It is shocking and it is irresponsible. Canadians get it. I have been reading into the record the comments of Canadians from coast to coast to coast who are concerned about the direction in which the government is headed.
Coming back to the rankings before I complete the table, after eviscerating tens of thousands of jobs, the government is hoping that economic growth is going to be better than what the IMF projects for Canada, which is 152nd. The Conservatives have dragged us all the way down to 152nd worldwide. If we look at what happens to a coach in a sporting context who brings the team down to last place, the coach is fired. If a government brings Canada down from its lofty height to 152nd worldwide for economic growth in 2012, even before it eviscerated over 60,000 jobs, we see a whole different order of things. It is not that we have to fire the coach, we have to fire the whole team and that is just what Canadians will do on October 20, 2015.
I thank my colleagues for their enthusiasm and energy because that is what New Democrats do. They bring a lot of energy to their jobs. In part, it is because we get so much energy from Canadians who are writing in to us today concerned about the impacts of this budget. Canadians understand that when 60,000 jobs are slashed in the public and private sector in one budget that it is not an achievement. The budget day of last Thursday was a black day for Canada.
I talked about the well over 13,000 lost jobs in western Canada. I talked about the 6,758 lost jobs in Atlantic Canada, including the great provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
After all these factory closures in Ontario and Quebec over the last few months, one has to ask what has happened in central Canada.
In Quebec 13,299 jobs will be lost. This province has already been hard hit by all the bad government policies that have resulted in factory closures throughout Quebec, in industrial areas such as Montreal, the South Shore and the Quebec City region. And in these areas, because of these bad government policies, there will be a total of 13,299 jobs lost, including 9,314 in the private sector.
We are experiencing an economic downturn. Everyone, all the economists and the rating agencies such as Moody's and Fitch, have warned the government that eliminating jobs will only slow the economy further. Who would have thought that the government would be so irresponsible and so driven by ideology that it would attack the public sector and cut services needed by the public, causing an even more serious economic crisis than the one we have been living through for months?
We can all agree that when tens of thousands of jobs are eliminated, we have an economic crisis on our hands. When tens of thousands of jobs are eliminated, it is a crisis for communities and for those who cannot meet their families' needs. These people have to find a way to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their heads. Even worse, it has an impact everywhere, on all communities and all regions. When a position is eliminated in the Eastern Townships, for example, the effects are felt in Sherbrooke, all over the Eastern Townships and all over Quebec.
Because of the deliberate policies of this Conservative government, Quebeckers will feel the effects of bad government policy 13,299 times. That is terrible. The NDP believes that all Canadian families deserve better than the job cuts that this government has delivered in its budget. They really deserve better.
What about Ontario? The government has killed more than 13,000 jobs in Quebec, more than 13,000 jobs in western Canada and close to 7,000 jobs in Atlantic Canada. What has it done in the heartland of our country? Everywhere else we are seeing significant job losses.
Thanks to the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, across Ontario, the southwest, to the north, eastern Ontario, through the Toronto region, 26,155 Canadian workers in either the public or the private sector will get that sickening feeling as they are given pink slips. They will have to go home, talk to their families and figure out some way of getting through the coming months and years because their jobs are gone and the economy will be worsened. Of the 26,155 jobs lost in Ontario, 18,199 are in the private sector.
When we look at all those job losses, over 60,000 across the country, this budget is an economic catastrophe. Everybody warned the government about the cuts. The only ones who seem satisfied with the cuts are the people who simply do not understand the multiplier effect of these public sector cuts, folks who may not have lived through what happened in Ontario with Walkerton, and other examples. Every time there are deep cuts to these austerity programs, it hurts families, the services and the economy overall. That is what is happening in this case. The government has deliberately and consciously taken actions that will lead to the loss of more than 60,000 jobs.
Before I close on that point, I would like to raise a few other rankings because it is important.
When we look at the overall so-called economic achievements of the government, they are quite dubious, such as record levels of export deficits and family debt, as well as considerable job losses. When we look back to May 2008, before we entered into the recession, since that time the government managed to barely create 200,000 net new jobs. Some would say that 200,000 is a really good achievement, except that the labour force grew over that same time frame, from May 2008 to today, by nearly half a million.
We were close to 300,000 jobs short. That means Canadians are going out and hitting the streets and sidewalks, knocking on doors trying to get a job and not getting them because we are 300,000 jobs short. They are discouraged and are still trying, but the result is the government's dubious efforts with respect to jobs. It throws out a big number, which we can only attribute to the same kind of sleight of hand it used for trying to calculate the prison budgets or the F-35 budget. It said that it was better than that and threw out some number that nobody could ever confirm where it dreamed it up. It cannot make up public policy on the back of a napkin. It just cannot invent figures. It has to actually go with facts. As we have mentioned before, the budget is cutting all the fact-finding agencies. It is not using facts. Rather, it is absolute fiction.
When we look at that lack of quantity of jobs and we also look at the lack of quality of jobs, the few jobs that have been created under the government over the last six years actually pay $10,000 a year less than the jobs that have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost. It has gained some of them back, but the jobs that have been lost are the family-sustaining manufacturing jobs. Those are the higher paying, value-added, family-sustaining manufacturing jobs.
As members know, we are now at a record low level of manufacturing jobs, lower than even 40 years ago when we had a much smaller population. The government has lost those good quality family-sustaining jobs. What did the government gain? It has been part-time jobs, temporary jobs and jobs that pay $10,000 a year less.