Mr. Speaker, we are working with the provinces. Much of what has been developed by departments has been shared with the provinces. Certainly we are working with the provinces, and next week we will meet with the finance ministers. We will sit down and discuss the economy and a number of issues—many issues, actually. One of them will be the CPP, which has been carried quite extensively over the last three weeks by the media.
We can take the numbers from the job creators and the businesses that have said that 42% will be laying off workers. Departments have said that under the NDP plan, up to 70,000 jobs will be lost. That is straight from Finance Canada. They have also talked about other provincial plans, whereby between 17,000 and 50,000 jobs would be lost. Those are not figures we alone are citing; those are the figures cited by finance departments.
Regardless of the number, I have had constituents and Canadians come up to me to say, “Mr. Sorenson, we are on a tight budget now. We cannot afford to have one of the two of us laid off. We need to be certain that we keep this economy rolling.”
What I do know is that two years down the road I do not want to stand in this place scratching my head and wondering why, if we went five years on a strategy that helped create jobs and prosperity and put Canada in the best position of any of the countries in the G7, we then changed and took action that caused this huge increase in unemployment?
We have a strategy that is working, a Prime Minister who is focused on the economy, and a Minister of Finance who understands the economy. The plan is working. We look forward to continuing to create jobs. We will not bring forward risky strategies that will hurt our economy.