Mr. Speaker, a while ago I asked the Minister of Finance to explain to Canadians why the government had broken its election promise to create jobs in significant numbers to address the concerns of Canadians and how did he feel about the government telling Canadians that they will simply have to accept and get used to high unemployment, which both he and the Prime Minister had done.
The Liberals have broken their promise about jobs. We know that. When they assumed office there were 1.5 million people unemployed. Now almost four years later there are still 1.5 million people unemployed.
In the 1993 election campaign the Prime Minister said under a Liberal government that it would be like the good old days, but he did not tell Canadians he meant the dirty thirties.
Young Canadians face a shameful unemployment rate, officially at 17 per cent, but we know it is much higher than that. That does not even count the thousands who have given up looking or the tens of thousands flipping burgers at Burger King for a living. The Liberals and Burger King are both famous for one thing, the size of their whoppers, whether it be burgers or broken promises.
There are millions of unemployed Canadians and millions more who fear that each pay cheque may be their last. With millions unemployed and everyone else looking over their shoulder, surely that is a national tragedy in a country such as ours.
Today with still millions of Canadians unemployed and under employed, millions of Canadians living in poverty, again the poverty numbers have increased over the last four years, another indictment of Liberal policy. With insecurity spreading across the whole of Canadian society, the last four years have shown beyond any doubt that you can never build a successful modern economy the Liberal way, on the crude and wasteful dogma of the free for all world.
The Liberal government has proven that it cannot privatize, or down load, or slash and burn its way out of mass poverty, that it cannot as a government contract out of its responsibilities to society and it cannot build for the future on Liberal economics of greed, waste and blind short-termism.
In place of the priorities that the government has forced on Canadians in a way which has failed Canadians, the country needs a government with a vision of working together for the greater good and the belief in the potential of everyone.
This requires investing in Canadians. This means investing in jobs; equipping not just the few but the many with opportunities in education and employment; a dedication to equality and social justice; the certainty of action against unemployment; and an economic policy run in the interests not of the privileged few but of the whole community.
Why has the government not required banks to reinvest in the communities that trust them with their funds? Why has it not fought to stop banks from choking small business, farms and families with service charges and inflated credit card rates?
It is long past time that chartered banks started pulling their weight and made a real contribution to job creation in Canada. Since the finance minister has been able to show some progress on meeting deficit targets, and he should be praised for that, why does he not set job targets and meet them the same way as he has set deficit targets? We could avoid double digit unemployment rates if there was a serious and explicit unemployment target.
New Democrats and Canadians believe that lives and jobs are more important than numbers done on an accounting sheet. Does the government not think so too? The Liberal message of a low paid job or no job is a message that Canadians totally reject.
I ask once again, as I did some time ago, when will the finance minister, instead of paying for failure, begin to invest in success? At that time I also asked him why would he not consult the Saskatchewan New Democratic government which has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, which has pursued a partnership agenda and which has been successful in generating an unemployment rate which is the envy of the country. There is much to be learned there.