Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure and honour for me to stand with the unequivocal opposition of all Liberals to the fiscal update of yesterday. We speak in one voice on this issue. It is entirely inadequate to the task at hand. I would characterize the fiscal update of yesterday with two simple words: it is pathetic and it is pernicious.
To give members some sense of where I am going, it is pathetic because it offers no stimulus. Canada, virtually alone, at a time of the worst crisis since the 1930s, offers nothing to help the economy, to help jobs, to help savers, to help people retain their pensions in their retirement years. It is pathetic in terms of a failed attempt to disguise the fact that the Conservatives are actually running a deficit. It is pernicious in its attacks on labour, on women and on the vulnerable.
Let me deal with each of these three points in turn.
As I just said, I feel that this economic and fiscal update is entirely inadequate. I am very pleased and proud that all Liberals will be voting against it. The fiscal update is pathetic because it offers no stimulating action by the government to help the economy. It is also pathetic as a failed attempt to disguise the fact that the Conservatives are actually running a deficit. And it is pernicious in ways that I will explain.
The Prime Minister sometimes speaks like Roosevelt, but he acts like Calvin Coolidge or R.B. Bennett. He made some comments that we had understood the lessons of the 1930s. In Peru he said that under the extraordinary economic crisis in which we lived, we in Canada had a need for extraordinary fiscal stimulus.
He also said something with which I agree, and it is another important lesson from the 1930s, that the world must never descend into protectionism. Those are good words and I commend the Prime Minister for them. The trouble is his actions are the opposite of his words. Rather than giving us extraordinary fiscal stimulus, which when he was in Peru he said was absolutely necessary, he has given us zero fiscal stimulus. He has given us even worse. He has given us cuts that he purports to be $6 billion next year. That is like negative fiscal stimulus.
When we look around the world, we see tens of billions of dollars of fiscal stimulus in the United Kingdom, in Japan and in the European Union. We see hundreds of billions of dollars of fiscal stimulus in the United States and in China. In Canada the Prime Minister talks about the need for extraordinary fiscal stimulus and we see nothing at all, or worse than that we see cuts and no stimulus.
Does he not understand that the Canadian economy is on the edge of the worst crisis since the 1930s, that the OECD predicts we will have a quarter million more unemployed people between now and 2010? Does he think it is not important for the government to act to help those unemployed people, to help critical industries that are in deep trouble and require urgent attention, to help Canadian savers and pensioners who have deep concerns about the ability to live out their retirement in dignity? I could go on. There are so many things but he does nothing.
Let me deal with two of the government's excuses. He talks about past stimulus, but that is irrelevant. Other countries have given stimulus in the past. When we were the government, we gave fiscal stimulus in 2000 and 2005. The point is the world needs stimulus now. The fact that the government had some measures some years ago, obviously has not done the job or else we would not be in a so-called technical recession. We would not be heading for a quarter million more unemployed people.
Whatever the Conservative government did in the past, whatever our government did in the past in terms of tax reductions, is inadequate to the task at hand facing the economy of Canada today. That is why countries like Britain, the United States and virtually every country in the world understand that we are in this economic crisis and therefore have taken action. The Conservative government has taken zero action.
Why should we believe that the government will give us a major stimulus in February or March, or even late January? First, why did it wait? The sooner it acts, the better. President-elect Obama is not even in office yet and he has in place an economic plan. Other countries, and I have named them, China, Britain, France and Japan, have already acted. The Conservative government has been in office approximately three years, so it has had plenty of time to put forward action plans, yet it has done nothing and it tells us to wait two or three months and eventually it might get the job done.
On this question of pathetic in terms of lack of stimulus is I do not even believe, I cannot have confidence, that the government is serious when it tells Canadians it will offer fiscal stimulus early next year. It has shown by its mind-set, by its ideology this time around that it does not want to do anything. I do not believe that in its heart of hearts it wishes to stimulate the economy.
While the Conservatives talk like FDR, they act like those great depression leaders, R.B. Bennett and Calvin Coolidge.
My second point as to why this fiscal update is pathetic, is the government's pretext of balancing the books.
They claim that there is no deficit. However, as Jeffrey Simpson said in this morning's Globe and Mail, there isn't one economist in Canada who believes that there will be a surplus next year. No one can believe that.
There are at least two reasons why no one can believe it. First, their assumptions about economic growth are far too optimistic in comparison to what economists said a month or more ago. And the situation has changed for the worse since then. The government is saying that we will see modest growth next year, yet a recent OECD report said that growth will be a negative 0.5%, which makes a significant difference when it comes to a deficit. The government, as many economists have said, is being completely unrealistic and far too optimistic in its assumptions when it comes to Canada's future economic performance.
The second reason has to do with asset sales. This is an old Mike Harris trick. They have $10 billion over five years in asset sales, including $2.3 billion this year, but when we were in the lock-up yesterday and asked the finance officials for a list, they said there was no list. This is an old Mike Harris trick, and they were caught out in 2003 in Ontario when they were running on a balanced budget. They lost the election. Dalton McGuinty called in the auditor and found that in fact they were running a $7 billion deficit. Part of the reason for that deficit was fraudulent accounting on the subject of asset sales.
The current finance minister was from that same gang. I do not believe for one minute that he has confirmed asset sales of that magnitude. I think he just put his finger in the air and chose the number that would show a balanced budget. That is his number for asset sales.
Let me make one other point on that subject. When we were in government, we did not record one penny in the budget of asset sales until we saw the money. We had to actually get the money before it was recorded in the budget as a sale. Not only has the government not received the money, it also does not even have a clue about which assets it plans to sell.
For at least these two reasons, and there are many others, the pretense that the government is going to balance its books next year is totally without foundation.
Finally, the budget is pernicious. It is enough to be pathetic--pathetic is pretty bad--but if it is pathetic and pernicious, that is even worse. It is mean-spirited. Let me give just a few examples.
The government needlessly attacked labour. Just days after public sector unions accepted a very modest wage settlement, the government felt the need to ban strikes in the public sector. Just days after the public sector union had accepted a multi-year wage settlement, why does the government have to ban strikes? One would do so only if one had a mean-spirited streak in one's thinking, which I think is characteristic of the government.
Why does the government have to attack women and pay equity? Again this is a mean-spirited, pernicious, ideological attack on the principle of pay equity.
The government also attacks the most vulnerable in our society.
It is an attack on the most vulnerable members of our society.
The attack on pay equity is an example.
The government has not told us what it is going to cut. It has told us it is going to cut a lot, but it has not told us what. We have to go on the Conservatives' record, and their record in the last Parliament was to make cuts in areas where people were most vulnerable, areas such as literacy programs, women's programs, and the court challenges program.
I can assure the House that we will be looking very attentively at where these cuts will be made. We have a suspicion they will be directed once again at the most vulnerable in Canadian society. I assure the House that we will be vigilant on that topic.
Finally, we see other governments working in the spirit of solidarity with their opposition parties to tackle the world's worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Mr. McCain, who lost the election to Barack Obama, has met with Mr. Obama to ask how he can help to deal with the worst economic crisis in the United States since the 1930s.
Would we not expect our government to reach out to opposition parties in Canada's moment of economic crisis to see if we could not work together to produce a package that would help to support the Canadian economy at its moment of great difficulty?
I would have thought that would happen. It happened in the U.S., and it is happening many other countries around the world. It would be normal to expect it from a normal government in this country.
The Conservative government has taken precisely the opposite approach through its attack on democracy and its attack on all the opposition political parties, just at the moment when parties need to work together for the good of the country.
I am proud to vote against this fiscal update. We Liberals speak with one voice when we believe something is not up to the task. This fiscal update is nowhere close to being up to the task of accomplishing what Canada needs as a result of our economic situation at this moment of danger and risk and uncertainty and potential crisis in the lives of all Canadians.
The statement is pathetic because it does nothing to stimulate the economy. It crows about past actions, which are now irrelevant. Everyone around the world agrees that what is needed now is action. There is no action now. I for one find it hard to believe, given the government's ideological mindset, that it is serious in its promise to provide significant fiscal stimulus down the road.
The statement is pathetic because every economist in the country knows that the Conservatives are not telling the truth when they claim a balanced budget. Even the finance minister yesterday virtually acknowledged that he was wrong.
The fiscal statement is not only pathetic; it is also pernicious in terms of its unwarranted attacks on labour, on women, and on vulnerable Canadians.
For all those reasons, the Liberal Party will speak with one voice, and proudly and definitely vote against this pathetic and pernicious fiscal update.