Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking my fabulous constituents back home in the riding of Lethbridge, Alberta for electing me as their member of Parliament and entrusting me with the honour of sitting in the House and representing their viewpoints for the nation of Canada. I consider it an immense privilege to serve in public office and I am committed to earning their trust each and every day that I sit here. I will always advocate for what is in the best interests of my constituents. I look forward to ensuring that the views of the people of Lethbridge are heard loud and clear in this chamber.
Unfortunately, the Speech from the Throne brought forward by the Liberals is not in the interest of Lethbridge. I am concerned for my riding, specifically for the rural region.
There was absolutely no mention of the importance of agriculture, and there was no mention with regard to supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The beef, pork, and poultry farms in my region alone stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars if the Liberals continue to dither and delay in ratifying this agreement. Canadian farmers face one of the most complex and competitive marketplaces in the world with little or no help from the present government. They deserve a government that will stand up for their interests, and this is clearly not happening with the Liberal government at present.
What we witnessed on Friday was a government that puts a premium on rewarding themselves and their friends. Take for instance the Liberal defence of the status quo with regard to the Senate. Does anyone seriously believe that their nominating committee will actually bring about real change? Let us look at the fine print. This is a committee that will be appointed by Liberals. This is a committee that will be advised by Liberals. This is a committee that will then freely select Liberals to be in the Senate on their behalf. Therefore, I have to beg the question: Is this in fact real change?
Instead of giving the Canadian people a say in who represents them in Ottawa, the Liberals have turned to the new aristocrats, the Laurentian elites, to pack out the Senate. We need to gain greater democratic accountability in the Senate, not patronage under a different name.
When it comes to democratic reform, the Liberals are not planning to give Canadians a say in the most fundamental aspect of our democracy, and that is the electoral system itself. Instead, we are going to see a Liberal majority try to ram through a new election method, a method to the partisan advantage of the Liberals at the expense of the Canadian public. It would appear that 2015 marks the beginning of the new Liberal tyranny. On something this fundamental, the only acceptable choice would be to hold a referendum and allow the Canadian voices to be heard.
Are the Liberals refusing to consult with Canadians because they do not trust us or is it simply because they do not want to listen to us?
The Liberals know that every single time that a provincial referendum has been held with regard to this question, the provinces have voted loud and clear to choose a first past the post system. However, that would not allow the Liberals to pick a system like ranked ballots would it? It is a system that would predictably elect Liberal majorities if the Liberals were the second choice for both the NDP and the Conservative on the ballot. Canadians are not fooled, I tell my friends. The residents of Lethbridge and all of Canada deserve more. They deserve good, strong, stable representation.
The unfortunate reality is that the new Prime Minister appears to believe his own rhetoric. He is convinced that he can spend his way out of a deficit. I guess he inherited that belief from his father. Unfortunately, this economic approach is going to have the same disastrous effect for Canada today as it did during the time of the late Trudeau.
As we saw in the 1990s, even a nation like Canada eventually runs out of credit. At that point we see a nation such as Greece or a nation that dramatically has to cut back its government services that our Canadians desperately need. We understand how this will play out because we have seen it before. This is not real change.
The Liberals balanced the budget on the backs of the provinces in the past. They cut critical welfare funding. They scaled back provincial transfers. What was the result of this? A decade of absolute darkness.
Provinces had to cancel public infrastructure, thousands of health care professionals moved to the United States because they could not stay in Canada, and the result for the middle class was absolute inequality and impoverishment.
I believe that the solution is clear. I believe that it starts with controlled government spending, lower taxes, and trust in Canadian entrepreneurs to create real, lasting jobs. Canadians understand that every family has to balance their chequebook or the family will go bankrupt. This is just basic economics. Just because the Canadian government is larger does not mean that this principle fails to apply.
Already the new finance minister is retracting his commitment to limit the deficit to $10 billion a year. Today we read that the Liberal tax plan is not in fact cost-neutral and will in fact cause a structural deficit from day one.
The Liberals have already pushed us into deficit, in record time I might add. Since the parliamentary budget officer had already confirmed this spring that our Conservative government had indeed balanced the budget, I find the Liberal plan incredibly disconcerting.
Furthermore, what concerns me is that when I look at this, I see that the first economic casualty is always our young people. Young workers work in physically demanding industries, like construction, and oil and gas, which are sensitive to the economic trends and will be the first jobs cut, or they find themselves in roles where they are at the bottom of the so-called totem pole. When the workforce has to make job cuts, they are the first to go. Already we are seeing the economic impact on our youth in Alberta as the NDP government does its best to kill jobs in our major industries, the oil and gas sector, and agriculture.
With the Liberals announcing a moratorium that kills new pipelines through B.C. and with their silence on working to overturn the negative Keystone XL decision, the Liberals are actually a part of the problem and not at all a part of the solution.
Using government subsidies to try to create youth jobs is incredibly expensive. As we saw with previous market-distorting government policies, this will only have a negative impact on our young people.
Meanwhile I would draw our attention to the former Conservative approach. It had consistently decreased youth unemployment since the height of the recession in 2008, and was working well to bring people further into the middle class and strengthen it.
Our approach focused on increasing access to skills training, improving market information on in-demand jobs, and reducing payroll taxes in order to give small businesses the flexibility to hire more employees. The Liberals are moving in the opposite direction, and I believe it is absolutely detrimental to the nation of Canada and particularly to my constituents in Lethbridge.
There is one more thing that I would like to note, and that is this Speech from the Throne missed a huge segment of this population, those with disabilities. In the diversity section of the speech, they mentioned aboriginals, Syrian immigrants, veterans, the CBC, and Canada's cultural industries, but absolutely no mention was made of those with disabilities.
I have to ask, is this real change? Is this the change that will benefit and advance Canada, and move us forward as one united nation toward a beautiful end? To that question, I would have to say the answer is no.
In closing, Canada's Conservative government provided a stable economic approach that emphasized low taxes and job creation, and this approach trusted that Canadian entrepreneurs understood how to create jobs far better than inefficient government programs. In short, Conservatives understand that the middle class does not have spare cash to pay for increased taxes.
The extravagant spending of the Liberals can only be paid for by increased taxes, and since their tax on the rich actually loses money, it means the middle class will be stuck with the bill. To state it simply, Canada cannot afford the Liberals' reckless, out-of-control spending.
Canada is not back; debt is back. Debt never serves the middle class.
