Mr. Speaker, my speech will describe the winners and the losers in this budget. Tonight I only have time to talk about the losers. To hear about the winners, members will have to wait until tomorrow after question period.
What does a job mean to an average Canadian? It means earning a salary to put food on the table, pay rent or meet the mortgage on time, buy Christmas presents and have money for pizza day at school for the kids. When a person loses a job, it is devastating. For some people it means losing their self-esteem, self-confidence, friends, and their community of work colleagues.
In the Conservative budget we are debating tonight, we are really talking about the lives of 43,000 Canadians who will lose their jobs directly because of this budget, and there are a lot more than 43,000 Canadians who are going to lose their jobs indirectly.
However, 43,000 Canadian workers will no longer have the money to contribute to the economy. They will suffer the humiliation of being laid off. Some will lose their house. Others will suffer depression. A few may not even recover from being unemployed or ever be able to find a job again.
Some lives will be destroyed. Those 43,000 Canadians are casualties of this terrible budget. The number of 43,000 was the number quoted by the Parliamentary Budget Officer in his analysis of this budget on April 26. He confirmed that this budget would slow the economy down. He confirmed that when combined with prior cuts, there will be a total of 103,000 jobs lost.