Mr. Speaker, after one year with the Prime Minister, things have only gotten worse for Canadians.
Canada is now the food inflation capital of the G7, with food prices skyrocketing 7.3% and food bank lineups of 2 million visitors per month. At the Saskatoon Food Bank & Learning Centre, we serve 23,000 to 24,000 people a month. That is up 6,000 to 7,000 per month since 2019.
Unemployment in this country has now hit 6.7%, with 84,000 more Canadians losing their full-time job last month. Youth unemployment is big now, skyrocketing to 14%, the worst level since the great recession. Canadians are increasingly reliant on part-time work to afford their basic necessities day to day. The federal deficit has doubled. Debt-to-GDP is now rising again. Families have to pay $3,300 a year of the interest just to service the national debt.
The dream of home ownership has never been more out of reach in this country. CMHC is predicting housing construction to decline 18.1%, well below the 10-year average. The government's own housing agency has said it will add only 5,200 homes this year. It promised 500,000 new homes every year. At the same time, Canadians are carrying record household debt, $2.6 trillion, mostly from mortgages just to keep a roof over their head. The Prime Minister promised to build at a scale we had not seen in generations. He promised this less than a year ago, yet one year later, Canadians are now finding it even harder to make ends meet.
Food inflation is now rising twice as fast as it was before the Prime Minister took office a year ago. Food prices, as I mentioned, have skyrocketed 7.3% year over year, leading to Canada having the worst food price increases in the G7. Canadian families are projected to pay nearly $1,000 more in food costs alone this year.
Meanwhile, the cost of food purchase for restaurants alone was up 12.3% in the same period, and for takeout and fast food it was up 14%. That means it is no surprise that nearly half the restaurants are operating at a loss or are barely breaking even. With 7,000 closing last year, about 4,000 are projected to close this year.
Canada, by the way, is the only country in the G7 with a shrinking economy, contracting 0.2% in the last quarter alone of 2025. That has a real impact on jobs, with over 100,000 full-time jobs lost in February alone, the largest single-month decline since the great recession, outside the pandemic.
Canadians are really struggling, and all we hear from the government is how great we have it. It will be interesting to hear the response of the government with these dismal numbers we have received in the last 12 months.