Mr. Speaker, people love to cheer on the underdog. Think of movies, like Rocky, Rudy, and Will Smith's The Pursuit of Happyness, or think of the great legends like David and Goliath.
Speaking of another legend, Robin Hood, our opponents are always telling us that the reason we need big government is to take from the rich and give to the poor, but big government always seems to send the money in the opposite direction.
The latest Bombardier bailout would take a billion middle-class tax dollars and give it to a company of billionaire owners and millionaire executives. Ontario's Green Energy Act forces low-income families to buy overpriced electricity from millionaire insiders. Government-mandated cartels in the taxi sector empower millionaire taxi-plate owners to rip off cab drivers and their passengers.
It is the insider economy. Those who can afford to lobby government and game the rules of government always win with bigger government. The underdogs are left to fight their own battles. We need to fight along their side. That means fighting for immigrants who are qualified as engineers or doctors, but who are forced into minimum-wage jobs because bureaucracy blocks them from their professions. It means financial transparency, so an aboriginal woman can hold her leaders accountable for how they spend her money.
It means further lowering taxes for the poor, so that work always pays more than welfare. Speaking of welfare, we should get tough on welfare for the incompetent millionaire CEO who is coming back to the government for yet another bailout and another handout from working-class taxpayers.
I believe it is time we shut down the insider economy and open up the free market economy, which is the greatest poverty-fighting machine ever invented. In so doing, let us all become champions of Canada's underdogs.
That is the basis upon which I approach any budget question. It has been proven time and time again that bigger and more bureaucratic government makes for poorer and less prosperous citizens. There are exceptions, of course, people with connections and people with well-paid lobbyists. They always do better.
We can expect that with recent Liberal announcements of new so-called climate change initiatives, we will see certain insiders, who call themselves green energy entrepreneurs and consultants, make millions of dollars. They have made millions of dollars on the backs of working-class Ontarians ever since the passage of the so-called Green Energy Act. They will make hundreds of millions of dollars more with the Ontario government's recent announcement, backed by the Prime Minister, that it will impose new taxes and regulations on Ontario families to pay for the enormous costs of the province's so-called climate change agenda.
The recent budget set aside hundreds of millions of new dollars in new subsidies for these same insiders. It is incumbent upon all of us to see who ends up getting the money. The question of social justice should weigh heavy on every single policy decision a government makes. There are two questions we should ask, therefore, regarding social justice of every policy a government implements. Those questions are these. From whom? To whom? Any expenditure of money takes money from somebody and gives it to somebody else.
The government has made a great rhetorical priority for the question of redistributing wealth and I believe that it will redistribute a lot of wealth. I believe also on close examination that redistribution will take money from the people who need it most and give it to the well-connected millionaire insiders who are most linked to the current government and its decision-makers.
Over the next three and a half years, my goal, and I hope the goal of the entire opposition, will be to stand up for those underdogs who actually earn their own money instead of those who are privileged and powerful and use that privilege and power to feast off the labours of other people. I think we will see that the real champions of social justice are those who expound the free enterprise economy.
Over the last 10 years while the Conservative government was in power, people in the lowest 10% of income earners saw their incomes rise by 14%. That is after tax and after inflation. Middle-class Canadians saw their incomes rise by 10%, after tax and after inflation. The share of wealth controlled by the top 1% actually declined in Canada, bucking trends to the contrary all around the world.
How is it then that the Liberal budget produced a graph that suggested that the middle class had not had a raise in 40 years? The information came from the Department of Finance. I said it cannot be true because we know that the last 10 years saw the middle class gain 10% after tax and inflation. How is it possible?
I looked at the data and the Liberal budget was right. The after-tax incomes of people were just slightly higher in 2015 than they had been 40 years earlier after accounting for inflation. How did that happen? The answer is that it actually took us 30 years to recover from the absolutely devastating economic policies of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The current Prime Minister is right. After accounting for the devastating decline in middle-class incomes that occurred in the seventies and early eighties under the national energy program and the big government centralized socialist approach to government, it actually took us three decades to recover the income growth of Canadians. Three decades and I am proud to say that the greatest growth of all, according to the Department of Finance data that was highlighted in the Liberal budget, occurred in the last 10 years when the previous Conservative prime minister was leading the government.
It is true that the middle class did not have an effective raise from 40 years back to the present, but in the last 10 years we have been correcting for that. What is most troubling is that the government does not learn from the graph that it put in its own budget. It is now repeating the very same policies that led to such devastating middle-class income declines: expanding governments, out of control deficits, more and more regulations that hold people down and suffocate our entrepreneurs.
I ask that the government learn from history rather than repeating history. We know what works. We know what has failed. Let us look at the evidence and the facts and choose the right path, the path of the underdog, where Canadians get ahead based on their merit, not on their connections, where people who work hard, pay their taxes, and play by the rules can achieve great things for themselves, their families, and their communities and where we shut down the insider economy and open up the free market economy as the greatest poverty-fighting machine the world has ever invented. Then and only then we can all say that we are champions of the underdog.
