Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand in the House today, after listening to the debate, to underscore a few facts about where this country is heading.
Just a year ago, the Liberals promised they could spend their way to prosperity. If hard-working Canadians trusted them to borrow just a modest sum, they said they could create more jobs and put more money into Canadians' pockets. Canadians are still waiting. By most measures, they are worse off than they were a year ago. The economy is stagnant, despite a big spending budget. The Bank of Canada, the IMF, and the OECD have all downgraded their forecasts for Canada this year and next.
What about the promised jobs? At 7%, the unemployment rate is exactly where it was when the Liberals entered office. Good jobs are in short supply. The vast majority of new jobs created under the Liberals have been part time, which helps explain why weekly earnings for the average worker have not budged. Meanwhile, the cost of living goes up, it is harder for Canadians to afford a new home or a home at all, and new federal rules announced this month mean fewer will be able to get a mortgage.
What do we hear? We hear excuses. The Liberals are full of excuses. The global economy is weaker than they thought. No one would have predicted the Alberta wild fires. Their much-touted infrastructure projects are just around the corner; we will see. It could be said that they are trying to win the triple crown. That is, managing to generate the lowest economic growth, the biggest deficits, and the highest taxes.
I come from a part of the country that is largely heavy manufacturing. It is blue-collar heritage in my community through building farm implements over the years. Having a small business of my own in the community for 25 years, I have watched over the years the transition of jobs in the manufacturing sector leave over the last 30 years or so. Why do these jobs leave? In many cases there are numerous factors, but earlier in the debate today I listened to people saying that taxes are somehow a common cost in society. If we buy the argument that somehow there is a level of common cost, that by the way, we the government will determine what that is, we will not only bleed the manufacturing jobs we have, we will bleed pretty much all the good-paying jobs in the country to other places, such as south of the border. The U.S. is going through a huge transition with a new administration coming. It will be reducing its corporate taxes to the lowest rate possible. It will be providing incentives, as it does today, to attract companies to go over the border. In my part of Canada, which is Ontario, we already see a certain degree of exodus of businesses that rely heavily on energy costs.
Let me give an example. A manufacturer in my community employs approximately 400 people. I recently met with them for the purpose of discussing future expansion in Canada or the U.S., where they have two of their plants in Michigan and one in Ohio. Their decision for the expansion and the possible relocation of the Canadian operation is based on the cost of their business. It is pretty darn simple. If electricity is costing twice what it costs in Michigan or Ohio, or any other jurisdiction for that matter, they are going to ask what is the long term for the cost of electricity. Do we foresee it going down and being competitive?
However, on the taxation level, the common cost that some people have talked about in the House today, such that we have a government that believes the theory that if we all pay our share then everything will be better, if that share is set at a much higher rate than other jurisdictions, then we lose our jobs. We lose those 400 jobs. Frankly, when I looked at the books, which were opened up to me, it is absolutely scary to think that the costs have risen as high as they have for that business.
If a carbon tax comes in at the level the current government has said it will, they have factored it out, per employee, $9,000 a year. The reason is that this is a heavy manufacturing forging plant, which forges huge metal pieces for the oil and gas industry, as well as dam gates and other products like that.
When I talk to business people like this, I ask myself what will happen. Do we have to have special rules and exceptions for them? Do we have to provide some kind of special exemptions for these types of manufacturers in that category?
Once we start going down that road, as some governments have tried, it ends in destruction, because we would be picking winners and losers. We would basically be getting on what some people have called the corporate welfare cycle, saying we know we are charging a lot but we will make it up over here and give exceptions over there. It does not work. It is a false economy.
As I talk about the budget and see what the government of the day is proposing, it brings up enormous concern, not only for the type of heavy, large manufacturers that populate different communities in this country, such as mine, but also for the medium-sized business and the small business person.
If we talk to small business people and ask what major thing is holding them back from growing their business—and many people find themselves in small business at certain points in time—the answer I get, generally speaking, is red tape, which is number one, and taxation levels. Many of the taxation levels are hidden taxes, such as the increase to CPP that the current government is going forward with.
We do not really realize how fine the line is until we are there in the shoes of the business people, the family, the mom and pop shops. We do not realize how fine a line it is for them to operate in terms of their margins. I know that a lot of people from outside the business world, when they look at these businesses, think that they are making all kinds of money. However, the truth is that it is a very fine line on which many of these companies work.
I want to bring up the alternative to this kind of thinking of a level of taxation that is the ideal common cost that everyone needs to pay and point out what we did when we were in government, and I will close on this. During the worst economic downturn since the great recession, Canada had the best job creation and economic growth record among G7 countries. We reduced taxes to their lowest point in 50 years, with a typical family saving almost $7,000 a year, and we balanced budgets.
After running a targeted stimulus program that created maximum benefits and approximately 200,000 jobs, we kept our promise to balance the budget, and we left the Liberals with a surplus. That is the truth of what our record is, and I am thankful today to be standing here—