Mr. Speaker, talk is cheap with the government.
I was astonished at the member's naive assertion of job creation numbers. The fact is that there is no evidence upon which the government can base its so-called job creation successes because it has not done its homework. It has not supervised the way the money is spent.
Even the last audit did not evaluate the results of the program. It simply evaluated the administration of the program. The government is blowing hot air when it talks about jobs being created. The fact is, it does not know for sure.
One audit states: “The sustainability results must be treated with caution. The estimates are still based on mere expectations, not real experiences”. The government has not done an audit or an evaluation on which it could base these numbers. It throws them out, blindly assuming that everyone is going to swallow its rhetoric when it is not based on anything credible to which Canadians can tie their belief.
I would hope that Canadians would not be taken in by this kind of rhetoric about hope, about creating jobs, about 30,000 people having work and transforming lives. The fact is, there is growing evidence that these pork barrel moneys actually destroy jobs because they help certain parts of the economy and penalize others, competitors and other businesses that are not getting government help. There is no evaluation of that.
The last thing that was so amazing was that the member said unemployment is at low levels and the government has created jobs. The fact is that Alberta and Ontario have created jobs because they have gotten their act together, along with some of the other provinces, balanced their books, gotten their tax regimes in order and created jobs in their provinces all by themselves, while this government continues to jack up job destroying taxes. For the government to claim credit for the good management of the provinces is absolutely repugnant. I ask the member to apologize to the provinces for taking credit for their hard work.