Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the motion because it is inherently a good one.
I must confess it is kind of rich that the motion is coming from the NDP, which is now calling on the Prime Minister to meet with the premiers, when the NDP leader's first job and first public speech when he became a new leader was to split the country into east and west.
Secondly, this is a party that ridiculed the national energy strategy, saying it was a ridiculous, and now we have the premier of the oil-producing province of Alberta saying she is looking at a national energy strategy. The NDP has never supported trade agreements, and this country depends on trade for 45% of its gross domestic product.
Having said that, I think it is kind of rich that the NDP brought the motion forward when its members have never practised what they are now asking for. That is kind of interesting.
However, let us focus on how we got to where we are today. We are in a huge deficit. Our employment rates are going up, and many people are only employed part time. We have one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the OECD. What we have discovered, as the OECD tells us, is that we have a number of young people between the ages of 15 and 32 who are neither employed nor are they in training or education. These are called NEETs by the OECD. We have a large percentage of NEETs, as large as the United States and as large as many of the failing European countries at the moment.
Let us talk about how we got to this place. When the Liberal Party was in government, we left a 6% unemployment rate and had started programs for young people who were coming out of university so that they could bridge that time to work.
When the current government came in, it had a $13 billion surplus, had nine years of balanced budgets by a Liberal government, had a $3 billion contingency jam jar for any kind of emergency that occurred, as a contingency or prudence fund, but it squandered it within two years. One does not have to be an economist to know that if the government has $13 billion in surplus and cuts the GST by 2%, which equals $13 billion, $13 billion from $13 billion equals zero.
Long before we even had a recession, that money was gone. The government stood in the House many times and boasted that it was the highest-spending government in the last 30 years in this country. It squandered what it had left of the $13 billion, blew the $3 billion contingency fund almost immediately and then refused to believe that the world was going into a recession and it had no backup.
I think it is really rich that the government talks about how it did so well during the recession, that other countries were doing badly and Canada had its head proudly above water. I want to remind the government that it, in opposition, voted against the opposition to bank mergers and the regulation of banks that was brought forward by the Liberal government and Paul Martin. The Conservatives voted against it.
Now the government is taking credit for it. Between the NDP and the government, I do not know who is more bold-faced in being hypocritical. It is very interesting that the government is taking credit for something it did not do.
However, what is sad is that we are in a position today where we see major issues. People love to talk about the Liberal government downloading to the provinces, blah, blah, blah. When the Liberal government ended in 2005, Canada was the number one performer in the world. By Canada we meant the country, the nation, including the provinces. That was because we, as a federal government, understood that our role as a federal government was to hold the federation together, to face the world as one nation, not to balkanize us into little provincial nation states with some provinces sinking and some swimming.
The Prime Minister has not met, once, with the premiers on issues such as health care, productivity or economic development since he came into government. Now he boasts that he does not need to meet with the premiers. In fact he meets with them individually, which is nice.
If he meets with them individually, how does he sustain a federation with everybody rowing in the same direction with the same objectives? What he does when he meets them individually is pit one province against another and try to find ways to divide everyone so we are all scattering in the wrong direction. That is the first major philosophical mistake that the government made, splitting up this country, balkanizing it, turning provinces against each other and letting those who are able to survive, survive, and those who are not able to, sink.
Health care is the biggest example of this. This summer, the Canadian Medical Association talked about the fact that the federal government has failed abysmally. It gave it an F in terms of medicare and looking after the future of health care in this country and balkanizing the country.
In terms of trade, we know the NDP does not agree with trade agreements but the government says it is going out there finding trade missions, building trade with other nations. However, to have a successful trade policy, we have to have productivity and our productivity is lagging, the OECD tells us, lagging very badly, not only for labour reasons but for spending on research and development as well. We are at the lowest in spending on research and development among the major OECD countries. We are with Greece. We are in company with Poland in terms of spending on R and D.
Under the Liberal government, this country was known to be number one in research and development, in public government spending on research and development. We had communications technology that was number one in the world. We had biomedical technology that made us number one in the world. We were number one in the world in environmental technologies. We no longer are. We are sitting with Poland and Greece in terms of our spending on R and D. We cannot be competitive and build a good trade strategy if we do not have productivity.
One element is R and D and the other one is the labour force. We find that our labour force has dropped dramatically in its productivity, by 4%. That is a huge drop for a small country like ours and the reason is that most people in the labour force are working part time. I know the government likes to stand up here and boast about its flex-time and how everyone is working, albeit part time, and they are sharing jobs. We cannot share jobs and still be productive. Unemployment is high in terms of full-time jobs in this country. We need full-time workers, pulling their weight, moving forward.
We also find that men with post-secondary education in this country are more likely to be hired than women with an equivalent education. That is because women cannot enter the workforce unless they have childcare and early childhood education help so they can go into the workforce. The government thinks all of that is a waste of time, so the government is not investing in its people and in its productivity. If we are not productive, we cannot be competitive.
We are dropping in terms of competitiveness, as I said before. In R and D we have dropped badly while India and China, with whom we are looking to trade, have increased their R and D budgets by 7%. They are moving forward to build a skilled workforce. We find that money spent on training in this country is down since the Liberal government left. We have dropped. Everyone is coasting on the Liberal policy of regulating the banks and this is not good enough. There is no vision or movement forward.
Creating a country that is productive and competitive, that has a strong economic base and is moving forward means that we have to invest in people. As a small nation, even though we do have some natural resources, that is finite. We need to invest in infinity, which is our people. It means creating opportunity. It means educating them. It means keeping them healthy. It means training them. None of that is happening. It means being competitive. The Prime Minister has said “no” to any aerospace development. We used to be a big player in aerospace, so we find that nothing is happening with the government.
Before I finish, I want to move the following amendment, seconded by the member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville. I move that all the words after Prime Minister in this motion be deleted and be replaced by the following: Immediately call a federal–provincial meeting on the economy.