Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to address the House on the budget bill today. It is also a pleasure for me that my second daughter, Lilly, is on the Hill today. It is great to have her here with us, and having my kids with me always reminds me how blessed I am. My kids really are the perfect combination. They have my wife's beauty, my wife's intelligence and my wife's personality. That is the ideal combination, and I am sure members would agree. However, it is also when thinking about my children that I think about the future of this country and the kind of future we are building for them as they grow up, as they think about the jobs and opportunities they have and as they think about what they will be able to pass on materially, as well as the kind of quality of life they will be able to have more broadly. I think for many members, providing a better life for our children is a powerful motivator of the work that we do. Taking that perspective, it is very troubling to regularly hear about the challenges young people are facing in this country, such as the fact that we continue to have this youth unemployment crisis. Youth unemployment is at 14.3%. Young people are frustrated by their inability to find jobs, their struggles to find jobs in their fields and the lack of action by the government. The government has no plan to address the youth unemployment crisis. We hear its members re-announcing existing programs that have already existed for a long time, but there is no plan to meet the new challenges, which in so many ways are the results of their policies. Last fall, Conservatives put forward a constructive plan to address the youth unemployment crisis with very simple, specific interventions that aligned very much with what young people are asking for, what the business community is asking for and with what our country needs. Our plan is to unleash the economy, fix immigration, fix training and build homes where the jobs are. Unleashing the economy means addressing the fact that so much unemployment for young people is a result of businesses struggling to start, to grow and to expand. When businesses are optimistic about the future, they hire more young people because they are planning for growth. When businesses are more pessimistic about the future, young people are more likely to be let go, because it tends to be last in and first out when it comes to young people on the work site. If someone is worried about the future of their company, they are not going to fire the long-tenured employees first; it is going to be those newer hires who are going to be let go. Also, when small businesses are under pressure, it is harder for them to invest in training and supports. Of course, when giving someone their first job, a lot of businesses want to be able to help young people adjust to the workforce, but training, investment and costs are associated with that. When a business is so close to the margin, it is very hard to do that. As such, we need to create a climate in this country where small businesses in particular can start and grow and, therefore, be able to hire young people. That is what unleashing the economy is about. Number two is fixing immigration. A poorly designed immigration system under the Liberal government has led to intensified competition for entry-level positions. Newcomers who have not had their credentials recognized are competing against young people who are just starting out. We should have an immigration system that is aligned with the needs and interests of Canada and that identifies specific skill gaps while we, at the same time, try to train Canadian workers to fill those skill gaps to where the numbers are proportionate to what our country can actually handle. That is unleashing the economy and fixing immigration. Number three is fixing training. There has been a significant problem in this country with a misalignment between the training young people receive and what the labour market is actually looking for. A big part of that is our push to recognize the value of vocational training and the value of trade skills. University is a great path for some people, but it is not the path for everyone. There are many folks in this country who have pursued a vocational or trade path, have been extremely successful with that and are actually earning more and enjoying a higher standard of living than those who have pursued university degrees. We proposed this pillar of fixing training as part of our youth jobs plan, where we said that we should offer relatively more generous grants to those pursuing in-demand skills. The Liberals went in the opposite direction. In their last budget, they removed funding for students at private vocational institutions. For them, I think it was sort of an ideological thing about wanting to go after students who are seeking grants at private institutions, but really, it is not about private versus public; it is just about the fact that this is where these skills are offered. There are certain kinds of skills that, if people want to acquire that specific vocational skill, they cannot do it at a university or are much less likely to find a program of study at a university. There are many kinds of skills, with the way our post-secondary system is structured, that are learned at a private institution, yet, the government is going after and defunding the students who are studying at those kinds of institutions. Our proposal is to unleash the economy, fix immigration and training, and build homes where the jobs are. We need to do more to support those young people, people of all ages, who are looking to relocate to find employment, because we have regions in this country of very high unemployment and regions of very low unemployment. One thing we proposed to help young people and others relocate to find those opportunities is to offer an accelerated capital cost writeoff for employers who are investing in workforce housing to try to remove a barrier that exists that maybe makes it more difficult for young people and others to relocate for those job opportunities. It is a very simple plan that we put forward last fall to unleash the economy, fix immigration and training, and build homes where the jobs are. We put this forward wanting the government to implement it, yet in some areas that I have identified, the government is moving in the opposite direction. We continue to see no plan to address the youth unemployment crisis as part of this budget. What are the effects of high youth unemployment? We have pressure on young people to get more credentials that may or may not align with the needs of the labour market. We have high youth unemployment. We have high housing costs. All of these things make it so much more difficult for young people to launch themselves into the world. When it becomes harder for young people to launch themselves into adulthood, to find a job and to afford a home to finish their schooling, then they will potentially start hitting those key personal milestones later and later. This is a big contributing factor to the fact that, statistically, we now know that young people are having far fewer children than they tell pollsters they want to be having. In polls, on average, people say they want about 2.2 or 2.3 children, yet the real fertility rate is about 1.25, which means there is a major gap between the number of children people want to have and the number of children they are having. I think a big part of this is just the challenges in getting started in life, in being able to hit those key personal milestones as early as they might want to, because it is so hard to afford a home and get a job. This has long-term effects on people's desires for a family not being realized. It also impacts the fact that we have an aging population with not as many workers contributing to the system to provide for the benefits our seniors, who have worked so hard and would like to see available to them. There are consequences down the line with respect to these problems impacting the challenges young people have launching themselves into adulthood. We have also put forward constructive plans to not only make it easier for young people to get into the workforce earlier, but also make it easier for young families to achieve their goals with respect to the number of children they want to have. We have proposed significant reforms to parental leave to make it easier for people who are working to balance work and family life. We have proposed, for instance, more flexible parental leave to allow people to pause and then resume parental leave. We have proposed allowing more learning on leave, so that a person who is on parental leave could always study and take university, trades or other kinds of courses while they are on parental leave. We have also proposed an exception to clawbacks to allow parents to earn income for caregiving while they are off watching their own children. These changes would make it easier for young families to achieve the goals they want and find a good balance between work and family life. As I have demonstrated, Conservatives are laser-focused on trying to make life better, especially for those who are starting out, for young people and those who are trying to start families and are struggling to hit those initial milestones that would allow them to launch themselves well into their dreams, both with respect to work and family life. We are proposing constructive proposals to try to address these challenges and would really like to see the government adopt some of those constructive proposals that we have put on the table. We would like to see it take ideas from our Conservative youth jobs plan. We would like to see it take some of the ideas from our proposal on parental leave reform, making it easier to balance work and family life. We have asked the government to implement these proposals. On Friday, in question period, I asked the government whether it would consider implementing some of our proposals for parental leave reform. We did not get an answer. The government simply came back with partisan insults. I would encourage its members to have a look at the constructive proposals we are putting forward and include them in our budget. Maybe if it did not shut down debate after three and a half hours, we would have more time to get through these constructive suggestions and put forward more of these ideas to make our country better.
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