Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government never tires of telling the Canadian public that it has been working to get the economic fundamentals right.
Low inflation and drastic cutbacks to social spending were supposed to have set the stage for future jobs. We have had very low inflation for years and the government is ahead of schedule on deficit reduction.
But Canadians are facing the highest rate of unemployment during an economic recovery since the last depression. Where are the jobs? When can we expect that bountiful harvest of jobs that the Liberals have promised?
I commend the distinguished economist Pierre Fortin for so convincingly showing Canadians in the past few days that the harvest of jobs will never occur under the Liberal policies because they have their fundamentals wrong.
While the American policy makers have tolerated 3 per cent inflation in order to achieve near full employment, the Liberals have inflicted the strait-jacket of 1 per cent inflation and high real interest rates which have killed, according to Fortin, 850,000 jobs.
The Liberals cannot expect Canadians to believe the talk of jobs when their actions of inflation are calculated to kill jobs.