Mr. Speaker, a strong Canada is a unified Canada. The concerns of every single province do and should matter. Right now, 20% of young men in the province of Alberta are unemployed. I am not just talking about stats, I am talking about faces. I am talking about real life stories.
Joshua, a 24-year-old IT graduate, is one of 33,000 young men in the province currently looking for work and finding nothing. Sean had to leave the province in order to find work and now makes $3 an hour less than a working wage. Tyler is 24 years old, drives three hours to work and barely makes enough money to support his two young girls. This is unacceptable.
Alberta once thrived. Young people would come from the east and go to the west, looking for adventure, work and a future, but not now. Now the unemployment rate has doubled in the last seven months, and the last time this happened was in 1983 under the last Trudeau.
This is a crisis, and it demands the attention of the current Prime Minister, and not tomorrow, not next week, but today.