Mr. Speaker, when the budget was initially tabled, Canadians rightly were focused on the big picture: the fact that the government's fiscal plan fudges the numbers and still contains the largest deficit in this nation's history outside the COVID period. Taxpayers have spent more and gotten less in the last 10 years under the Liberals, and that is not changing under the Prime Minister, who is running a record-smashing, $78-billion deficit and is still leaving Canadians less able to afford basic essentials.
This is the big picture, but today, as Parliament begins debate on the budget implementation act, I want to use this critical opportunity to expose the designs hidden deeper within the budget. I want to talk about jobs, the dignity of work, the esteem we have for different kinds of workers, and the harm that the budget will do to critical sectors of our economy. Before I get into those details, I want to talk about a philosophy of work, because policy, intentionally or not, always must reflect some philosophy.
I believe that all work done by human beings has a special kind of dignity. This is the consequence of a more foundational belief in the universal dignity of human persons. If we understand human beings as having inherent rights and inherent dignity, then we are led from there to the conclusion that the work done by human beings has a special kind of dignity as well because it involves the commitment and effort of a human person.
If a human person is giving a speech, fixing a car, performing a surgery or cleaning a bathroom, in each case that person brings themselves into that activity, with their creativity, effort, desire for excellence, and humanity. Work has dignity, therefore, not because of the nature of the activity specifically but because it is done by a human person and because it expresses the desire of that person to contribute and to create a better world through their work. Therefore everyone who works can and should take pride in the work they do, as long as they are bringing the fullness of themselves and their human dignity into the work they are doing as the creator or co-creator of some new reality.
This is a clear, coherent and necessary philosophy of work. When done with pride and commitment, work generates all kinds of personal benefits. Work is much more than a means to earn wages; it is the means by which so many people contribute to their communities, create new things, demonstrate their proficiency and creativity, build community and support the people they love. This philosophy of work is understood intuitively by many working people across this country and around the world.
Sadly, however, many modern elites implicitly or explicitly reject this philosophy of work. Instead of valuing all human work, many of our elites have come to esteem different kinds of human work differently, based on self-interested class prejudice. The rampant existence of profession prejudice, prejudice that values different kinds of work differently and that treats people differently based on the jobs they do, has been deeply harmful to our society and to our economy.
Profession prejudice has led authority figures to steer young people towards university to get a good job, even if they are much better suited to and could make more money working in the trades. Authority figures often have an unconscious bias towards their own chosen path, thinking that the road to dignity and meaning necessarily involves following the path they followed. Creating a more equal society does not mean sending everyone to university; it means recognizing the dignity of every person regardless of the work they do.
Profession prejudice has given us profound skill mismatches. It has given us people pursuing programs of study deemed to be more prestigious and more likely to signal their worth to elite society, but then those same people are finding out afterwards that they cannot get a job in their field. Profession prejudice leads elites to make artificial distinctions between what they think are jobs of the future and what they think are jobs of the past, often denigrating physical work and work in resource development. Most often, these predictions about such things turn out to be way off the mark in terms of what is the future and what is the past, yet impressionable young people are often fooled into absorbing these predictions into their own career planning.
The result of all this has been profound mismatches in our labour market: high unemployment coexisting with labour shortages, especially labour shortages in areas where well-paying, secure jobs nonetheless lack the arbitrary social esteem dispensed inconsistently by elites and elite institutions.
Conservatives are committed to fighting profession prejudice, and we will defend a philosophy of work that emphasizes universal human dignity and the universal dignity of work done by human beings.
To the young people watching, I say that when they are picking a career, they should focus on what they like to do and on what the labour market is looking for, and ignore the bad advice of disdainful elites hawking their profession prejudice.
This brings me back to the budget. At a time when many university graduates are already working outside their field of study because they were given bad advice about the needs of the labour market, and at a time when industry is desperate for workers with underappreciated but critical skills, such as those in the trades, this budget doubles down on Liberal profession prejudice and fails to make the transition to a coherent philosophy of work.
Budget 2025 puts well over $1 billion into helping university research councils try to attract foreign researchers to move to Canadian universities from other countries. Meanwhile, the budget fails to reinstate the apprenticeship grant, a clear broken promise from the Liberal 2025 election platform. Liberals promised to support apprentices, but instead, they have nothing for apprentices directly and nothing for polytechnics, where the majority of apprentices are trained. Liberals pumped an enormous amount of money into attracting foreign researchers for universities at a time when many Canadian post-secondary graduates are unemployed or working outside their field, and they could find nothing for most apprentices despite skill shortages in critical areas in the trades.
It gets worse. Budget 2025 specifically targets career colleges. It attacks what they do, and it withdraws support from students who attend them. Why would the Liberals choose now to attack career colleges? What kind of fit of elite snobbery could motivate a government to target attacks on career colleges at a time when many Canadians need the benefits of targeted vocational programs to get the skills employers are looking for?
Page 217 of the budget announces the intention of the government to make students attending private, for-profit institutions ineligible for student grants, making studies at these institutions inaccessible to many low- and middle-income students. This cut is targeting students at particular institutions, but it is not job-neutral in its implications.
There are many specific kinds of jobs where training is generally not available at public institutions. If someone wants to get a history degree, law degree or women's studies degree, they have got a lot of public institutions to choose from. However, there are many good jobs in areas where there is public and labour market demand, where it just so happens that public institutions have not offered these programs and private, for-profit institutions have filled the gap. This policy change therefore does not just affect institutions; it makes it harder for young people from low- and middle-income backgrounds to pursue studies in certain areas, and it creates critical gaps in these sectors.
This is the pernicious practical outworking of professional prejudice in policy. Let me give a few examples of professions affected by this change.
This week, I met with representatives from BeautyCouncil. It represents a wide variety of hard-working professionals who cut hair, do makeup and generally help others look good. They have got a harder task in some cases than in others. I know how hard these folks work. My barber actually follows me on social media, and when my hair gets too long, he messages me and tells me it is time to come in. He is a great guy.
These are proud professionals, and they benefit from being able to afford good training that often happens to come from private, for-profit institutions. This budget makes it harder for people to access those professions. One can say what they like about Justin Trudeau, but at least he would have known never to attack the beauty industry.
Another profession attacked by budget 2025 is traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Because this budget proposes to cut student grants for private, for-profit institutions, most students studying acupuncture and other forms of traditional Chinese medicine, and many students studying other kinds of health disciplines, such as chiropractors and massage therapists, would be cut off from financial support.
Many people in and outside the Chinese community want to access various kinds of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and should be able to do so. This is a good job, and it reflects the dignity of work and the breadth and beauty of Canadian multiculturalism. However, Liberals are making a choice to propose a policy that would make it more difficult for young people to pursue studies in traditional Chinese medicine, especially given the duration of study required.
Why are Liberals attacking Chinese medicine? Why are subsidies available for any university program, no matter how irrelevant they are to the labour market, while they are being withdrawn from in-demand vocational programs that happen to be offered at private institutions? Conservatives recommended the opposite approach. We recommended an alignment between the needs of our labour market and the level of student grants, recognizing the universal dignity of all work and the potential of student grants to help magnify market signals. This is the more hidden agenda of the budget: an attack on vocational programs and on in-demand jobs by a government drowning in profession prejudice and elite snobbery.
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
“the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-15, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on November 4, 2025, since the bill fails to:
(a) implement a budget so Canadians can have an affordable life;
(b) consider that every dollar the Liberal Government spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians in the form of higher taxes and inflation;
(c) bring down the deficit to the level Liberals promised in their last fiscal update, which promised $42 billion last year;
(d) scrap hidden taxes on food, including the industrial carbon tax on farmers, the food packaging tax that adds billions in costs, and the fuel standard tax that adds 17 cents per litre to diesel and gasoline for farmers;
(e) end the inflation tax by bringing down the cost of government instead of printing money to pay Liberal bills; and
(f) include a plan for any oil and gas pipelines that would strengthen our nation's economy and get our resources to market.”
