Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my good friend from Western Arctic, who will be raising some other good points of northern value.
I represent a riding in northwestern British Columbia, a place that has an incredibly long and rich history, diverse in its culture but also in its appreciation for the natural resources that are our endowment as a people. What we have seen over the last number of years going back to the mid-eighties is a slow and steady degradation of our economy and our ability to put food on the table, our ability to add value to the natural resources that exist in our part of the world. Steadily, both from forces that we can lay at the feet of the various governments and from those market forces that we feel sometimes have a challenge in understanding the human element of the economy, we have been losing our ability to add value to our lumber, fish and mineral resources.
Increasingly we have seen not only governments at peace with the idea of sending out those resources raw, but also an encouragement from those same governments, because there is a short-term benefit to some in the corporate offices to no longer make those investments. It was the condition of contract of doing business in this great country that one would seek to make investments with the consideration of the governments of the day that would benefit the people. Time and time again we have seen what I would describe as neo-conservative governments siding more and more with a narrow interest of Canadians in the broader investment sector and less and less with the general population.
We see it in the motion today, which as I said to my friend from the Liberals, has the audacity to suggest that the Prime Minister of this country should meet with his counterparts, the various premiers of the provinces and territories. This is not at the request only of the New Democratic Party but at the request of those premiers, Conservative premiers, Liberal premiers and New Democratic premiers across this country, who have said in order to, “fully engage all the economic forces in the country the two orders of government must be working together”. The premiers called on the Prime Minister to join them at the Council of the Federation national economic summit in Halifax.
We have the audacity to suggest that real leadership from the federal government and the Prime Minister would require that from time to time he sit down with his counterparts and addresses issues that are at the forefront of the day.
The economy is fragile. There is not a dispute in this place or in the general discourse of this country that our economy is not yet on solid ground. It is reminiscent to me and to many others of a government that believes that simply talking up the economy is enough to replace the fundamental concerns within that economy. Conservatives said this before the 2008 recession. Time and time again the finance minister was on his feet, lauded by his own party for being a financial wizard, saying the fundamentals are sound and there is no recession. We know he actually believed that, because he brought in a budget that same year that addressed nothing of the economic reality that was coming our way.
To simply try to split hairs and say that the things that happened were a global event and Canada has somehow become a island is an interesting iteration of geography from the government: Canada is an important trading nation on the one hand but an island on the other. Being a stable island, the effects and causes of what happens in the global market no longer come to bear on us. Conservatives had to eat crow and introduce a budget that was counter even to their political ideological nature and say the role of government in an economy happens from time to time to involve itself, to become engaged in that economy in different ways.
The government is remiss to say that, in its history as Conservatives, it has not done this exact thing. The prosperity that has come out of northern Alberta and the oil sands was only possible because the various levels of government sat down with industry and made plans together, designs together, thoughts and actions together to ask how they could take a resource that sits in northern Alberta that is not commercially viable because it did not have the technology or regulations to deal with it. They did not know how to get it out of the ground, make any money and have anyone go to work. It was the various levels of government, municipal, provincial and federal, that became engaged in the question. They forgot to finish the second part of the conversation, which is to ask, once we start it, how much do we want to do and how fast.
Folks like the recently departed Premier Lougheed said that maybe a plan would be a good idea for the oil sands in northern Alberta, because if they went too fast, it would actually have the counter-effect of overheating the economy, not just in that region of Fort McMurray but right across the Alberta economy, the western economy and maybe throughout Canada. Those were Conservatives saying that and raising a fundamental point of resource development, which is that it is a good idea once in a while to have a plan.
We see what a government looks like when it does not have a plan. I will provide Statistics Canada numbers. These are not numbers that New Democrats have pulled out; these are numbers that have been gathered by the federal government. There are 300,000 more unemployed Canadians. Canadians watching will wonder how that number jibes with the number we hear insidiously from the government day after day that there are all these net newly created jobs. The fact of the matter is that since the bottom of the recession, one out of every three new jobs created in Canada has gone to foreign temporary workers. That is not an accident; that is a policy. That is a government telling industry that if it is too inconvenient or expensive for industry to hire a Canadian worker, the government will allow it, through its policy and bills passed through the House of Commons, to hire 200 carpenters from Colombia, 300 plumbers from the Philippines and electricians from wherever.
The government also includes the numbers of temporary foreign workers in its immigration numbers, saying nothing has changed in Canada's immigration policy and the numbers have stayed relatively the same. It is not true, because it has padded these numbers with all the temporary foreign workers who have no ability or right to ever apply to live in Canada. After their two-year contracts are done, they have to leave. They cannot become Canadians.
My family is an immigrant family. We played the traditional role of immigrants all across the world. We came here, invested here and worked hard. I was raised as the first-born of my family coming from Ireland. The contract between my family and the people and government of Canada was to work here, follow the rules, do what we could to build this country up, and we did, as did so many millions of Canadians. However that is not what this is.
During the last election, we talked about working together, not just in Quebec but across Canada. The idea—the role and vision of a Canadian government—is to work together. Today, the Conservative government has the option of working together. Let us work together with the provinces and territories. It is not a bizarre concept or option for Canada, since the provincial leaders have Conservative, Liberal and New Democrat roots.
For me, it is bizarre to see Conservative member after member say that it is shocking, strange or bad for a government to have such a meeting.
When we look at the fragile state of our economy right now, the average household debt is 154% of its net income per year. That is the average. There are Canadians who owe far more than that. We say we have lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs that have not been replaced and we have lost more than 300,000 net jobs since the bottom of the recession. We have an economic strategy from the government that says to replace Canadian workers with temporary foreign workers because they are cheaper for industry to hire and they are less of a hassle for industry to hire because they cannot join a union or demand workplace safety regulations the same way a Canadian worker can. These are facts.
The Conservatives are entitled to all the opinions they want, but the fact of the matter is that the Canadian economy remains fragile and some of that fragility and weakness is a direct result of a government that says hands off of certain sectors, allows people to suffer on their own and says it will allow the nationalization of our natural resource companies by a foreign country without any concern or bother. The clock is ticking on the Nexen deal. There must be some colleagues within the Conservative ranks who have some concern about a state-controlled company buying the 12th largest player in the oil patch. It must cause some concerns for our energy security and sovereignty. They wrap themselves in the flag in moments of convenience but not in moments when we need them to stand up for Canada, not as some sort of pamphlet that appears at election time but when the questions are being put and decisions are being made.
Meet with the premiers, and they will say the same thing.
