Canada has lost tens of thousands of jobs since April and now has the worst 30-year productivity outlook among advanced economies. GDP per capita briefly rose after the 2025 election but fell again, and most Canadians say their lives aren't better than a decade ago.
We've lost net 8,000 jobs since Prime Minister Carney took over, right, in April.
80,000. 80,000. Yeah, over the, over the course of the summer, 80,000.
Let's take just the first metric, GDP per capita.
Yeah.
As soon as Justin Trudeau was elected in 2025, you know, you see GDP per capita going up and then going back down.
It tells you the picture of how you're doing. And what's worse about the GDP per capita, we've got the worst outlook for the next 30 years of any of those advanced economies. So we've got a really, really big problem, you know, in terms of our own, uh, our own productivity and reducing— frankly, as a country, you're juicing the GDP number with— well, with immigration as well. You can ask anyone, is your life better today than it was 10 years ago? And the answer is no.
I try to think, I try to steelman my opponent. And are these people just dumb? Like, if you— like, what are they doing that's wrong that they think they're doing right? Like, what is going wrong here?
I think it's a worldview that's just very different than, well, mine or yours or one that makes sense in my estimation. Like, government can't be the answer to everything. It can't actually even be the answer to anything. You don't have an economy that's going to be productive and fast-paced, you know, if the government is the sole investor. Government doesn't know how to do stuff. Like, I mean, it's that simple. Like, if you've ever had to try to get a passport or try to get anybody on the phone at CRA and like, I make— I use these examples because they're constant examples in my own office on a daily basis. Like, why on earth would you want government doing those things for you? And fundamentally, that's the, you know, that's the difference of view. And then when you make government so bloated and so fat and so excessive and it does things that it never had core competencies or did before, well, then it becomes very hard to remove government from all of those things. And that's what we saw. You know, we saw this. We talked a little bit around the time of the pandemic and we saw sort of the creep of of government getting bigger, and when government gets bigger, it's impossible to shrink.
