Mr. Speaker, it is always a privilege to rise in the House. We are talking about the budget today, and I think it is important to start with some context as to where the country is. The member who preceded me did an excellent job. Hopefully, I will build on his strong work.
Canadians are experiencing difficult times from coast to coast. Millions of Canadians are finding that, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, there is simply more month than money. They are unable to feed themselves, and food bank usage is off the charts. Over two million families will go to the food bank each and every month in Canada. The food banks in Otonabee-South Monaghan in my riding have seen the number of families with children using food banks double just in the last six months.
The suffering is a result of Liberal policy failures. There is no two ways about this. The Liberals' policies are responsible for driving people deeper and deeper into financial crisis. Financial crises and financial issues generally have two different sides to them, as does the affordability crisis. We have income on one side and expenses on the other. There has been a lot of talk in the House about the expense side, the ever-increasing inflation, interest rates and taxes, and for good reason. It is causing considerable pain for Canadians.
My focus will be on the other side, which is the income side or the growth side of the economy. I believe this is as serious, if not more serious, than the expense side, the reason being that history shows us that, when incomes rise, increasing costs can be managed by economies. There are a number of examples, but there has never been a time, not once in human history, where there has been prosperity in the absence of economic growth. For thousands of years, when the economy has grown, we have had prosperity. When it does not grow, we do not.
Let us be clear that the income side of the ledger in Canada is bleak. We have experienced what Conservatives call, and what economists are starting to call, a lost decade in Canada. GDP per capita in Canada has barely grown. By this metric, we are in the worst economic time since the Great Depression, and quite frankly, there is no sign of relief. This is not getting better. We have had seven straight quarters of a decline in GDP per capita. If we measured recessions on a per capita basis, we would now be in one of the longest recessions in our lifetime.
Liberals, of course, will attempt to obfuscate by blaming the lack of growth on other factors beyond their control, like the weather or other things, and their having no control over a weather front coming in, but the failure is distinctly Canadian. In this last decade, the American growth of GDP per capita, or the measure of each individual economic contribution of every American, has increased by 47%. In Canada, over that same period, it is 4.73%.