Mr. Speaker, when a government drains our best and brightest from our workforce, it drains our future, our promise and our prosperity as a nation. Right now we have an entire generation of economic refugees fleeing our borders, a generation driven away by high taxes.
These are the brain drain facts. Over the last seven years, work visas to the U.S. have increased tenfold. There has been a 20% increase in Canadian doctors and nurses leaving for the states since 1985. Last year the University of Waterloo had 120 U.S. companies recruiting its graduates, four times more than in 1995. One-third of its co-op computer grads are hired away by Microsoft each year.
The fact is we are subsidizing American jobs with Canadian education. What we really need is to create an environment that lets our graduates stay here at home. For us in Canada this means lower taxes.