Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to get up and close things off today. I am looking forward to a good discussion here that is beneficial to the people of Canada, particularly the people of Northumberland—Clarke.
I rose on June 9 to ask a question with respect to housing. I said, “In 2015, housing costs were an average of 38% of Canadian household budgets. Today, it is overwhelming. It is 52%.” This is a dramatic increase upward of over 20%. We are now sitting here in a housing crisis, which continues.
The housing crisis, in some ways, has actually worsened, because we are now seeing people who are facing the renewal of their mortgages, and they cannot afford to stay in their houses. We are seeing an uptake in foreclosures and power of sales, and that has a devastating impact on many families across Canada. However, at the same time, we are seeing people lose equity in the value of their house. We have a problem that, really, only Liberals created. There are people who cannot afford to keep their house, people who cannot afford to buy a house and people who are seeing a decline in the value in their house all at the same time.
The heart of this issue comes down to some fundamental economic issues that have arisen over the last 10 years. We have seen an incredibly bad economy over the last 10 years. If members do not believe me, they can just ask the Prime Minister. In his speech, he talked about how bad the economy has been managed over the last 10 years and how badly his party has done. It almost reads like a Monty Python skit with the former minister of industry now being the Minister of Finance. The one who helped direct us into this economic quagmire has been put in charge of the future, and somehow this is supposed to be a new government, a government that has woken up. I agree with some of the Prime Minister's criticism of the past 10 years, because there can be no doubt, what we need is a new direction where people can afford houses again.
I will run through a couple of the economic numbers in case people out there are unaware of just how challenging the economy has become over the last decade. We had the third-lowest growth in the OECD among 30 nations, dropping well below the OECD average. In fact, GDP per capita, which is simply the economic output per person, has dropped to almost 0% over the last 10 years. It has really been an economic lost decade, which has put Canadians in a position of earning less and things costing more. At the end of the day, it is not the amount of money we print, it is how many goods we produce and how efficiently. In Canada, we have seen a market loss relative to the rest of the world, which has created an economic nightmare where people are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, everything from food to housing.
Now, we have an entire generation that has nearly given up on the hope of owning a house. What is this Prime Minister's response? He says that we have to make sacrifices. Well, why does he not make some sacrifices? Why does he not donate the billions of dollars he has invested in Brookfield and other countries? Why does he not make some sacrifices instead of telling our young people, “Well, we know you can't afford houses, suck it.” This is his response to them. We need to do better.
When will this government finally wake up, change direction and make housing affordable again?