Mr. Speaker, I will congratulate my friend on his posting and I will wish him luck, because he is going to need it as the backup to the Minister of Finance while Canadians are experiencing these incredibly difficult times with the highest personal household debt in Canadian history.
I counted because this was important. I noticed it was three and a half minutes before the first partisan attack in his speech started. It seems that if the government put as much energy into focusing on restoring Canada's strength, particularly in the manufacturing sector, and into helping young Canadians find the jobs that they need, as it does on attacking the opposition with made-up, make-believe ideas about what we propose and do not propose for the Canadian people, it might get somewhere.
There are 350,000 missing manufacturing jobs in Canada since before the recession. The government can put out all the numbers it wants, but that is the reality. Replacing those jobs with service industry jobs does not create the kind of wealth that Canadians are looking for.
There was $150 million-plus wasted in self-promotion advertising, interrupting hockey games and soap operas, which the government somehow thinks is good for the Canada economy. It thinks that spin is going to make a job become a reality and that partisan attacks are going to get to the solution. They are not. The member needs all the congratulations and help he can get, because the Conservative government has consistently shown a prejudice and a bias toward helping those who do not need the help, and a complete ignorance and an attitude of despair toward those Canadians who are struggling to just get by.
We know, because it is in the numbers that Stats Can reports every year, that the income gap is growing every year in Canada under the current government and the previous government. That is what has to change. Poverty affects all of us, each and every one of us. The government simply has no response, other than promising to buy jets that we do not need and that do not work, building jails rather than solving the problems of crime, and not dealing with the environment in a sustainable and prosperous way.
If the government would address some of those things and drop the partisan attacks, Canadians would be more encouraged and feeling more hopeful about the future.