Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak in support of Bill C-31, an act to implement economic action plan 2014.
Before I begin, I want to first pay tribute to the late Hon. Jim Flaherty, who first tabled the budget back in March. He was referred to as the best finance minister in the world. We all hold him close to our hearts, and I think that the passing of the first budget implementation bill is due in great part to the effort he put in to develop this budget, which was tabled, as I said, earlier this spring.
One thing that happened when Jim Flaherty first became finance minister was that we were soon into the largest global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thanks to the leadership of Jim Flaherty as finance minister and thanks to the Prime Minister, Canada has been able to recover from this great recession more strongly and more quickly than any other country in the G7.
One of the reasons we were able to do so was that between 2006 and 2008, we took $40 billion off the federal debt, giving us the flexibility we needed when the recession hit to engage in stimulus spending, to keep our tradespeople working, to keep the economic engines that make Canada flow churning. Because of the decisions that were made early on in this mandate by that finance minister and the Prime Minister in support of Canada, we were able to go into that recession in a strong enough fiscal position that we could take strong action at the beginning of that recession to limit its damage to the Canadian economy.
As we emerged from the greatest recession since the Great Depression, we made a commitment during the 2011 election to return the federal government to a balanced budget. This is a daunting task. Many people across Canada said it would be impossible in such a short time or that if we took strong steps to do that, we would be destabilizing the economy and hurting the future of Canada if we tried to do it by 2015.
As I see it, there are three ways for a government to balance the budget.
The first is a path that we did not choose, a path that I call the easy path to balance a budget. It is to simply raise taxes. We have seen other governments attempt to balance budgets by raising taxes across Canada. Not only did we not raise taxes on Canadian taxpayers, families, and businesses, but we actually made a decision and a commitment to lower them, and today in Canada, the average family of four is paying over $3,200 less federal tax than they did when we took office in 2006. That is a testament to the courage and determination of the Prime Minister, finance minister Flaherty, and the current finance minister.
We also lowered corporate taxes, which encourages investment in Canada and keeps our economic engines running. It gives our small businesses and medium-sized enterprises the ability to pay low taxes so that maybe they can hire one or two more people to help us encourage employment in this country. Low corporate taxes, low personal taxes, and lower taxes on families are the direction we chose to go. We chose this path instead of raising taxes, as we see some of the opposition parties pushing for on a continual basis.
The second direction we could have taken to balance the budget would have been to slash transfers to the provinces. These are the funds provinces need to provide the services that Canadians hold so close to their hearts: health care, education, community services. Provinces across Canada need those valuable transfer dollars so they can deliver on these services that Canadians not only need but expect. These transfer payments are very important for the provinces to do their job as partners with the federal Government of Canada. In fact, we have not lowered those transfer payments, as we saw the former Liberal government do in the 1990s when it tried to balance the budget after an earlier recession and cut billions and billions of dollars from federal transfers to the provinces, particularly in the area of health care.
The billions of dollars that the previous government cut in health care saw nurse layoffs, hospital closures across this country, and doctors fleeing to the United States for better deals because the provinces could not afford, with these federal cuts, to provide adequate health care of a competitive nature in North America.
We believe that was the wrong way to go, and I personally believe that we still have not fully recovered from that the cuts made early on in the previous government's mandate during the 1990s.
Instead of cutting transfers to the province in an attempt to balance the budget, we have made a commitment to the provinces and increased those transfers. In fact, we would increase the transfers envelope to the provinces from $42 billion in 2005 to $65 billion in 2014. That would be a $23-billion increase in these valuable transfers to the provinces.
The health transfer alone would go from $20 billion in 2005 to $32 billion in 2014, and it would reach $40 billion for health care alone by the end of this decade. That is a true commitment by the Prime Minister, from finance minister Flaherty, and from the latest Minister of Finance to health care across the country.
In my home province of Nova Scotia, in 2005 the total transfer envelope for the Province of Nova Scotia was $2.2 billion. This year, for the first time, the federal government would transfer $3 billion to the Province of Nova Scotia. Almost a third of the total revenue of the Province of Nova Scotia comes directly from these transfers from the federal government.
Can members imagine how difficult it would be for the provinces to meet their commitments to the people of this country if those transfers were slashed by the government in some sort of random, willy-nilly attempt to balance the budget on the backs of those transfers to the provinces? We chose not to do that. We chose a different path.
The path that we chose under the leadership of finance minister Flaherty and the Prime Minister was to look inside government spending itself first. We made precise and needed cuts and reductions to government departments across the board, making sure that we took the time to make sure that the front-line services for Canadians were protected.
We made good reductions so that Canadian taxpayers could have lower taxes, the provinces could have their transfers protected, and we could balance the budget. That was the decision that we made under the leadership of the finance minister and the Prime Minister.
With the implementation of this budget, we would be facing a balanced budget moving forward. Out of all the countries in the G7, Canada is the one best positioned to seize the next 20 years as decades of growth for this country. We will achieve a leadership position unannounced and unknown to us well before that recession took place. We would emerge stronger and better than we ever expected Canada to be at this point.
I know that I only have a couple of minutes left, but I would like to talk about one more issue contained in this act. It has to do with a challenge we face as we move forward and engage in this positive future for the country. It is the paradox of having too many Canadians still unemployed in this country, despite our recovery from the recession, while at the same time having many jobs across Canada for which employers cannot find skilled people to fill them.
That is why, in this budget implementation act, we would implement the youth apprenticeship loan. This would be a $100 million program that for the first time would enable young people across Canada who are engaged in the trades to count on the federal government to help support them, to the tune of a $4,000 interest-free loan for each year of their training. This is so that they could engage in a trade that would lead to a job so that they could get married, raise their own families, and be confident that they could provide a solid basis for family life and provide for their families as they raise their children.
This is a commitment that we made in this budget. We think it is the proper route to take.
As Canada now emerges from the largest recession since the Great Depression in a strong fiscal position, we now have confidence that we can engage in a robust recovery, create jobs, and have the skilled Canadians to fill those jobs.
This is the challenge we face, and we are up to the job. We look forward to the opposition's support for this bill. I encourage them to support it. Help us make Canada the strong, proud nation we know it can be.
