Mr. Speaker, the member for Hamilton Mountain has been a passionate advocate of advancing through Parliament the quality of life of ordinary working families and, as has all the NDP caucus, has been pushing forward an end to this economic disillusion that somehow just continuing to give to the wealthiest in the country will somehow, through some magical, mystical trickle down theory, bring prosperity for all Canadians. Clearly, that has not worked.
We also have the failure of the budget to deal with employment insurance, retraining, access to apprenticeship programs and post-secondary education programs. What we have seen instead is an incredibly short-sighted, misguided trade policy that continues down the same road that the Liberals took. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
We see the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA, because we capitulated on all points, are leading to an actual fall in the income of most Canadian working families. They certainly understand it. When we ask families whether they are doing better now than they were 15 years ago, most say that they are not. Most families say that they are struggling to make ends meet. They said that they are working harder and longer hours and yet they have fewer and fewer financial resources.
After the government capitulated on NAFTA, it moved forward with the softwood lumber capitulation. Now we are seeing the trade minister, as a renegade because the Prime Minister has no understanding of trade policy whatsoever, moving forward to sign free trade agreements that will lead to more catastrophic job losses. The FTA will gut our shipbuilding industry. The trade minister, who has betrayed his constituents and who is now betraying the whole country, which makes him consistent, is now trying to sign a trade agreement with South Korea which will devastate our auto sector. What is next?
Time and time again we have seen the government capitulate and give away everything. The results for most working families from coast to coast to coast are lower incomes and part time, temporary minimum wage jobs, such as burger flipping because that is all that is left when the auto sector is gutted, the shipbuilding sector is gutted, the textile industry is gutted and the softwood lumber industry is gutted. When, in every sector, our value added manufacturing is simply tossed away so that some banker in Toronto can make another million dollars then we can understand why we are seeing greater and greater frustration arising across the country.
The government is off the rails. It said that it would be different than the previous Liberal government and yet we now see the exact same inability to grasp economic fundamentals. It does not understand that when most working families are earning less it must change the policies in order to address the fundamental income crisis. It is same old, same old.
The NDP will continue to push and say that the emperor has no clothes and that the government needs to start taking action on these issues. We will continue to press because we are the only voice for ordinary working families who have seen their incomes erode, their manufacturing jobs taken away, the doors to post-secondary education and apprenticeship training closed and access to health care when they need it no longer there. Alberta and Saskatchewan are experiencing an agricultural crisis but the Alberta and Saskatchewan Conservative MPs will not say a whit about that. We are here to stand up for Canadians and we will continue to do so. We know there will be a lot more of us in the House after the next election.