Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to present slides in one moment, but I just want to state that I have been a full-time tenured professor at Carleton University's school of business since 1987, teaching business, economics, and public policy. This is my 29th year at Carleton. I have taught over 100 times in developing countries, including every year in Poland since 1991 and China since 1997. These are the two most successful post-communist countries in transition, which provides a lot of lessons in terms of economic development and so forth.
I appear on my own behalf as I do not work on behalf of lobbyists, NGOs, unions, corporations, political parties, or other individuals. Finally, since 2008 I've appeared 24 times before House and Senate committees of the Parliament of Canada, including multiple times before this august committee. I recognize the veteran, Monsieur Caron. I was mentioning to him that I am, I guess, a veteran, too.
In the run up to the budget, you'll receive numerous submissions from what Captain Renault in Casablanca called the usual gang of suspects, with long shopping lists of millions and billions of dollars. I will not do that today. I am going to do something completely different, following Prime Minister Trudeau's excellent statement that policy must be evidence based.
I will now provide some empirical data on the graphs that deconstruct some urban legends that are being touted regularly in the media by pundits, sometimes by elected officials, as the budget must be grounded on empirical reality and not on snake oil or quicksand.
I will start just by stating that Canada, as we all know, has experienced a temporary—and I underline the word “temporary”—oil shock. The economy is growing, albeit slowly. This year it's forecast to grow at 1.5%—that's positive 1.5%—next year, over 2%. There's already massive monetary stimulus sloshing around the system because of the historically unprecedented low interest rates, and there are $30 billion right now as we speak being pumped into the Canadian economy, representing the annual provincial deficits in aggregate across Canada.
I want to deal with urban legend number one. I've heard NGOs and some elected officials say that we're a one-trick pony, completely dependent on oil and gas. This is one of the biggest urban legends of all. I deconstruct it as often as I can. This is a very fresh graph. It's only two weeks old. It's posted by Statistics Canada. It breaks down the totality of Canada's economy into sectors ranked by employment. I'm not going to read through the list. I just simply want to highlight that the totality of all Canadians working in natural resources—that's where we're all allegedly working—is 370,000 Canadians, one-third of one million.
By contrast, 16 million of 18 million employed Canadians are working downstream in the services—plural—sectors, and that includes education, like me. There are 1.3 million of me running around, one million in financial services, and 2.7 million employed in health care. I can go on and on. We are one of the most diversified economies in the entire world alongside the United States, so when people say we're not diversified, that is not evidence based. We can discount that urban legend.
Another is that we're running into very bad times and we're very poor, or we're about to be. This is simply not true. We are one of the richest, most affluent countries on the planet Earth, somewhere around the 10th wealthiest in the world ranked by GDP per person on a PPP—that's purchasing power parity—basis, which is the proper way to do it. As you can see, there's the graph showing that we're in the top 10 countries of about 200 countries in the world.
Another urban legend is that the middle class is in collapse—it's shrinking; it's disappearing; it's vanishing. This is simply not true. This is Stephen Gordon's graph. You're all aware of Professor Gordon from Laval, and this is from a CANSIM table. Again, I'm not going to belabour this. Yes, it collapsed or dropped very dramatically in the 1990s because of the historic downsizing. It was the largest downsizing in Canadian history, but it has recovered since then.
Another thing we're hearing all the time from the NGOs is that inequality is exploding in Canada, yet people refuse to do comparative empirical research. This is OECD data. It's unimpeachable and it's showing that we are almost smack dab on the OECD average. This idea that we're an extreme outlier is simply empirically false. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't do more about each of these urban legends, that we can't do more to reduce inequality, but we have to start from facts and not from urban legends.
Another issue is that I receive emails from NGOs who get angry at me talking about this. Andrew Coyne has also talked about this in his columns. Poverty has collapsed in this country over the last 50 years, collapsed.
It was 25% in the mid-1960s when I was a child growing up in eastern Ontario. Twenty-five per cent of Canadians were below the poverty line. Today it's 8.8%. That's under both Liberal and Conservative administrations. This is completely non-partisan. We are doing an extraordinary job at reducing poverty.
Parallel with that is the idea that—