Mr. Speaker, I thank you and the House for agreeing to host this debate this evening. I think members of all parties will agree that it is an important conversation and that our constituents across the country will be listening. This is one of those rare occasions when a national news event sends reverberations right across the country, even though its crucible is in one particular geographic location. All Canadians stand with the people of Oshawa today.
Tonight, moms and dads will go home in that city and sit their children down at the dinner table and tell them they have terrible news, that the place they go to work every day might not be around for very much longer. After the kids go to bed, moms and dads will come together and talk about what they are going to do, how they are going to pay the mortgage, how they are going to make that minimum contribution to the registered education savings plan so that the kids who are graduating from high school in just five or six years will have a chance to go to university.
This night might be a very long one. Those parents might go to bed, but they might not sleep because those incredible pressures will weigh on them all through the hours of darkness. We want them to know that there will be light at the end of this tunnel and that we have the opportunity to rebuild these opportunities. We have the opportunity to rebuild the economic livelihoods of the people who have received this terrible news.
There is nothing I can say or that any of us can immediately do this evening that is going to change the decision of General Motors to shut down its operations in Oshawa. There is nothing we can say that will provide comfort to those families, but what we can do is learn from the events over the last 24 hours and plan accordingly. What these events teach us is that no matter how good things seem to be going on the surface, trouble may just be around the corner.
I remember back in the early 2000s, both Liberal and Conservative governments faced criticism. People asked, “Why are you so focused on paying off the debt?” Ministers, like Martin and later Flaherty said, “We have our reasons.” Both of them paid off large quantities of national debt, to their credit. The member for Milton, with whom I will be splitting my time, will comment further on this point. Those men understood that good times do not always last, and that is why it is always wise to save up money and store it away for a rainy day.
Our ancestors taught us that. We are a nation with agrarian roots, and when our ancestors had sunny days, they filled up the cellar with goods so that when a rough season came, when the rain fell too hard for a crop to be harvested, they would have something to get them through the hard times. That was the same lesson that governments, both Liberal and Conservative, followed during those earlier years.
That wisdom became apparent when the great global recession of 2008 hit. For a brief moment, I think all of us who were around at that time were reminded of those terrible days. We turned on the news and Lehman Brothers and massive investment banks were literally collapsing. Large financial institutions were losing literally tens of billions of dollars a month, and that is individual financial institutions. Of course, large sectors literally came to the brink of falling right off the cliff and being eliminated altogether. The manufacturing heartland in Ontario was threatened, and GM was among those companies that received a bailout just to survive.
Of course, no one is suggesting that we have returned to that crisis-level situation. The worldwide economy has not collapsed. To the contrary, the world economy has done very well over the last couple of years. It peaked in 2017, with roaring growth both around the globe and, in particular, south of the border with our largest trade partner, the United States, which purchases 75% of our exports. Times have been good and it is very easy for us now to forget that it was not so long ago, only one decade, when the entire global economic system had come crashing down.
The fact that the Flahertys, the Chrétiens, the Martins and the Harpers made the decision to pay off tens of billions of dollars of debt gave us enormous structural resiliency going into that crisis. Members of both parties, historically, deserve some credit for those decisions. As a result, Canada was the last country to go into recession and deficit and the first country to come out of both. Consistently, we had among the lowest unemployment rates in the G7. We did not have to bail out our banks. We had no debt crisis at the governmental level. However, now Canadians look on with great concern as their government is doing precisely the opposite of what our wise predecessors did 10, 15 and 20 years ago.
We are reverting to the first Trudeau government's approach of diving deep into debt, structural deficits that exist even when times are good. The government recently released its annual financial report and in it pointed to the factors that delivered massive revenue windfalls in the 2017-18 fiscal year. The government's own admission was that those factors were low interest rates, booming housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto, roaring U.S. and rural economies and high commodity prices. These are all factors out of the government's control. They are also factors that can come and go with the wind. They generated $20 billion in additional unexpected revenue for the government in the last fiscal year. What did the government do with that revenue? It spent every single penny and then borrowed $20 billion more.
The Prime Minister had said that next year we would have a balanced budget. He famously said the budget would balance itself. We learned in the recent fall economic update that not only will the budget not be balanced next year but the deficit will be bigger than it is this year. He plans to put another $20 billion on the national credit card. Again, this is in the good times. As Canadians look on with great compassion and sympathy to their compatriots in Oshawa, they first think how can they help and, second, what if this happens more broadly across the country and across the economy? Will our foundations as a government and as an economy be solid enough to resist the kinds of storms we have seen in the past? With the debts the government is accumulating, many Canadians are concerned that the answer is no.
Our suggestion, as the official opposition, is that it is not too late to do the right thing, to turn the corner, to moderate government spending, allow the economy and the taxpayer to catch up with the cost of government so that we can gradually return to a balanced budget in the medium term and, hopefully, even begin to pay off debt as the government, as represented by both Liberals and Conservatives, did in the past. That is the responsible thing to do. That is the Canadian way. It is what our ancestors, were they here today, would advise us to do with their great knowledge of history. Not only would our ancestors advise us to do it but our grandchildren would thank us for doing it.