Posted: Tuesday, 26 February 2008

What We Wanted

The CLC said that the Budget should focus on Canada's growing job crisis, and start to close the fast-growing gap between the corporate elite and ordinary working families.

The manufacturing and forest industry job crisis is deepening and unemployment will rise rapidly as the US slows down, and as the impacts of the high Canadian dollar intensify. We said that the Budget should kick-start new manufacturing investment by supporting sector development strategies in key industries like auto and forestry. We need highly targeted measures to boost real investment, not more reckless, costly, across-the-board corporate tax cuts which mainly benefit the booming energy sector and the banks.

We said that the Budget should make major investments in environmental infrastructure, twinned to Buy-in-Canada procurement policies. We need major investments in basic municipal infrastructure, public transit, energy conservation and renewable energy to address key environmental challenges while also building new industries and creating new jobs.

We also need more government support for labour adjustment and worker training. Instead of the stop-gap temporary foreign worker program which has led to many cases of gross exploitation, we need to move unemployed and under-employed workers, especially recent immigrants and aboriginal Canadians, into good, skilled jobs.

The lion's share of income gains over the past decade have gone to the top 1% while wages and the living standards of Canada's working families have stagnated. Unfair tax cuts have increased income inequality and undermined public services. We called for higher top income tax rates for those with very high incomes, and increased child tax credits, income tax credits for the working poor and improved Employment Insurance benefits which would put more money in the hands of those who need it the most.

We said that the Budget should reverse the withdrawal of the Federal government from areas which matter most to working families, and fund a national child care and early learning program; home care for our seniors; affordable housing; and a national drug plan.

The investments we called for would benefit working people much more than the costly tax cuts like the two percentage point cut to the GST which already costs the Federal government more than $12 Billion per year, and deep cuts to corporate taxes which will cost us $15 Billion per year when fully implemented.

Find out what we got - Download the PDF.