Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to the Liberal opposition motion.
One of the things I want to stress is that this will be about jobs, jobs, jobs. When we look at what has happened with job creation in this country, we see that in the past year Canada has experienced negative job growth. In fact, as my colleague just said, from August 2013 to August 2014, the entire country created a net 81,000 jobs, but only 15,300, or 19%, of these are full time.
How do we expect families to live, to work, to pay their mortgages, to feed themselves, to send their kids to university, to do all the things that families have to do when they are working part time? It is not a sustainable way for people to live, so creating full-time jobs is what we need to talk about, not part-time jobs.
We can look at the United Kingdom. My colleague spoke about the number of jobs, but I want to put it into perspective. In the same period of this year, the United Kingdom created a 2.6% increase in new jobs, the United States 1.5%, and Canada 0.5% only.
Therefore, Canada is not doing very well. In spite of what we hear from the Conservative government, Canada is not creating new jobs, and when we do not create jobs and people keep losing their jobs and try to live on part-time jobs, there are huge effects that no one is talking about.
The health effects of unemployment were well documented in the 1990s, when many countries in the world were facing recession. We know there is a high incidence of high blood pressure, a high incidence of anxiety and depression, and a high incidence of suicide. A lot of people cannot afford to feed their families and a lot of people cannot afford to buy the prescriptions they need for chronic diseases. That is another impact that we are not even counting when we think about jobs and the ability of people to work, to pay taxes, to produce, and therefore to grow the economy. These things are inextricably linked.
The Liberal Party is not just saying that this is a terrible plan that the Minister of Finance announced; we are also offering a solution. We are offering an opportunity for the Conservatives to change the plan and moderate it so that it can actually start creating the kinds of jobs we are looking for.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business suggests that this plan the minister tabled could create about 20,000 to 25,000 jobs. However, we also have economists saying that it could create no new jobs and actually cause a loss of jobs. These are things we have to take into consideration.
What we are presenting is evidence-based. I will go on to say why it is evidence-based, but we are talking about a way the government could help to stimulate businesses to create about 175,000 new jobs. We can compare 20,000 jobs, or a possible loss of jobs, to the creation of 175,000 jobs.
If the government is serious about doing the right thing to help stimulate the economy and create jobs, then the government will listen. This is not about politics. This is not about the Liberals saying they know better than the Conservatives and pointing out what they did; it is about finding the best solution when Canadians are having a difficult time.
This is where we in Parliament should work well together. All of the political parties should look for the best evidence-based solution.
The government has heard our solution. We are suggesting that for every new job created by any kind of business, small, medium or large, the business will get a holiday from EI premiums for two years, the same length of time the government is proposing for its plan. That is the first thing we are proposing.
I want to explain why I say it is evidence-based. When we became government in 1993, we had an unemployment rate of about 14%. By the time we left government, that unemployment rate was down to 6.5%, so that measure surely worked. The evidence shows that when we did something, it achieved the objective.
In 1997 we brought in a new hires program for two years. In this program, for every new job that was created, the company, regardless of its size, was given freedom for two years from EI premiums. That was an important thing. Then we topped that up in 1998 with a new hires program for young people, who were facing an 18% unemployment rate. We brought that down to about 12%.
We are talking about stuff that worked. We said that every business, regardless of its size, that hired a young person between the ages of 18 and 24 would actually get a holiday from EI premiums.
As a physician I have talked, and as a party we have talked, about being evidence-based. It means looking at what works. We can say that it worked. The figures are there. Everyone may deny it, but they are there. Members can go and look them up. It is true. We also started bringing down EI premiums overall. Every year, we dropped those so that by the time we left government in 2005, EI premiums across the board were down for all businesses. That is the way to stimulate work, agreeing that, in fact, it is small and medium-sized businesses that create the majority of jobs in this country.
We are offering a very important solution. This is not something that, again, looking at the evidence, we made up. We can see that this plan the Minister of Finance tabled was a very bad one.
Barrie McKenna, of the The Globe and Mail, said, “Put simply: Growing companies, not small ones, drive economic growth”. He said that growing companies, period, drive economic growth.
He continued, “Governments should want more of them. But [these] policies are sending exactly the opposite signal: Stay small. Don’t grow”.
Then we have Mike Moffatt saying, “...it is clear that firms under the $15,000 EI threshold”, which the current government is setting, “have a big incentive to keep wage increases to a minimum so they do not lose their tax credits”.
Those firms can do a couple of things once they get over $15,000 in EI premiums: they can lower the incomes of their employees, or they can cut their hours of work. This is a disincentive, not an incentive to create jobs.
Sometimes I think the government across the way has to put big flashy things in the window. The Conservatives think it is going to work, but they have not done their homework. They have not actually looked at the consequences of what they are going to do. They have not looked at the outcomes. This is where their plans are nearly always flawed and blow up in their faces.
I also talked about the evidence the Liberals had when we brought in an across-the-board payroll decrease in EI premiums, year after year. Here is what Stephen Gordon, who is an economic professor at Laval University, said:
Reducing payroll taxes is usually a clear win-win situation, resulting in increased employment and higher wages. The Conservatives have passed up this opportunity by creating yet another targeted boutique tax credit.
Instead of making things easier for everyone, the current government has actually created a more complex tax system. It has created these little boutique tax credits. It seems to thrive on giving little boutique tax credits to certain groups, and we have seen that this has not worked. It has not actually resulted in what the government wants.
I like to say that this particular plan by the finance minister is right up there with the brilliant plan, with a $13-billion surplus left by a Liberal government, to cut the GST by two percentage points, which cost $13 billion. One does not have to be an economist to know that 13 from 13 is zero, so the current government ended up with a zero balance at the time it needed it most, because a year later, there was a recession. The government was unable to deal with this. We have seen the snowballing consequences of what the government does.
If the Conservatives really mean to do well by Canadians, it is important that they pay attention. We are not asking to take all the credit. We are saying that if they do it, we will back them up. We will support them on this, because in this House, this is not about playing politics. Sometimes, yes, we do play politics. We are in politics, after all. However, it is most important, at a difficult time in our history, for us to come together, all political parties, to do the best thing, based on evidence and based on what the outcomes are going to show us we will achieve. We would work together to do the right thing to create jobs at this particular time, when people are losing jobs and suffering as much as we know they are.