Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to argue in favour of Bill C-13, which is the government's plan to keep Canada's economy growing and the job creation machine going.
It is very important that we take a step back and look at the government's overall economic action plan. We have been talking about specific elements in this plan, tax credits and other specific measures, but sometimes it is useful to take a step back and look at our overall plan, because every individual initiative in this plan is part of a much bigger plan to steer Canada's economy through what has been an unprecedented economic crisis that the world has been facing over the last 36 months.
Before I go on, I will mention that I am sharing my time with my colleague, who sits with me on the official languages committee, the member for Ottawa—Orléans.
Just over three years ago, which I remember well because we were in the middle of a federal election campaign, we witnessed some pretty unprecedented events that I have never been through in my lifetime, the kind of events that our grandparents talked about when they lived through the depression of the 1930s and the stock market crash that took place in the late 1920s. I felt like I was reliving the experiences of a generation that had gone before us. I do not think we have fully realized the results of this crisis and I think it will continue to unfold, not just in the coming weeks and months but in coming years. By the time this decade is out, I think we will be facing a very different global economic order.
The government has done a fantastic job of steering the Canadian economy through the last three years. When the recession and global financial crisis hit some 38 or 39 months ago, few could foretell the way things would unfold in the following months and years. Yet the government very quickly showed that it could be not only pragmatic but flexible. In the following six months, it worked with the provinces and our other partners in the federation to come forward with what is, arguably, the biggest investment plan since the end of the second world war. That plan, as we all know, was the first phase of Canada's economic action plan.
We delivered in some 24 months an unprecedented $60 billion in stimulus spending across this country, which played a critical role in ensuring that Canada did not slip into the kind of severe recession that we have seen in other countries, like the United States and Europe. Through the stimulus plan, we also delivered long-lasting benefits and record investments in universities and colleges across the country. As an MP from Ontario, I can say that the investments we made in Ontario's community colleges were the biggest made in that system since William G. Davis was minister of education in the 1960s and created the community college system. In the subsequent 50 years, we have never seen such a huge wave of investments into that community college system. That was delivered through the government stimulus plan, specifically through the knowledge infrastructure program.
We also ensured that the banks had credit facilities to swap out their mortgage portfolios with credit that the government would provide to ensure that the banks continued to lend throughout that time. We delivered fiscal stimulus through other measures, like enhancing the employment insurance program and introducing work sharing, which ensured that employers would not have to lay off workers in industries that had experienced severe slowdowns. We also extended a major loan and equity investment in General Motors and Chrysler, which ensured that the manufacturing industry in the heartland of Ontario would still be able to rely on the auto industry as a key component of that sector.
Those are some of the measures we made fiscally. We worked closely with the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney. We gave the bank new legislative powers to expand its mandate so that it had all the tools available to respond to any monetary threats the country would face.
Over the last 36 months or so, the results are evident. We have created over 600,000 net new jobs in the country. Our unemployment rate in our country is significantly lower than in many of the other major advanced economies in the world. Our budget deficits are significantly lower than in many of the other major developed economies, both in North America and in Europe. These are some of the successes to which we can point.
Sometimes it is useful to look to outsiders outside of Canada to get a perspective on how well we have done in the last 36 months. Sometimes we can be pretty provincial in our country. We tend to not have the perspective that others who live outside of Canada might have, others who have seen what has gone on not just here but elsewhere.
I will quote what Standard and Poor's said recently when it reaffirmed Canada's triple-A credit rating. It said that our credit rating was due to our, “superior political and economic profile and strong flexibility and performance profile”. Other rating firms, such as Fitch and Moody's, have also reiterated our credit standing in the world.
The World Economic Forum, the very well-respected organization, has ranked Canada's banking system, for four years running, as the soundest in the world. As we all know, the banking system is the foundation for our economy. We just have to look at the banking crises that have taken place south of the border, in the United Kingdom and currently in continental Europe to realize how important it is that we maintain and regulate our banks properly.
However, we are not out of the woods. The fact is the crisis from outside our shores, both in the United States, which is failing to resolve its deficit and debt conundrum, where Congress has recently failed to come to an agreement through its congressional committee, which will trigger a default plan, and the events that are currently taking place in Europe, where the contagion in Greek sovereign debt markets is now starting to spread to Italy and possibly beyond to countries like Spain and France.
All these events show that we are not out of the woods yet and there remains significant risks to the downside. That is why it is incredibly important that we stay the course and that we implement the next phase of Canada's economic action plan. That is precisely what Bill C-13 would do. It would continue with the government's prudent, flexible and pragmatic approach to steering Canada's economy through this global crisis.
We have put specific measures in this budget. For example, we have implemented the hiring credit for small businesses, a commitment we made during the last election. We have put in place in this bill the regime to help simplify the collection of customs tariffs in order to facilitate and enhance cross-border trade. We are extending the accelerated capital cost allowance deductions for the manufacturing sector, which has been especially hit because of the global recession. We have also put in place measures to eliminate the mandatory retirement age for workers who work in federally regulated sectors.
These are some of the things that we have put in the bill that will allow us to build on the successes that Canada's first economic action plan have put in place.
We have also made permanent, in this legislation, the gas tax transfer to Canadian municipalities, some $2 billion a year to help them with their aging infrastructure and to ensure that they can continue to maintain the infrastructure that they have built over the last number of decades. We have enhanced the wage earner protection program to help workers affected by bankruptcies or receiverships.
These are some of the additional measures that we are putting in place because we remain focused on creating jobs and economic growth.
I want to finish by making this point. In the last election, our party, our candidates, our Prime Minister campaigned on one issue and one issue over every other issue. That was that we needed to stay the course economically, that we needed to keep implementing Canada's economic action plan, building on the successes of the first plan by putting in place the second phase of the plan so we could create jobs and economic growth for Canadian families.
This bill does exactly that, and I ask all hon. members of this House to support it.