Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, we all know we are living through one of the most dangerous and divided moments the world has seen in generations. We all know the pressure that is coming toward Canadians is not coming from just one direction, but all directions at once. We know our closest ally and trading partner has imposed tariffs at levels we have not seen in living memory. Wars are being fought in Europe and the Middle East. Supply chains that took decades to build are being fractured in real time. All of this is unfolding against a technological transformation that is defining what work and our economy will look like a decade from now and, indeed, in less than a decade from now. This is not a normal moment, and most Canadians know it. They feel it at the grocery till and at mortgage renewal. A young person feels it doing the math on a first home. We all understand that. We all understand the concerns and the risks, and we all understand that it is our job to figure out how to make it better. No honest account of how we got here points to a single villain or a single year. This has taken decades, across governments of every stripe in a country where it has become simply too hard to build, too hard to get major projects off the ground, too hard to keep our best talent, research and companies from leaving to go elsewhere and too hard to turn ideas into industry. These are not partisan accusations. They are an inheritance for every single one of us in the chamber from decades and decades of action. The question before the House is not whether the moment is hard. We all know it is. The question is what a serious government does about it. What this government has chosen to do is focus relentlessly on what is within our control. We have established a Major Projects Office to make sure that we can get nation-building projects built and that they do not die in a queue. We passed the One Canadian Economy Act to make sure that we tear down the internal trade walls that made it absurdly easier to trade with another country than with the next province over. Our productivity superdeduction gives businesses a reason to invest here and now. Build Canada Homes is already building thousands of homes. Through team Canada strong, we are putting $6 billion behind 100,000 new skilled trade workers, because we cannot build what we approve without the hands to build it. Here is the part that the members opposite will never mention, because it is not convenient: We are doing this with people, not against them. Premiers of every political stripe, Liberal, Conservative and New Democrat, and even Danielle Smith have found that this government is a partner with whom they can actually work. That is what governing in a time of crisis actually looks like. We put down the partisan cudgel, we pick up the tools and we work together. This brings me to the motion from the Leader of the Opposition that is before us today, because it was definitely not written in that spirit. It is not an offer to build. It is not an offer to think about how we might work together. It is not even an honest account of where we are. It is, yet again, performative theatre. I want to take a moment to focus on a single word that is at the centre of it. The motion does not say “a difficult quarter”. It does not say “a slowdown”. It reaches, in the very first line, for the biggest word available: “recession”. There is a body that all of us have recognized, whose entire job is to decide whether that word applies. It is the C.D. Howe Institute's business cycle council. Trusted by Conservatives and Liberals alike, it is the organization that has effectively been trusted as the organization that determines whether we are, in fact, in a recession, and it has not said that. It is not a Liberal organization. It is not a Liberal press release or a Conservative press release that gets to decide this. It is the council that called the 2008 financial crisis and the council that called the COVID downturn. When the real thing arrives, that council is the one that names it, not politicians. Three days ago, the council looked at exactly the same data the Leader of the Opposition is brandishing, and it refused to use his word. It found the decline so slight, at a fraction of a single per cent, that it does not even come close to any recession it has ever declared, and it warned in very clear terms that it is precisely this kind of label placed upon it by politicians and stapled onto numbers like these that causes further problems, because it is designed to sound official and frightening. The country's own referees, the people who called the 2008 recession and the COVID downturn, looked at this and would not go there. The Leader of the Opposition decided that it is his job to go and write a bigger word than theirs into a motion. Let us ask the question that the motion was built to stop anyone from asking: Why? Why would the Leader of the Opposition reach past the experts, as is custom for him, for the most frightening word he could find? Why does he need a slowdown to be a catastrophe? Why is it valuable for him to cast fear into the hearts of Canadians, who are already facing challenging times, which we all acknowledge? It is because, for him, the catastrophe becomes a permission slip. A slowdown asks the government to steady the ship and keep building, but a catastrophe is the only thing that could ever justify what this motion actually demands, which is to reverse the policies. We should say what is clearly hiding inside that intention. Reversing the policies means taking away the dental care that seniors are using right now. Taking away child care means telling the parents at Butterfly Kisses, a child care centre in his own riding that has brought fees down for working families, that those working families will no longer be able to access the subsidies that make it possible for children in his riding to access affordable child care. Reversing the policies means taking away the national school food program that feeds children before they sit down to learn. Whether they are in Carleton or Battle River—Crowfoot, Canadians are asking for the same things. They are asking for dental care, child care and certainty and stability in the government. They are looking for leadership that not only tells them that things will be all right, but shows them a path and takes the action to do so by building consensus. The Leader of the Opposition wants rubble he can stand in. That is what reversing the policies means once we start performing the word “recession” in pantomime or theatre in this place and start reading the fine print. They cannot rip the floor out from underneath people over a fraction of 1%. They can only do it if they first convince the country, as they are seeking to do, that the house is on fire. The Leader of the Opposition needs catastrophe. He needs the fire, but not because the data supports it. He does not. He needs it because without it, there is no excuse for what he is selling Canadians. Without it, there is little reason for toxic leadership from his side. That is the real divide in this chamber, and it could not be starker. One side is working to convince Canadians, alongside premiers, Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats that it is time to work together and build things, and another side is saying the building we are trying to build together is condemned so that no one objects when they start tearing down the walls. On this side, we are going to keep building. That building is showing up in results where people live and in what they will experience. In B.C., which is my home province, the merger that created Anglo Teck has planted a new global mining champion headquarters in Vancouver, with thousands of Canadian jobs and billions of dollars in investment secured here at home. That is talent and capital choosing Canada at the very moment when the members opposite insist that Canada is collapsing. The OECD, which is by no means a Liberal agency, projects that this country will grow the second-fastest in the G7 this year and next—
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