Mr. Speaker, some time ago I rose in the House during question period and asked a question of the Conservative government, given the history of a Prime Minister stating that there is no recession, given that if there were going to be a recession we would already be in a recession, and given that the Minister of Finance was coming out in November with a disastrous and completely unrealistic economic and fiscal update. And it goes on and on. My question was, how can Canadians believe the Conservative government when its numbers are always contradicted by experts?
The answer I received from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance was basically that there are lots of experts in here. Some have projected high; some have projected low. Then he quoted from Dale Orr, a very respected economist from Global Insight who said, “The budget overall was a pretty reasonable compromise. The best thing to do is to pass it and get on with it and get things moving as quickly as possible”.
In the 2009 budget the Conservative economic action plan claimed that it would create or maintain close to 100,000 net Canadian jobs and yet there has been no mention of that job figure since. What are economists saying to date on the rosy forecasts that were predicted and are still being predicted by the Conservative Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance?
David Dodge is calling the Prime Minister's prediction that Ottawa will be back in surplus by 2013 “totally unrealistic”. David Dodge also says the economic recovery “is not going to be as quick as everybody thinks”. He says, “I think anybody would be dreaming in Technicolor to think that you're going to get through this by the third quarter of this year”. He also says, “And the rest of the world, including the United States, is probably not going to recover as quickly coming out of this recession as it did coming out of 1982 or coming out of 1990-91 recession”.
Don Drummond of the TD Bank calculates that Canada's federal debt will swell by $81.5 billion over the next two years, which is more than the Conservative government has calculated it will increase. In fact, when the Conservative Minister of Finance tabled his budget 2009, he predicted that the debt would grow by $63 billion.
Don Drummond of the TD Bank says the government will produce an “all-time high deficit of $39.2 billion in fiscal 2009-10 and $42.3 billion in fiscal 2010-11, well above the red ink of $33.7 billion and $29.8 billion shown in the budget”.
Experts have spoken and what they are saying is that the forecasts and predictions of the Conservative government are not realistic. In fact, Canada is shedding jobs 50% faster than the United States over the same period of time. Canadians are going to want real accountability from the government with its economic action plan.