Madam Speaker, I thought we were going to be talking about small businesses today, but I am very much interested in the subject matter that the member has raised.
It is always interesting. I enjoyed statistics courses. I did not have very many of them, but I did have the opportunity to have discussions with individuals who loved to talk about statistics. The numbers always look great and they can be twisted in different ways, no doubt.
However, I listened to the member when he said that the Liberal Party said this or that the Liberal Party budget said that and tried to give an impression that things were going in the right direction. Then he said the Conservative Party did this when it was in government and it appeared as if it were going in the right direction. Then, I think he went back to the seventies and early eighties where he said it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau that kind of set us back.
I would tend to disagree, especially on the latter point. I think that if we take a look at it and ask people what the difference is today, if we talk to our constituents, put the numbers to the side, and talk about the seventies and the eighties, I was a teenager back then. I can tell members that when I was a teenager, things were going along pretty good not only for me but also for my peers. We had a sense that we could move out of our parents' house. We could acquire assets and buy a house. We had these dreams and so forth. The general feeling, at the time, was that people had a disposable income and that disposable income was enabling them to fulfill their dreams.
How does that compare with the last 10 years? Check how many parents will tell us, “I love my son” or “I love my daughter, but they're 28 years old and still living in my basement”. They are still living in their homes. We love our children and we want them to be able to stay with us as much as possible, but the point is that the disposable income is something that is of critical importance, in terms of lifestyle and so forth. If members were to check with my constituents, I believe they would concur with me that it seems they have not had the same sort of money to be able to do the things they want, and their generation is feeling somewhat left behind at a very critical time in the last 10 years.
I think what we need to see is a government taking a proactive approach at trying to build hope and to demonstrate that it believes in the middle class. This Prime Minister and this government, more than any other government, even over the last 10 years, have put so much focus on the middle class and building the middle class. Two great examples of that are, first, the Canada child benefit program, a very progressive program that is tax free and that is going to lift literally hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, and second, the first initiative that we took in terms of legislation coming into the House, the tax break from which over 9.6 million Canadians are going to benefit directly.
Both policies are going to see literally hundreds of millions of dollars of disposable income being put into the pockets of Canadians in every region of our country. That is going to benefit, I believe, all Canadians. Most important, I believe it will change the attitude and hopefully provide more hope for Canadians as they see a government that truly believes in the middle class and wants to support it.