Mr. Speaker, I would like to let you know that I plan on sharing my time with the member for Halifax.
We are seeing the result of the enormous amount of work that was carried out across Canada. Individuals and groups were surveyed on the vision they would like to see in the next budget, and the direction they would like our economy to take in the coming years.
I worked with the member for Halifax and the member for Victoria on this. It is an extraordinary opportunity to remind people that the NDP, unlike the Bloc Québécois, represents all of Canada, and has representatives from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. This image of the breadth of the country is important, because people tend to forget that to properly represent the economy, we need a balanced vision.
This is the main point of my speech today. I want to talk about the work that has been done in recent months to try to rebalance the economy. This can be seen in the New Democratic Party minority report, appended to the committee's report. There are points that we completely disagree with, because of where the Conservative government is currently taking our economy.
Looking back, we can see that the end of the second world war marked the start of attempts to build a Canadian economy that still existed two or three years ago, a balanced economy in which forestry and mining were dominant in the primary sector. Our country's natural resources, which are non-renewable in the case of mines and renewable in the case of forests, need to be used sustainably, in a way that respects future generations, which has often not been the case.
Canada also needs a processing sector. Too often in its history, Canada would cut its trees and ship them to other countries, including our neighbour to the south. It would also extract its mineral resources and ship them to other countries for secondary and tertiary processing. This vision also needed to be changed. Canada therefore developed ways of doing secondary and tertiary processing here whenever possible. It did not always do enough of this sort of processing, but things were improving.
Lastly, the Canadian economy was based on a strong service sector centred mainly in Montreal and Toronto at the time. Today, it is unfortunately based less and less in Montreal and more and more in Toronto. Of course, I am speaking as a member from Quebec.
Once in office, the current government stepped up a process aimed at making Canada a subsidiary of the American economy. I am referring, for example, to a project known as Keystone, which is a way of exporting not only unprocessed crude oil, but also 18,000 jobs to the United States. That is the Conservatives' record.
The boom in the oil sector in western Canada has had adverse effects on other segments of the economy. As the oil sector heated up, the value of the Canadian dollar, our loonie, rose to unprecedented levels. This had a direct impact on our manufacturers' export capability. It is a simple equation: the higher the value of our dollar, the harder it is for an American company, for example, to buy goods produced in Canada, because the American company has to pay in Canadian dollars and the Canadian dollar is much stronger than it was not long ago when it was worth much less than the American dollar. As a result, hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector.
Jobs have also been lost in the forestry industry for two reasons: first, we have the overheating of the oil industry, which is also affecting the manufacturing industry; and second, we have the softwood lumber agreement with the U.S. under which we handed over $1 billion for no reason. Under NAFTA, we were totally right to do what we did. Unfortunately, our hands were tied. They kept pushing and we foolishly signed. The NDP was opposed to that agreement, while the Bloc was in favour of it.
Two industries have suffered the consequences greatly: the forestry industry and the manufacturing industry. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost. That is what we call imbalance.
Has this government been able to correct the situation? Not at all.
Last week—I am not talking about before the holidays, but just last week—the very first question I asked the government was whether, before the budget, it could hand over the $1 billion it promised in the form of a trust.
The response from the hon. member for Pontiac and Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities was rather shocking. He said, from his seat here in this House, that what I was asking for was impossible because it was an expenditure and it needed to be passed with the budget. According to him, it was impossible to do so.
What happened a few days later, this week? Precisely what he said was impossible to do last week. That is the Conservatives' logic when it comes to the economy.
We have a real challenge before us. There are things that Canadians agree on, such as having a public health care system that is accessible, universal and open to everyone. What are the Conservatives doing? They are rendering the system meaningless. The NDP is proud to remind Canadians that it was Tommy Douglas who was the precursor to our health care system. He was a member of the CCF, which became the NDP.
Canadians are proud of having a better health care system than the Americans, but we are worried. This system is not adequately funded.
There are many things the government can and must do something about, but to which the Conservatives are ideologically opposed, except when they have no choice, as was the case with the $1 billion to help the manufacturing and forestry industries.
I said at the outset that I would be sharing my time with my colleague from Halifax and I propose to do just that now.
I remind people that the NDP, in the process that led to the budget consultations and all through it, was able to hear from Canadians. In Halifax for example, 15 of the 18 groups that came in were very clear that they shared our vision and not that of the Conservative government. The Conservative government, by favouring the petroleum sector in the west, by giving over supposed tax breaks that are supposed to help the economy, is only helping companies that made profits and paid taxes, so manufacturing and forestry companies that made no profit last year benefited nothing. Who got the money? The big oil companies and the banks. Did they need it? No.
The Conservative government has been destabilizing what was up until now a very balanced Canadian economy and in a couple of years it has actually made the situation far worse. So much for good fiscal management by Conservatives. It is a little bit like the situation in the United States where the most catastrophic economic times in recent memory are now taking place under the governance of another right winger, George Bush, a good friend of Steve, but we here in Canada are going to stand up and fight for what is right.
