Jamil Jivani

Mr. Speaker, it is good to see you, as always. I rise in the House today on behalf of the beautiful, wonderful people of Bowmanville—Oshawa North, to oppose the Liberal budget, specifically Bill C-30. I do so because this is the latest example of the current Liberal regime failing to meet the moment in Canada. The Liberals are simply tinkering at the edges of the status quo, without offering any positive, substantive changes for our communities to become stronger and healthier. Liberals may ask, what is the moment we are in? Certainly, they seem unaware. It is a moment when a generation of Canadians are knocking on the door, asking to be admitted into the Canadian dream, yet they are having that door shut in their face by a government that continues to show very little self-awareness for what is going on in our economy today. For Canadians who, frankly, have been working hard for over a decade now to establish themselves in the economy, to buy their first home or to start a family, they are encountering an uncomfortable and unstable position. They are working hard to do so, despite the challenges they face. If the Liberal regime were truly interested in meeting the moment facing our country right now, they would do more than just tinker at the edges of the status quo. Rather, this would be a government that would respond with real change and real hope for the builders, the dreamers, the strivers and the hustlers who are working hard to get ahead every day. The part of this budget that I would like to focus on in particular is the matter of housing, because it has become emblematic of the challenges we face in our country today. In this budget, in Bill C-30, the government has a provision to extend the grace period for repayments in the homebuyers' plan. Now, in a vacuum, this might actually be a worthwhile idea. It is good to extend the grace period. However, the problem we face is that when we look at the context of our country right now, it is simply not enough. In fact, it is outrageous to sit in the chamber and see Liberals patting themselves on the back for continuing to fail to fix the housing crisis in this country, while failing to recognize that much more needs to be done. While Liberals sit in the chamber or fly off to Europe to celebrate their half measures and their band-aid solutions, one of their own housing bureaucracies, one of several, has published data today showing that the housing crisis continues to be unaddressed by the Liberal Prime Minister, who promised to fix it, the second Liberal Prime Minister, I may add, who promised to fix it in the last decade. From today's CMHC housing starts and construction data, we see that in the month of May 2026, “Actual monthly housing starts were down 5.2% year-over-year in centres with a population of 10,000 or more”. We also see in that data that “housing starts for all areas in Canada decreased [month to month by] 6% in May”. CMHC's deputy chief economist looked at all of this data and offered a comment that I think this House must consider. He said, “Overall, these results suggest that construction activity is uneven and taken together with the decline of approved units not yet started and market intelligence point to weaker momentum for future supply”. If we zoom out for a moment and think about what this means for the young Canadians knocking on the door who want to get in on the Canadian dream but are having the door shut on them by the Liberal regime, we see that there are real consequences for real people behind all of these numbers. For every house that is not getting built or is too expensive for the average middle-class Canadian to afford, we know there is a life being put on hold: people who want to move out of their parents' house but cannot do so; people who want to make an investment in their future but cannot do so; people who want to start a family but cannot do so. By the way, as an aside, I would like to add that if we fix the housing crisis, we might see the declining birth rate start to tick up and the Liberals would have less of an excuse to continue with their mass immigration plan. However, I will leave that for another day. This is what is happening to young Canadians today. They deserve so much better than what they are getting from the Liberal government, from a regime that continues to put budget after budget forward that fails to solve a single serious problem and is not getting better results. Young Canadians are not getting the response they deserve from their own government, the government they pay taxes to and the government that is intended to serve them. I would like to share a story of a young man I met yesterday, from north Oshawa. He runs his own business, and on the weekends he drives an Uber. He is a very hard-working guy who grinds every week, non-stop. He recently got married, and he does not have any children yet, but he hopes to be able to afford a home one day. He shared his family story with me, and he is a real family man. He told me about his father who recently beat cancer, and I could see how proud he was when he talked about his dad going through that hard time with a smile on his face on the other end of it. This business owner in north Oshawa told me that he had a conversation with his wife last week, and he asked his wife an important question. He asked what she thought of some of the concerns weighing on him at the moment. Specifically, he was wondering whether he should continue to work so hard and continue to work two jobs and be away from his family as much as he is. He wondered if he should stop. He wondered if his effort was ever going to pay off based on what he saw happening in our country. I will be honest; it was tough to hear him talk that way, because he is a talented and very capable young man, but he was considering giving up. He told me that when he had that conversation with his wife and asked her those questions, she thankfully told him that she thought he should keep trying. She expressed belief in him. When he told me about his wife's confidence in him, I could tell it meant the entire world to him. I bring this up because people need to better understand what is happening to this generation of Canadians knocking on that door and trying to get in on the Canadian dream. They are often thinking about giving up and often questioning the merit of hard work. They are second-guessing themselves and the way they spend their time, and whether doing all of the things they were told a contributing citizen should do is actually going to bear fruit as they continue to get older. This is exactly what is wrong with the Liberal regime's budget. It fails to offer any sort of understanding of what is going on today. It fails to show any contrition from a government that has, for 11 years now, made bad decision after bad decision, often sentencing young Canadians to a much harder life than generations past, making it harder to get ahead and making it harder for people to feel hopeful and optimistic about their futures. The Liberal regime then has the audacity to question the patriotism of people who say that they deserve better. I would say that the young Canadians knocking on the door hoping to get in on the Canadian dream do deserve better. They deserve a lot better than what they have been getting. My message to all of the strivers, dreamers, builders and hustlers across this country is to just keep going. I know that it is hard and that often it feels like people in positions of power are not listening, but the reality is that we have no choice but to continue fighting for this country and for a better future. Even when the people who are privileged enough to fly first class to Europe lecture us on what kind of country we should want to have here in Canada and even when they show us how tone-deaf they are, I want those who are fighting for a better future to know that someday I hope they will have a government that honours them properly. God bless Canada.

Mr. Speaker, I agree with Premier Ford on very little actually, including his opinions of the Liberal regime here in Ottawa and its performance on matters like housing. It is quite unfortunate that it is so difficult to get the people who profit and benefit off the status quo to understand why so many Canadians are frustrated with multiple levels of government, provincial and federal alike. It is also unsurprising that the federal government would find common cause with a provincial government that also seems to be perfectly fine with a situation where no one's life is getting better and the quality of life for the average middle-class Canadian is declining.

Mr. Speaker, I will be perfectly blunt with the member. We have a lot of problems in this country, and I think we have a government here in Ottawa that has used the drama with the United States as an excuse to solve very few problems that affect the day-to-day lives of our fellow citizens. I think it is shameful that it has become a political tool to exploit justifications for making nothing better for the lives of the average Canadian. Instead, the Liberals are able to position themselves as fake nationalists who seemingly have very little pride or long-term vision for the good of this country. I would like to see some humility on the part of the Liberal regime here in Ottawa. I would like to actually get a trade deal done for the good of Canadian workers and Canadian industries, and for the Liberals to stop exploiting this issue for their own political gain.

Mr. Speaker, the member for London—Fanshawe's observations are completely accurate. We have a government here that has been sitting around for 11 years watching the decline of a country and, in many cases, managing the decline of a country. People naturally are increasingly frustrated by a status quo that is not working and is not serving the best interests of our people. We have seen members opposite sit there, heckle, laugh and high-five each other while things keep getting worse for the average middle-class family. I would like to see them show any sense of contrition or learn from their mistakes. Alas, I have not seen that evidence.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of Canadians who are concerned with the continued economic mismanagement of our country and who are observing that the Liberal government is using its majority of seats now in the House of Commons to continue mismanaging our economy and putting young Canadians in a tough position. Canadians are looking for accountability, and they are looking to have confidence in the democratic process renewed by having the Parliament of Canada Act amended so that MPs who have left their party and crossed the floor, handing the Liberal Prime Minister a majority, will have to face their voters in a by‑election.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition in support of Conservative bill, Bill C-218, also known as the right to recover act. Canadians are rightly concerned about the Liberal government's plans to expand euthanasia to people whose only medical condition is a mental illness. With this petition, they are urging the government to change course, to not expand euthanasia to even more people and, instead, turn to offering more services and more accessible health care.

Mr. Speaker, I stand today on behalf of my constituents of Bowmanville—Oshawa North to oppose Bill C-9 and to support efforts to further scrutinize and study the legislation. I will be sharing my time with the member for York Centre. There are many problems with Bill C-9 and the Liberal attempt to amend Bill C-9 to criminalize the reading and sharing of Bible verses in this country. We oppose this for many reasons, but I do want to draw attention to an area that has not gotten enough attention: the efforts of the Liberal Party to enact a form of cultural imperialism on Christians, Muslims and Jews in this country. I want to share an academic definition of “cultural imperialism” because I am sure many members of the House probably are not used to hearing that term to describe what the Liberal Party is attempting to do to citizens of our country. This definition comes from EBSCO, a research database. Published in 2024, the definition reads: Cultural imperialism refers to the imposition of one culture's values, beliefs, and practices over another, often leading to the erosion of the latter's unique cultural identity.... It manifests through various mediums, including education, religion, and media, where dominant cultures often shape and redefine the social and ethical frameworks of less dominant societies.... Cultural imperialism causes changes that are usually faster than would otherwise occur, and in a direction that benefits those from the dominant or influencing culture. The faster pace can mean that the changes have a destabilizing effect on other aspects of the culture, and the association of the changes with benefits accruing to members of the dominant culture, taken together mean that one party is benefiting from actions that are harmful to others. I share this definition to provide some context for what I believe the Liberal Party is doing right now. It has been in power for over a decade and has tried its very best to exercise influence over every institution in this country. It has abused the power of the federal government to impose its values, beliefs and practices on as many institutions in our country as it possibly can. Today we see evidence of that through Bill C-9 and the Liberal effort to amend Bill C-9, an effort to exercise that cultural imperialism over churches, mosques and synagogues. I have provided an academic definition of cultural imperialism, but I would also like to provide a pop culture reference. In the hit song from last year, Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, Lamar uses some language to describe colonial thinking, in his diss track to Drake. He says: ...you not a colleague, you a...colonizer That is precisely what the Liberal Party is attempting to do to Christians, Muslims and Jews in this country. Liberals are not treating the diverse communities of our country with any degree of respect. They are not treating them like colleagues, listening to them, working with them and respecting their traditions and faiths. Instead they are behaving like colonizers, attempting to abuse state power to exercise undue influence by attempting to criminalize things that families in this country have believed in since the very founding of this nation by the English and the French. The Liberals will make, of course, as they have made throughout this morning and afternoon, efforts to characterize our concerns over the legislation as theatrics, but I bring it back to the actual language used by the now Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who was promoted by the Prime Minister after he made the following comments. As chair of the justice committee, on October 30, he said that three books of the Bible, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, are hateful. The minister used the language of hate to describe verses in the Bible that people have prayed over, read to their children and shared in communities all across this country for a very long time. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which the Liberal Party pretends, and I emphasize “pretends”, to care about, enshrines the right to religious freedom precisely as a sign of respect for the fact that there are things the government should not have its fingerprints on. The government should not make its way into churches, mosques and synagogues in an effort to bring Liberal values, nor use the criminal justice system to enforce Liberal values on the private religious lives of Canadian citizens, but that is precisely what a colonizer would do. That is precisely what a cultural imperialist would do. They would look at churches, mosques and synagogues and ask how the federal government can make its way in there. It is wrong, it is unethical and it is against the traditions of this country. It is an insult to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. One thing I have observed in the relatively short time I have been a member of Parliament is that the Liberal Party does something that I do not know what to name; perhaps it is mind games or false presentation. It is making an effort to convince Christians, Muslims and Jews of various cultural backgrounds that they respect them. The Liberals make an effort to show they want to hear them and welcome them into Canadian politics. I have seen with my own eyes Liberals in the Toronto area running around at cultural events and holidays, eating samosas and jerk chicken and pretending they respect people from diverse community backgrounds. They run around offering people DEI slogans like “Diversity is our strength.” They say all kinds of funny things, like “diversity, vote for me”. I know the kind of attitude they bring around our communities. What do they do when they come to Ottawa? They want to culturally imperialize the people of this country and their children. They actually have no respect for diversity at all, and any Christians, Muslims, or Jews whose ancestors come from any part of the world must be able to unite in recognizing that the Liberal Party has no respect for our religions, our traditions or our values. The Liberals believe that the federal government is superior to us, and they believe they have the right to impose their values on our churches, mosques and synagogues. When we talk about the language of colonizers and cultural imperialists, we have to recognize that when they attack scripture, when they attack the Bible, when they attack our religions and when they try to justify bringing the criminal justice system into our places of worship, they are trying to strip away the things that make us well-rounded people. To them we are simply economic inputs. We should have no culture. They believe we should have no meaning in our lives. They offer us nihilism. They offer us the chance to be a column on a spreadsheet used to calculate GDP. That is all they think of us and of the efforts we make to be well-rounded people, to be part of a community, to believe in something, to have conviction and to be connected to the traditions of our fathers, our mothers, our grandfathers and our grandmothers. They ridicule and they insult. They call it hateful to believe that we come from something. However, we stand on the shoulders of giants who sacrificed for us to be here. They sacrificed for us to have the life we have today, and we will not denounce the very people who have made our lives possible. We will not denounce the cultures and traditions they come from. We will not sit here quietly and idly while the Liberal Party seeks to call our ancestors hateful. We will not accept that. We will reject their cultural imperialism. We will call them colonizers when they behave like colonizers. In closing, I will suggest that one of the reasons the Liberals denigrate Canadian history, one of the reasons they keep the Canadian flag at half-mast for a year, and one of the reasons they support teaching our children in this country that our country should be ashamed of its own history, is that they are embarrassed by what they see in the mirror. They have not learned the lessons from history, and they repeat the mistakes made in history of colonizing and imperializing over other people.

Mr. Speaker, I do not pretend to know anything about the member for Kingston and the Islands other than what he shows me when I show up to work. What I see when I show up to work is a man with no respect for Christians, Muslims and Jews in this country and a man who supports efforts by the Liberal Party to colonize and imperialize people—

Mr. Speaker, I talked about Liberal colonizers and Liberal imperialists, just to clarify the record. To my colleague from Quebec, what I would say is that the Bloc Québécois has represented their efforts here in this chamber as pushing back on the encroachment of the federal government. In this situation, with Bill C-9 and the amendment, the Bloc Québécois is actually asking the federal government to have more power over the lives of Quebeckers and all Canadian citizens. I would think that would be an area where the Bloc Québécois and Conservatives would agree: no abuse of federal state power.

Mr. Speaker, what is uniting faith leaders and faith communities across Canada is concern that we have a Liberal federal government right now that does not understand the boundaries over its own power. Instead of being humble enough to recognize that people who are sick or struggling in communities across our nation rely on churches, mosques and synagogues as a source of support and strength, the Liberal government instead looks at these institutions and wonders how it can exercise more state power over every function of our lives and communities. It is wrong, and it must be opposed.

Mr. Speaker, I stand today to provide some perspective on the Liberal government's 2025 federal budget and its implementation. I have had the chance to speak with many of my constituents in Bowmanville—Oshawa North, and with Canadians across our country, to gather feedback on the vision for the future of Canada that is expressed by the Liberal government in the budget. I want to start with one of the signature items in the budget that we have heard Liberal members mention here in the chamber on many occasions as a point of pride. They mention it as a statement of progress, but the reality is that it is a huge red flag for what kind of economy the Liberal Prime Minister is intending to build. They mention the national school food program and the fact that they are introducing it as a permanent feature of the federal government, as a positive thing. They are even clapping now, showing how out of touch they really are. They say that they want to fund this for years to come, yet the concern that many Canadians have is that they do not want to be dependent on the federal government to feed their children. What they want to see from the federal government are efforts to bring down the cost of food. It is a fact that parents are having a tougher time affording food. It is a fact that, over the last decade, the cost of food has skyrocketed year to year. It is a fact that keeping up with grocery bills and other bills is a huge source of stress for Canadian families, as food bank lines get longer every month. In this situation, Canadians expect to see the federal government do everything in its power to bring down the cost of groceries. We saw in the lead-up to the budget that the Liberals were actually quite insincere in promising to work with other parties to solve our country's problems. In the lead-up to the budget, Conservatives provided multiple proposals for how the cost of food could be brought down, including proposals that would remove needless taxes on Canadian agriculture and food packaging, taxes that are passed on to the Canadian consumer at the grocery store. The Liberals did not want to work with us, and they did not want to adopt any of those proposals, which is their right. If they want to be obstructionist, that is a choice that they get to make here every day. There were other institutions in this country that also offered policy ideas to bring down the cost of food, such as Canada's Competition Bureau, which has been recommending for years that the federal government increase competition in the grocery industry to lower the cost of food. Of course, the Liberal budget did not include any references to that either. Instead, what did we get? We got a vision for the future of Canada by the Liberal Prime Minister that makes it clear that bringing down the cost of food is not their objective. In fact, what they want to do is normalize the idea that moms and dads cannot afford food for their own children and instead require government assistance in order to do that. We should all be alarmed by that because, for years and years, decades and decades, throughout our history, the federal government knew that its purpose was to create the conditions for families and communities to thrive, so that parents could buy their own food and provide food to their own children. What we have seen from the federal government is a significant shift in another direction, a shift away from that primary responsibility and instead toward the idea that families and communities need the government's help because the economy is so unaffordable. This is not what a healthy society is supposed to look like. In a healthy society, families and communities are independent enough from the government that if they do not like what the government is doing, they can very easily tell the government to kick rocks. That is not the vision for Canada that the Liberal Prime Minister articulates in his federal budget. In fact, the logic of the Liberal government was betrayed by the Liberal member for Vancouver Centre, when she criticized Conservatives by saying that we believe that “parents would prefer to feed their kids themselves rather than have the government feed them.” That is true. We do believe that. We believe that the vast majority of moms and dads across the country feel the exact same way. The vision that the Liberals are articulating is not one of compassion. It is one of dependence. They have sold the national school food program and its permanency as a compassionate and noble idea. Let us continue to explore this vision for the future of Canada expressed by the Liberal Prime Minister in his budget. He says he wants to be compassionate. I would ask why then in this document, which is hundreds of pages, does the word “addiction” appear once? Why in the midst of an addiction crisis that is harming families all across this country, harming people of all generations and destabilizing our communities would a compassionate government, as the Liberals say they are, pay such little attention to such a crisis? I would argue it is because the Liberals are frankly not as compassionate as they would like us to believe. In fact, the one time they do mention addiction in their federal budget, they make a point to say that the federal transfers to provinces to deal with this issue will remain the same over the next several years, which means, even though we have a piling amount of evidence that the addiction crisis is getting worse, they actually offer no new money for this. This has been a very serious issue in my community of Bowmanville—Oshawa North. As I visited young people across this country, it is one of the top issues I heard from students because they all know somebody who has been affected by the addiction crisis. We have seen, since January 2016, over 53,000 opioid toxicity deaths. In the first three months of this year, over 1,300 people died because of opioid overdoses, yet in a budget that shows the vision for this country, the federal government has decided to pay very little attention, offering no new resources and no vision for how we will help our friends and neighbours overcome their challenges. That is not what compassion looks like, so forgive me for calling their bluff when they say they care a lot and are leading with their hearts because, in a budget that increased the federal deficit annually to over $80 billion, they could not spare a single extra penny for this problem. Let us further explore the Liberals' vision for the future of Canada, because the Liberal Prime Minister also presented his 2025 federal budget as if it is about sovereignty, strength and nation building. That is what the Liberals say, yet we see, snuck into the budget on page 100, a very interesting and, for many people across our country, alarming idea. It states, “The government will also consider options for the privatisation of airports.” That is critical public infrastructure that a truly sovereign and strong country would take very seriously, yet the Liberal government sneaks in the idea of selling it off to private interests as one line in the budget, hoping that, in the hundreds of pages, people probably will not pay enough attention. They certainly did not mention that when they asked Canadians to vote for them in April. The Liberal Minister of Transport received a letter from the national president of Unifor expressing concern over this idea, concern I have also heard from many of the unionized workers who I am proud to represent in Bowmanville—Oshawa North. In that letter, the president of Unifor wrote, “Canada's airports are vital economic hubs and public assets. They require public investment and democratic stewardship, not divestment to private interests.” Once again, the claims by the Liberals that they are concerned with sovereignty and strength are betrayed in the 2025 federal budget. I look forward to seeing the Liberal Minister of Transport respond to that letter and explain to the Canadian people what exactly the government means by considering privatizing critical public infrastructure. My point remains that, as we explore the vision articulated for the future of our country, it is not what the Liberals have honestly presented. In fact, it is an alarming one, one where affordability is not resolved. Their vision is one where more families are dependent on the government to feed their children. It is a vision where the addiction crisis does not get the attention it deserves. It is a vision where big issues like the privatization of public infrastructure are mentioned as throwaway ideas by a government misrepresenting itself as being concerned with our sovereignty and our strength. This is why I oppose the federal budget and why we should all be very concerned about its implementation.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member opposite's continuing to affirm that we are correct when we say the Liberal government does not have a vision for the strength and independence of communities and families. Rather, it continues to present federal government dependency as a solution to the very economic problems that have been created under Liberal leadership over the last decade. One would think that the member just showed up but, as he mentioned, he has been a politician since 1988. I was a one-year-old when he first got elected. With every problem that has been created in the last decade, the government positioned itself as a solution, not seeing the irony in this vicious, weird cycle and vortex of bad public policy.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to plug the fantastic work done by food banks in my home community of Bowmanville—Oshawa North. The Clarington East Food Bank, the Salvation Army food bank and the St. Joseph's food bank, are full of great volunteers committed to making sure that the problems created in our economy by bad stewardship and bad leadership here in Ottawa can be resolved by the wonderful charity and hard work of wonderful people in my community.

Mr. Speaker, the member for Oshawa serves her constituency incredibly well. We have a very serious unemployment problem in our part of the country, and this is also affecting all parts of the country. We also have a very serious youth unemployment problem. I want to stress to everyone listening in the House that I speak to young people all the time. They see what is happening. They work hard. They go to school. They hope to have a career and a future, to own a home, start a family, start a business or do whatever they want to do for whatever their dreams are, yet they are constantly seeing evidence that it is only going to get harder. In the 2025 federal budget, we see an out-of-touch government thinking that young people want to see more state dependency as a solution to their problems. However, they want to thrive as independent people.

Mr. Speaker, Liberals have banned the vast majority of nicotine pouches for sale in Canada, despite the fact that many Canadians use these products to help quit smoking. Canadians just want to go to the corner store, the gas station or wherever cigarettes are sold and choose an alternative product. Even the Neighbourhood Pharmacy Association of Canada agrees. When will the Liberals do the right thing? When will the Liberals free the Zyn?

Mr. Speaker, the very same government that likes to push so-called safe supply drugs into our communities now wants to point out nicotine as a problem for adult usage. Health Canada set a target for 2035 to reduce the number of Canadians smoking to less than 5%. The government should have no excuses for making alternatives to cigarettes available wherever cigarettes are sold, such as corner stores, gas stations, wherever. The question remains. When will the Liberals do the right thing? When will they free the Zyn?

Mr. Speaker, today, we have thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young Canadians who have done exactly what they were asked to do. They went to school. They studied hard. They gave their best effort on the promise that, at the end of all that, they would be able to get a job and start a career. What they are experiencing right now is a broken promise by their government. They are experiencing a job market that is lacking in jobs and opportunities. In fact, many are feeling overwhelmingly anxious right now when they think about what their future holds. It is heartbreaking to see and hear, and many of us in the House see and hear that from our constituents on a regular basis. For me, in Bowmanville—Oshawa North, I hear that very often from students at Durham College and Ontario Tech who have worked very hard and gotten good grades. They really should be feeling excited about what awaits them, yet they are anxious every single day. We know the unemployment crisis facing young people, where we have 460,000-plus Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 looking for work, has exacerbated many of the issues young people are already facing in this country. Boys and young men in particular are disproportionately shouldering a burden for very many social and cultural problems right now, including opioid overdoses, suicides and homelessness. They are victims of violent crime and dropping out of high school. The unemployment crisis makes all of those things even worse. I myself was once a young man struggling in the school system, labelled illiterate by the Ontario public schools for failing a literacy test in grade 10. I know for a fact that if not for the chance to work, I might have never finished high school and I might not be standing here right now. For years, I found work in restaurants, at Red Lobster and other places, working as a dishwasher or a line cook. It was not glamorous at all. Scraping seafood off pots and pans is not the stuff people dream about doing one day, but the skills I learned, the personal attributes I gained from working at night made up for all the things I was not able to learn and do during the day in a classroom. When we see these statistics about young people not having jobs, it is more than just not having a paycheque every week or every two weeks; it is also a sign of young people being robbed of the personal development and growth that is necessary for the future leaders of our country. The research is very clear on this: when one works as a young person, they learn things they might not learn anywhere else in their life. They learn responsibility, time management and conflict resolution. They learn how to be responsible for other people, how to work as a team, social skills and personal development that is essential, personal development that, when it is lacking, becomes a problem for all of us, because we all depend on the young people of today to be leaders for our country in the future. I have been worried for quite some time that young people would internalize the bad economy created as a result of 10 years of Liberal policy, and they would blame themselves for the lack of opportunity in front of them. I have worried for a long time that young people would think they had made mistakes or think they had made the wrong choices and that is why they are struggling in the economy right now. This is one of the reasons I have been visiting university and college campuses across Ontario and soon the rest of the country. It is precisely to hear them out and hear what is going on, what is weighing on their hearts and their minds, but also to deliver a very clear message: It is not their fault. In fact, the economy they see before them right now is a result of a series of bad choices and bad policies made by people in positions of power. Liberal politicians, corporate bigwigs on Bay Street and bureaucrats here in Ottawa have consistently put the interests of the next generation of leaders in this country on the back burner to serve all sorts of, frankly, bizarre ideological agendas. Young people need to know this, because we do not want young people to feel discouraged and demoralized. We want them to know that better choices are possible, a better future is possible and, in fact, how we get to that better future, in many ways, can depend on their being involved in our democracy and our political process and their gaining the ability to be leaders in this country to make decisions for our institutions that would be forward-thinking and not backward-looking. I believe that when we talk about the choices made by people in positions of power, it is helpful to be specific. Here today, we have heard about some of the policies that have been enacted by the government for the last decade that have held back our economy from the necessary growth required for young people to have jobs and careers. We have heard about the anti-resource policies, high taxes and heavy red tape. We have heard also about the fact that the labour market has been completely misaligned, not just at the post-secondary level but also when it comes to immigration policy. When I visit university and college campuses, I hear that young Canadians across this country know that small tinkering at the edges of the status quo is far from enough to create the changes necessary for young people to be optimistic and hopeful about their future. Small programs and small policy changes by a government that is pretending right now that it is different from what this country has had for the last decade are simply not going to get the job done. Young people know that real, serious, substantive changes are required and there may be no better example of that than immigration policy. We saw here in this very chamber, just a few hours ago, the Liberal government once again double down on irresponsible and unsustainable immigration policy, creating a new system of unlimited chain migration; doubling down on the very policies the Liberals pretend they want to fix. When the time comes to exercise their power to fix the system they have broken, they continually fail and demonstrate that they have learned nothing from 10 years of breaking an immigration system that was once heralded as the envy of countries around the world. This very day, just hours ago, the Liberals once again voted for Liberal immigration policies, not knowing and not being able to answer to the people of this country how many new people would be entering this country as a result of this legislation. Young people know very clearly, because they have eyes and they have ears, that things have changed dramatically in this country and they feel it every time they apply for a job. They can see that we have too many people, not enough houses; too many people, not enough jobs; and too many people, not enough public services. They are being asked to turn a blind eye to the reality they see in front of them every day and pretend that the government has their best interests in mind, which is simply not true. I have encountered, on these college and university campuses, people from across the political spectrum, some who voted for us in the last election, some who did not; some who vote regularly and some who have never voted before. However, the common thread among the students with whom I have spoken, a thread that I wish were visible here in the House of Commons, is an understanding that change is required and the status quo simply is not working. Young people are bearing the brunt of failed policy for over a decade and they are asking for something new. They are asking for something different. When we talk about youth employment, job losses and what is happening to the next generation of leaders in this country, we are talking about the need for change. I mean real change; I do not mean changing the leader of a party and pretending that it is a new government.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member opposite for demonstrating precisely my point earlier, which is that young people across this country are hungry for a political movement and a government that are forward-looking, yet we see quite clearly from the Liberals that they are still looking at the past. They are unwilling to accept any responsibility for 10 years of mismanaging this country and its economy. Instead, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still occupying their psyche. It is disturbing. The years the member is talking about are times when I was a student working at Red Lobster, yet we are trying to talk about how we plan for the future of young people today. I look forward to seeing the member at the national forum to end Liberal racism, on November 17.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is precisely right. He has observed the same thing as I and many people across our country have, which is that the Liberals refuse to take any responsibility for their own policies. They have been in government for over a decade, yet when they speak, one would think they had showed up just yesterday. They take no responsibility. They cannot even have any degree of humility to apologize to the young people in this country for what they have done to their opportunities and for what they have done to the economy in which young people are now entering the labour market. I would love to see some humility, and I know I am not the only one. Many Canadians would love to see some humility from the Liberals. Unfortunately it is not their strong suit.

Mr. Speaker, the reality is this: There are jobs that traditionally and historically were an entry point for young people to join our economy, to earn their first paycheque, to learn their skills, to find a place where they belong and, from there, to grow in all sorts of different directions. The temporary foreign worker program, over the course of decades, became a way to deny young people jobs they ordinarily would have, to pay people a cheaper wage. That is the reality, and anyone who goes to a Tim Hortons across this country will see the evidence of it themselves. It is important for the economy to be tied to the young people in this country. It is important for Canada's economy to see its health as tied to the health of our young people, but when large corporations can bypass our young people and bring in people from elsewhere to occupy entry-level positions, it drives down the wages of young people and divorces our economy from young people.