Mr. Speaker, it is an honour and a privilege to speak to the bill and hopefully try to persuade hon. members that this bill is worthy of their support.
I thought that I might start off my conversation about Bill C-30 with an incident from my pre-political life. When I was a lawyer practising law in the east end of Toronto and the Durham region area, from time to time I used to do some real estate work, particularly for companies that were moving executives from place to place but also for a variety of other real estate clients.
One of the persons who was recruited by the Canadian Cancer Society was a physician from I believe Denver. We went through our usual real estate transaction and then I fell into a conversation with him about what he was going to be doing in Toronto, what research he was going to be conducting, and things of that nature. He was specifically hired as a physician researcher to track demographic and other patterns with respect to cancer. The question I asked him at the time was what the greatest indicator of health was. His comment was “The size of your pocketbook will directly relate to how healthy you are”. I thought it was kind of a crude comment, to be perfectly honest, but he went on to indicate that, by and large, wealthier people live longer, live healthier lifestyles, are more satisfied, have better access to medical services and are more up on trends that would enhance and lengthen their lives. That story sort of stayed with me.
I would put it to members that a government that creates wealth, in absolute and in relative terms, will also have the happy coincidence of creating health in its population. Over the course of the last number of years, that is exactly what the government has done. In fact, the wealth of this nation has been enhanced and increased, and we are, as a result, a healthier population.
It is not merely the $37 billion that the government has infused into the health care system. That is important money and significant money and if the Prime Minister gets an opportunity to meet with the premiers in the next few months, we are committed to putting that on a fiscally sustainable path. Similarly, the $2 billion that was allocated in this budget for additional funds into health is important money but I do not know if it actually tells the full story.
My argument will be that over the term of the government, indeed going back to 1993 when the prime minister and the then minister of finance started the arduous task of turning this nation away from a precipitous decline into third world status to now running seven surplus budgets in a row, the wealth of this nation has, in absolute and relative terms, grown, and therefore the wealth and the health of Canadians has increased, especially over the last seven years where we have run surpluses.
In all candour, the record is not uniformly good but in my view the good outweighs the bad. Strangely enough, there is an almost exact parallel between when the government started to run surpluses and the indices of wealth actually beginning to turn around.
There are essentially two ways to create wealth: people either work harder or work smarter. The way in which we have done it lately has been in improved labour participation. One of the interesting facts, when we start to parcel out the employment numbers, is that Canadians have actually been participating in the labour force in record numbers. We have actually increased our participation in the labour force and as a consequence we have improved our productivity numbers. Productivity numbers can also be improved by actually getting more involved with technology and improving the way in which goods and services are produced.
It is a gross generalization, but by and large our increases in standard of living have come because of the former, namely labour participation rather than the latter, which is increases in productivity due to investments in machinery and equipment. We have started to work harder with more labour participation and more numbers of people working rather than necessarily working smarter.
From 1980 to 1996, which is a 16 year period in which this government had the last three years of that period of time but the Conservative government had the bulk of that period of time, we ranked dead last in productivity in the G-7. Then from 1997 to 2003 we shot up to third. We are essentially in a dead heat with France and Japan. Going from dead last to third, is it any coincidence that simultaneously the government is running budget surpluses?
I will not argue that the standard of living tells us everything. Neither will I argue that it says nothing. What charts do say, however, is that ever since the government started to run surpluses our standard of living has in factual terms increased. We are wealthier and therefore we are healthier.
When we break it out by labour force participation, that is, working harder, during the period of 1960 through to 1996 we were fourth in labour participation. However, from 1997 through to 2003 we exceeded everyone, the U.S. included, and now we rank first. The joke is that Americans live to work and Canadians work to live. In fact, we are number one in the last five or six years in the labour participation rates of all of the G-7 nations.
That is both good news and bad. It is great that our labour participation rate has been good, but it is not sustainable. Demographics tell us that our labour force is aging and therefore people will be withdrawing and not contributing to the GDP as they have in the past. Our growth in productivity, which has been largely sustained by a participation in the labour force, is not a sustainable pattern over time.
From 1980 through 1996 our standard of living growth was second last. In other words, from 1980 to 1996, again a similar period of time of 16 years, we were second last in the G-7 in terms of standard of living growth. However, from 1997 through to 2003 we were first with an annualized rate of 2.7%. Is it simply a coincidence that those years were the same years that the Government of Canada ran surpluses and introduced the largest tax reductions in the history of the nation?
The effect of that has moved us from seventh in the OECD in 1996 to fifth in the year 2003 and second in the G-7. We still lag behind the U.S. by a substantial margin. However, we have started to close the gap. We are still about 14.5% behind the Americans in terms of standard of living, but we have substantially improved that from 18%, which is where it was in 1996.
A standard of living is not a measure of everything, that is, quality of life and other things that people consider to be very important, but it does measure something. The something that it does measure is of considerable importance to most Canadians.
The real question is, can we sustain this growth? The short answer is that our increases in productivity need to be less focused in labour participation and refocused on increases in working smarter.
How do we get smarter? The most obvious way is to get an education or to improve the educational attainment of the nation. Education is what unlocks the productivity chain. Adding just one year to the average education attainment in our country will add 5% to the GDP per capita.
Canadians are a fairly well educated lot. We have the second highest post-secondary attainment of any G-7 nation. However, it is not just any education. It has to be specific education. Not to put too fine a point on it, we need more degrees in science and fewer in law.