44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 1, 2022 10:00AM
- Nov/1/22 11:56:19 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for New Brunswick Southwest.
It is important that we are all able to speak to this important issue today and have as many voices as possible. Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis and the cause was made right here in Canada. The $54-million arrive scam is one of a litany of examples of how the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. The more the current Prime Minister spends, the more Canadians are finding things cost.
We are seeing higher prices. Canadians are very concerned as they get that first fill-up of home heating fuel, propane or oil, or their first natural gas bill. When they look at that they see taxes on taxes. They see the carbon tax on there and they are concerned. What are these bills going to look like when they get a fuel delivery in January?
What is the government doing to help control the expenses that Canadians have? Is it committed to cutting taxes? No, it is raising taxes. Is it committed to getting its spending under control. No, it is not. Is it being accountable for the spending that it has undertaken? That is what we are doing today. We want accountability. We want an audit.
An audit is something the government should be able to vote in favour of. When we look at what was spent and look at the public accounts, 40% of the deficit spending the current government undertook was not related to the pandemic. It will say the Conservatives voted in favour of helping people who needed help during the pandemic. We are not talking about that spending. We are talking about the waste, the excess and the insider deals, and there was an awful lot of that.
If we can believe it, when we read the public accounts that were published last week, every single minute of last year the government incurred more than $170,000 of new debt. That is staggering. If two income earners in a family were each making $40,000 to provide a living for their family, they could not put a dent in one minute of the debt the current government racked up that year. It is unbelievable.
Because of that, Canadians are going to pay higher prices for everything. We know they are paying higher prices for their homes. We know they are now going to pay higher prices for their mortgages, on the interest they pay, as well as on credit cards and lines of credit. We know that rent is going up to $2,600 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver and to $2,300 a month for the same in Toronto.
It is more important than ever that Canadians extract accountability from their government. For it to spend $54 million on this failed app is an egregious number, but I fear the number is much higher. We are hoping to find that out. It does not even know where all of that $54 million went.
When members of the House asked the government for information, it came back and listed some of the contractors. However, there are tens of millions of dollars in subcontracts for which it is not willing to say who did the work or what work was done. Of the ones we do know, and the list was short, it claimed that it paid $1.2 million to a company that claims it did not do any of the work, nor did it get a penny for it. The government said that it was a mistake and that it was actually someone else.
It is bizarre the government was so quickly able to say it made a mistake but did not know where the money actually went. When we are dealing in millions of Canadians' dollars, it is really important to know where we are sending the cheques. When it came to the support measures some Canadians needed, it was less careful. It sent cheques to prisoners, an an example, people convicted of crimes, and to people who did not need the help and who were gainfully employed, making great salaries with great benefits and great pensions.
One needs to wonder why the Liberals were so cavalier with these particular millions. Did they go to someone with an inside connection? We have seen before that folks who appear on the Liberal list end up getting cushy order in council appointments and fat government contracts. I will remind the House of course that we saw a half-billion dollars try to get shovelled out the door to the Prime Minister's buddy at the WE organization, but Conservatives caught it.
We saw when the Prime Minister was found to have broken ethics laws. He was happy to take a vacation to billionaire island, but we caught him. It is really about accountability. We found, through the work of members here and a referral to the Ethics Commissioner, that the Prime Minister had inappropriately interfered in the criminal prosecution of his buddies at SNC-Lavalin. This is another company that does quite well under the Liberals.
Recently, while Canadians are facing this cost of living crisis, there is scrutiny about this $54-million boondoggle. I have talked to, face to face, dozens of CBSA officers, who signed up to protect our country and our borders and to interdict weapons smuggling, drugs and human trafficking, and they are getting asked to be IT support for an app that does not work. They did not find it enhanced their ability to keep Canadians safe. It slowed the lines down. It slowed the movement of people. They can look at a certificate. If the government demanded proof of vaccination, if that was its decision, misguided as it may have been, it could have done that and those customs officers could have verified those documents the same way they verify a passport, without a $54-million boondoggle with all kinds of pork to Liberal insiders.
While that is going on, the Prime Minister jet-sets on one of his many travels and does it in style, of course, with a private taxpayer-funded jet and stays at the finest hotels and charges it to the taxpayer. One thinks he had to go to London and it was important he was there. What does one think a hotel room, one room, should cost for a night for a prime minister?
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- Nov/1/22 12:06:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader asking how much I think it should be. I know it should not be $6,000 a night. The fact that these apologists are not demanding accountability speaks volumes, and that is why they are going to vote against this motion.
I look forward to when the parliamentary secretary stands up in about 30 seconds and says he will call for accountability because he believes in transparency, but that is not what he is going to say. We know that because that is the pattern. They spend Canadians into the poorhouse. Canadians are lined up at food banks in record numbers, and what do these Liberals say? They say, “Let them eat cake.”
We want accountability. That is exactly what we are going to get.
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- Nov/1/22 12:07:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, well, stupid is as stupid does, as they say.
When they are covering for a Prime Minister who claims that he is seized with a climate emergency but burns more jet fuel in a single vacation on his taxpayer-funded jet than a Canadian family spends in an entire year in its carbon footprint, we know that this is a very unserious government that is out of ideas. While it is out of ideas, Canadians are out of money, and they need accountability from the government. That is why we are here. That is what we are going to get.
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- Nov/1/22 12:08:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have asked for basic transparency from the government, and it wants to drag out document production for months. The information that it does provide is erroneous. While I would like to think that there is malice at play, it may very well just be incompetence, which is especially concerning when we are dealing with tens of millions of dollars.
We are going to continue to ask for this level of transparency. Hopefully, with an independent audit, we will get the answers that the government is concealing from Canadians, which it is likely doing to protect the insiders who got rich.
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- Nov/1/22 12:09:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a big question for not a lot of time. As opposition parties, we worked very hard to try to get answers for Canadians, and there is still a need. If folks at CRA are watching, an audit or two is well overdue for those folks at WE Charity because, my goodness, there was a spider web of shell companies in an attempt to hide from transparency. We know that they hid witnesses and would not reveal documents.
While it cost a finance minister his job, and we saw even more corruption, we still do not know all of the details. The government tried to give $912 million, nearly a billion dollars, to buddies of the Prime Minister. It is incredibly concerning. We do not have all of the information. We want to know what happened with those property sales in this company, which they said they were folding up. It is another great example of the accountability that Canadians deserve when the Liberal government is being cavalier with their tax dollars.
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