Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an honour and privilege to rise in the House.
Today, we are discussing the budget implementation act. I want to talk, just in generalities, about the importance of the private sector and of the individual workers, entrepreneurs and job creators across this great country. Ultimately, they will drive our productivity and our economy forward. Unfortunately, the Liberal government has been working at cross-purposes to empowering them and getting them to do the work that they do great, which is to create jobs and wealth.
In our country, as nearly any metric by nearly any international or domestic organization will show, we have extremely high rates of taxation and regulation. This regulation has the undeniable impact of limiting our potential and our ability to fully exploit our economy as we go forward. This is across different sectors, including manufacturing in my great province of Ontario, where we have some of the best manufacturers in the entire world.
When I meet with them, and I have met with many of them in my own riding in towns like Cobourg and Port Hope, they all talk about their inability to fully exploit their potential because of the amount of red tape and regulation surrounding them, particularly at the federal level. The ones who ultimately benefit from a corporation or a company being successful are the workers, because when a company is successful, it is the workers that will receive much of the compensation that comes from that. However, when we look at this, we see this regulation, and we see things slowing down.
If Canadians do not believe politicians, it may be because there have been politicians, even in this very House, who have been disingenuous and who have not been entirely believable. I would like to direct attention to a scholarly book written on business by one of the bright lights in terms of academic discussion of businesses and how businesses succeed. Jim Collins wrote Good to Great. For those with no knowledge of this, I highly recommend it. His books have been highly influential, not just in the business sector but in the non-governmental, non-profit and charitable sectors as well. He had a number of different rules based on an incredibly large study that he did of many companies over a long period of time. The empirical data in there is really undeniable.
One of his conclusions talked about the level of control, bureaucracy and rules in a corporation. He said that, ultimately, governments, or actually in this case, companies, often put copious numbers of rules in place in order to fence in, or box in, a couple of bad actors. What happened with all these rules was that those folks who were entrepreneurs, who were inventive and who were driving the productivity of those companies forward were snuffed out.
Once again, the book is called Good to Great. I highly recommend that everyone check it out. In his research, he compiled the empirical data. Those companies with too much regulation almost always failed. They were unable to compete with those businesses that, instead of hemming individuals in with these oppressive regulations, established a culture of responsibility. In other words, they trusted individuals to do what was in their best interests and also in the company's best interests, going forward.
By putting in place that culture of personal responsibility, not only did it have the effect of making people more entrepreneurial and more innovative, but it brought people into the organization and, quite frankly, brought people together. No longer did they look at other people as the enemy or as their competitors in the corporation, they saw their colleagues as people who could potentially help them up the ladder. The empirical evidence is clear.
The next subject I would like to talk about is what I have deemed to be the fiscal or financial imbalance in our country. In any modern society, there is a calculus that has to be made: How many resources are dedicated to the public sector, and how many resources are dedicated to the private sector?
I want to start by saying that the public sector has many great purposes: our police, fire and armed forces. Even the equity ability of the government should not be understated, but the challenge is, if too many of the resources are put on the public side of the ledger, the private sector of the economy ends up being starved. This creates what has been seen in many countries, from the Soviet Union to Venezuela, Cuba and many others, which is a socialist death spiral of the economy.
What happens is that as the private sector gets starved of oxygen or resources or capital, this starts to have a compounding impact. As businesses do not have the ability to go forward, to move, to grow and to invest, it multiplies throughout the economy. If one business fails, what happens is that those companies that supply the company may also fail, which cascades across the entire economy. What then happens is that more individuals require the assistance of the state going forward, which requires the government to pay more money. This cycle just continues.
As more money is taken out of the private sector, the private sector shrinks even more, which shrinks the tax base and puts greater needs on the state. This creates a socialist death spiral, where the private sector just gets smaller and smaller and the state gets bigger and bigger. The reality is that the innovators, the job creators, are snuffed out one by one. We have seen the impact of the socialist death spiral. Most notable in the not-too-distant past was the Soviet Union, which centralized everything and snuffed out the private sector and innovation from going forward. We have seen this in Venezuela, Cuba and in other states around the world as well. That is all well and good, but what do we do for a solution?
I will tell the House where we are in Canada before getting into solving this issue. Canada is headed toward that path. There is just no denying that with a $1.35-trillion debt, a $78-billion deficit and $55 billion being paid in interest. Unfortunately, we will hear individuals on the other side, if not purposely then unintentionally, misleading Canadians by stating that Canada's debt is not that high. As our leader has said, if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.
The reality is that you must take a picture of the total debt calculation, which includes provincial and federal debt as well as the debt required for the CPP. We cannot use CPP money to apply to debt, which is what the Liberals do when they try to say they do not have a debt issue. That money is already spent, or at least I hope it is. Otherwise, they are going to rob CPP. The reality is that when we take that calculation, we are the second-worst, with a total debt ratio of well over 100% of our GDP. We are second only to Japan, which had its own lost decade. We have experienced ours and, quite frankly, we continue to experience that.
What do we need to get back on track as a country? We need to move away from seeing government as the answer. The government is, in most cases, not the answer. In fact, it is the culprit. It is responsible for driving down our economy. It is the reason we have had the worst economic growth since the Great Depression.
We need to, once again, not trust in the Canadian government but trust in the Canadian people. We need to correct the fiscal financial imbalance that has given way too much money to the federal government and not enough money to Canadian citizens, entrepreneurs and job creators.