Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about the recent Statistics Canada announcement that 129,000 Canadians lost their jobs in January. This is the singlest largest monthly job loss on record in Canada. It brings the total number of job losses to nearly a quarter of a million in the last three months alone.
The government failed to recognize the seriousness of Canada's sharply declining economy. It failed to plan for it and it failed to bring in an immediate stimulus package. As a result, it failed to protect Canadian jobs.
Last September the Prime Minister claimed that, “if we were going to have some kind of big crash or recession, we probably would have had it by now”. In October, he told us there was still no recession, but that there were a lot of great buying opportunities. In November he claimed there would only be a short recession and that there was certainly no need to run a deficit.
The government must wake up, realize the gravity of the present situation and start protecting Canadians.