Mr. Speaker, the latest job numbers show that jobs are, figuratively, falling off a cliff, with 108,000 full-time jobs lost in one month and 47,000, almost 50,000, youth jobs lost in the same period. Under this Prime Minister, we are losing jobs at speeds not seen in a generation, and that is quite literally true. Outside of the COVID period, the last time we had a single drop in jobs in one month comparable to this was way back during the great recession. We are now a year into this Prime Minister's tenure in office and have had well over 10 years of Liberal government. We continually hear these promises about how good things are about to get, yet job numbers are falling off a cliff.
Some of the news coverage of these terrible job numbers was to say what a surprise it was, apparently, that we lost over 100,000 full-time jobs in a month. I can tell members that I was not surprised, because in the year I have been in this role as the shadow minister for employment for our caucus, I have been speaking with young people, employers, training institutions and other organizations. I can say that there is deep, abiding concern about the employment situation and about the policies of government that relate to it. There may have been surprise in some quarters about the fact that we lost over 100,000 full-time jobs last month, but this was not a surprise to me or, I think, to many people who have been talking to Canadians and hearing about these issues closely.
We heard a myriad of excuses from across the way for these terrible job numbers. We heard the minister for AI say that it was because of the war in Iran. Maybe he got that answer from AI, but the fact of the matter is that these job numbers come from a period that was before the war in Iran even started. Putting aside the absurdity of that speculation, it is chronologically impossible. We had another minister say that this is all because of the trade war, yet we have the second-highest unemployment in the G7. The Prime Minister promised a deal by last summer. He has not delivered on that. Moreover, Canada has a more acute unemployment crisis than many other countries, and it is particularly acute for young people.
We had different excuses from different ministers. The Prime Minister actually said that these numbers were not so bad. He said to compare our performance to that of the U.S. Well, okay, their unemployment rate is 4.4%, and our unemployment rate is more than two full percentage points higher, so we have substantially higher unemployment in Canada.
The critical point to make about our engagement on this issue of jobs is that last fall, Conservatives put forward our Conservative youth jobs plan, with specific policies to unleash our economy, to fix immigration, to fix training and to build homes where the jobs are. It emphasized the need for a stronger economy, how failures of immigration have exacerbated competition for entry-level jobs, how there are mismatches in our training system that need to be remedied, and how we need to support labour mobility to help people take opportunities in areas of lower unemployment. We proposed these constructive solutions, and the Liberals have failed to adopt them. In fact, in many ways, they are moving in the opposite direction.
Given the Liberals' catastrophic failures on this file, why will they not adopt the constructive ideas we have put forward?