Mr. Speaker, we are going to get that government on October 20, 2015.
The Canadians who are writing to us, tweeting and posting on Facebook are reacting to the broken promise around health care. They are also reacting to the broken promise around retirement security.
We have had a chance thus far to raise a number of times the importance of the OAS and the overall pension plan in Canada and how Canadians feel strongly about that. Over the course of the last few hours and as we enter what will soon be the sixth hour of debate, I have raised the concerns of Canadians from coast to coast to coast around retirement security.
Canadians are reacting to that the same way they are reacting to the broken promise around how the health care transfers have been gutted and reduced over time without the kinds of measures that we have been talking about, such as putting in a valid fiscal framework for health care transfers and health care costs. They have seen retirement security gutted. There are the cuts to a wide range of services that we saw in the budget on Thursday night, whether it be food safety, transportation safety, or environmental assessments. I will get into that in more detail later on. We are talking about wide and deep cuts which in many cases will eliminate completely some of the services Canadians enjoy. In some cases it will eliminate completely the source of information. This has been a recurring theme.
The First Nations Statistical Institute was gutted, killed by the government. The Nation Council of Welfare was killed by the government. StatsCan was seriously gutted. All of these organizations supply facts to the Canadian public and the Canadian government. In each case the government is saying that it does not want and cannot handle the facts. It wants to invent its own facts. It does not want Canada’s modern economy to function on a fact basis. It wants it to function in some kind of weird ideological fact-free zone. Canadians have seen those cuts as well and are reacting.
Canadians are seeing cuts in jobs, some 19,700 in the public sector and add to that the cuts in the private sector. There is a multiplier effect. I came here from the private sector. I know that cuts in the public sector lead to larger cuts in the private sector. That is a basic fact. There are members opposite who would like to function in a fact-free zone, but that is just the reality. We are talking about tens of thousands of jobs that will be hemorrhaged--there is no other way to put it--over the next few months. Under this budget, which we call the “fewer jobs, less growth and less prosperity budget”, actually admits that the unemployment rate is going to climb.
It is hard to believe that a government would put on the front page of a document that it knows creates fewer jobs, that it knows creates less growth, that it knows creates less prosperity and say that it is going to pretend exactly the opposite. That is what the government did on Thursday.
What is wonderful about Canadians is that they see through all that. The government provided its arguments on Thursday night. Canadians were willing to listen to the finance minister's speech. They were willing to look at the budget, as we all were. Then they saw what was in it. That is why we are being deluged by comments from Canadians from coast to coast to coast. They want their comments put forward in the House of Commons. A continued recurring theme of what they are saying is that Canadian families deserve better than this budget.