Mr. Speaker, the recent figures in the Work Competitiveness Report show that Canada is in a very bad position. In 1989 Canada had the fourth most competitive economy among OECD countries. Five years later, it stood fourteenth!
This drop is the predictable result of the federal government's inability to control its deficit. The government's stubborn insistence on using its spending power to intervene in provincial areas of jurisdiction is a waste of public funds and is slowing down job creation. Labour training, a tangle of federal-provincial overlap, as the Quebec manufacturers association pointed out yesterday, is a perfect example of the ineffectiveness of federal intervention. And who is paying for all this? Taxpayers and the unemployed.