Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to Bill C-14 and pick up on many of the themes discussed by my colleague from Souris-Moose Mountain. I do not know nearly as much about sports as he does, so I probably will not be as well versed on those issues, but I certainly share a concern about the impact on our energy sector.
Right now the government is talking about its various proposals for government spending. In reality, the government is saying that it is not going to support the existence of jobs and will put in place policies that will likely kill jobs. However, it tells us not to worry; it will have some money afterward.
What I hear from Canadians over and over again is that they are interested in working. Their desire is to get back into employment and have the joy, satisfaction and pride that comes from earning income. They also understand that the government's long-term approach is not realistic. We cannot have fewer and fewer jobs with more and more government subsidy and expect this to be an economic plan that will give us the capacity to provide support to people in the long run.
We are debating Bill C-14, which lays out aspects of the government's fiscal agenda. Part of the bill is for correcting errors in previous bills. The government has put forward other bills and pushed hard to rush them through quickly, but they have had significant technical flaws or other flaws. They have had a big negative impact on individuals and businesses. We are carefully reviewing and understanding this legislation to make sure we do not create more errors in the process of the government correcting errors it has made in the past.
The Conservatives are supportive of providing essential support to people in the midst of very challenging circumstances. However, our major concern, as we look at the government's fiscal plan for the present and for the future, is that it does not have a plan for jobs, growth and getting Canadians back to work.
There is a discussion of providing various kinds of benefits without thinking about jobs and growth. However, the government misses the reality that if we do not have a plan for jobs and growth over the long term, inevitably we are going to run out of the fiscal capacity to provide Canadians with the support they need. We have to be growing the economy and creating wealth before we are in a position to redistribute it. That is where I want to focus my arguments today.
This is the frame through which I see questions of fiscal policy. The cost of government programs depends on two things. It depends, first, on how much those programs allocate to individuals who need them and, second, on how many people need them. If we have very generous unemployment benefits when a very small percentage of the population is unemployed, it is going to cost us less than if a larger percentage of the population is unemployed in the midst of lower benefits. It is not just a function of the size of benefits we are providing; it is a function of the level of need for those benefits, as well as the size of them.
Logically, then, if we notice enormous levels of government spending and runaway deficits, as we see right now, and we need to reduce government spending at some point, then there are two ways of doing that. One might be to reduce the amount of money allocated to individuals or as part of individual benefit programs. The second might be to strategically think about how we can reduce the need for government benefits. If we can find ways of increasing the employment rate, there will be less need for unemployment benefits and it will cost the government less even if it is providing sufficient benefits to help people in those situations. Similarly, we might say this with respect to criminal justice: If we can reduce the crime rate, we will need to spend less money on responding to crime.
If we look at the causes of the need for government response and can find ways of addressing the underlying need, then it costs government less and we have more fiscal capacity to provide resources to people in situations of significant need. I think we would all generally agree that reducing people's need for or reliance on government services is a much better route to go than simply reducing the availability of those services without taking into consideration how we can address the issue of people's real or perceived need for them.
This underlines the point that we should not be measuring the success, effectiveness or commitment of government in terms spending alone. We might have a government that is spending a lot of money on providing benefits to people but doing so in a way that is poorly targeted and does not address the underlying root causes of the need. It is therefore not there for those who are in a position to need support. On the other hand, we could imagine a situation where a government has very generous and targeted benefits in situations where people have need and at the same time is addressing root causes such that there is less need for government services. In the latter case, that government would be spending less money. It would be spending less money by having more targeted benefits and by thinking about the need for government services, not just about the magnitude of the services in place.
As we think about the current dynamic with COVID and the various economic challenges facing our country, it is important that we think about creating jobs and growth, reducing the need for government services, strengthening communities and strengthening the supports individuals face independent of government. We would have a greater capacity to focus the public resources we have on those who are not able to find assistance any other way. If we have a lower unemployment rate, it stands to reason that we can provide more, better, longer-term effective supports to those who are not employed. However, if we have a higher level of unemployment, our collective capacity to do that is somewhat reduced. Unfortunately, what we see right now from the government is the lack of a plan for jobs and growth. That is really what is going to get us moving.
There are many different ways we can think about what that plan could and should include. What we need to keep in mind is that a great deal of our jobs are coming, and will continue to come, from resource extraction and manufacturing. There are a variety of sectors in our economy that people are working in, but there are many people in my riding and across the country who are working in resource extraction and manufacturing. We need a government that appreciates the value of that work being done, one that does not live in some fantasy world where everybody is working in an office behind a computer. The hard work people do with their hands in resource extraction and manufacturing are the jobs of the present and future and require our protection and support.
What we see from the government is a piling on of regulation and red tape that nominally is often about the environment but is very ineffective at allowing us to reach our environmental objectives. We also see a sense of unwillingness to defend the rule of law in cases where natural resource development projects have been through an appropriate review process and have been signed off by affected communities, but there are a few people trying to physically blockade them. We have cases of end runs, where projects have gone through the whole process and people are trying to stop them, even if they meet the existing requirements. That undermines investor confidence in the Canadian economy.
In a conversation I had with an ambassador regarding the opportunities in Canadian energy development, the person said that, more and more, Canada is being seen as a country of political risk. People can do all the work and have all the technical pieces in place and the project can make sense and conform to regulations, but there is a risk that some political factors will come into play and the rug will be pulled out from under them. That kind of environment makes it very hard for investors to want to invest in Canada.
People try to make the argument in the House that resource extraction and manufacturing industries are industries of the past. On the contrary, these investments are being made in other parts of the world; we are just not seeing many of those investments happen to the same degree in Canada. When we see growth in energy sectors outside of Canada but not the same kind of investments being made in Canada, we see that the problem is political.
In conclusion, to be able to provide support to Canadians who are unemployed, we need to have more Canadians who are employed. That means respecting and supporting our resource extraction and manufacturing sectors. That means working to have reasonable regulations, not unpredictable, constantly changing red tape for people who want to pursue projects. That is what we need for jobs, growth and opportunities—