Mr. Speaker, my friends across the way honour me with their presence in wake of the speech I am giving.
I want to say a few words about something that is perhaps the greatest flaw in this budget and it is really the greatest flaw of the government in general. The Liberal government has been in power since 1993. Where it falls short, more so than in any other way, is with respect to the economy.
The government makes decisions every year about how to spend roughly $170 billion of taxpayer money. I think it is engaging in a game. It takes the hard earned dollars of taxpayers and appropriate them to itself in the form of taxes and then hands the money back to those same taxpayers and tells them to be grateful. That is fine as far as it goes. However, as members across the way know, that has a terrible impact ultimately on the economy. I will get into that in more detail in just a moment.
The truth is that in the last number of years Canada's standard of living has fallen rather dramatically. I want to quote some statistics in order to help make that case. The 1990s really was a decade of drift in Canada. I want to touch on some numbers and I hope members will allow me to do that.
Taxes drifted higher as a share of the economy in 2000 to 44.3% of GDP, up from 44% in 1999. The Canadian living standard fell $44, or about 0.2%, from $17,915 in 1989 to $17,871 in 2000. Over that entire decade our standard of living actually went down.
The U.S. standard of living increased by $2,573 or about 13% from U.S. $20,546 in 1989 to $23,119 in 2000, an average annual increase of 1.1%. An average American could buy more in 2000 than they could in 1989. They were much richer.
The gap between Americans and Canadians increased 61% between 1989 and 2000. By 2000, Canadians were just 70.3% as well off as Americans, down from 79.3% in 1989.
I want to underline that those are not my numbers. It was just a couple of years ago that the former industry minister, now the Deputy Prime Minister, raised these issues as the industry minister in the House. He said that the average standard of living for Canadians at that time was lower than that of the poorest of the poor U.S. states, Alabama and Mississippi. That was a tragedy. Does anyone know who that was a real tragedy for? It was a real tragedy for the poorest of poor Canadians.
For years I have sat in this place and listened to the government lecture us on how it cared about the little guy. However when the economy does not move at its full capacity, who are the people who are hurt? It is not the people with big incomes and all kinds of education. It is not the people with all kinds of contacts. It is not part of the family compact. It is not people who are connected to the government. Those are not the people who are hurt. It is the people without skills. It is the people who come from underdeveloped regions of the country.
The reason our economy does not move at full capacity and why we have an unemployment rate that has gone from 7% to 8% to 8.4% in the last several months is because the government decided it was willing to sacrifice economic growth in order to sustain billions upon billions of dollars in funding that it can use to politically benefit it and its colleagues. That is a moral outrage and a disgrace but it happens every budget.
What the Liberals should do, and they know this because they have economists who sit in their caucus, is pare out the unnecessary spending. By definition, if it is unnecessary, it is a waste and should not be in there. They should turn it back to people in the form of lower taxes, which creates more activity in the economy and broadens the tax base. When more businesses start up because of more activity, more jobs are created and eventually the unemployment rate is lowered.
The best example is the recent expansion in the United States. I pointed to this many times in the House. During the height of the U.S. expansion, the unemployment rate in the black community in the United States, which traditionally has been the poorest ethnic community in the United States, dropped to 7%. It was the same as our national unemployment rate in Canada. That was a wonderful thing because the black community had been disadvantaged for so many decades in the United States.
As a result of that great expansion, many companies that could not find workers when the unemployment rate was 4% went into areas where the unemployment was very high. They went into ghettos. They said they would train the people because they wanted them to come to work for them. Maybe these people had been on welfare their entire lives, or did not have the skills or had not finished school. However the companies wanted them to work for them. The companies said that if they did, they would not only get a wage but they would get some training, some contacts, some confidence and some hope, something they had not had that until then. That is the great triumph of an economy that is moving at full capacity.
In Canada, our economy cannot move at full capacity because it so weighed down by taxes and debt that the government has built up.
The way to change that is to change the entire course of what we do. We do not just maintain the status quo or make it worse by increasing spending by 9.3%, which was what the government did last time around. We shed all that heavy baggage of extraordinary spending that is not needed and offer it back to people in the form of lower taxes. We cut unnecessary regulation and pay down debt. The government should focus on its core role, which is to ensure that we have a peaceful country and that people are protected and secure.
If that were done, eventually underdeveloped regions of Canada, just like occurred in the United States in the recent expansion, would see industries move into them, like Cape Breton, Newfoundland, or northern Canada, northern Ontario, northern Alberta, northern Saskatchewan. Industries would move there because of the pools of labour, those people who do not have jobs but want them. Pretty soon people would have the opportunity they did not have before.
It is to the shame of the government that it has never ever recognized this obvious fact that it needs to do things to make our economy work much faster so that people who are on the bottom end and who have never had a chance in Canada will finally have some kind of an opportunity.
I promise the government that as long as I am in opposition, I am going to harry it on this every chance I get. It has been completely hypocritical to the point where the Liberals speak forever in this place about how much they care, yet on the other hand, their actions show something completely different.
I am simply going to conclude by saying the budget implementation act should not be supported. Again, this is a disgraceful budget, the worst effort ever by the finance minister. We see that in recent developments where the government is still trying to tinker with it two months after it coming out. We see the judgment of the markets in the form of a falling dollar. It is rather obvious the markets do not care for it and think the government is out of control. A 9.3% spending increase is absolutely shocking.
For instance, the government has not put any emphasis on providing for our military, those brave men and women who are going to Afghanistan. It has not put a priority on protecting them by funding them adequately and ensuring they are well equipped. The same applies to customs officers, immigration officials, RCMP and CSIS agents, all those people who do so much to protect our country.
I urge members around this place to vote against Bill C-49, the worst budget ever produced by the government.