By Ujjal Dosanjh

Four times in three years, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has prorogued our Parliament—derailing the nation’s business in order to protect his own partisan interests. Time and again, Harper has proven that his first and only impulse when in trouble is to shut down debate, dissent, and, ultimately, democracy.

His actions have become a truly worrisome and damaging trend, and all Canadians pay a price for this. By proroguing Parliament, Harper wiped out 35 pieces of important legislation, but Canadians lost more than just legislation or missed days in the House of Commons.

Every day that Harper cancelled Parliament this winter meant lost opportunities for future generations of Canadians. Every dollar this government spent promoting its so-called “Economic Action Plan” with partisan TV ads over the last three months is a dollar that could have been spent on job creation. And every day that this unambitious Harper government continues in office creates a new deficit of hope for the millions of Canadians suffering through tough economic times right now.

This week’s budget demonstrates the severe magnitude of this deficit of hope. We now have a Conservative budget that offers nothing new and no substantive change for the Canadians who need it most.

The prime minister said prorogation was necessary to “recalibrate” the direction of his government, but it is abundantly clear that their agenda and their budget are more about recycled old promises than a recalibrated new direction for Canada. Both the throne speech and the budget this week were long on generalities and gimmicks, but painfully short on actual plans to create jobs, balance the books, and invest in Canadians.

Canada’s new deficit stays sky-high at a stunning $49.2 billion. Unfortunately though, this government’s vision is not nearly as big as its record-setting budget deficits. This budget contains no funding for affordable childcare, no effort to confront the climate change crisis, no plan to reform and enhance Canadian pensions, no plan for advanced education, no plan to protect and support our health-care system, and no plan to house our homeless or confront child poverty.

As Michael Ignatieff has said, we need a government that will start making serious and positive investments in Canadians. But we can’t get to a better Canada if nearly half of our aboriginal population hasn’t finished high school. We can’t get there if too many new Canadians can’t speak English or French, and we can’t get there if some six million Canadians have low literacy skills. If we are serious about our aspirations for a competitive and compassionate 21st-century Canada, it is absolutely imperative that we invest in our people.

While this budget is a clear disappointment, the federal Liberal caucus is focused on building a better alternative for Canadians. We’ve made clear proposals on jobs, pensions, and poverty, because we’re the party that stands with middle-income Canadians, seniors, and families struggling to get by.

We have proposed a job creation program including support for manufacturers, financial incentives to hire young Canadians to help reduce the worst youth employment rate in a generation, and tax incentives for investments in start-up companies and emerging sectors like clean energy.

On climate change, we have proposed a binding cap-and-trade system that is fair to all regions and industries. We must act now and show real leadership on climate change and not just wait for the United States.

We put forward ideas to reform our pension system so that Canadians are secure in their retirement: a Supplementary Canada Pension Plan to help Canadians save more, giving employees with stranded pensions the option of growing their pension assets through the Canada Pension Plan, and protecting Canadians on long-term disability by giving them preferred status as creditors in case of bankruptcy.

While the Liberals hosted 24 nonpartisan policy roundtables on major issues facing Canadians, the Harper government shut down Parliament for three months—wasted days.

We must not let them do it again. We have put forward a number of clear proposals to provide the basis for a productive session of Parliament. A session that could have—and should have started weeks ago.

Ujjal Dosanjh is the Liberal member of Parliament for Vancouver South.