Shawn Murphy , M.P. for Charlottetown

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tabled the 2010-11 federal budget in the House of Commons yesterday.

 

It was very much a “stand-pat” budget with nothing new in the way of announcements, directions or any realistic plan to deal with the many important issues facing this country, including the elimination of the deficit.

 

I could go on at length but one very successful program that was axed and has been around for ten years is the Atlantic Innovation Fund.

 

Basically this program spent about $60 million per year on research related projects. It has been extremely beneficial to our university; the Atlantic Vet College; producer organizations; a number of our primary industries and many of the start-up companies in our emerging industries such as biotechnology. The program has been cancelled and replaced with a program with less than one third of the funding.

 

There was no discussion and very little mention about the environment, climate change, productivity, pensions, culture and the demographic challenges facing this country. This is very unfortunate.

 

The whole exercise was very backward looking and will present future problems for our country.

 

There is an overriding issue here and that is the actions of the baby-boom generation towards the next generation of Canadians: they are incurring large deficits and totally ignoring issues that face us as a country. If you are under 30, I urge you to read the budget. Is this behavior fair to our next generation of Canadians? Who is going to fix the deficit mess? Who is going to fix the pension mess? Who is going to fix the climate change mess? Given the direction that the Conservative Government is clearly on, that answer is you. This issue is going to play itself out in years to come.