Mr. Speaker, today we will receive a fiscal update and some proposals to deal with a crisis. I want to take a look at something very specific in terms of finances. The Conservatives boast of their excellence in management. Since their election at the start of 2006, program spending has increased by 24%, or $40 billion. That is the kind of management we have been subjected to.
Today, part of their almost imperceptible ideological manoeuvring is to blame those who have been elected, to make a politician a figure to be hated, just as Karl Rove taught George W. Bush to do in the United States—attack and divide. We already know that only 59% of the population votes and even that is too much for the Conservatives because they want to muzzle the opposition and cut off their funding. And they will do all of this without taking any action during the worst economic crisis Canada has seen in generations. It is shameful.
For the Conservatives to be able to propose any concrete change or bring any structural ideas, something that would build the economy, something that would help create and maintain jobs, they would need to admit that there was a problem or that they had ever done anything wrong. Of course that would require a modicum of modesty. Now that they are back in here with a minority situation, they will not even recognize that they have done anything wrong or that the public does not trust them enough to give them a majority.
Let us look at the facts. Right now in Canada 350,000 families, which corresponds to the 350,000 manufacturing jobs that have been lost because of the Conservatives, do not believe the state or the government has a role in the economy. They, therefore, have held back. They give across-the-board tax cuts but, of course, if a company did not make a profit last year it did not pay any taxes and it did not get anything back on a tax cut. Who got the money? Companies in the oil sector and the banks, the ones that did not need it. The companies in the forestry sector and the manufacturing sector in B.C., Ontario and Quebec, in particular, those are the families that have lost their jobs and those are the communities that are without work. That is the desperate situation that we are already in and the Conservatives refuse to recognize it and will not act on it.
What a colossal fraud, Mr. Speaker. Just look at them go. Last week, Kevin Page said that we were headed for a $6 billion deficit because of their poor choices. And what do they have to say in today's statement? One has to read it to believe it; it really is something else. Let me read one sentence, and I am not making this up: “The government is planning on balanced budgets for the current and next five years, although given the downside risks, balanced budgets cannot be guaranteed.” They have managed to say one thing and then say the complete opposite in the same sentence. Is that what they call good management of public assets? This is pathetic. That is what we have had to put up with for the last two and a half years.
That is why the NDP, on behalf of Canadians, is looking at the numbers and the proposals, such as the proposed sale of public assets. They want to sell off major assets that took years to acquire just to have a balanced budget. Take all of the institutions we have built and created in Canada over generations: social rights, the right to collective bargaining, which has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada. For no good reason, they want to abolish these rights in one fell swoop by eliminating the right to strike. They want to take away women's right to equal pay for equal work.
I invite my colleagues to take a look —and it is well worth your while—at the difference between the speech as read by the rather dry and accusatory minister, that unadulterated homo reformensis , and the slightly broader document, expressed a little more lyrically, which proposes what another system might be like. They are doing this for the benefit of their reformist base. They never learned their lesson from the last election.
Our constitutional system has a remedy for this. Part of that remedy will come from the NDP. I trust that everyone on this side will stand up against this right of centre ideology that no longer has a place in a country that is open and established, a modern country whose socio-economic institutions respect everyone. Our families and future generations are entitled to better than this. We will do our part to restore equality and freedoms here in Canada.