Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to share my time with the hon. member for Haldimand—Norfolk.
I am pleased to rise to speak to budget 2016 presented by the Liberal government. However, I would like to waste no time at all though and express my opposition to the direction of this budget and particularly where the Prime Minister is taking the country.
I am here on behalf of my constituents in Edmonton Riverbend, and I owe it to them to represent our views and our vision for the future. I have pledged to view every decision made in the House through that very lens, but this budget makes it so very easy to feel like we have been let down in Edmonton and in Alberta.
This budget took away what hope struggling Canadians had left and failed to explicitly do what Liberals promised Canadians during the 2015 election campaign. The Liberal candidates in Edmonton paraded around the city saying, “Don't worry, it's only a $10-billion deficit,” and “Don't worry, we have a plan to ensure people don't lose their jobs.” These are words that perhaps every Liberal candidate in my city believed, and perhaps even some Liberals in this House still believe. However, this budget is something that should make every member of that caucus go back to his or her riding, particularly in Edmonton, and feel embarrassed. The messages of “don't worry” are certainly worrying Albertans more and more each day.
The unemployment situation in western Canada is dire. Families are struggling to pay their bills, and some are even foreclosing on their homes. Their hardships are made even worse when many are facing layoffs, and the ones who are wondering when it will be their turn cannot simply, as the Prime Minister put it, “hang in there”, nor should they be forced to. These hard-working Canadians deserve a budget that gets them back to work.
The Liberals said, “Don't worry, we'll build bridges, roads, green transit.” However, the infrastructure announcements in the budget go absolutely nowhere to help those in the energy sector. My constituency office phone is ringing off the hook with not only my constituents but those from the ridings of Edmonton Centre and Edmonton Mill Woods asking for my help and if I can talk any sense into the Liberal government, the Liberal members, and the Prime Minister. They want to know where the Liberal government's claim that its spending will create 143,000 jobs over the next two years and boost the GDP by 0.5% in 2016 and 1% in 2017 came from. Bank economists have said that the Liberal budget as delivered vastly overestimates the jobs that will be created, and will only increase GDP by 0.1% to 0.3%. This is a “real” change.
I cannot ignore the major focus of Edmontonians over the past two weeks without addressing the impact of leaving Edmonton out of the EI expansion. Edmonton and area residents were the only region in Alberta that were left out of the expansion and left without any sort of financial relief, even though Edmonton is a region that is uniquely positioned within our country.
It is easy to look at the cold, hard mathematics, as the Prime Minister said, and determine that Edmonton is a very small percentage, below the arbitrary number selected by the Prime Minister for this expansion. However, that is not understanding Edmonton; that is not understanding Alberta, and that certainly is not understanding the energy sector.
Edmonton and the Edmonton area have an immense impact on the energy sector in our province. For example, in my riding I have a number of workers who live in Edmonton Riverbend; however, they commute weeks on and weeks off to Fort McMurray. These people are counted in the Fort McMurray mathematics and not the Edmonton mathematics.
Another example, and a place I had the honour of touring over the last week is Nisku. Nisku, if members have ever visited, is a hub of activity for heavy machinery and industrial work specifically related to the oil sands. This region has been hit hard, so hard that a major company like PCL Industrial does not know where its next job will come from six months from now. That is scary. Denying these workers and these companies the expansion of EI benefits like the rest of the province shows a serious lack of understanding of how our province operates.
When the Prime Minister did come to Edmonton, flanked by two very uncomfortable MPs for that matter, and proceeded to tell us that we should be, and I quote, “thankful”, I was shocked. The previous day I was asked by a number of media outlets to comment on the visit by the Prime Minister. To be completely honest, I was expecting the Prime Minister to adjust his thinking, show up in Edmonton, and say that Edmonton is now included, what a terrible oversight that was, and offer an apology to Edmontonians. I was ready to commend the Prime Minister and tell him he did the right thing, but he did not say what I had hoped he would say, and we are still fighting with his office to have him reconsider the unique situation Edmonton is in.
To further drive home the point of how out of touch the Prime Minister really is, even the provincial New Democrats pulled themselves away from their latest attack on Alberta workers and jobs in the province, to raise alarms on what the decision to exclude Edmonton from the extended EI benefit means to the Edmonton region. Granted, they did it a day too late, as the Prime Minister had already left town, but at least they were making an effort.
Setting this aside, I wonder why there was an EI expansion package plan but no formal road map to get unemployed Canadians back to work. It seems that the Prime Minister would prefer to grasp at the low-hanging fruit and spend money giving a few more weeks of EI rather than providing a necessary job growth plan that would allow workers to be financially independent and generate revenue for the government. Getting hard-working Canadians back to work, not in a decade but right away, should have been the primary objective of this budget. It is jobs that are ultimately going to put money in Canadians' pockets and help to balance the budget without raising taxes.
I am proud of the previous Conservative's government record of prioritizing jobs. Under the Conservative government, 1.3 million net new jobs were created, the most per capita in the G7. These were high-quality jobs, with 80% of them full time and in the private sector. The budget presented by the Liberals is a failed budget attempt and has let down hard-working Canadians who are struggling to pay their bills and seeing their savings dwindle away. It is obvious that the Prime Minister and the finance minister do not truly understand what is happening in western Canada.
However, to be honest, I am mostly disappointed with the Liberal MPs from the west who, in caucus, had a real opportunity to raise these issues on behalf of their constituents and did not. That is something that these MPs will have to live with back home. Perhaps some of them have been too busy over the past few weeks attending JUNO celebrations, hockey games, farewells to arenas, and hosting the Prime Minister in his riding. I can tell those MPs' constituents that on this side of the House, we listen to our constituents. We are here for them, and we will not let hard-working Canadians down.