Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley.
I am honoured to be representing the people of Markham—Unionville.
If capital can be considered water, then Canada is a leaky bucket. Our foreign direct investment, FDI, is the directional flow of this water. FDI coming in is the total inflow of capital from the world to Canada, and FDI going out is the total outflow of capital to the world from Canada. If we subtract the inflow from the outflow, we get our net FDI, or the level of water in our bucket.
The Canadian bucket has been leaking every year from 2015 to 2024 under the Liberal government. Rounding solely to the nearest billion, these are the quick stats for the net outflow each year, all negative: 2015 was $30 billion, 2016 was $44 billion, 2017 was $69 billion, 2018 was $26 billion, 2019 was $36 billion, 2020 was $24 billion, 2021 was $56 billion, 2022 was $50 billion, 2023 was $63 billion and 2024 was $40 billion. From 2015 to 2024, this equates to negative $437 billion.
Do we even have a bucket here, or is this a pipeline of our capital being pumped directly to other countries under a decade of Liberal loss? Let us discuss the cause of these leaks. When the outflow FDI from Canada consistently exceeds the inflow, it means that Canadian capital is finding better opportunities abroad than foreign capital is finding in Canada. This means we need more domestic projects with streamlined regulations to retain our leaky capital.
Our domestic market is small, with only about 40 million people dispersed across a land mass that is second only to Russia in size. This already means that our firms cannot completely rely on domestic consumption. It already means that the only way we compete internationally is through exports. It already means that the only decision in the mind of our firms is whether they can build in Canada and ship to external markets or whether they set up production internationally to sell internationally.
We need incentivizing structures to make it easier to launch massive projects in Canada around energy, infrastructure and manufacturing. These projects would give our economic actors reasons to keep their capital within our borders. However, the Liberals want to make it hard to build in Canada. Our reputation is ruined for investors with multiple failed projects like northern gateway or energy east.
The Liberals want carbon pricing. The Liberals want environmental, social and governance, ESG, reporting requirements on everything. The Liberals want impact assessments over and over again, barriers upon barriers. The Liberals do not want us to build. They do not want us to be industrialized. The Liberals want to drive us back to the Stone Age, where we can frolic in fields, beset by poverty.
We only need to look at current stats to see the road to poverty that is being paved for us by Liberal intentions. Since the Prime Minister was sworn in, in March, 86,000 Canadians have lost their job, Canada has the second-highest unemployment rate in the G7 and food inflation is double the Bank of Canada's target rate.
I came across an interesting definition of the west: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. When we take away our industrialization, we lose what makes us rich and what enables us to be educated. We often find in cities that universities emerge only after the city has undergone an industrial and commercial build-out. There is no true mass democracy without a mass society fostered through the foundation of industrial wealth.
When too much capital leaves Canada because of anti-growth Liberal policies, will Canada still be a western nation? The Conservatives want to stop these capital leaks. The overarching vision is very simple: Retain more of our domestic capital and attract more foreign capital. Another way to look at this is when we have more water than our bucket can contain. Imagine that our bucket is no longer leaking, but that it is very small. This small bucket could not contain the $437 billion of outflow that exited our bucket over the last 10 years under the Liberal government. Building a bigger, capital-retaining bucket means having cities where we can deposit our capital for an expected return.
As I mentioned before, let us focus on energy, infrastructure and manufacturing. If we cannot create a policy environment where it is easy for major projects to be set up in Canada, these major projects will be set up outside of our borders. Along with these out-going projects will be the jobs that should have existed for Canadians. There is no other way for us to make meaningful moves within the parliamentary cycle.
I have one additional point that relates to manufacturing, and I will relate it through an analogy. All things being equal, do we want to be grape sellers or wine sellers? Speaking broadly, Canada is very used to being a seller of grapes throughout our distinguished history. However, if we want to retain more capital within our borders, we need to do more of the venture-added processing work, which would behoove us to have a stronger domestic production build out. From an industrial policy standpoint, this means selling less of our resources raw, investing in more production capacity for the resources that we have in abundance and ensuring that we have end markets for our value-added products, otherwise this export strategy all falls apart.
Let us recall that, first, if we do not do this ourselves within our borders, it means that our capital will find itself investing in production facilities within the end market destinations. Second, our roughly 40-million person market across a vast land mass is not enough to serve our total pool of capital. Finally, an export-oriented strategy built upon the foundation of energy, infrastructure and manufacturing projects may be one of the few ways to reserve our flows of capital from a federal policy standpoint under the consideration of a parliamentary cycle.
Absent our capacity to retain our capital through policy levers at the federal level, we risk becoming a nation of fields to frolic in, beset by poverty in a post-industrial wasteland that the Rust Belt knows only too well. Perhaps we will then come to rely solely on tourism to our green society, and guess where our tourists will come from? They will come from industrialized societies producing wealthy citizens, uninhibited by carbon pricing, ESG reporting requirements and impact assessments.
Every dollar that leaves the country means lower wages and lost jobs for workers. We Conservatives call on the Liberals to stop driving investment and jobs down and the cost of living up.