Madam Speaker, as I indicated, I was somewhat expecting we would be talking about small business. I had a lot of wonderful things to say about small businesses. Instead, the member comes forward, has all these statistics and says that he wants me to use statistics.
If I reflect on statistics during the former Conservative government, the one that comes to my mind is the issue of jobs. Imagine the not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of jobs that were lost in the manufacturing industry, while the Conservatives had the reins of power over the last 10 years. Those are statistics, real statistics that affected people.
If a person is making $35 or $40 an hour at a manufacturing plant, is 45 or 50 years old and then becomes unemployed, he or she will have difficulty finding another comparable job. To what degree did the Conservative government assist that person? It did not. Instead, that person would have had a substantial shift from that $35 or $40 an hour job to a $17 an hour job, more often than anyone would like to see. Therefore, if we want to talk about statistics, I would invite the member to come back and hopefully I will be able to provide a response where we can do some comparisons strictly on statistics.