Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the chamber on strong leadership; a balanced budget; and a low-tax plan for jobs, growth, and security. I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, a great champion of taxpayers and her constituents.
My job is called “Minister of Employment and Social Development”. I am very blessed with the opportunity to serve in this capacity. Sometimes our terminology in government, though, is too technical when really things can be said much more simply. My role is to focus on jobs, families, and communities. Those will be the three cornerstones of my address today.
I will start with jobs. How can we can create them? The plan of this government is the three ts: trade, tax cuts, and training. Trade, tax cuts, and training have helped us create 1.2 million net new jobs. That is 1.2 million people who got a phone call and someone on the other line said, “Congratulations; you got the job”. We want more people to get phone calls like that. One way to do it is to promote trade.
When our government came to office, there were six free trade agreements in place for Canada. Now there are about 44. We have added almost 40 new free trade agreements. In fact, about 97% of Canada's free trade access was secured by a Conservative government. The 3% remaining was done by Liberals.
Let us make this practical, because trade might seem a bit abstract to some people. We signed a free trade agreement with Europe, for example, which is the largest combined economy in the world in terms of GDP, even bigger than the United States or China. This free trade agreement, according to economists, will create 80,000 net new jobs. Some of them are right here in Ontario, and we are already learning about them. Just three weeks ago, the Prime Minister visited a Honda Canada plant where that company announced that for the first time in its history it will export Canadian-built Honda vehicles directly to Europe. That is 400 net new jobs.
We have also signed a free trade agreement with South Korea, a fast-growing, free-enterprise, democratic economy. Just recently the Prime Minister announced a deal that will allow Canada to export its uranium to India, the second-largest country in the world in terms of population, a country with one of the fastest growing middle-class populations on earth. That uranium will help India power its economy, literally, and it will create jobs for hard-working employees of companies like Cameco and others in Saskatchewan, which has one of the richest reserves of uranium on planet earth. Trade creates jobs.
Tax cuts do too, the second t of our job plan. In our recent budget, our Minister of Finance announced that we would be bringing in the biggest tax cut in 25 years for small business. Ninety per cent of businesses in this country are small, and two-thirds of Canadians who are employed work for them. In other words, small business is the engine of job creation. Whether it is Sonny's gas station on Main Street in Manotick or any other neighbourhood business that all members know, meet with, and can trust, these are the people who lift up our communities and who would benefit from this massive tax reduction. It would mean that they would have more money in their pockets to hire promising employees. When those employees are hired, they would pay lower taxes.
This budget also announced that in 2017 we would be lowering EI payroll taxes by 21%. That means it would be less expensive to hire and that the employees who are working would pay less of their salary into the EI fund and keep more of it in their own pockets. That too creates jobs.
This follows on the EI hiring credit, which we announced in the fall, that saves small businesses money. It is specifically targeted to small businesses for additional hiring by reducing the EI tax burden that small businesses bear when they employ additional people. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business confirmed that this tax cut would create jobs.
Tax relief and lower taxes allow businesses to have more money to hire, families to have more money to save and consumers to have more money to spend, all of which generate more jobs. Therefore, tax cuts create jobs, as does training, the third T in our job creation plan.
We have made a mistake in our country. For 40 years we told our kids that there was only one way to get a job when they got older, and that was to go to university and get a white collar job wearing dress shoes. Now we are suffering the consequences. Over the next seven years we will need a million skilled workers, most of them in the skilled trades. We will need 300,000 people in construction alone.