Madam Speaker, the Liberals have been talking an awful lot about the middle class lately. In fact, they produced a cool chart in their budget to try to demonstrate that middle-class incomes have grown almost not at all in 40 years. That claim was surprising because Conservatives had previously produced data showing that middle-class incomes had skyrocketed over the last decade alone.
So I secured the Department of Finance Canada data that were used to create that funky chart I mentioned earlier, to try to reconcile the claims. From at the data, who was right? Was it the Conservatives, who claimed higher incomes for the middle class in the last 10 years; or was it the Liberals, who claim that the middle class has had almost no real raise at all in four decades? The answer is both.
How is that possible? How is it possible that Liberals can say, truthfully, that incomes have not gone up in four decades and Conservatives can simultaneously say, truthfully, that they have gone up dramatically in the last 10 years? Let us look at the chart. In 1976, the median income in Canada, in constant inflation-adjusted dollars, was $46,300 under a former prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. However, that dropped by $2,800 or 6% down to $43,500. It then took 30 years to recover incomes back up to $46,500.
In other words, the first Trudeau did so much damage to middle incomes in this country that it took almost three decades for the Canadian economy to undo that damage. Then, during the subsequent Conservative government, incomes did rise from $44,700 to $49,602, an increase of $5,000 or 11% after inflation. That is according to Liberal budget data. That is the largest increase in median incomes in 40 years. In fact, under our recent Conservative prime minister, median incomes grew faster than under the Trudeau, Clark, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, Chrétien, and Martin governments combined. Again, that is according to data in the Liberal budget.
The question really is this. Given that this chart, which comes from page 11 of the Liberal government's budget book, demonstrates the overwhelming damage that the first Trudeau did to middle income, why would his son produce economic policies that are nearly identical? Those policies include rising taxes, spiralling debt, massive government interference and control in the economy, and bail-outs for incompetent corporate leaders.
Why would the current government want to repeat the mistakes of a previous Liberal government that took 30 years to reverse? Are the Liberals suggesting that we should sacrifice another generation to the damages that always flow from over-intervention of government in the economic life of Canadians?