Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Kildonan—St. Paul for an excellent speech that will be very difficult for me to follow.
Here are the hard facts. While it is important to provide interim support for people who are jobless during COVID, what people really want are paycheques. This is all against the backdrop of an unemployment rate that is by far the highest in the G7. It is higher than the rates of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan.
The government has tried, since these data points have come out, to claim that unemployment rates no longer matter and that we should look at some other statistics that it has cooked up. The problem is that since the Prime Minister took office, he has said, on 49 occasions in the House of Commons, that the unemployment rate is precisely the measure we should look at to determine how our job market is working. However, right now it is not working.
There are 850,000 more people unemployed today than there were in February 2020. Interestingly, the government brags that Canada has secured a larger recovery of the lost jobs in percentage terms than other countries. That is, of course, the result of the fact that we lost more jobs in the first place and had more to gain back. Even with the minimal recovery we have had of jobs, we still have a higher rate of unemployed than our competitors.
It is getting worse. The most recent monthly data showed the loss of another 200,000 jobs in the same month that the United States gained jobs. The leading indicators of what job losses are to come are even worse. According to the largest association of small businesses in Canada, the CFIB, between 70,000 and 220,000 business owners in Canada are thinking of closing their businesses for good. This is between 7% and 21% of all businesses in the country. If they were to close, we would lose between one million and three million jobs, a catastrophic outcome for our economy.
Forget the fact that other countries are roaring back, recovering and putting their people back to work, and that foreign workers are getting paycheques while ours are getting credit card debts. Let us stop talking about stats and start talking about people, because a job, though it means a paycheque, means so much more than that. It means the pride, purpose and independence of getting up in the morning and taking control of one's life. People who lose jobs lose this pride and independence, and the data shows that their mental health suffers dramatically. According to a study by the University of Calgary, the suicide rate rises by two percentage points for every one percentage point increase in unemployment. People take their lives when they lose their jobs.
Since the pandemic began, we have had a 50% increase in opioid overdoses in Alberta and Ontario. In British Columbia, 911 operators reported a surge in phone calls from family members and loved ones who are begging for a paramedic to come and rescue someone who has overdosed, usually on opioids. This is the result of depriving people of work. It is good and necessary to provide interim income for those people, but it is not the ultimate resolution to their problem, which is that they do not have a job and do not know how they are going to pay the bills in the long run.
This is not just because of COVID. The whole world is facing COVID, yet all the other G7 countries have lower unemployment than Canada. This is the result of a government policy that has systematically destroyed employment in this country for four years.
The government has blocked the energy east pipeline, which would have delivered a million barrels of western oil to eastern refineries, creating jobs for energy workers out west, refinery workers out east, steelworkers in central Canada and trades workers everywhere across the land. It vetoed the northern gateway pipeline and therefore deprived dozens of first nations communities of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars' worth of agreements to share revenue, money that would have paid for schools, hospitals and job training for the youth.
It has imposed job-killing taxes that have driven employers out of Canada and into the United States. Right now, Canadians have $800 billion more invested outside of Canada than foreigners have invested in Canada. Why is that? It is because right now Canada is not the place to invest to get things done. In Canada it takes 170 days longer to get a building permit for a pipeline, business park, factory, warehouse or any other economic infrastructure in this country than it does in the United States. In fact, we are ranked 34 out of 35 OECD nations for the delays associated with getting approval from government to build anything.
Our first nations communities are forced to send their own revenues to Ottawa and then apply to get some of them back, rather than being allowed to harvest the revenues directly from their own economic activities. Leading first nations entrepreneurs talk about how long it takes for bureaucrats and politicians to sign off on commercial and other development activities on first nations lands, preventing them from giving paycheques and purpose and pride of a job to their own people.
When immigrants come to Canada and seek out the chance to work in the fields for which they were trained, they are prevented by professional bodies and other occupational licensing regulators from getting a permit to work and are not told what they have to do to get one. Therefore, we have doctors earning minimum wage, architects who are unemployed and mechanics who are stuck only changing oil and tires when they could be running a full service mechanical operation and earning six figures. These people deserve the paycheques for which they were trained, but because of the bureaucracy of our permit-driven economy they are prevented.
The government should put paycheques first. The federal government should set the goal and drive all other levels of government toward it to be the fastest place on planet earth to get a building permit for any kind of economic project, to allow first nations people to approve their own economic developments and to welcome home ownership for their people. We should allow first nations communities to keep more of the revenue from these projects.
We should repeal Bill C-69, the no new pipelines bill, so we can actually deliver our oil to market and get full world prices. We should end the offshore shipping ban off the northwest coast of British Columbia so that our energy producers can get world prices as well.
We should reduce the tens of billions of dollars of regulatory red tape costs that hold back businesses and force them to spend their time serving bureaucrats rather than hiring workers and serving customers. We should knock down interprovincial trade barriers so that Canadians can buy and sell goods from one another rather than importing and enriching foreign businesses abroad. We should reform our tax system so that it rewards work, savings and investment, and allows people to climb the income ladder rather than being penalized for each extra dollar they earn.
Right now we should be encouraging municipalities to make it easier for new and long-term vacant office space to be repurposed for housing for people who desperately need it. Here in Canada, despite having one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth, we have among the highest real estate costs for people trying to find a home.
These are all actions we could take right now to get—