Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's comments and congratulate him on his re-election. However, I note that throughout his entire discourse, when he laid out very clearly the problems of productivity and demographics that haunt our nation, he failed to offer a single, solitary solution to those problems. He ranted about the Speech from the Throne and his displeasure with it. He complained that it was not of the sort that his former government would have written, almost omitting January 23, election day, from the history in his mind.
The reality is that under his past Liberal government our productivity fell further and further behind. The Irish economy grew its productivity at five times the rate of Canada under the last year of the Liberal government. The average Canadian worker has to work five hours to achieve what an American worker achieves in four hours. Those are simple economic productivity data.
That all resulted from 12 years of Liberal government, so why will the member not now join with our agenda of cutting taxes on capital gains, reducing the GST to encourage more consumer spending, and using tax incentives to get more apprentices into the trades? All of these steps, driven by a small, focused government rather than large fantastic multi-billion dollar schemes, are aimed at creating a more productive economy. Why will the member not join us in that enterprise?