Mr. Speaker, I am happy to kick off coming back to our debate today, which was brought by my friend, our industry critic, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. He is a great member of the House, who brings up competitiveness issues all the time. If Canadians are following this debate, this is why Conservatives have brought this debate to the floor today.
The last week or so in Canada shows how uncompetitive our economy is becoming under the Liberal government. Just on the weekend, we saw the Premier of Alberta limiting production of Canadian resources, in fact controlling or interfering with the private marketplace because of the crisis of depressed oil prices. We are losing billions of dollars. It was going to be $15 billion before the large drop in price. They were looking at $25 billion or $30 billion less in revenue to Canada as a result of the inability of the government to get pipelines built.
The other thing we saw in the last week, which was very personal to me and my community, was the announcement that GM intended to close the Oshawa assembly plant at the end of next year, after a century of assembling automobiles in Oshawa and after being at the epicentre of the auto industry, and indeed, the manufacturing industry, Ontario was known for. The driving force for decades of Confederation, the success of manufacturing in Ontario, is faltering now under three years of the current government.
Finally, at the beginning of the previous week, there was the inability of the government to even answer a question with respect to when the budget will be balanced.
Canadians should be very concerned that we have a Prime Minister with no experience in the private sector and no understanding of the unique needs of the economy in different parts of the country, whether it is softwood in British Columbia; resources, including potash, in our prairies; the aerospace industry in Manitoba and Quebec; the manufacturing base in Ontario; or seafood and exports in Nova Scotia and the Atlantic provinces. There is a total disconnect for the Prime Minister.
Should we be surprised? Here is what the Prime Minister said, as the new third party leader, to manufacturers at an auto parts factory in southwestern Ontario, in January 2015, as he was kicking off his election bid:
The people of southwestern Ontario are amazingly resilient and have demonstrated that moving beyond manufacturing-based employment is something they're willing to do.
That was his message to manufacturing facilities in southwestern Ontario and writ large to communities like mine in the Durham region: we need to just move past it.
What else did he say? In his first foreign trip abroad as Prime Minister of this country, he offended the resource industry at Davos. In January 2016, he said, “My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources. I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness.”
In one brush, he was mocking or dismissing the impact of the resource sector and the innovation brought to that sector, such as steam-assisted gravity drainage and a reduction in the use of power and water. All these are innovations that, over time, have reduced the economic and environmental impact of resource development. He swept that aside with one statement, so much so that the mayor of Calgary, who was in Davos, criticized the Prime Minister. He is usually his wingman ideologically, but he criticized such a dismissive and divisive comment trying to pit one economy against another, one region against another, as if resource jobs are not the type of jobs we want. We want to be resourceful, as if Ontario has to move past manufacturing.
This is a Prime Minister who, in the middle of an election campaign, said this about his economic plan, on August 12, 2015, when he was the third party leader running to become prime minister:
We're proposing a strong and real plan, one that invests in the middle class so that we can grow the economy not from the top down the way Mr. Harper wants to, but from the heart outwards. That's what Canada has always done well with.
That comment is absolutely ridiculous, and it shows the absence of an understanding of the private sector, capital investment and risk-taking in the economy. It was comments like that the member for Scarborough—Guildwood, in opposition, called bozo eruptions. They were misplaced comments that showed a Prime Minister so disconnected from the real needs of Canadians that he is not worthy of the job.
What is interesting about the minister heckling is that before she ran for Parliament, she ran on closing the oil sands. Here we have a cabinet minister who made public statements about shutting down the oil sands and who had no real experience before Parliament, and she is at the cabinet table making the decisions. These things should really concern people. When people come with an activist point of view, trying to shut down jobs that hundreds of thousands of people depend on, Canadians should be concerned about the fact that the current government is on cruise control.
The resource industry is in crisis. The manufacturing sector is in crisis. We have tariffs. We have trade disruptions. We have a government that has piled taxes and tariffs on top of the manufacturing base, and it has been struggling under it.
The day the Prime Minister made that Care Bear economic speech, as it was termed at the time, was August 12, midway through a marathon campaign. At that point, the Liberals were still running on a balanced-budget plan. Interestingly enough, the current Prime Minister, as third party leader, said this: “It's a well-established fact. Liberals balance budgets.... Our platform will be fully costed, fiscally responsible and a balanced budget.”
He said that in April 2015. That was the Liberals' policy. They used to say that they were the party of Paul Martin and that they were going to have a balanced budget.
Midway through the election campaign, in fact mere days after he made the Care Bear economic speech, the Liberals changed their fundamental economic position for the country, and on August 25, they said they were going to run deficits. At that time, they said the deficit would never exceed $10 billion, and they promised to get back to budget by the end of their mandate, in 2019. However, they changed their underlying economic promise to Canadians. Within months, they had indicated that they were no longer going to stick to deficits under $10 billion, and within a couple of years, they abandoned any notion of balancing the budget. In fact, it is awkward when the Minister of Finance will not even give a date on which he intends to try to get back to balance. Those are fundamental economic promises to Canadians broken.
Why are we seeing a crisis in western Canada and in Ontario? The canaries in the coal mine in the last week alone are the price changes by the Premier of Alberta and the GM closure, with taxes, tariffs, trade disruption and excessive regulation.
Bill C-69 itself killed the energy east pipeline. An executive of TransCanada pipeline confirmed that. We have had taxes upon taxes. It is not just the carbon tax, which we highlighted last week. Payroll taxes in the first budget made it punitive for employers to hire more people. We had small-business private-company tax changes.
The Liberals have raised taxes on entrepreneurs. They have raised taxes on hiring people through the payroll. They are bringing in a carbon tax. None of those tax increases are happening in the United States. The U.S. is eliminating regulations and lowering taxes.
The auto industry competes in the Great Lakes region, so when Canada is getting uncompetitive because of the actions of the government, we are going to see capital and jobs flow. We have been calling that out for several years. When the Liberals are almost banning pipelines through Bill C-69, we are going to see companies leave the country.
Canadians need to be worried. We need a plan from the government. That is why the Conservatives have brought this debate to the House today.