Madam Speaker, I rise in the House today to speak to the opposition day motion.
Before I get into the specifics on economic recovery, I would like to take this time to reach out and thank the many members of all parties and Canadians at large who have supported me and my family through the passing of my son, Garrett Cumming.
Garrett had an extraordinary life in his 35 years on this planet, and I am extraordinarily proud of him. Garrett was like many at-risk Canadians and spent the year very isolated. His struggles demonstrated the incredible importance of our work in this place and the importance of getting things back to normal as soon as possible.
We must all recognize that there is no feasible way that we, as a country, can make any kind of significant recovery without addressing and conquering this health crisis. Small businesses will continue to flounder until they are forced to finally close their doors. New graduates who want to get a job will find applications unfilled.
Single-parent households will have this $2,000 cheque, but they really want to get back to work to support their families. Sending out money as a crutch for individuals and businesses was needed to keep Canadians afloat, but it is simply not sustainable. We need to have strategies to plan and protect the compromised and get the economy back on track.
Spending to protect Canadians in the pandemic was the right thing to do and, frankly, Canada's Conservatives supported it, but we cannot pass unsustainable debt on to future generations. Once the recovery starts, we will need to get our spending under control and grow the economy. Only once we secure the health of Canadians will we be able to begin a meaningful talk on economic recovery, and the answer is not a lifetime of CERB cheques or government handouts, it is jobs. It is the dignity that comes with earning a paycheque. It is the freedom that comes from being able to control one's own finances at the moment.
Canadians are experiencing a joblessness rate that is 40% worse than the G7 average. At 8.2%, this means that more than 1.3 million Canadians are not working and could be working. We need a plan to come out of COVID-19 to create jobs, get our economy back on track and allow people to earn those paycheques. We cannot keep on putting this on the national credit card. Only jobs will provide Canadians with personal financial security. Jobs allow them to have good child care, education, nutrition and recreation. Jobs produce tax revenue, which helps reduce the government debt and protects our cherished social safety net.
Canada's Conservatives are offering a path, one of security and certainty. It may not be that glamorous, but it will safely secure our future and deliver us to a Canada where those who have struggled the most through this pandemic can get back to work.
Integral not only to our build back, but equally as important to sustain our country's growth, are two metrics that I have been following over the past year: Canada's competitiveness and Canada's innovation. With a country of our size and the sparsity of population, there is no way we can rely just on our internal economy to lead us to recovery. Canada will need massive growth in exports to fuel any kind of recovery. Spending on infrastructure should be predominately focused on those things that improve productivity, competitiveness and access to markets. Private sector innovation is what will lead us into the future and provide us with the technology we need both to shift to global sustainability and reinstate us as a world economic leader. This will give the world what it wants, which is more Canada.
The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom have both released public plans for their economic reopening, while Canadian officials have yet to give Canadians the clarity for when regular economic activity and social life will resume. The U.S. is our largest trading partner, yet over a year has passed and we still do not have a reopening strategy for the border.
Carlo Dade, director of trade at the Canada West Foundation, said, “In 2019, the World Economic Forum's ranking of perception of quality of trade and reliability of trade infrastructure saw Canada drop 22 places...to 32nd in the globe.” Moreover, Canada has fallen out of the top 10 ranking of the world's most competitive economies, and we have fallen near the bottom of our peer group on innovation.
Little interest has been shown in expanding trade in industries in which we have a strategic advantage given our abundance. There is little mention about mining, the forestry sector, the agricultural sector and the resource sector. These are sectors that have proven in the past to drive the economy and contribute significantly to our economic health. The world wants and needs more of our natural resources and we should think about expanding our market share, not hasten its decline.
We need to stop scaring off investment like the government has done since 2015 and start encouraging it again. The most recent example is Chevron Canada, which stopped funding its Kitimat project. It is not surprising that it has had a difficult time trying to get someone to buy its interest in the project.
Instead of focusing on party platitudes, we need to get busy, help drive the recovery and get people back to work. If the government wants to focus on rebuilding the economy, it should consider some of the following. It should speed up approval of job-creating projects, large and small. The OECD ranks Canada 34th out of 35 countries for the amount of time it takes to obtain a permit for a new general construction project. All three levels of government have to participate in this. We need to be the quickest to build factories, shopping centres, business parks, mines and more. We should be removing, not adding, more regulatory burden. We should support the advancement of carbon capture technologies, unlock innovation in the technology sector, focus on the quantity and quality of R and D, and provide greater IP protection and policies that support retention in Canada, as well as have immigration policies that support the attraction of talent and, of course, we need greater access to offshore markets for our natural resources.
Economic recovery cannot be an Ottawa-knows-best approach where the government picks and chooses which jobs should be where, in which sector and which region. We can never recover if only the few get richer while working families get left behind. Specifically, I would recognize the government's failure when it comes to Canadians working in the tourism, airline and hospitality sectors, sectors that have been among the hardest hit. Conservatives would take immediate action in those sectors and get people back to work.
The tourism industry knows what needs to happen for us to head into a successful recovery. Across the board, stringent measures have already been implemented in an effort to assure that all tourism-related activities are safe, and it has communicated that to the public. It knows it has to build public confidence in travel and the risk perception surrounding it. That is going to determine the speed of this recovery. The Tourism Industry Association of Canada has said that “A plan to replace Canada’s current patchwork approach of reacting to daily numbers is overdue.”
While the government neglected to come up with a plan to innovate in tourism and hospitality, we saw fantastic collaboration from the Canadian airlines and our world-class institutions to provide solutions as the now-defunct rapid testing pilot program. This was a great example of a private sector success, only to be shut down by the federal government. Ed Sims, the president and CEO of WestJet, stated, “Countries around the world have taken action to limit or defer costs to the aviation industry, yet our situation remains exacerbated by double-digit increases that are beyond our control.”
At the end of the day, the government has an entire tool box at its disposal. It has a spending account in excess of $700 billion; it has access to the most educated population on the planet; it has more land than it knows what to do with and resource potential beyond compare. It has absolutely everything it ever needs to get this country well on its way to recovery, like other countries who have much less have done. We need to look at the data and science when it comes to recovery, not what will make Liberals more electable.
We are too small a country to trade with just ourselves. We have the potential to lift Canadians economically in all corners of this great country and we have proven industries that can help us build back. Canadians are amazing innovators and innovation must be part of the solution, but not the only solution. Our country has an incredible amount of potential and we, as Canadians, can bounce back if the government allows it.
Rather than emerging from this crisis by relying on government cheques and handouts, Canadians should trust that they will emerge from this crisis with resilience and all the tools they need to rebuild this great country. We—
