Madam Speaker, one of the great questions facing any nation is whether it trusts its people more than it trusts the government. That question lies at the heart of the economic challenges facing Canada today.
For most of our history, Canada was a country where ordinary people could arrive with little more than a dollar in their pocket, work hard, take risks, build a business, buy a home, raise a family, and leave their children better off than themselves. It was not because government created prosperity. It was because government created the conditions in which prosperity could grow. New Canadians were allowed to freely create their own opportunities without too much government interference.
Today, however, we see the consequence of a very different philosophy. We are told that every problem requires another government program, another regulation and another bureaucracy to oversee it all. Yet, after years of this Liberal central planning approach, Canadians are not becoming more prosperous. They are barely managing to get by. More than 112,000 jobs have disappeared in the first few months of this year. Youth unemployment has climbed above 14%. Business investment continues to flee the country, and household savings have been used up. Families are working harder while falling further behind. This is the disastrous result of a government that cannot keep its hands out of our pockets or their red tape out of our enterprises.
The government seems determined to argue about whether Canada is in a technical recession. I wonder whether the Prime Minister would use that same ridiculous argument while standing beside a mother waiting in a food bank line, a young person sending out résumés with no response or a family losing their home. Canadians do not experience recession through Liberal talking points. They experience it through lost jobs, missed mortgage payments, shrinking savings accounts and the growing fear that despite working hard and playing by the rules, they are falling further behind.
This recession is the logical consequence of Liberal ideology. The Liberals have a governing philosophy that believes prosperity can be designed by Ottawa in a boardroom, rather than created by millions of Canadians making decisions for themselves. When a government makes it harder to build, invest, hire or expand, it should not be a surprise when investments leave and jobs disappear. What is especially troubling is that Canada is not suffering from a lack of talent, resources, innovation or ambition. We possess all of those things in abundance. What we lack is a government that is willing to remove the barriers that prevent Canadians from putting those strengths to work.
Every year it becomes more difficult to build, invest, hire or expand, because government has inserted itself into more and more areas of economic life. The result is a system that satisfies almost no one. Those paying for it feel overburdened, while those depending on it often find that it delivers less than promised. Government grows larger, yet the problems it claims to solve seem only to multiply.
Adam Smith understood that prosperity is created when free people are allowed to pursue opportunity and create value for others. We know that liberty is weakened when power becomes concentrated in government institutions. One truth never changes: A nation becomes stronger when its citizens are empowered, not when they are centrally managed.
After years of rising bureaucracy, rising spending, rising deficits, rising unemployment and now a recession, when will the government acknowledge that prosperity does not come from Ottawa treating citizens like incapable children, but from smart, hard-working Canadians—