Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the House tonight, as always. I was noting some of the commentary online today as I posted some of my fierce criticisms of the government over its failures on jobs and other things. People were saying, “How come yesterday you were campaigning to keep Alberta in Canada, and today you are criticizing the government?” I said that that is exactly the job, to fight for the country and also to fight for a better country by challenging the government. That is what it means to be the loyal opposition. Out of the mouths of Liberals here, the member was saying, “the greatest opposition of all time.” The bill before the House, Bill C-38, deals with affordability. As I get into talking about this bill, I want to share with members that we recently marked an important milestone for my extended family. We were celebrating 60 years since my father-in-law immigrated to Canada from Pakistan. It has been a pleasure getting to know him since I joined the family 15 years or so ago. He has been a great success here in Canada, starting a business that employs many Canadians of all backgrounds, raising three beautiful daughters and, of course, having three exceptional sons-in-law. I remember him sharing with us those early years as he was getting started out in business. He started a business while he was still working at another job. He had a car phone, which for those who do not know is a corded phone that was attached to the car. It is not a cell phone. I was telling my daughter recently that we did not have Skype when I was growing up. She said, “Did everyone just FaceTime then?” Technological reference points change. He would share with us how he would use every opportunity to make calls to prospective clients from his car phone as he was trying to juggle the responsibilities of starting a business and also continuing with his job. This is sort of part of the “getting ahead” lore. For many families it is the “immigration lore” people heard from parents or grandparents, maybe about how they came to Canada with almost no money, and how they strove and struggled, and were able to get ahead and provide a better life for themselves and their families. These are great stories that are the foundation of what our country has become. It is people coming and being welcomed from every part of the world, often with very little, and being able to build, create and ultimately contribute to the communities they are a part of. I remember hearing some of these stories from my grandparents. My paternal grandfather, for example, would tell us about how he arrived at the train station in Toronto. He got a job working for the rail lines before he left the train station, and he worked that same job until he retired. He told us the story about how he bought his first car. He had come from the little island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea right after the Second World War. Malta had been heavily bombed by the Germans during the Second World War. When he came to Canada, he was buying a used car from a fellow who happened to be a former member of the German Air Force. He used his experience as a tool to try to negotiate down the price of the car. That was his way of trying to get ahead financially every moment that he could. These are the stories of newcomers, of people from different backgrounds and different places who struggle to get ahead and to build this country. These are great stories that are part of my family and I am sure are part of the family experiences of many members in this House. It occurs to me, thinking about this sort of connection between economic vitality and opportunity, and also about the struggles that people from different backgrounds have had to get ahead, that there is this connection between economic opportunity and also social cohesion and integration. When we are a society in which people can get ahead, in which people even those starting from very limited backgrounds can nonetheless create and build and become very successful, then we are a kind of society of greater hope and optimism where people say, “Yes, regardless of where I come from, I can get ahead. I can prevail and succeed in the face of various challenges.” This is what our country has been and this is what our country could be again. It is a place where economic opportunity being widely available is a source of not only shared prosperity, but also shared goodwill and social cohesion, where we do not feel that we have to, in a negative way, compete with each other and pull each other down to get ahead, but rather where every person, through their own ingenuity, creativity and struggle from whatever point they start, can build, create and deliver opportunity, especially for the next generation. That is very much what this country has been and the hope of what this country can be. However, we are living through a time where, because of government policy, red tape, regulation and burdensome costs that make it so much harder to start and grow a business and get ahead, people feel much more stuck in the context of their present circumstances. Those who already own their home and have certain assets or positions obviously hope to maintain those positions, but those who do not own a home or do not currently have a position involving opportunity are less optimistic about their ability to ever attain that greater position. Whereas at one time the combination of economic vitality and a baseline of social programs made Canada a very dynamic opportunity society in which anyone from anywhere had the hope of being able to do anything, we are now a society in which people feel much more stuck. This is especially evident when talking to young people. Since taking on the role of Conservative shadow minister for employment, I have been meeting with young people across the country. I have been on various university campuses, in six different provinces now, asking young people the simple question of whether they think they are better or worse off than their parents’ generation and to tell me why. Many young people feel they are worse off, feel stuck in their circumstances or situation and in particular struggle with the prospect of ever attaining the career they want that would provide them with the income necessary to afford a home where they live. These basic things of having a good job and a home people can afford, which were the presumed baseline at one point in time, are now things that young people increasingly perceive as being out of reach. This leaves them with a sense of being stuck. For these young people, getting to the critical starting points of having a home and a job is part of the road toward being able to start and establish a family, have children and meet the family goals they have. The statistics show objectively that there is a major gap between the number of children people tell pollsters they want to have and the number of children people are actually having. This is not me making objective claims about what is desirable or not in terms of family size or structure. It is simply looking at what people say they want in terms of their own sought-out family goals and what people are realizing in their own lives. There is a big gap between desire and outcome, and I think part of it is because it is so much more difficult now for people to start out in life. It is so much more difficult to start a family, own a home and get to a secure position in a career where a person perhaps feels ready to take these steps that many people are delaying and delaying these starting points in life and are thus not able to achieve the kinds of family goals they had hoped for. That is a real tragedy, individually, when people have these hoped-for goals for their families that they are not able to realize. It does have broader social implications for the young people that we have, the opportunities they have and what we are seeing in the next generation and their ability to provide for and be part of a shared community with older relatives. These issues of young people and of people of all ages feeling stuck and not being able to achieve their goals, being limited by a lack of economic opportunity and vitality, the issues we are seeing right now, have real implications economically. They also have implications socially. We need to do the work to again establish the kind of society where people do not feel stuck, where they have hope about the opportunities that they can achieve, where they are able to, early on, get a job, afford a home and access a career, where somebody, whether they have been in the country for 50 years or for five minutes, can use their ingenuity, their creativity and whatever limited start-up capital they have to start a business, to make a go of a new idea and to build something new. We need to appreciate again the basic and critical insight of Adam Smith, which is that wealth is expandable, infinite and something that is not simply found and distributed but created. It is created under conditions where individuals can create and see the rewards of that creation. We have limitless potential as a society, not only because of our bountiful resources but also because of the ingenuity of our people, if we were only to have the policies in place that allow for that unleashing of opportunity. Today, Conservatives moved to have debate on the 10th report of the human resources committee. Part of that report is recognizing the link between restrictions on business growth through red tape and high taxation and the implications that this has for youth unemployment. We put forward a number of recommendations in that report that had the unanimous support of the committee and that were oriented toward addressing these taxation and regulatory barriers so that we can unleash opportunity, recognizing the implications that this would have for youth employment. We had many constructive and very specific proposals in that report. It is a shame that we did not have an opportunity to conclude debate on that today, but we will continue to be relentless in highlighting these issues of opportunity for Canadians, of again trying to build up an opportunity society, where people who are younger or older, people who are new Canadians and people who have been here for a very long time, can see that, regardless of where they come from, regardless of what their starting points are, they can have opportunities because of what the country is and what the country offers. The bill before the House deals with what, on the face of it, might seem like a purely mechanical and mercantile issue, the issue of fuel prices. Fuel prices have much wider economic implications in what they can unlock or block for the creation and development of new businesses. So much economic activity in a country this vast obviously requires things to be able to move around. If we are going to make a go of a new idea, if we are going to try to bring something to market, if we are going to try to seize and create new opportunities, there is a very good chance that it is going to involve bringing something from somewhere to somewhere else. The constraints that are imposed by unreasonably high fuel prices make it difficult for new entrepreneurs to start and grow a business. They make it difficult for people who are starting out, especially, to be able to see it as realistic, to put the capital needed into getting something new going. It makes it especially hard for that independent operator who is reliant on reasonable fuel prices in order to be able to move their product as required or to be able to work on their farm. Whatever the case may be, we are all deeply affected by fuel prices. Fuel prices also impact our ability to interact with each other. They impact choices people are able to make in terms of visiting friends and family and maintaining and strengthening communities. Again, there are so many things about social cohesion, as well as economic vitality, that are impacted by our ability to get from place to place and to move things from place to place. This is why we have chosen to really focus, as part of this affordability issue, on the fuel price issue and the ripple effects that go out from it. It was Conservatives who put forward the proposal to pause the fuel taxes that are imposed on all Canadians. The government kind of went partway in response to our proposal, but it has not gone far enough in terms of offering the relief that we have suggested and that Canadians really need right now. We can see the role of this historically effective opposition in winning these debates and getting the government to incrementally take some steps, but we can also recognize the need to do much more. While we hear some piecemeal parroting of the rhetoric from the opposition, we have yet to see the full implementation of the agenda we have put forward, which is really about restoring prosperity and opportunity for this country and recognizing how, in the absence of opportunity, when people feel more constrained, more stuck and less able to get ahead, there is also more social conflict. When people perceive that it is more difficult, or even impossible, to create their own wealth, there is intensifying conflict and competition over scarce resources. We are inserted into a Malthusian world of competition for limited resources, rather than being what we could be: a country of limitless potential and opportunity where there is a greater sense of cohesion and optimism flowing from the reality that a person’s own ideas and own ingenuity can be put to work to build and create beautiful things. This is what we want: a society of hope and opportunity where people can get a job, afford a home, start a family, start a business, move goods around and visit family members, without the kinds of constraints that have grown up over the last 11 years as a result of policy choices made by the current government to intentionally make fuel more expensive and to intentionally block resource development and export. The effect of these policies has been to create more social division because of greater constraints on wealth creation. We can do better. We must do better. Even if there has been some shift in the rhetoric from the government, here is where we are in substance. We are today at a point, according to the latest job numbers, where youth unemployment is at 13% and overall unemployment is up to 6.5%. The job finding rate is around 30%, substantially down from the prepandemic averages. We are at an almost 30-year low in terms of workforce participation. Fewer Canadians are in the labour force as a proportion of the overall population than at almost any time in the last 30 years. This underlines how the results just are not there from the government. There have been some improvements in rhetoric compared to where things were under the Trudeau government. The Liberals are saying some of the same things we are saying, but the results and the action have not been there. That is why it is so important to have more of the changes that are being advocated from this side of the House, so we can become a more cohesive, opportunity-oriented society once again. This is my hope for this country and for Parliament. We will keep putting forward positive, constructive solutions towards that end, towards that goal of a cohesive, opportunity-oriented and free society.
