Mr. Speaker, I am requesting an emergency parliamentary debate in response to the Statistics Canada report published on Friday, which shows that the Liberal Prime Minister is the only leader of a G7 nation steering his country into a recession. We have learned that Canada's economy has contracted over two consecutive quarters. That is the official definition of a recession.
However, that is not all. Canada has lost 112,000 jobs this year, 45,000 of them since this Prime Minister entered office. We have the second-worst unemployment rate in the G7, one-third higher than unemployment in the United States. The number of people missing mortgage payments has increased by a third in one year. That is the highest level in the world. Furthermore, Canada has the highest household debt of any G7 country.
If this were only a result of global factors, Canada would not be the only G7 country and the only North American country in a recession. These are Liberal effects because this is a Liberal recession. It is an emergency for ordinary Canadians. For the single mother who has to return items as she goes to pay at the grocery checkout because she has no more money left, it is an emergency. It is an even bigger emergency if she drives to a food bank that has run out of food for clients. What about the father who has to go home to tell his kids he has lost his job and has to sell the home? It is an emergency for young couples who cannot buy a home and build a family. Those are the human consequences of this Liberal recession.
The Prime Minister has been silent since Friday when this news became public. This is the man who is supposedly a banker, an economic genius, yet he has nothing to say about the fact that he led the country into a recession.
I therefore call on him to be here in the House of Commons so that we can have a genuine debate on how to reverse this Liberal recession.
I am rising today to ask the Speaker to declare an emergency debate on Friday's Statistics Canada report that shows that the Liberal Prime Minister is the only G7 leader to take his country into recession. The agency revealed that Canada's economy has now shrunk for two quarters in a row. That is only true of Canada.
It is not just the one data point, though. The economy has shrunk three of the last four quarters that the Prime Minister has been in power. Investment has dropped five quarters in a row. We have lost 112,000 jobs in the first three months of this year alone, and we have had 45,000 net job losses since the Liberal Prime Minister took office promising to create jobs. We have a one-third increase in mortgage delinquencies, the highest level in 17 years, as Canada's households are, by far, the most indebted in the G7, and three million Canadians will have to renew at higher mortgage rates over the next two years.
We cannot blame global effects when it is only Canada that is in recession among G7 nations, nor can we say that we are in an especially difficult position vis-à-vis the Americans because we are in North America since our friends in Mexico are also not in a recession. It is only this country, under the Prime Minister, that faces this Liberal recession.
One might say the economists should be concerned about the word “recession” and ask if it really is an emergency in the lives of Canadians. For that single mother who has to return items as she goes to pay at the grocery checkout because she has no more money left in her bank account, it is an emergency. It is an even bigger emergency if, later that day, she drives to one of the one in four food banks in Canada that has run out of food. What does she do then? Does she start calling friends and family and asking if they have any surplus food in their fridges? What about the father who has to home tonight to tell his kids he has lost his job and has to sell the home? For him, just like for that mother, this is an emergency.
The Prime Minister could not be bothered to say a single thing about this emergency since he learned of it on Friday morning. He has been in hiding. He refuses to take a single question from the media or in the House of Commons, and today, once again, he is banning the media from asking him questions, expecting they will just cover photo ops of him wandering around a construction site. That is not good enough. This is an emergency in the lives of people who have empty fridges, empty stomachs and empty bank accounts, and they expect the Prime Minister, who promised that he was a great economic genius, to get in here and explain how he managed to be the only leader in the G7 to cause a recession.