Madam Speaker, that is pretty close, actually. A member says I would have been in diapers. I was born in 1979. I just turned 44.
My earliest memories started to appear around 1982-83. I remember the horrible strain and stress my parents faced. There was actually the national energy program, whereby the Trudeau government demolished the Alberta economy, where I was growing up. We were largely protected from that because my folks were teachers, so they did not lose their jobs, unlike many of the unfortunate but greatly patriotic and courageous Albertans and Saskatchewanians who were hit directly. However, my folks had a few little rental properties that my mother had scrounged and saved to make possible, and we were all hit with the higher interest rates, rates that could not be paid with the rent the tenants were paying. We could not pay our mortgage, so we had to move to a smaller house.
That period was very stressful. There was massive dislocation. It is no wonder that the misery index reached its highest level, because misery is the best way to describe it. Some people cannot take the misery. During that time period, the suicide rate reached a record high. In 1983, when I would have been four years old, the suicide rate hit 14.8 per 100,000 people, an 8% increase from 1980. Seven of the eight worst years for suicide rates in Canada happened when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. That is because people's lives were coming apart.
Members can just imagine. It is not just money. It is not just the desire to have more stuff. It is the shame of coming home to one's kids and saying, “You can't go on that little camping trip. I'm cancelling your hockey. We have to leave this house and move into a tiny, little apartment.” That is the real, human anxiety, the guilt, the pain and the frustration that literally break families apart and cause divorce and suicide. People lose hope, and everything falls apart.
When I talk about the possibility of a very real debt crisis, with all of these mortgages that were locked in at low rates three years ago, two years ago, even one year ago, I am not talking about an accounting phenomenon. I am talking about a human phenomenon, one that we have a duty to avoid. We have a duty now to foretell the dangers that are coming and to protect our country against the ravages they would mean for our population. We know how to do that. We know there are simple, common-sense decisions that we can make in order to avoid such an eventuality here in our country, as we have seen all around the world and that we could replicate if we do not change course now.
We know what the necessary steps are today. It is about spending less and creating more. The member across the way will instantly assume that if something costs less, it must be of less value. This is a fundamental breakdown in his understanding. The Prime Minister is the worst for this. He thinks that if something costs more, it must be worth more, as though the half-billion dollars he wanted to give to WE Charity was worth more than, for example, just having a passport actually delivered to people on time. Just because something costs more does not mean it is better.
For example, the government has a housing program. It has spent $89 billion on it. In fact, the number one bragging point it has is that its housing plan is really expensive. One can almost imagine a restaurant running an advertisement: “Come dine with us. We have terrible ambiance; the service is garbage; the food is rotten. It might even make you sick, but guess what? It costs 1,000 bucks a plate. Therefore, it must be the best, because it is the most expensive.”
Let us take this back into the government realm. When I was employment minister, we had a program, which I believe is still in place today, to help visually impaired Canadians read books by sending them CDs with the books on them. They could then put them in their computers, hit play and listen to them. One of my constituents was actually capable of listening to books at four times the speed, because she had trained herself. To the rest of us, it would sound like gibberish, but she had trained herself to speed read using audio players. It was a wonderful program.
However, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind said there was one problem, which was that it did not use CDs anymore, so we did not have to pay Canada Post to ship these CDs to people's homes. It had come up with a technology that would allow the Canadian government to simply pay the cost of having radio personalities go into an audio room and record the book, and then it could be sent as an audio file, a particle of light through cyberspace, and people could read the book without having to have a cassette.
It turned out that this reduced the cost of the program by about 80%. Furthermore, we signed a deal with the other countries that had the same English-speaking and French-speaking books as we had. We said we would waive copyright on all of our recordings, and all the authors would agree to waive copyright if the other countries did the same. That way, the other countries could give all the books they had to us and we could give all the books we had to them. Therefore, everyone would have more books, and because there was no longer a physical copy of any of these books, we were going to massively increase the number of books by something like 500,000, all of a sudden.
The cost of the program went down by 80%. Using Liberal logic, Liberals would say that was a savage cut and ask how we could do such a thing, even though it meant more convenience, more books and a faster turnaround in customer service for people. Just because it cost less did not mean it was not worth more. This is common sense.
Let us think about it this way. We have had these arguments with the Prime Minister. He says that my time as housing minister was no good because I did not spend $89 billion on housing, but housing cost half as much. When I was housing minister, the average mortgage payment was $1,400 and the average rent was $900 for a single-bedroom apartment. The average down payment needed for a house was $22,000. Now it is double, double and double.
However, the Prime Minister would say that his is a success, because even though nine in 10 young people believe they will never be able to afford a home, he has the most expensive housing program in Canadian history; therefore, it must be the best. He thinks that the price is equal to the value. There is a difference between value and cost, a distinction that the government never makes. That is why it has spent so much to achieve so little.
How can we organically impose discipline on government to ensure that it gets more for less? One way is to impose the simple law of nature, called scarcity. Every creature in the universe, every bird in the trees, every fish in the sea, must live with the law of scarcity: maximum use of scarce resources. They can have this or that, not this and that, or they can find a bargain on this and that. The single mother who wants to build a new porch might pass up on the vacation, or she might go to the local lumber yard to see if she can get a bargain on the lumber to build the porch for a lower price and maybe get a bargain on kids' camp so that she can do both. That is the common-sense budgeting that families do every single day.
Politicians are the only creatures in the universe that do not have to live by the universal law of scarcity, because by using inflation, taxes and debt, they externalize the scarcity on everyone else. They push austerity out of government and into the living rooms of the people, into the small businesses and onto the farm gate, where someone else has to deal with more scarcity because government is pushing its costs onto everyone else.
What if we internalized that scarcity? What if we required that government make the same trade-offs, the same common-sense bargains that the single mom, small business person or farmer makes every single day? What if we passed a common-sense law, called the “dollar for dollar law”, that required a politician to find a dollar of savings for each new dollar of spending?
I promise, by the way, to be conservative in my remarks, if members promise to be liberal in their applause. That is my idea of a bipartisan speech: Conservative content and Liberal applause.
This—