Dear Editor,
The federal budget presented on November 4 looks like a neoliberal bandwagon budget. It valued cuts in expenses and worker and worker funded investments for corporations. A more balanced budget would have a much lower deficit and an austerity budget that includes austerity for everyone.
The bandwagon for years has been cutting the number of government employees, and the plan calls for that. No careful examination of each of the programs they serve and how they might function better. The new wait time for people with temporary visas to get permanent residency increase to three or more years. It should be fixed. The same goes for all their programs. The challenge is this process would use real data, not imagined data.
The rapid write down of capital expenses will be mostly paid for by workers. It should have been paid by corporations with a five per cent surcharge on corporate incomes over $1 million along with the investments in ports and other infrastructure.
Carbon capture and sequestration is a sham. Only oil companies should be paying for it. It would be a waste of public funds.
Programs like school lunches have a huge social and economic payoff but wealthy people and corporations do not need them. Will they be among the programs the government will cut?
Top of the list of neoliberal bandwagons is no increase in taxes. The cuts under Chrétien, Martin, and Harper contributed to the widening economic gap between the very wealthy and everyone else.
The increase in investments in the military comes without a discussion in Parliament on what our military priorities and objectives should be. Investment in expensive equipment will benefit corporations but what do they actually contribute to the defence of Canada?
A report came out in the last month or so claiming that 95 per cent of corporations using AI did not gain any net benefit yet.
We are in a position that calls for a government response similar to going to war. In past wars, governments increased revenues through increases in taxes. The main pain in the budget that was presented will be felt by civil servants and people benefitting from the programs that will be cut including veterans and the RCMP. Increasing taxes would be fairer.
Sincerely,
Jim Kenney
East Hawkesbury
