, housing is a very important issue. It does not matter what region of the country one lives in, there are significant needs in housing. Let me give a couple of very specific examples.

A proactive national government working with other levels of government and other stakeholders could make a difference, everything from housing co-ops, which provide a wonderful alternative to owning a home, to being a renter, to looking at senior life lease programming, infill housing, encouraging governments to support home improvements. Canada's overall housing stock should be of concern to all of us. It does not matter in what region of the country one lives. There are serious issues surrounding first nations housing and the affordability of housing.

We need to recognize that the Government of Canada has to play a stronger leadership role in working with the different stakeholders, the different levels of government in trying to address a national housing strategy that would make housing more affordable, safer and cleaner, ultimately investing in housing infrastructure across Canada. Mr. John Carmichael (Don Valley West, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, our government not only delivered a prudent, balanced budget, but one that also contains important measures to address the priorities of Canadians.

I am pleased to take the opportunity to discuss a few highlights today, and I will be sharing my time with the member for Burlington . Just as our government has worked hard to bring forward a balanced budget, every day Canadian families are also working hard to balance their budgets, and that is one of the reasons I am particularly happy about budget 2015: because it supports Canadian families in meaningful ways. We have recognized that each family is unique. We are not attempting a one-size-fits-all solution, as some of the opposition members are proposing.

One such example is the universal child care benefit, which would give families $1,920 per year for each child under six and $720 per year for children six through 17. This money could be used for the needs of children in whatever way parents choose. As promised, our government implemented income splitting for families with minor children. This allows many families to be in a lower tax bracket, keeping more money in moms' and dads' pockets.

We have also increased the children's fitness tax credit to $1,000, helping to provide children with the opportunity to participate in the sports they love and build the habit of a healthy, active lifestyle. These tax measures and benefits provide relief for 100% of families, primarily hard-working middle-class families. Our government's measures provide tax relief and benefits of up to $6,600 for an average family of four. That is almost $7,000 per family each year.

I know from experience that raising a family is not inexpensive, and although my children are now grown, I can appreciate what these measures would mean to Canadian families with young children. Statistics show that 11 million Canadians have eagerly made use of the tax-free savings account. Budget 2015 increased the annual contribution limit to $10,000 each year. I have had numerous constituents in my riding who are quite excited about this new saving opportunity.

I have just highlighted measures that benefit families raising the next generation of Canadians, but I would also like to talk about how budget 2015 benefits our seniors, those who have spent their lives building Canada into the proud nation that it is today. The financial state of our seniors has seen great improvement. Canada's low-income rate for seniors has fallen from 21.4% in 1980 to 5.2% in 2011. That is one of the lowest rates in the industrial world.

Budget 2011 introduced the largest GIS increase in over 25 years, investing more than $300 million per year to further improve the financial security and well-being of more than 680,000 seniors across Canada. Our government has also implemented pension income splitting for pensioners. In 2014, a single senior can earn at least $20,054 and a couple at least $40,108 before paying federal income tax. As a result of the actions our government has taken since 2006, approximately 380,000 seniors have been removed from federal tax rolls completely.

Over the last few years, many of the seniors in my riding have written to me about the need to adjust RRIF rules to bring them into alignment with the increased lifespan of seniors. In response to their letters and calls, I addressed this issue with the Minister of Finance . Budget 2015 significantly reduces the minimum withdrawal factors for RRIF, allowing seniors to preserve more of their retirement savings. As well, budget 2015 introduces the home accessibility tax credit for seniors and persons with disabilities so that they can continue to live independently in their own homes.

Speaking of those who have contributed to building our nation, there are those who have put their very lives on the line to defend our nation's freedom and security: our veterans. In Don Valley West , we are proud to be the home of Sunnybrook, the largest veterans centre in Canada. I enjoy serving the veterans in my riding and I am thankful that our government continues to place their care as a priority. The government has continually made important improvements to the new veterans charter to meet the needs of veterans.

(1330) Economic action plan 2015 further demonstrated this growing commitment.

This includes implementing the new retirement income security benefit for moderately to severely injured veterans, expanding access to the permanent impairment allowance to help compensate disabled veterans for the loss of career opportunities, modifying the earning loss benefit to ensure that part-time reserve force veterans have access to the same level of income support as regular full-time reserve force veterans, and increasing the level of individualized care to veterans requiring regular support by improving the ratio of veterans to case managers.

In addition to the measures in the 2015 budget, we have also opened new front-line mental health clinics across the country. The new family caregiver relief benefit will provide veterans who have a service-related injury with an annual tax-free grant of over $7,000 to provide caregivers in the home with flexibility or relief while ensuring that the needs of the seriously injured veterans are met. All these benefits build on our record of keeping our economy strong by defending Canada at home and abroad, enhancing national security, and standing up for our veterans.

I have spoken about various groups of people and what the budget means for them. Now I would like to take the opportunity to highlight what budget 2015 holds for an issue that I hear about from every age group and from many walks of life in my riding of Don Valley West: the issue of transit. One of the most common complaints I hear from Toronto constituents has to do with congested traffic and gridlock.

This year's budget held particularly good news for Toronto: the new innovative public transit fund will invest an additional $750 million over two years starting in 2017-18, and $1 billion per year ongoing thereafter. Our mayor said of the new innovative public transit fund, “This is a major step forward for Toronto and for the country” and said, “The federal government committed to establishing a dedicated, national fund to invest in public transportation.

This is good news for Toronto and for cities across Canada.” This new transit fund is in addition to the ongoing funding already in place through the new Building Canada plan, which continues to provide $5.35 billion per year on average for infrastructure, and in addition to the gas tax fund. I feel very few people know about the Building Canada plan and the gas tax fund, and even fewer understand how these programs have already impacted their cities and municipalities, and specifically, in my case, the city of Toronto.

For example, since 2006, through the gas tax fund, the Government of Canada has invested more than $2.2 billion to support municipal infrastructure projects across the GTA. Our government doubled and extended the federal gas tax fund and made it permanent. This is a dedicated, predictable, and flexible source of infrastructure funding for municipalities. Despite all contrary claims, since 2006 our investment in infrastructure has been at the highest level and length ever seen in Canadian history. Being a businessman, I like solid numbers without the spin. The facts cannot be clearer.

I am proud of our government's record investment in infrastructure. Another issue that I often hear addressed by all age groups is health care funding. The administration of health care is carried out by the province, but the federal government contributes to the funding. This year the Province of Ontario will receive record high transfer payments from our government to support health care, education, and social programs. Ontario will receive $20.4 billion in federal transfers this year alone.

This is an increase of 88% from under the old federal Liberal government, which radically slashed transfer payments to the provinces. We will never do that, nor will we allow it. Our government's balanced budget and our low-tax plan for jobs, growth, and security are just further demonstrations of our strong leadership for Canada, leadership that has been consistently demonstrated and carried out through action. This year's economic action plan 2015 is no exception. I look forward to seeing the bright future of our growing, beautiful country, one that we are all proud to call home.

(1335) Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Winnipeg North, Lib.) : Mr. Speaker, my question to the member is with respect to infrastructure. The government continually says that it is investing in infrastructure as no other government has done in the past. However, what it is actually doing is allocating a large block of tax dollars over the next number of years, and this relates to the question I have for the member. The government is not spending money this year or next year. The actual allotment is heavy at the latter part of its commitment.

In other words, the Conservatives will go around throughout the summertime saying that they will give this to this community and that to that community, knowing full well that the money will not flow for at least a year and more. Would the member not agree that the government is putting politics ahead of the very badly needed infrastructure that we need to be investing in today? The question is this: why is the government playing politics with infrastructure dollars?

(1340) Mr. John Carmichael : Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's question. Clearly, I totally disagree with the premise upon which he places it. The Building Canada fund was a great initiative that was established a year ago. It set out a 10-year target of $53 billion, the largest infrastructure commitment in the history of this country. That is combined with the gas tax fund, which we made into law and which delivered infrastructure spending to municipalities from day one, including $2.2 billion to the area that I represent in Toronto.

I think the member opposite has to be fair in assessing the infrastructure programs that we have established, built, and developed. They are clearly designed to phase in as applications become available, but those applications are already under way today. I can look at a list of projects in my area alone. These programs provided $622 million for the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension and $133 million for the Toronto Union Station revitalization. I could go on, but I think I have made my point. Mr. Mike Wallace (Burlington, CPC) : Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for sharing his time with me.

This probably will be the last time I am on my feet making a speech in the House in the 41st Parliament, but I am hoping to be back in the next Parliament. I think the Speaker was hoping that this was a going away speech, but it is not. I want to give a shout out to my grandmother who watches the House of Commons on television every day hoping that her grandson will get up to speak, so Mr. Speaker, allow me to say hello to Grandma Wallace. Today we are speaking to Bill C-59 , which is the budget implementation bill.

I explain to my constituents all the time that the budget itself is a policy document that needs to be implemented. We have a couple of opportunities throughout the year to implement what is in the budget. The budget was actually passed by the House and now we have to implement what was in the budget through a ways and means motion and this bill we are debating today.

Normally we would have one in the spring and one in the fall, but we will be active on the campaign trail in the fall, so we are addressing Bill C-59 now, which has a lot of very important pieces that were in the budget and which will be implemented immediately. I also heard today that our colleague from Edmonton—Leduc is retiring and is not seeking re-election. That member of Parliament has done an excellent job for a number of years as the chair of the finance committee. I want to thank him for his efforts and all he has done on the financial items. We heard some really good speeches last week.

I was in attendance both Tuesday and Wednesday nights last week for the speeches of those who are not seeking re-election in the fall. I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the House who made some excellent speeches about why they ran for office, the accomplishments they made and why it is important for us as parliamentarians to continue this work. I want to thank those individuals who are moving on either to retirement or to other career opportunities.

The budget implementation bill we are dealing with today has a number of key items which I and other colleagues have advocated for over a number of years. The first item is the changes to the plans in terms of withdrawal rates for RRIFs. I have been told that in my riding of Burlington, the statistics are that 50% of my constituents are age 55 and older. I do not represent all of Burlington. I represent a portion, but the area I represent tends to have a fair number of seniors. I have been here nine years and there were a number of issues where I had a response from constituents.

On the issue of withdrawal rates for RRIFs, there were 40 individuals who came to see me. They were not related to each other. They were not connected by any organization. Forty individuals expressed the need for a change to the RRIF plan. They explained to me why it is important. People in my riding are living longer, as people are across the country. I still have a grandmother. When RRIFs first came to be, there was an understanding based on what the average lifespan of an individual was. In Canada, because of our quality of life, the health care provided and the environment, people are living longer.

They need to be able to stretch their retirement dollars longer as the average age is increasing. The other point that is important is that once people turn 71 years of age, their RRSPs have to be converted into registered retirement income funds. The Conservatives moved the age from 69 to 71 years.

(1345) Those funds are normally invested in the marketplace, and there were some challenges in the marketplace in 2008 and 2009. Those retirement nest eggs that those people worked all their lives for and saved for suffered due to the economic downturn that happened at that time. At the same time, we were forcing individuals to take money out at a minimum level even if they did not need the cash flow because they had other cash flow opportunities, whether that was a pension plan or funds from other sources.

The requirement to take that money out meant that those individuals felt a loss twice: once in the marketplace and once in having to pay taxes on money that earned less than they had anticipated it would earn. With the help of many of my colleagues on this side of the House, we advocated that the Minister of Finance reduce the minimum amount that had to be drawn from a RRIF. I am very happy to see that in the budget. It is a win for seniors across the country, including in my riding of Burlington. I am happy that it is part of this implementation bill so we can have it in place before this Parliament is done.

The next item is something that I had talked about and advocated for. This was actually a bit of a surprise. Often, we backbenchers are asked how much influence we have. On two points in this budget alone, I can say we backbenchers were advocating for change. One change allows people who are caring for a sick loved one to collect EI for six months instead of six weeks. That is a significant change and an important piece for my riding. As I said, we have a number of seniors in my riding and, as we know, when people age, their health care and support needs increase. It is natural for that to happen.

In this budget there is the opportunity for caregivers to increase the amount they can collect in EI if for some personal or family reason they need to be at home to look after someone who is in need. That change from six weeks to six months will have an important impact on someone being able to afford to stay at home with a relative who needs that support. It will also help build the community.

It will help the family because at whatever stage of the illness the individual is experiencing, the caregiver will be there and will not have to worry about the financial aspects of missing work for that six-month period. The other thing I would like to talk about is that in my riding we do not have one big employer. We are not a one industry town. Our largest employer employs around 800 people, which is fairly large. That is a good-sized company. Members should know that the unemployment rate for Burlington is in the range of 5% to 5.6%.

The majority of our employment base is small businesses, the job creators in this country. Our change to the tax rate from 11% to 9% will make a significant impact on the small businesses in my community. They will be able to pay more people to come to work for them. The tax burden will be less. They will be able to use the money that will become available to reinvest in their businesses. Reinvesting in their businesses means either buying more equipment or having more employees, which creates employment and wealth and makes this country a better place.

It was my honour to speak to Bill C-59 . (1350) [ Translation ] Mr. Guy Caron (Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, NDP) : Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his speech. I would also like to join him in wishing the member for Edmonton—Leduc the best of luck. I had the good fortune of working with him on the Standing Committee on Finance. He is highly regarded on both sides of the committee table. With respect to my colleague's speech, at the end, he was boasting about initiatives like lowering taxes for SMEs from 11% to 9%.

This budget also contains a measure that is basically a two-year extension of the accelerated capital cost allowance for businesses in the manufacturing sector. I have a very simple question. I would like to know why, on February 5, 2015, when we put forward an opposition day motion dealing precisely with those two issues, my colleague voted against the proposal, only to turn around and boast about including those two NDP proposed measures in the budget. [ English ] Mr. Mike Wallace : Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his comments as well as his congratulations to the member for Edmonton—Leduc .

People ask me what the main issue is I hear on the streets and in the coffee shops and workplaces in Burlington. The main issue I have heard is about balancing the books, that we not spend more than we bring in if we can help it. We did not face a recession, as did other countries around the world. We invested to make sure we got people back to work. We also made a commitment on this side of the House. In budget after budget we made a commitment and a plan to get back to balance. That has meant that we have had to make tough decisions and have had to make them in an orderly manner.

That is why this budget gets us back to balance. That is why there are a number of things in the budget implementation bill that we are now able to accomplish, because we made the hard decisions at the right time to get us back to balance. Mr. Scott Simms (Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, Lib.) : Mr. Speaker, the member made the point that from the backbench he was able to talk to the front bench about how he wanted to make it more lenient for caregivers to access EI.

I wonder if in the to and fro of the backbench and the front bench he was able to advocate not just for the caregivers but for the actual sick themselves, who only get 15 weeks of EI benefits. I think that should be expanded to more, and my private member's bill should be supported. I was wondering if he had that conversation as well. Mr. Mike Wallace : Mr. Speaker, the answer is no. The point that had been brought to my attention by a number of organizations and individuals in my riding was about the caregivers. That is what I advocated.

So members across and people watching at home know, every year when there is a budget, members of Parliament are given an opportunity to talk to the Minister of Finance about the issues and items they think are important to Canadians and important to their riding. I had a number of them on my list this year. It was the same as every year, 11 or 12. In actual fact, a number of them were included in the budget. It would be erroneous for me to say that I can do it once and it happens. It has been a number of years of advocating for these changes. That is my job, advocating for my riding, f