Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak about the bill to implement our budget, because it is a great bill. It is a plan that has not only the economic present at heart, but also our economic future and the future strength of the Canadian economy for generations to come.
Before starting on my substantive remarks, I would like to address some of the comments that were made by the previous speaker and some of the previous questioners.
We would not be doing our job here as parliamentarians if we did not present facts. The Jenkins report was mentioned. The previous speaker claimed that it has not been implemented in any way in this budget. As Canadians well know, members of the Jenkins commission have already acknowledged that the government has gone a long way toward adopting and implementing important conclusions from that report and that this is absolutely vital to the future of innovation and productivity in the country.
Second, the member in the corner, representing one of the ridings in our nation's capital, mentioned hewers of wood and drawers of water. I do not think that term was even fairly applied to the Ottawa of 19th century in a country that was leading the world in the production of timber and lumber. He, with his family background, should know that.
We were already at the cutting edge of productivity, at the cutting edge of the export market for this valuable commodity in the 19th century. To term even the workers of that time as hewers of wood and drawers of water, to use that Biblical language referring to them, is absolutely insulting. It represents the irrelevance of his party to economic debate in Canada at the moment.
This is a country that is leading the world in high-quality research and development, in the creation of new enterprises, in attracting new investment for manufacturing, for high technology, for the creation of jobs across the board. We are leading the world in resources, as well as leading at the very highest level of technological innovation and productivity, and the member opposite knows that.
My remarks will focus on three aspects of the budget and the implementation bill. The measures contained in it are complex but absolutely necessary and predictable, given our government's stated objectives in our platform on the budget earlier this spring, the goals of driving forward jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for the country.
The first point I would like to touch on relates to the whole issue of debt.
We are living in exceptional times. They are times of great opportunity globally, and not just for Canada but for the whole world. The global economy now represents, depending on whose statistics one believes, about $61 trillion. Estimates go as high as $70 trillion.
Canada's part in that is less than $2 trillion. Our estimated GDP for 2012 is $1.7 trillion, $1.8 trillion, but we need to keep in mind what kind of growth that represents. In only 1990, as the Cold War was ending, as the Berlin Wall had just fallen, as the Soviet Union was about to break up, global GDP was $27.5 trillion. Therefore, we have seen more than a doubling, maybe a tripling, of growth in global GDP in that time.
Why? It is because almost all the countries of the world, including large countries like Russia and Brazil, those that are among the leading emerging economies today, have adopted a set of rules based on market discipline and democracy. That has driven a phase of growth that is in many ways unrivalled. I think the only period that compares with this period is the 1950-1970 period, when recovery from the terrible Second World War was taking place, but in spite of the great recession we have had in recent years, this period in some ways surpasses that earlier period of absolutely stunning growth for the world.
However, this growth has been characterized by financial crises. Let us not forget that this week, of all times, when we are debating Greece and the Leader of the Opposition is calling for Canada to throw good money after bad into a cause that is neither ours nor historically a role that Canada has played, given the internal dynamic of the European Union and the European community.
This whole period over the last 20 years has been characterized by successive financial crises beyond our borders. We had a Scandinavian banking crisis in the early 1990s. We had a crisis in the European exchange rate mechanism in the early 1990s. We had Mexico in the mid-1990s. We had Southeast Asia and massive devaluations of currencies in the late 1990s. We had a Russian financial crisis, which I saw first-hand as an official in our Department of Foreign Affairs at the time in 1998. Then there was Turkey, Argentina, the dot com bubble, followed by the granddaddy of them all, the financial crisis in 2007, and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, which we have seen since 2010 and which remains unsolved.
We in Canada have had to protect ourselves from these crises. We have to had to keep our economic fundamentals strong in spite of the pressures for indiscipline, the pressures for spending our way out of trouble in a way completely unjustified by common sense or prudence, and on the whole we have succeeded. We have the strongest record of currency stability and price stability among advanced nations. We have one of the lowest rates of debt. Members know the story: for our economic fundamentals, we are in many ways the envy of the world.
However, in recent times it has become harder than ever to maintain this record, to pursue fiscal consolidation and deficit reduction, in spite of the absolutely manifest evidence of some of our closest partners and allies going in other directions, often at great cost to their own economic fundamentals.
It is our view on this side of the House that one of the great achievements of this budget is to continue the course of setting an example, not just for Europe but for the whole world: an example of what moderation represents, an example of commitment to spending on an even keel and an example of spending not beyond one's means.
It has been harder, but we are managing it. We feel, along with many on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, that this is the best role that Canada can play.
There are examples in Europe itself of what, on a smaller scale, Canada has been doing. Sweden has implemented fiscal consolidation on a grand scale. I think the members opposite would be surprised to know that with its social democratic tradition, Sweden, with a right-of-centre government, recently has consolidated its finances and won the highest praise from the IMF, independent analysts and experts around the world for its fiscal record in the past few years. It has gone down the same path as Canada.
The same goes for the small country of Latvia, buffeted terribly by the financial crises of 2007, 2008 and 2009, but now, thanks to a 15% cut in terms of its budgetary spending in relation to GDP over several years, it has put itself back on course.
Nothing so dramatic is required in Canada's case, but we have done what is necessary to continue that record, which is exemplary and which is going to be a lodestone for many of those in Europe and Asia who are struggling to find a course forward.
The second point that we have accepted on this side, and that the other side has clearly not, is that more efficient, more effective government is the order of the day. I myself, as a former public servant, am the first to subscribe to the view that government can always be done better. Government must keep itself productive. It must keep itself modern. It must stay up to date with current practices, with technology, with innovations in management and organization.
That is exactly what this budget sets out to do by reforming environmental review, by focusing the Fisheries Act on the fisheries and by making labour market reforms through immigration and through employment insurance policies that will actually help Canadians—new and old Canadians—to get the jobs they want and for which they are increasingly qualified.
We are living in extraordinary times. Canada has an opportunity. We have an economic plan.
I often find myself asking myself and others what the NDP would have done in earlier phases of our history. When this country was being established as a series of colonies of European powers, would the NDP have considered the fur trade and the fishery in the 16th and 17th centuries as diseases? Was that what natural resources were to the NDP, even at that stage?
Would the timber and lumber industries, engines of our growth in the 19th century, have been cancelled by the NDP, had it been in power, because private enterprise was essential to their development, because they relied on natural resources?
I like to think they would not have, but reading the NDP constitution, listening to the Leader of the Opposition and listening to the members and critics opposite, I am afraid I am skeptical on that point.
