Mr. Speaker, I know I sound like the Hon. Herb Gray but I have to point out that the minister is simply wrong when he says that the government balanced the budget. It is absolutely untrue. Of course it was the Canadian taxpayers who balanced this budget. The hospital workers balanced it. Patients balanced this budget. The minister is absolutely wrong to take credit for balancing the budget.
There are so many things I could touch on. The minister talked about the government's economic performance and I have to take issue with some of the things he said. He painted a pretty rosy picture of the economic performance, but a lot of people would disagree with that. I want to provide some evidence in the form of the report of the governor of the Bank of Canada who appeared before the finance committee just two days ago. He pointed out in his monetary report that productivity growth in 2003 in this country was zero. In 2004 it was zero. At this point in 2005 it is only 0.7%.
Productivity growth is critical to our ability to raise living standards in this country. If we do not improve our productivity as a nation then our standard of living cannot rise. We cannot defy gravity because when we talk about productivity, really we are talking about the ability of every person in the country to produce goods and services, to keep increasing the number of goods and services that they can provide. That is not done by working harder. That is the wrong way to do it. It is done by investing in education and by investing in technology. When we do that, we ultimately raise living standards.
Who pays the price when living standards keep falling further and further behind? It is certainly not Liberal friends. It is the people of Canada and their living standards are mired where they were a long time ago.
In January, Don Drummond, the former deputy minister of finance, produced a report showing that take-home pay in Canada has only gone up 3.7% in the last dozen years or so which amounts to less than $60 a year more in take-home pay. However the take for government has gone up about four times that amount.
When it comes to who is reaping the benefit of any increase at all in the output of Canadians it is not Canadians. They are not getting that money. It is going to the government and the government is keeping that money.
The minister argued in his speech that tax relief was not a panacea but for the people who need the money it is tremendously important. People want to raise their families and have enough money to send their kids to school.
My colleague across the way talked about jobs, and job creation is important, but it is also the types of jobs. In Ontario we have seen 100,000 manufacturing jobs disappear in the last little while. These are high value jobs that are being lost because the government has refused to act in important ways to ensure we can keep those jobs.
There is another thing the government has done, which the minister somehow failed to point out. I would think as a major economic initiative he might point to these things. I am sure he is very proud of his record. It is a little odd to me that he would not talk about things like the NDP budget deal that he cut, where for many weeks he argued against the very things that the NDP were proposing, only to adopt them in the end and raise spending by $4.6 billion. In his speech he criticized the NDP for always asking for more money and spend, spend, spend but that is what he did. In fact, spending last year went up 15% under the government, the largest increase since 1974.
That is not all. The finance minister also took out the tax relief for large employers. This goes to the point I was making a minute ago when I was saying that we are trying to preserve manufacturing jobs. The minister has reneged on his commitment in the budget to provide tax relief for large employers, manufacturers, to keep those jobs in Canada. How regrettable is that? He has flip-flopped on it about three times. He said that he would bring it back in the fall and then he said that he would not. Now he is floating it again. I do not know if we will ever see that.
However we need tax relief if we are going to preserve jobs in Canada. I am truly sorry that the finance minister has not followed through on that commitment in the budget. In fact, I am very surprised that he did not mention the deal that he cut because I am sure he is very proud of those kinds of things.
I could probably talk about all the things the minister raised in his speech that were a little misleading during the entire 20 minutes but I will not do that.