Parliamentary Speeches

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for her question. Once again, I can see that the Bloc Québécois wants the federal government to be more involved in the health sector. This is another example of how the Bloc Québécois often wants more federal intervention in areas under provincial jurisdiction. I think the provinces should be able to spend their own money without federal interference, and I believe in provincial autonomy. The governments that are closest to the people are the ones that should have the most power.

Madam Speaker, what she is seeing is the consequence of the government's policies. The Bank of Canada has purchased $300 billion worth of government debt. The government's deficit is $356 billion. In other words, about 85% of all the borrowing the government has done in the last year has simply been generated by the Bank of Canada. That has increased the money supply by 20% and has driven up the costs of food, fuel and housing for the seniors who live in her riding. While this has been very good news for the very wealthy, who have watched their financial and real estate assets explode in value because of all this printing, it has been very bad news for the poor and the working class.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the first report of the Standing Committee on Finance, presented on Tuesday, February 16, 2021, be concurred in. The Prime Minister is spending Canada's tomorrow on his today. Here we are, with another record-breaking deficit. In fact, in the last two years alone, the government will have added roughly half a trillion dollars to Canada's national debt. With the fiscal program laid out, we will see the Prime Minister having added more debt than all of the previous prime ministers going back to Confederation combined. The Prime Minister might take delight in the present-day experience of all of his spending. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, and that is why they call it a present. He might not worry about what is to come. He might say the mystery of tomorrow will find out its answers when we get there. How can we predict what all of this debt will mean tomorrow? The only way to see into the future is to look to the past. Let us look at the example of the most prescient, prophetic political leader of all time: Winston Churchill. In the early 1930s, he predicted World War II while most were blind to German aggression. In 1946, while most still believed that they could maintain the wartime pact with Stalin well into the post-war period, he arrived at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and gave his famous “Iron Curtain speech”, predicting the Cold War that would define the following half century. Not only that, but in Maclean's magazine in 1931, he wrote some very prescient language about technology, with which we can all relate today. He said: Wireless telephones and television, upon their present path of development, would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly installed and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in through the window. The congregation of men in cities would become superfluous.... There would be no more object in living in the same city with one’s neighbor than there is today in living with him in the same house. The cities and the countryside would become indistinguishable. Now, as we are all entering the Zoom world, where people are living in the countryside and doing work that was formerly done congregated together, we can see the incredible prophecies of Winston Churchill, who predicted everything that we would call today the iPad, the smart phone, the Zoom and the Skype. How did he make these kinds of predictions 90 years before they would happen? The answer is, as he put it when he advised young people at one commencement ceremony, study history, history, history. He wrote 52 volumes of Nobel Prize-winning literature, almost all of it on history. He said there was a methodology for seeing the future. Here is what he wrote it would be: There are two processes which we adopt consciously or unconsciously when we try to prophesy. We can seek a period in the past whose conditions resemble as closely as possible those of our day, and presume that the sequel to that period will, save for some minor alterations, be repeated. Secondly, we can survey the general course of development in our immediate past, and endeavour to prolong it into the...future. In other words, look back in order to see forward. We can do the very same thing about economics. Thankfully, Dr. Rogoff and Dr. Reinhart from Harvard University have condensed 800 years of financial and debt history into five leading indicators for a forthcoming debt crisis. Do they apply to Canada? I will quickly go through them. One is declining output. Last year, our GDP dropped $120 billion, check. Two is large and sustained current account deficits. That means we buy more from the world than we sell to the world. We have had that for the last five years as well, amounting to $300 billion of current account deficits, check. Third is asset price inflation. Anybody who has tried to buy a house lately knows we have that. House prices are up somewhere around 25% in the same year when the income with which our economy buys those houses has dropped. In fact, Toronto and Vancouver are two of the most expensive housing markets on planet earth, two of the 10 most expensive, to be precise, so yes, we have asset price inflation, check. The next thing we have is rising household leverage. We have $1.75 of debt for every dollar of take-home pay, which is the highest ratio in the G7, and a near record in Canadian history, check. Finally, there is a rise in overall debt across the economy, which I think we can all agree is true. Last year, the deficit was equal to 17% of GDP, which is the largest single deficit we have ever had outside of the Second World War. In fact, as a share of GDP, it is twice the size it was in World War I, three times the size it was in the Great Depression and four times the size it was in the great global recession. The only time it was ever bigger was in the middle of the Second World War, when we were fighting imperial Japan, the Nazis and the Mussolini's fascists. Other than that period, we have experienced record levels of debt increase in this short period of time. Therefore, we have the fifth and final leading indicator based on historical experience of a forthcoming debt crisis, according to these two distinguished economists who have done exhaustive research, case by case over eight centuries. All five of those rules are checked in this case. Some will say that this time is different. This time we will be able to break all of the rules of public finance and have nothing go wrong because we have Skype. We have new technology, and we have Twitter. We can do all the things that were mathematically impossible throughout all of history. This time it is different. It turns out that Reinhart and Rogoff named their book This Time Is Different because, every single time there is a debt crisis, in the years leading up to it, politicians say that this time is different. Let me quote them: The essence of this-time-is-different syndrome is simple. It is rooted in the firmly held belief that financial crises are things that happen to other people in other countries at other times; crises do not happen to us here and now. We are doing things better, we are smarter, we have learned from our past mistakes. The old rules of valuation no longer apply. Unfortunately, a highly leveraged economy can unwittingly be sitting with its back at the edge of a financial cliff for many years before chance and circumstance provokes a crisis of confidence that pushes it off. We ask ourselves if we are, again, sitting with our backs at the edge of that cliff. As I said at the outset, we need to look back in order to see forward. Have we been here before? It turns out that we have, but they were totally different circumstances. For example, back then, the prime minister's name was Trudeau, and he was running a deficit of 11% of GDP. Right now, we have a Prime Minister by the same name, and he is running a deficit from last year of 17% of GDP. That is totally different. Back then, Pierre Elliott Trudeau sent the Bank of Canada on a money-printing spree to pay for all of his spending, and the money supply, M2, grew by 15%, but now it is totally different. Money supply has only gone up 13% under completely different circumstances. Why do we keep going back to the past like that? Next, back then, federal government spending had gone over the 20% mark. Now it is almost 30%. It is completely different. The government, as a share of the economy, is a third bigger now than it was back then. With all the same ingredients put in the pot, we expect to come away with a different stew. The reality is that history repeats itself. When we do the same things over and over and expect a different result, we are carrying out the very definition of insanity. What happened as a result of the debt crisis of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the early 1980s when he ran deficits of over 10% of GDP, increased the money supply in just one year by 15% and had a federal government alone that consumed more than a fifth of the economy? Well, we had something called “stagflation”, the stagflation crisis of the early 1980s. What was the human cost of that crisis? There were 650,000 more people in poverty by 1984 than were in poverty in 1980, a 25% increase in poverty in just four years. Inflation hit a nearly half-century high of 12% and unemployment hit an all-time high also of 12%. There was an all-time high in interest rates with the bank overnight lending rate hitting 18%. Can the Speaker imagine interest rates of 18%? He is far too young to remember all the way back to that time. When we combine inflation and unemployment, as economists do, they add one to the other to create something called the “misery index”, which is the amount by which consumer prices are rising and the percentage of the people who are without jobs. It reached 24%, again an all-time high. There is something very tragic about a high misery index. When people's costs go up and their salaries go down, their desperation rises and often they end their own misery. In the year 1983, under Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the policies we see replicated now, the suicide rate hit 14.8 per 100,000, the single highest suicide rate in Canadian history before or since. When things get miserable enough, people have a tendency, tragically, to end their misery. We know from economic data around the world that financial crises can be lethal. For one, according to Rogoff and Reinhart, they see a drop in housing prices of one-third, which means people's homes are worth less than their mortgages, meaning they cannot possibly ever pay off their mortgages and must default with enormous losses that cascade across the economy. Because they have no net equity, they cannot find a place to live. Unemployment rises by seven percentage points in the average financial crisis. According to the University of Calgary, in Canada, for every one-percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, we get a two-percentage point increase in the suicide rate. In financial crises that happened across Asia, for example, in 1997, there were 10,000 excess suicides that occurred. In the great global recession, the great recession of the 2008-09 period, there were also another 10,000 additional economic suicides reported by the British Journal of Psychiatry. There is an abundance of scholarly evidence that financial crises destroy not only people's livelihoods, bank accounts and their net worth, but also force many to do the most desperate of deeds, and that is exactly what we need to avoid. History also gives us reason for hope, and let me look back at another part of our history. As I said at the outset, only once in history has the deficit in Canada been bigger than it was last year, and that was in the middle of the Second World War. Our men and women returned from the battlefield having this enormous debt, and what did they do? They immediately worked to pay it off. By 1947, the federal government was running the single biggest budget surplus as a share of GDP in Canadian history: 5% of GDP. That would be the equivalent of a surplus of over $100 billion today were it matched relative to our economy now. As well, from the end of the war to 1973, our economy grew from $12 billion to $128 billion. That is economic growth of 1,000%, literally a 1,000% in the size of our nominal economy. Our ancestors returned from the battlefields and went to the farm fields and factories and unleashed a torrent of production at the same time as they exercised good, responsible management. They had fought for our freedom, and then they returned to fight for our finances, and they basically vaporized the debt. It is true that in this period there was a phenomenal growth in the industrial power of our economic system. New machinery was invented that allowed our factories, our mines, our warehouses and our transportation systems to crank out far more goods and services for our people than ever before, but, happily, the same is now occurring with technology. We are experiencing another industrial technological revolution that can empower the same kind of productive enhancements, but it will take change and it will take an effort to secure our future. We need to unleash the free enterprise system, restore industry and frugality at the same time, so that our incomes can outpace our debts, so that we can replace a credit card economy with a paycheque economy, so that our people can be confident in their ability to pay down their mortgages and our governments to pay down their debts, so that our programs upon which our most vulnerable rely will always have a solid financial footing, and so that our hard-working public servants can continue to draw the salaries that they deserve. This is what it means to secure our future. Unfortunately, we have a government that is focused exclusively on the myopia of the here and now, taking incredible risks as we sit on the edge of this debt cliff. It does not have to be this way, because, just as our history tells us of the folly of the past, it tells us about the hope for the future. We, in this party, will build upon that hope and stand on the shoulders of our ancestors who gave us this mighty and great country and let us keep Canada strong and free.

Madam Speaker, Canada has four dollars of household, corporate and government debt for every dollar of economic output. That is the highest ratio in recorded Canadian history, twice our historic average, higher than the ratio in the U.S. during the subprime crisis or in Greece during that country's sovereign debt crisis. We now show all five leading indicators of a forthcoming debt crisis. Will the budget, which has been delayed for two years, address this forthcoming debt crisis?

Madam Speaker, the government's deficit and the rising debts of households and small businesses is the cost of inaction. It is the result of the terrible job the government did in letting thousands of people enter from China after it was warned by the military of a brewing pandemic. It is the cost of the government's vaccine failure. It is the cost of the late turnaround on rapid testing. The cost of all of that will be a debt crisis. Will the government address the forthcoming debt crisis in the budget, or will we cross that bridge when it collapses?

Mr. Speaker, the government with the worst economic growth since the Great Depression is the one right across the aisle right now, and we are not part of that government. The finance minister said that COVID is a time for epiphanies. The Prime Minister had a strange and, for him, unusual epiphany in his letter to her. He said, “you will avoid creating new permanent spending” in the budget. That is right in the mandate letter. Will the finance minister honour the Prime Minister's letter and avoid all permanent new spending, yes or no?

Mr. Speaker, it is actually the finance minister who revealed she had an epiphany. I guess we are going to learn what was in that epiphany. We already know what was in her mandate letter. The Prime Minister's letter said, “you will avoid creating new permanent spending.” That is necessary because Canada is currently on trajectory for a massive debt crisis if we continue to borrow at this rate. Yes or no, will the finance minister honour the Prime Minister's written word to introduce no new permanent spending?

Mr. Speaker, all we need to know is what the Liberals plan to do with the $600-billion increase to the debt limit. They want to increase the debt limit to $1.8 trillion from the current $1.2 trillion. To put it in perspective, our national debt was only $600 billion a year and a half ago, so they basically want to take the debt to triple what it was not so long ago. That is what the bill does. It allows them to do that, and they think they have no obligation to tell Canadians what they are going to spend all that borrowed money on or how it is ever going to be paid back. The second thing we want to know before passing the bill is how the government is going to avoid leading us straight into a debt crisis. We now have a total public and private debt-to-GDP ratio of almost 400%, the second highest in the G7, higher than 41 of the 45 biggest debt crises in the last century, twice our traditional average and by far a record for our country. This is an enormous debt ratio that we have. We have now ticked all five boxes of leading indicators for a forthcoming debt crisis, and the government comes here with a bill to increase the debt further, by another $600 billion, and expects us to ram the bill through on short notice. We are not going to do that.

Mr. Speaker, that was a tough question, but a fair question. I want to thank my neighbouring member just to the south, who is very well respected as a former mayor. He was actually quite an old man when he became mayor, 22 years old, and here he is, serving on the floor of Parliament. The community loves him, and with good reason. He asks an important question. When we have too much debt, we can “debtonate”, and we are becoming a “debtonation”. Our debt is 400% of GDP. We have a $2.2-trillion economy with $8.6 trillion of household, corporate and government debt. That is a ratio that we have never seen before in this country, and it has increased by almost one-third just in the last five years alone. The only reason we have been able to get away with this much debt is that interest rates have been supernaturally low for an unusually long period of time, and more recently have been driven further by the Bank of Canada printing cheap money and pumping it into the system. However, eventually that comes to an end. If rates rise before debts go down, then we will have a debt crisis. Now is the time to stave that off by replacing our credit card economy with a paycheque economy.

Mr. Speaker, sure, the minister was there to answer questions, except he did not know any of the answers. We asked, for example, why the contract with WE had been backdated more than six weeks; he did not even know that was the case. We asked why it was that they went ahead with the grant after Treasury Board found no evidence that WE could even deliver the program; he did not even know that. He did not know that the Prime Minister's Office had received promotional material from WE with his mother and wife in it. Did they not just send this minister over to the committee because he did not know anything and therefore could not accidentally tell the truth?

Mr. Speaker, we wanted to hear from the minister responsible, not Minister “I don't know”. That is what we got from him. He did not know any of the facts. We asked question after question, and he broke the Guinness Book of World Records for not having answers and, to his credit, openly admitting that he did not know any of the answers. If he does not know any of the answers, can the Liberals send another minister, who can explain why the government gave a half-billion-dollar grant to a group that had paid the Prime Minister's family half a billion dollars?

Madam Speaker, can I just begin, just start speaking? I do not have to fill out a form or get permission from an agency or a department or some other authority? Are we not in Canada here? Do we not need to fill out a form or get permission before we make anything, even if it just making a speech? Well, we need permission for everything else and have to wait an awful long time to get it. According to newly released World Bank data, Canada ranks 36 out of 37 nations for the time it takes to get a building permit. One cannot just go out and build something, create jobs and support one's local economy, one has to wait for the gatekeepers in order to get permission. One does not have to ask the World Bank that, one could just drive 25 minutes from here and ask Tim Priddle, who runs a lumber mill near Manotick. That lumber mill opened a big warehouse about 40 years ago. Guess how long it took to get approved? One week, one form, one stamped document from an engineer; one and done and away we go. That big, beautiful building is still standing safely to this day. Tim wanted to build another warehouse with similar dimensions and doing similar things. This time it took six years and 600 thousand dollars' worth of consultant fees, charges and other obstructions. In fact, he had to hire an arborist to write a report on each little poplar tree he cleared, which was actually just useless ditch brush that had never been used for anything before or otherwise and had not been planned to be used for anything else. It took six years, $600,000 and 1,500 pages of paperwork for him to do that, money he could have spent creating real jobs. He experienced what so many experience in this country: Life behind the gatekeepers. These are the people who are among the fastest-growing industry in the country. They are the bureaucracies, lobbyists, the consulting class, the politicians and the agencies who make their living by stopping other people and charging them excess tolls to do anything positive at all. In fact, the Liberal government personifies the gatekeeper economy. The very first decision it made on taking office was to veto the privately funded expansion of the Toronto downtown island airport, an expansion that would have allowed Porter airlines, a Canadian company, to buy $2 billion of Bombardier jets and land them there, creating jobs for another Canadian company, but also reducing traffic by landing business people in the business district rather than having to travel between Pearson and downtown, adding to pollution and delay and killing jobs. In this case, who were the gatekeepers? Of course the competitor airlines that did not want to add convenience to the customers who would go to the downtown airport if this were approved, and of course the wealthy waterfront condo owners, almost all of them millionaires, and by virtue of their wealth having an excessive amount of political power. They killed all the opportunity for the people who would have worked on that project, the customers who would have saved time and the people who now have to sit on the roadways between a distant airport and a downtown destination. Not far from there are some more gatekeepers in a place called Cabbagetown. This is a well-off community, a leafy neighbourhood with beautiful old Victorian brick houses. Along came an entrepreneur who said that a day care would go well on a street corner in a very large brick building. It had enough space for 80 kids to go to that day care. He was prepared to put all of his own money in it and did not need a cent from the government. Suddenly, the uber-progressive, wealthy elite Cabbagetowners who were against this construction rose up in protest. One man said, “This is standard-issue capitalism run amok.” This man, it turned out, was a mining executive. Columnist Chris Selley actually called him a “Marxist mining executive”, hilariously. One can imagine this gentleman trying to get a mine approved if he thinks that a day care is “standard-issue capitalism run amok”, but I guess mines are in someone else's neighbourhood. Another neighbour said that this is a slippery slope for this iconic neighbourhood. What next, a playground, children laughing? One other person complained about the noise. One lady said that these kids will be walking within two metres of her house, and she signed her submission with “Ph.D.” Quiet, children, there is a genius at work in that house. Another signatory was a gentleman named Tiff Macklem. He happens to be the Governor of the Bank of Canada, who has been lecturing Canadians on the need for taxpayer-funded day cares, the same kind of day cares that he made a submission to the City of Toronto to try to block. This is typical of the progressive left. They want government to block the provision of a service, and then they claim that the government needs to provide that service directly. However, it is not just day cares, airports and lumber mills. It is more essential than that; it is the houses in which we live. A C.D. Howe report produced recently showed that government barriers add between $230,000 and $600,000 per single detached unit of housing in this country. While the government brags that it is spending $70 billion of taxpayer money on housing, governments are blocking the very construction of that housing. I want everyone to think about how insane it is that we live in one of the least densely populated nations on planet earth. There are only four Canadians for every square kilometre in this country, and yet we have some of the most expensive real estate. There are more places in Canada where there is no one than there are places where there is anyone, and yet Vancouver is the second and Toronto is the sixth most expensive housing market in the world when we compare median income to median housing price. It is more expensive than New York, more expensive than L.A., more expensive than London, England and more expensive than a tiny island nation called Singapore. All of these places are vastly more populated and even less expensive to live in. Why? It is because while our central bankers print money to goose demand, our local governments block the construction and, therefore, constrain supply. With demand up and supply down, the price rises. It is pretty straightforward. What are the consequences? It is good for the rich. For those who already own a mansion, they are getting wealthier every day because their house price is going up. They can sit back and have rocking-chair money. Their house makes more than they do. However, for those who are poor and cannot find places to live, like the young people who just told a survey that came out today that one-third of them have totally given up on ever owning a house in their life, those people are out in the cold. In Toronto, a social services organization said that 98% of homeless shelter space is occupied. Over 300,000 people in one city are on a waiting list for subsidized housing. There are 10,000 people in that one city who are homeless. A lot of people worry about what happened to the homeless in Toronto during this pandemic. In fact, one carpenter took matters into his own hands. Khaleel Seivwright, a carpenter, said that these people are going to freeze to death because they cannot stay in a shelter where they will catch COVID, so they are out on the street. With his bare hands, he built mini-shelters for them. He put in insulation, a smoke detector, a carbon monoxide detector. He said plainly that this was not a solution; it was just something he was doing to save people's lives until we can finally find a way to house people in this, one of the wealthiest countries on planet earth. What did the city say? It did not say, “We are going to give this guy a hand. Let's give him a round of applause and let's see how we can help him do even better.” No. It did not say, “Boy, this guy is taking action that we should have taken long ago. He is making us look bad. We had better perform better than we have before.” No. It hired lawyers and got an injunction against him. All of a sudden, the one guy who is selflessly trying to help solve the problem caused by city hall and by the bureaucracy is the villain. How typically this is of the story we see in our country. Another poverty fighter is Dale Swampy, the head of the National Coalition of Chiefs, which has as its mandate to fight and defeat on-reserve poverty. That is its mission. It came up with a plan to support a brand new natural resource project that would ship western Canadian energy to the coast where it could be delivered to the fast growing and energy hungry markets of Asia, thus breaking the American stranglehold on our energy exports, creating jobs for steelworkers, energy workers, logistics and transportation workers and delivering $2 billion of wages and benefits to indigenous communities. The CEO of the project was going to be an indigenous person, and 31 of the 40 indigenous communities along the route supported it. That is more than 75%. The environmental agency responsible took a look at it. It spent three years, heard from 1,500 witnesses and read 9,000 letters. It reviewed over 100,000 pages of evidence. It went to 21 different communities. It concluded that the pipeline was safe and in the public interest. However, the Prime Minister took office and he killed the project, denying those first nations communities their constitutional right in the charter to be consulted. He did not consult with any of them. What happened? Those indigenous communities lost the $2 billion. Now we are keeping toll. There will be these green jobs that the government will deliver. I asked Mr. Swampy how many of these green jobs had shown up since the pipeline was killed. It was zero, nada, nothing. In fact, he said that the so-called environmentalists did to him what they did to his father's generation 20 or 30 years ago. They came then and campaigned against hunting, trapping and fishing. Once they were done with their politics and they had won their political battle, they were gone. They left behind impoverished communities with less opportunity than they had before. That was the result. One of the gatekeepers who comes to mind is Gerald Butts. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars working for the World Wildlife Fund, which is a supposedly an environmental organization. Instead of spending money on the environment, on preserving wetlands and so forth, it was paying him a multi-hundred-thousand dollar severance for quitting his job and coming to work for the government, where he has helped to block pipelines ever since. We live in a country where we cannot even trade with ourselves. Maybe our friends in the Bloc, who want to create their own separate country, like it that way. I do not know, because we do not even treat our own interprovincial trade the way we treat foreign trade. Someone can be arrested or charged for bringing alcohol across an interprovincial border. I will quote from our Constitution, “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall...be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” That was promised us back in the time of our Constitution, yet to this day someone can be charged for bringing liquor or maple syrup in from another province. They can be charged for working in construction in the wrong province. According to Statistics Canada, the effect of these barriers on trade between Canadian provinces works out to a tariff of about 7%. According to the World Trade Organization, the tariff that Canada charges on foreign imports to Canada is 4%. In other words, we charge 7% on goods that travel between provinces and only 4% on goods that come from abroad. If people order something from Alibaba to be delivered to their doorsteps, it is likely tariffed at a significantly lower rate than if they went and bought a product that was made in their neighbouring province. This is economic hara-kiri that we would punish our own businesses with higher tariffs than we would apply to Chinese businesses that sell within Canada. It raises the question, could we even build the Canadian Pacific Railway today? I am not sure we could. What about our national highway system? Could we build that today? There would be some gatekeeper wanting to block it. If we cannot even transit goods across our borders without some parasitical interest group claiming there needs to be a tariff or regulation keeping it out, why would anybody allow a railway or a highway to be built? Forget transmission lines or pipelines; I am not sure we could get anything done as long as this gatekeeper economy continues to stand in the way. We forget that there was a time when we got things done in this country. This is the country that discovered and isolated insulin, for God's sake, saving the lives of millions of diabetics. We discovered stem cells, which treat cancer and countless other conditions, and have the promise to repair spinal cords and bring sight to the blind. We created a mechanical arm that can go into outer space and move hundreds of thousands of kilograms of weight with a remote control, the Canadarm. We conquered Vimy Ridge. We liberated the Dutch. We fought and succeeded at Juno Beach. Of course, that was at a time when if people said they had been triggered, it did not mean they heard a comment that hurt their feelings. It meant they had been shot at by enemies on the battlefield. That was the generation of that time. We are a country that once had a government that would stand up and lead the world against apartheid. Now we have a government that is too terrified to speak out against the genocide of the Muslim minority in China. We have, today, a country where some people seriously talk about banning local kids' sports organizations from keeping score for fear of hurting the losing team's feelings. This is the country of Paul Henderson, who scored the winning goal in the summit series with less than a minute left to electrify the world and send a signal in favour of freedom and against communism, back in 1972. One day, I believe we will knock down these gates and remove these gatekeepers altogether, to make Canada a place that is the easiest place on planet Earth in which to build a business, the fastest place to get sign-off to build something, the freest place on Earth in which to do commerce, to buy, sell, work, build, hire, take risks and, yes, to even win. How about a budget bill like that?

Madam Speaker, first of all, the member condemns me for talking about municipal obstructions to business, and then he quickly turns his attention to municipal politics in his own backyard. If the member does not understand the relationship between the time it takes for a business to get started and to get anything built in this country, and the finances of the nation, then maybe that is why we are in the mess we are in. If the member does not understand it, yes, actually building permits are federal in nature; anything that crosses interprovincial borders requires a building permit. The Teck Frontier mine and countless other mines that are even within one individual province require federal building permits. There are countless projects, far too many, that require federal sign-off. The fact that the member does not know that or understand the financial impact that is had when these projects are blocked is exactly why we have a $400-billion deficit today.

Madam Speaker, we absolutely have to reduce the burden on all our entrepreneurs, our workers and the Canadian economy. However, I often see a contradiction with the Bloc Québécois. Every time Bloc members rise, they say they do not want to be part of Canada, but they want the federal government to spend more money in Quebec. My personal view is that Quebec should be part of Canada. Every time Bloc Québécois members rise, their goal is to increase their power and the federal government's burden. Only the Conservative Party wants to cut the cost of and power wielded by politicians, bureaucrats and the federal government in this country as it stands. We, the Conservatives, are the ones who want to give the provinces and Canadians more autonomy.

Madam Speaker, that was a fantastic question. Yes, I will make those calls. Every premier should knock down interprovincial trade barriers. I should tell him the good news, though: Alberta has already done it. Alberta knocked down the barriers and does import tariff-free British Columbia wine. Every province should do that and we should let this beautiful British Columbia, Niagara and Nova Scotia wine flow freely right across the land, as the founders of this nation originally envisioned.

Madam Speaker, let us start, of course, at the beginning. In the beginning, this Prime Minister created a program that already existed. That program is called the Canada summer jobs program, and it is a program that lets young people work for charities, small businesses and other organizations that serve the community. The federal government simply reimburses a share of the wages paid to that student employee. Now, the Prime Minister was suddenly hit by a lightning bolt that caused him to think it was necessary to contract out the very same program that had been functioning for so many years, and with such great success, to a group that just happened to have paid his family half a million dollars in speaking fees and expenses. He told us that there was no other way this could have been done. He told us that a bureaucrat in the employment department, the very department that has been running the successful in-house program for decades, concocted this scheme to give the money to this particular organization called WE. The entire government's defence, as the member for Langley—Aldergrove will be saying, as I am splitting my time with him, is that the Prime Minister had nothing to do with any of it. The defence is that a mid-level bureaucrat rammed it all down his throat, and he was suddenly hit with a surprise attack at a cabinet meeting, when he apparently pushed back and said, “Hell no, I'm not giving all this money to my friends. Come back to me in a week and I'll reconsider.” That is the basis of his defence. There is only one problem with this defence and that is the documents. Let us start with correspondence between the WE organization and the Prime Minister's own senior adviser, Ben Chin. Craig Kielburger, the founder of WE, sent Ben a message about the program. The message read, “Hello Ben, Thank you for your kindness in helping shape our latest program with the gov't. Warmly, Craig.” We would think that if Ben actually had no role, and that it was in fact a mid-level employment department bureaucrat who did it all, he would write back and say, “Craig, thanks for the message, but you're being far too kind. I had nothing to do with setting up that program. It was designed by an employment department bureaucrat, with no involvement from the PMO. I wish you well in all of your future endeavours.” However, he did not write that. Instead, he wrote, “Great to hear from you Craig. Let's get our young working!” In other words, he was not for a moment suggesting that the message he got from Craig Kielburger was wrong, but rather, he was validating that it was, in fact, right. If Mr. Chin has nothing to hide and if he played no role in setting up this program, then surely he will have no difficulty coming, as this motion from the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes has proposed, and testifying under oath to explain his lack of involvement in establishing that very program. He would have to be careful because he would be followed by Rick Theis, the Prime Minister's director of policy and cabinet affairs. Mr. Theis is the man who puts things in front of the Prime Minister at cabinet, so he would know if the Prime Minister really did push back on this half-billion-dollar grant to the group that paid off his family. If so, he would be able to answer very specific questions before a parliamentary committee, putting the whole thing to rest. That is exactly what we are proposing in this motion. We are proposing that Mr. Theis come to explain who really set up this program and whether the Prime Minister really did push back on paying off this group that had done so much for his family. What we find instead when we look at Mr. Theis's correspondence with the Kielburgers is that Mr. Theis was actually quite involved in the early stages. I have a quote directly from correspondence from Craig Kielburger to this senior prime ministerial adviser, “Please find attached an updated version of the project plan and budget.... We appreciate your assistance both on timelines for a decision, and, if relevant, potentially assisting with streamlining the contribution agreement.... [W]e would appreciate a list of names with whom to discuss the youth entrepreneurship program to ensure that it's...[ready] for phase-2 recovery...[plans].” In other words, the contribution agreement, which again we were told was not the purview of the Prime Minister's Office but was being handled by a mid-level bureaucrat far away on the other side of the Ottawa River, was in fact being discussed between Mr. Kielburger and Mr. Rick Theis, the top adviser to the Prime Minister. In fact, we have correspondence from Sofia Marquez, a lobbyist for the WE organization. She wrote, “Hi, Rick, Just wanted to let you know that I and, our co-founders Craig and Marc Kielburger are on the line waiting for you. Thank you! Sofia”. To Ms. Marquez, Mr. Theis responded, “Sorry! Joined!” Then began the telephone conversation between the Kielburgers and this second to the top prime ministerial adviser. We are now getting to a summary of the program. It says here that Rick Theis spoke to Craig Kielburger, Marc Kielburger and Sofia Marquez, and according to Mr. Theis, the call lasted for approximately 25 minutes, so it was a substantive conversation. The summary states, “WE Charity raised their ongoing work with ESDC on the [Canada student service grant]”. That is the employment department and the half-billion-dollar grant. It continues, “as outlined in the attached document, and a proposal for a social entrepreneurship. Mr. Theis asked WE how what they are proposing for the [student service grant] would ensure diversity of placements. The Kielburgers expressed concern that this type of program would need to get off the ground soon. At no point were expenses discussed, nor any commitment, assurances or advice given by Mr. Theis to WE on any subject, other than to contact the ESDC.” That is Mr. Theis's claim. It took 25 minutes for Mr. Theis to tell them not to ask him, but to ask ESDC because he has nothing to do with this. How long does it take to say to call someone else because they have the wrong number? They spoke for 25 minutes on May 5, during which time, as is documented here, the Kielburgers were in a rush to get the money flowing. Do members know what happened? On May 5, their expenses became eligible for taxpayer reimbursement. It was a total coincidence that this 25-minute conversation was about nothing. They would have us believe that this is a Seinfeld conversation. It was a 25-minute conversation about nothing, except that the Kielburgers asked if they could please hurry up because they wanted to get busy spending all that money promised. What do we know, on that very same day those expenditures became eligible for taxpayer reimbursement. This is a top adviser to the Prime Minister, who had nothing whatsoever to do with setting up this whole affair. It is incredible. These two gentlemen in the Prime Minister's Office would have seen the promotional material that WE circulated in the PMO. Do members know who was in that promotional material? The Prime Minister's mother and wife. By the way, everyone in the PMO, the boss's wife and mother get money from WE. Maybe take that into account when deciding whether to give them some money. I am sure that Mr. Theis was so nice because he knew that the boss's wife and mother were getting paid by the organization with which he was having that 25-minute Seinfeld conversation about nothing. The Liberal government might think a half-billion dollars is nothing. To the working people, to the people who are bagging groceries and serving on the front lines paying taxes throughout this pandemic, half a billion dollars is not nothing. They do not get speaking fees from powerful organizations like WE. They work hard every day for their money, and they deserve answers on what the Prime Minister did with that money. If the government has nothing to fear, if the Prime Minister has any courage, he will support this motion and let us get to the answers.

Madam Speaker, actually, I am glad to have a chance to explain the difference, because back in the Conservative era, we were getting in trouble for giving too much of our money to the government. That was the scandal of Nigel Wright. He wrote a cheque with his own money and gave it to the government. Liberals get in trouble for precisely the opposite reason, which is taking money from the government, or in this case, through third party organizations funded by the government and funnelled to the Prime Minister and his family. Of course, that is the pattern with illegal Liberal law-breaking. SNC-Lavalin had given countless illegal donations to the Liberal Party, which earned it the right, according to the Prime Minister, to avoid criminal prosecution for bribery and corruption. In the case of the Aga Khan island, the Prime Minister took hundreds of thousands of dollars—

Madam Speaker, the member rightly points out all the political involvement, whether it was that minister from Waterloo, who is not a public servant but a politician; whether it was the two PMO staffers I just mentioned, whose fingerprints are all over the set-up of this program; or whether it is Amitpal Singh, who then worked for Bill Morneau. I guess to keep him quiet they moved him into the office of the Deputy Prime Minister after Bill Morneau became Bill “no more”. We have an email transaction from him, an email from Amitpal Singh to Michelle Kovacevic, who is a public servant. We were all told the public servants were just leading the charge to set up this program. This political staffer wrote about connecting them with Sofia, from WE, and about speaking that day about the Canada student service grant and the work ahead of on the national file. In other words, hint hint, nudge nudge, get to work and get these people their money. That is a message from a political staffer. No wonder the bureaucrats at finance said that WE was “besties” with the finance minister at that time.

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister claims that his office had nothing to do with the half-billion-dollar grant to a group that had paid his family half a million dollars. However, there is something about the timeline that does not add up. I have the contribution agreement that gave WE the half billion dollars. It was signed on June 23. However, the Kielburgers got authorization to start spending taxpayer reimbursable money on May 5, six weeks earlier. Did the Kielburgers speak to anybody in the PMO on May 5?

Mr. Speaker, the question was whether or not the Kielburgers spoke to anyone on May 5. They had to have found out somehow they were eligible to spend taxpayer funds on May 5, and it certainly was not from the contract, which was signed by that minister on June 23, unless they have some telepathic abilities. It turns out they do not have telepathic abilities, but they do have a telephone. They spoke to Rick Theis, top adviser to the Prime Minister and cabinet, on May 5, the day they started spending money. Will they let Mr. Rick Theis be nice and testify at committee to answer questions?

Mr. Speaker, for the Prime Minister charity begins at home—his home. In fact, when little children across Canada donated their lunch money, pennies and allowances to help poor kids and develop countries, somehow hundreds of thousands of dollars of that money ended up with the Prime Minister's family. He paid it back, of course, with a half-billion-dollar grant to the WE Charity, but committee information on how much his family got is now contradictory. In writing, the total is $566,000, but in Kielburger testimony, it is $427,000. How much did his family get?

Mr. Speaker, he says he has Canadians' backs. He actually has his hands in their back pockets. The question was whether his family got $427,000, as the Kielburgers claim, or $566,000, as the written documents suggest. Either way, it is a lot of dough. It is real, serious and true dough. The question we want answered is, what did this money have to do with influencing the Prime Minister's decision to give half a billion dollars to this charity? Will he let his staff who were involved in setting up this program testify at the ethics committee so that Canadians can know the truth?

Madam Speaker, I want to share some good news with the House. The Seattle Mariners will host 9,000 fans. They just got approval from Washington State, a very progressive and woke state south of the border, whose ideological inclinations are very similar to the government's. They have signed off on a safe plan, according to that state, to allow 9,000 fans to participate at a major sporting event in Seattle. Simultaneously we got the news that our Toronto Blue Jays are not going to be able to do anything similar. In fact, they put out a statement in which they said, “we had hoped to see improvements in the public health outlook as we neared the baseball season. With the ongoing Canada-U.S. border closure, we have made the difficult decision to play the first two homestands of the 2021 regular season...at TD Ballpark in [Florida]”. The Floridian businesses will get all of the benefit of that major sporting event. It is not just sporting events that are reopening around the world. Australians and New Zealanders are finalizing plans for quarantine-free travel across the border between their two countries. Then there is Taiwan, which has pretty much the lowest COVID mortality rate on planet earth, even though it is right next door to the country from whence COVID originated. The Brookings Institution, a progressive U.S. think tank, stated: Taiwan has managed the spread of COVID-19 far better than most: It suffered only seven deaths among its 23.5 million people in 2020. Except for a few short weeks of lockdown in March last year, life in Taiwan has been normal. Schools, offices, and restaurants have been open as usual, although with temperature screening, hand sanitizing, and social distancing. Live concerts by Yo-Yo Ma and performances of “Phantom of the Opera” have attracted thousands of people into indoor arenas. All of this is happening with seven deaths. It is not seven deaths per 100,000 or seven deaths per million. It is seven total deaths since COVID started in the country right next door. In fact, Canada now has 601 deaths per million; Taiwan has 0.42; Singapore has 5.13; and Australia has 35.6. In other words, even if we just compare Canada to Australia in that group, we have a factor of 20 times higher deaths per capita than they do, and we have among the most severe restrictions on our lives. It is easy to wave one's hand and ask who cares about baseball or artistic conferences or travel between countries, as none of those things are core to human existence, so we ought not worry about the fact that they are still largely eliminated and restricted. However, the reality is they are but symbols of the massive human sacrifice that our people are being forced to make. Not only do we have a ranking of roughly 45 vaccinations per capita, we are ranked 11 out of 15 in the misery index. That is the overall combined misery that we have suffered during the COVID pandemic, according to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. This is not just numbers and statistics. It is human lives. Calls to one suicide prevention line have risen 200% over the last year, reports CBC. That has prompted a Conservative MP from British Columbia to put forward a motion for a single suicide hotline. It is a good idea, but one that we wish we did not have to pursue. We wish there was no need for suicide hotlines, but the University of Calgary has found that for every one percentage point increase in unemployment, there is a two percentage point increase in suicides across Canada. That is the human cost. Let us go not just to suicides, but also to drug overdoses, which have also spiked during the pandemic. They were up 50% in both Alberta and Ontario during the times Canadians were forced to lock themselves down. These statistics reflect what has happened right across the country. Even the chief public health officer, Theresa Tam, wrote, “Statistics Canada found lower life satisfaction among unemployed Canadians and noted that this relationship is about more than just money”. She is pointing out in that statement what Canadians who are suffering lockdown in their homes or are restricted from their jobs have known all along. This is not just a massive $100-billion economic crisis, though it definitely is that. This is not just about a $400-billion deficit, which is by far the biggest in Canadian history. This is about people's human and very real suffering, which has led to higher mortality rates in countless other areas. I think not only of the drug and opioid overdoses, but also of the suffering of seniors, many of whom, in the tragic stories we have all heard, have had to die alone, separated from the loved ones they have known all of their lives. In a message I received recently from a senior, she told me she does not know what she has to live for. She has not seen her grandchild for a year and has not seen some of her children for an equally long time. Many of the activities that she enjoyed doing are now banned, and because she is over 80, she does not know how much time she has left. For someone in that age bracket, time is a precious and shrinking commodity, a reality the government, through its incompetence in managing the COVID situation, has exacerbated day by day. This is the very real human suffering that has resulted from the government's failure to safely protect our country from this pandemic and allow us to go forward and reopen our economy while protecting human lives. For example, I think of our friends in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on the phone at 3 a.m. with the companies responsible for delivering the vaccines. As a result, he was able to deliver more than 100 vaccines for every 100 Israelis, whereas we are now at around five. Tiny Israel, a small country with endless security and economic challenges, surrounded by hostile states, many of which are controlled by terrorists and tyrants, is managing to outperform Canada. Then we can look at the other countries of the world, such as Singapore, a tiny island with no resources, and Taiwan, which is right next door to the origin of the disease. I know the Liberals across the way are thinking that Israel, Taiwan and Singapore are ahead of Canada because they are such advanced countries with which we cannot expect to compete. There was a time when Canada had an advanced economy and was among the best places on earth to do business and deliver the necessities of human life. Sadly, those days are slipping away. I fear that we are accepting slowly, as the frog in the heating water, the “loserdom” the government is bringing us into. We have the highest deficit as a share of GDP in the G20, the worst vaccination rates in the G7 and the highest unemployment rate in the G7. These are the results for Canada. There is almost a quiet acceptance that Canada, a country that used to be the best, can be behind the rest of the world. It used to be that the United Nations would say we were the best place on planet earth to live. We do not hear people talking like that anymore. They now talk about Ireland, which has a GDP per capita that is 70% higher than Canada. That is a country with a fraction of the resources and land of Canada, and nowhere near the geographic advantage we enjoy here. We have to say enough is enough, that we are not going to accept “loserdom” anymore. We as a country should be the best, not just at procuring vaccines and protecting our population, but also at everything else. We have been blessed with more natural advantages than any country on earth and maybe any country in the history of the world. It is time for us to hold ourselves and our government to a higher standard, so we can live up to the expectations we as Canadians had for so long. We need to pass on to the next generation a country that is second to none.

Madam Speaker, of course the member's smear is absolutely false and most of his question was replete with factual errors. I can tell him that of the 2,000 people who came to Canada from the most affected region of China, after the military warned his government of a brewing pandemic in that country, none arrived by truck either. They all got here by plane, unless he is aware of a trans-oceanic bridge that they would have taken. No, they came here because his government left the borders open even after we warned it not to. This member, of all members, should not be lecturing about politicians using numbers with zeroes on them. He regularly brags about how he has a $70-billion housing plan that has been delivered to 10,000 homeless people in his hometown of Toronto. Toronto is now the sixth most expensive real estate market on planet earth, even though we live in one of the least densely populated countries in the world. He has been responsible for housing in that city for the last 15 or 20 years, and with all the money he is proud of spending, he has delivered one of the worst possible results.

Madam Speaker, certainly the Australians, like people in almost every other country in our peer group, undertook practices that we could learn from. Here in Canada, there is no doubt that there was a lack of coordination, but part of it was that the government was spreading dangerous misinformation right from the get-go. The Liberals told us that it would not help, in fact it would harm, if we closed our borders to travel from the affected countries. We later learned that they were wrong, and they now admit they were wrong about that. They actually told Canadians not to wear masks and then they flip-flopped and changed their minds on that. The government's constant dissemination of false and misleading information is one of the core reasons why Canada has had, comparatively, such a poor response to this pandemic, relative to other countries.

Mr. Speaker, when it came to light that the Prime Minister approved a half-billion-dollar grant to a group that had paid his family half a million dollars, he said, “Listen, this thing was just dropped on the cabinet table, and I knew nothing about it.” Is it really believable that the Prime Minister would know nothing about a half-billion-dollar cabinet submission? Well, actually, yes, it is, but people should see this email that was sent to his top adviser from Craig Kielburger: “Hello Ben, Thank you for your kindness in helping shape our latest program with the government.” What role did the Prime Minister's top adviser play in setting up this half-billion-dollar handout to the Prime Minister's friends?

Mr. Speaker, while the minister said the program did not unfold as intended, that is because the Liberals got caught when they were intending to hand money over to their friends, but there they go again, blaming the non-partisan public service for the program, except for this little email from Craig Kielburger, who says, “Hello Ben”—the senior adviser to the Prime Minister—“Thank you for your kindness in helping to shape our latest program with the government.” If these ministers cannot give us a straight answer about the role the PMO played in shaping the program, will they let this senior adviser come testify at a parliamentary committee under oath to explain his story?

Mr. Speaker, when it originally came to light that the Prime Minister had given a half-billion-dollar taxpayer-funded grant to a group that had paid his family a half-million dollars, he blamed it all on a bureaucrat over in the employment department, saying that his office had nothing to do with it. Well, that was until last week, when it came to light that Craig Kielburger wrote a message to the Prime Minister's senior adviser: “Hello Ben, Thank you for your kindness in helping [to] shape our latest program with the government.” Will the Prime Minister agree to let his top adviser come to the ethics committee and explain what role he played in shaping this program that gave money back to a group that had paid off the Trudeau family?

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are so anxious to see committees do their work that the Prime Minister actually shut down committees and, indeed, all of Parliament for almost two months to stop them from answering those questions. The Liberals then began another two-month filibuster to block questions. Today, when we came forward with a motion asking for Mr. Chin to come to testify, Liberal members showed up and began filibustering all over again. If the government has nothing to hide, why does it not let us open up the investigation and find the truth?

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, when I asked about the 850,000 Canadians who have lost their jobs, giving Canada the highest unemployment rate in the G7, the Prime Minister told a childish joke, then sat down and smirked. He should know that for every one percentage point increase in unemployment, we get a two percentage point increase in suicides. People's lives are at stake. They want to know how they are going to pay the bills. We have the worst job record in the G7. Will we get a plan for paycheques or is the Prime Minister just going to sit there and smirk?

Mr. Speaker, it is a shame that the Prime Minister does not have the guts to stand up and answer the question himself. The reality is that he has said 49 different times that the best measure of job market success is the unemployment rate. Now that we have the highest unemployment in the G7, the Liberals want to change the measurement. They say we should celebrate them for the recovery of lost jobs. Of course, Canada had the most jobs to recover because it had the biggest job losses. People do not want any more games with statistics. They need paycheques in their bank accounts and food on the table. When will they get that?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister loves to brag about what he calls big, fat government programs. Maybe if he had focused on smart, results-oriented programs we would not have the highest unemployment rate and the worst vaccination rate in the G7. Out of 15 countries measured by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, we are ranked 11th on the COVID misery index. Why did he spend so much to achieve such miserable results for the health and livelihoods of Canadians?

Mr. Speaker, congratulations to the Prime Minister. He knows that Japan is in the G7. Maybe he should also know that Japan has one-tenth the COVID fatality rate of Canada. Let us start judging results. He has delivered the highest unemployment rate in the G7 and the worst vaccination rate. Now we find, from a scientific and statistical study of health and well-being, that he has delivered among the highest levels of misery for the biggest price. Why does the Prime Minister judge his success simply by how expensive he can be, not by how many lives he can save?

Mr. Speaker, what was that? Is he really expecting us to believe that? When I ask the Prime Minister about having the worst vaccination rates, the worst jobless rates and among the highest misery rates during COVID, the best he can do is stand up and read some talking points that were written for him by his bureaucrats? Why can he not show a little contrition for his failures? The Prime Minister has cost us the most to achieve the worst results, and what he expects us to do now is just continue down this failed path. If the Prime Minister wants the confidence of Canadians, will he tell them what he will change to reverse the failures that he has delivered thus far?

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Huron—Bruce. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, and that perfectly encapsulates this government. The Liberals knows the price, the very high price, that they have made Canadians pay, but they confuse that high price with value. Instead of judging our performance in government during COVID based on the mortality rates, the unemployment rates or the vaccination rates of our country, all of which are among the worst, they think that they should be rewarded just because their programs are the most expensive. Today they were literally bragging that their programs are big and fat—not smart and effective, but big and fat, and not as a means to an end but as ends in and of themselves. One would think that we would judge the value of the government's actions by, for example, the percentage of people who have been vaccinated, but if the Liberals did that, of course, we would find that Canada is the worst in the G7. They might want to judge the performance of the government on jobs on the basis of the unemployment rate, but of course if they judged the value of their actions on that basis, they would again find Canada worst in the G7, so instead the Liberals tell us not to worry about the value of their performance but to congratulate them simply because they have delivered this bad performance at the highest possible price. They are literally like a used car salesman's dream. They show up and they say, “Give me the most expensive car on the lot. The make, model and condition do not matter. I want whichever one will add the biggest bill to my credit card, because that must be the best one.” What if other countries thought like this? Taiwan, for example, has a COVID mortality rate of 0.04 per hundred thousand. We have a mortality rate of 59 per hundred thousand. In other words, our mortality rate here in Canada is more than 1,400 times higher than in Taiwan, but that does not matter, because Taiwan has a smaller deficit. Taiwan's deficit is 4% of GDP, whereas ours is about 17% of GDP. The Liberals would say that their plan and their performance is three times greater because it is three times more expensive. Can members imagine the Taiwanese people holding a protest and saying, “Sure, you kept our mortality rate down, and sure, fewer people died, but you were not as expensive as the Canadian Liberals, so you obviously do not care as much as they do.” That would be how the Taiwanese people would look at their success in managing COVID if they were judging simply on the basis of how expensive their government could be. However, this is the approach the Liberals have taken on everything. Let us take infrastructure. The Parliamentary Budget Officer found, when he looked, that the $180-billion infrastructure program that the Liberals have been bragging about has no associated plan. Now, we know it is the best, because it is the most expensive. The government brags all the time that it is twice as expensive as the previous government's infrastructure plan, and therefore it must be twice as good. When I asked how we could spend $180 billion without a plan, the then infrastructure minister stood up and said something to the effect that “Well, we got 20 buses in Halifax”, to which I replied, “How much does that work out to per bus? Are they all made out of solid gold?” Then we went over to the finance committee, and I asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer if he had seen a list of the projects that had been funded through this $180-billion plan. He told me that, yes, they had a list, but it only accounted for half the money spent. I said to him that if I came home after spending a lot of money for groceries and said, “Honey, I want you to congratulate me; I have spent more money on groceries than anyone in the history of the world”, and if she asked what I had bought and I said that I only had receipts to account for half of what I had spent, I can tell members that I would be sleeping in the doghouse that night. The reality is in most human existence, people do not judge their performance by how expensive they can be. They judge it by what they get for their money. They judge their success by the value they obtain, not just the price they pay. Only in government would we advertise ourselves as the most expensive product around and expect to get more business. Imagine a restaurant operating that way. Come dine with us: the service is terrible and the food is not very good, but we charge more than anyone else, therefore we must be the best. It is not just in infrastructure. In housing, for example, the Liberal member for Spadina—Fort York stood in the House and said, “We have a $70 billion housing plan,” as though we were supposed to congratulate the Liberals because it was really expensive, not because of what it does. What has it actually delivered? Vancouver is now the second most expensive place on earth to buy a house, if we compare average income to average house price. Toronto is number six. We are one of the most sparsely populated nations on the planet. We should be the most affordable place to buy a home but somehow, under the government, housing right here in Canada has become one of the most expensive things to buy anywhere in the world. Think of this. Singapore has a life expectancy over a year longer than Canada. It ranks better than us on the United Nations Human Development Index. Its government costs 14¢ for every $1 of GDP. In Canada, it is 41¢. Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, the U.K. and New Zealand all outranked Canada on the United Nations Human Development Index even though the cost of their governments, as a share of GDP, is less than here in Canada. In other words, they delivered some combination of longer life expectancies, more schooling and/or higher GDP per capita for their populations at a lower cost. That is because they judge success based on value, not on price. They do not go around bragging that they have the most expensive programs around. They work to make their programs successful in delivering results for people. Here in Canada, we could do the same if we would stop bragging about the billions we can push out the door, saying, “My program has more billions than your program”, for example, and start talking about the good the programs could do. We should unleash the power of our free enterprise system to deliver more for less and make life more affordable for people, including for taxpayers. That would be a new and different approach by which we could judge success in this place. Perhaps when we judge things by the right metric, which is to say value, rather than the wrong method of price, then we would get better results and a higher standard of living for people. For a house to be affordable, it cannot take up more than one-third of a family's income. The average house takes up 50% of the average family's income in Canada. In other words, the average house is two-thirds more expensive than the average family can afford here in Canada, one of the most sparsely populated places on earth. We have more spaces where there is no one than we have places where there is anyone. According to a leading poverty group, in the home town of the member bragging about the $70 billion worth of spending the Liberals have done on housing, there is 98% occupancy in homeless shelters, and 330,000 people are on waiting lists for affordable housing. Ten thousand homeless people are in that member's home town. Where did the $70 billion go? Maybe if he doubled that budget, there would be twice as many homeless people. That is what happens when success is judged not based on what is done, but on what it costs other people to do it. If we think it is impossible to get more for less, look at other countries that do exactly that.

Mr. Speaker, Dr. Richard Audas, a health statistician and economist at Memorial University, has published a COVID misery index, and the results for Canada are, well, miserable. In fact, Canada ranks 11th because of the government's poor performance on the health and economic side. With the worst deficit, the worst unemployment and the worst vaccination rates in the G7, why is the government so miserable?

Mr. Speaker, there are excellent grades for Canadians but terrible grades for the government. In the last quarter of the year, the Liberals had far more ground to make up because our economic downfall was far greater. In fact, after all the quarters are done, Canada still has the highest unemployment in the G7, which the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister have long said is the best measurement to determine the job market. Now an independent scientific study shows that Canada has the highest COVID misery index out of 11 countries. We rank 11th out of 15, even worse than the United States. Why such miserable results?

Madam Speaker, I will remark that the member said he would keep paying more and more for my speech. That was exactly the point of my speech: Liberals will pay more and more for anything. Luckily, I believe in free speech, and that is why my speech was free today. On the question of the stats, the member talked about mortality rates. New Zealand, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Iceland, India, Norway, the UAE, Denmark and Finland all have lower unemployment and lower COVID mortality rates. They did a better job of protecting lives and livelihoods. That, and not how expensive we can make it for present and future generations, is how we should judge success.

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her good question. First, the government did away with balanced budgets. Second, it decided to do away with all budgets, not just balanced budgets. Why does the government not want to table a budget? Usually governments love budgets because they present an opportunity to publish all the results, all the promises and all the work they are doing for Canadians. Usually, surveys show that there is a major increase in support for governments that table a budget, but this government does not want Canadians to see how it is ruining our public finances and what kind of trouble our country is in. That is why the government does not want to table a budget.

Madam Speaker, NDP members cannot tell us how they would pay for this. They say this money would fall out of airplanes into people's hands, but they do not tell us from where that money would come. There is no study, actually, that has simulated what the effect would be on people's health and well-being of raising their taxes by seven or eight points on the GST to pay for the scheme he describes. If he can come up with an explanation for where he will get the money, then I will look at the proposal and judge it on its merits. It is just that so far all we get are dreamland promises that cash will fall from the heavens, with no idea where it is going to come from. The previous proposals that have come forward by, for example, the provincial Liberal government in Ontario would have actually hurt working-class people and disproportionately given money to families that are well off at the expense of working-class families. We need to work through all those details before we can talk about just dumping money out of airplanes into people's hands, because as we know, money comes from people who earned it in the first place.

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Kildonan—St. Paul for an excellent speech that will be very difficult for me to follow. Here are the hard facts. While it is important to provide interim support for people who are jobless during COVID, what people really want are paycheques. This is all against the backdrop of an unemployment rate that is by far the highest in the G7. It is higher than the rates of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan. The government has tried, since these data points have come out, to claim that unemployment rates no longer matter and that we should look at some other statistics that it has cooked up. The problem is that since the Prime Minister took office, he has said, on 49 occasions in the House of Commons, that the unemployment rate is precisely the measure we should look at to determine how our job market is working. However, right now it is not working. There are 850,000 more people unemployed today than there were in February 2020. Interestingly, the government brags that Canada has secured a larger recovery of the lost jobs in percentage terms than other countries. That is, of course, the result of the fact that we lost more jobs in the first place and had more to gain back. Even with the minimal recovery we have had of jobs, we still have a higher rate of unemployed than our competitors. It is getting worse. The most recent monthly data showed the loss of another 200,000 jobs in the same month that the United States gained jobs. The leading indicators of what job losses are to come are even worse. According to the largest association of small businesses in Canada, the CFIB, between 70,000 and 220,000 business owners in Canada are thinking of closing their businesses for good. This is between 7% and 21% of all businesses in the country. If they were to close, we would lose between one million and three million jobs, a catastrophic outcome for our economy. Forget the fact that other countries are roaring back, recovering and putting their people back to work, and that foreign workers are getting paycheques while ours are getting credit card debts. Let us stop talking about stats and start talking about people, because a job, though it means a paycheque, means so much more than that. It means the pride, purpose and independence of getting up in the morning and taking control of one's life. People who lose jobs lose this pride and independence, and the data shows that their mental health suffers dramatically. According to a study by the University of Calgary, the suicide rate rises by two percentage points for every one percentage point increase in unemployment. People take their lives when they lose their jobs. Since the pandemic began, we have had a 50% increase in opioid overdoses in Alberta and Ontario. In British Columbia, 911 operators reported a surge in phone calls from family members and loved ones who are begging for a paramedic to come and rescue someone who has overdosed, usually on opioids. This is the result of depriving people of work. It is good and necessary to provide interim income for those people, but it is not the ultimate resolution to their problem, which is that they do not have a job and do not know how they are going to pay the bills in the long run. This is not just because of COVID. The whole world is facing COVID, yet all the other G7 countries have lower unemployment than Canada. This is the result of a government policy that has systematically destroyed employment in this country for four years. The government has blocked the energy east pipeline, which would have delivered a million barrels of western oil to eastern refineries, creating jobs for energy workers out west, refinery workers out east, steelworkers in central Canada and trades workers everywhere across the land. It vetoed the northern gateway pipeline and therefore deprived dozens of first nations communities of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars' worth of agreements to share revenue, money that would have paid for schools, hospitals and job training for the youth. It has imposed job-killing taxes that have driven employers out of Canada and into the United States. Right now, Canadians have $800 billion more invested outside of Canada than foreigners have invested in Canada. Why is that? It is because right now Canada is not the place to invest to get things done. In Canada it takes 170 days longer to get a building permit for a pipeline, business park, factory, warehouse or any other economic infrastructure in this country than it does in the United States. In fact, we are ranked 34 out of 35 OECD nations for the delays associated with getting approval from government to build anything. Our first nations communities are forced to send their own revenues to Ottawa and then apply to get some of them back, rather than being allowed to harvest the revenues directly from their own economic activities. Leading first nations entrepreneurs talk about how long it takes for bureaucrats and politicians to sign off on commercial and other development activities on first nations lands, preventing them from giving paycheques and purpose and pride of a job to their own people. When immigrants come to Canada and seek out the chance to work in the fields for which they were trained, they are prevented by professional bodies and other occupational licensing regulators from getting a permit to work and are not told what they have to do to get one. Therefore, we have doctors earning minimum wage, architects who are unemployed and mechanics who are stuck only changing oil and tires when they could be running a full service mechanical operation and earning six figures. These people deserve the paycheques for which they were trained, but because of the bureaucracy of our permit-driven economy they are prevented. The government should put paycheques first. The federal government should set the goal and drive all other levels of government toward it to be the fastest place on planet earth to get a building permit for any kind of economic project, to allow first nations people to approve their own economic developments and to welcome home ownership for their people. We should allow first nations communities to keep more of the revenue from these projects. We should repeal Bill C-69, the no new pipelines bill, so we can actually deliver our oil to market and get full world prices. We should end the offshore shipping ban off the northwest coast of British Columbia so that our energy producers can get world prices as well. We should reduce the tens of billions of dollars of regulatory red tape costs that hold back businesses and force them to spend their time serving bureaucrats rather than hiring workers and serving customers. We should knock down interprovincial trade barriers so that Canadians can buy and sell goods from one another rather than importing and enriching foreign businesses abroad. We should reform our tax system so that it rewards work, savings and investment, and allows people to climb the income ladder rather than being penalized for each extra dollar they earn. Right now we should be encouraging municipalities to make it easier for new and long-term vacant office space to be repurposed for housing for people who desperately need it. Here in Canada, despite having one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth, we have among the highest real estate costs for people trying to find a home. These are all actions we could take right now to get—

Madam Speaker, that self-righteous member did not save anyone. In fact, he and his government left the borders open for months after the military warned them to close borders to keep COVID out. They invited 2,000 people from the most affected region of China to come in after they were warned by the military. They then were the slowest among the G7 to get rapid testing, which would have helped us safely open our economy and protect people's lives. Now we are in last place in the G7 for vaccination rates. I think we have all had enough of hearing government members claim that the reason they have destroyed so many livelihoods is they were busy protecting lives. They were not protecting people's lives. If they were, we would not have the worst vaccination rate in the G7 today and we would be competing with countries like—

Madam Speaker, I want to start with the words “genius”, “savant” and “lightning-quick”. These were the words that legendary Ottawa broadcaster Bill Carroll used to describe 26-year-old Brian Fraser. Brian was known for lighting up the newsroom over at CFRA. As the technical producer, he always knew how to intersperse exactly the right jingle, clip or piece of music to bring laughter to the thousands of listeners who enjoyed the show across the city and beyond. When he was diagnosed with leukemia, instead of feeling sorry for himself, he used it as an occasion to spread the message that all Canadians should give blood in order to help those suffering with the disease. He reached hundreds of thousands of people on social media with his pleas. Sadly, we lost Brian just last night. He passed away just after his beloved Senators won another game and he went on to be with his maker. On behalf of all of our residents, I send my condolences to his family, to his loved ones, to his many friends and fans. May he rest in peace.

Madam Speaker, if excuses were paycheques, then we would not have over 800,000 people without jobs since the beginning of the pandemic, but excuses are all that we are getting and they are pretty creative ones too. The government blames COVID, but of course the other G7 countries also have COVID and they all have significantly lower unemployment than Canada. The next excuse is that the Liberals tell us the unemployment rate no longer matters, that we should not worry about it. What they really mean is that the people who are unemployed no longer matter. We think they do matter and they do not want excuses, but they want jobs. However, we do not expect that from the government, so what excuses do they have today?

Madam Speaker, in fairness it is true. The U.S. bureau does use a different method, but happily, Statistics Canada lines those methods up apples to apples, so when we compare Canada and the U.S. unemployment, apples to apples, what do we get? Canadian unemployment is still one-third higher than in the United States, higher than in Japan, Germany, the U.K., Italy and France. Every single G7 country has lower unemployment than Canada. The Liberals cannot just blame COVID, they cannot just shift the statistics. They need to get to work to try and create jobs because what Canadians need are paycheques.