44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 1, 2022 10:00AM
- Nov/1/22 10:33:00 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the New Democratic Party will take no lessons from the Conservative Party, which sent Jason Kenney to Alberta. He became premier, and guess what? He lost $4 billion of taxpayer money.
Does the member have any answers for that?
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- Nov/1/22 10:52:47 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as I said in my speech, there is a link to a CBSA website that lists exactly how the app was created in terms of the spending. We encourage this debate as a vehicle for transparency and scrutiny. We should all embrace ensuring that we are using taxpayer dollars in a way that is fiscally and transparently responsible.
However, the more important point that I want to make to my colleague across the aisle is that if he agrees, and I hope he does, that vaccinations are the most effective way to overcome COVID-19, a once-in-a-century pandemic, then surely a logical extension of that strategy is that it was a useful mechanism to have ArriveCAN at the border to make sure that travellers were vaccinated upon entry, not only for their individual safety but for the safety and security of all Canadians.
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- 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 12:07:04 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 12:23:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, our Conservative friends are talking about how the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. They are saying that the government needs to use taxpayer dollars more wisely and eliminate waste. They are focusing on the $54 million that was spent on the ArriveCAN app. I agree with them that that was a stupid mistake.
Last week, we pointed out an even stupider mistake: the monarchy. Eliminating that recurrent expense would save us $67 million a year. Then there is the stupid mistake to end all stupid mistakes, and that is the oil and gas industry, which gets $8.5 billion a year. Yes, I said billion, not million.
Today, we see that ExxonMobil's profits rose from $4.7 billion a year to $17.9 billion. Our Conservative friends are saying that we need to support the oil and gas industry and that we should be criticizing the $54 million that was spent on the ArriveCAN app.
Am I the only one who finds this completely outrageous?
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- Nov/1/22 12:25:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his interventions today.
I want to really think about the work the public service has done to date. We know that the public service is a very valuable service and was especially so throughout the pandemic. We have seen Canadians rely on the services of the public service.
We know as well that this Liberal government supports outsourcing. We hear that from public service workers across Canada, that outsourcing is hurting our workers. Would the member agree that we need to protect public service workers, ensure that there is quality for the taxpayer and make sure these programs actually work?
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- Nov/1/22 12:54:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Calgary Midnapore.
I am very pleased to participate in this debate, which centres on one of the main reasons I got involved in politics 14 years ago today, first at the provincial level and then at the federal level. That reason is the sound management of public funds.
Not a single dollar that the government has in its hands has fallen from the sky. Someone has gone to work, produced something and saved that money, and the government has gone and taken that money through taxes so it could manage it responsibly. In this case, however, its management was anything but responsible.
I will get right to the point. We are talking about the infamous ArriveCAN affair, which started out as a typical tale of a government wanting to bring people into its country. People coming to Canada have to pass a test to ensure that there are no issues. That makes sense.
However, the leadership of this Liberal government—which spends lavishly and has never, in the last seven years, shown the slightest interest in reining in its spending, yet boasts about its lofty principles while generating huge debts and deficits that our children, our grandchildren and our unborn great-grandchildren will have to repay—has given rise to the financial disaster that is ArriveCAN.
Let us review the facts. About a year ago, the government began this process to allow people to come to Canada and fill out the questionnaire.
I do not want to get into my life story, but my brother is an engineer and a Canadian citizen, and he now lives in Portugal with his family. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, he had to come to Canada last spring. My brother is an engineer. As a student, he was among the first computer programmers at Laval. The point is, he is pretty comfortable with computer stuff. When he got off the plane, one of the first things we talked about, after personal and family matters, was ArriveCAN. He asked me what was up with that. He said it took forever to fill out, it was complicated, it did not work, there were lots of pages and so on. If my brother, who is an engineer, who studied engineering and knows a lot about this stuff, had problems, let us imagine what it was like for average citizens who were not used to doing that kind of thing but, all of a sudden, had to.
It was fundamentally poorly designed, but when we look at how it was managed, that was even worse. The Canadian government spent $54 million of taxpayers' money, which Canadians saved and set aside, for which they worked and for which companies worked by producing products. The government collects taxes in order to run things properly, but that has definitely not been the case here. This app has been a fiasco from day one, considering that it almost never worked. It was not at all user friendly for people who had to enter their information. It was a fiasco because more than 10,000 people had to quarantine because of it. Worst of all, however, was the financial mismanagement, because it cost $54 million.
As we have heard, a programming expert said he could have made it in his basement over a weekend or a Saturday night for about $250,000. The Liberal Canadian government spent $54 million on this. That is why our motion today states:
...it is more important than ever for the government to respect taxpayer dollars and eliminate wasteful spending...
No one can be against that. Our motion goes on to demand that:
...the House call on the Auditor General of Canada [a neutral and objective entity] to conduct a performance audit, including the payments, contracts and sub-contracts for all aspects of the ArriveCAN app, and to prioritize this investigation.
How can anyone be against transparency? How could anyone even think of voting against this motion, which asks the Auditor General to do her job with respect to a matter that has affected hundreds of thousands of Canadian families?
Many people did not want to travel because of this. Some 10,000 people ended up in quarantine. More than $53 million seems to have been poorly invested, because someone could have done the job for $250,000 rather than $54 million. That is our job here in the House of Commons.
All 338 of us, regardless of political stripe, were elected to see to the sound management of public funds, among other things.
This is a prime example of mismanagement of public funds. We have a golden opportunity to get to the bottom of this business and find out exactly why things did not go as planned, so we can avoid making similar mistakes in the future. That is why I do not see how anyone in the House could be against us doing our job and asking the Auditor General to do hers.
Government members are likely to be a bit embarrassed when we start analyzing their management of public funds, and rightly so. Let us not forget that, seven years ago, right after the election, this party, led by the member for Papineau and current Prime Minister, boasted that it would run very small deficits and a zero deficit in 2019 because it wanted to stimulate the economy. The result was anything but. It ran one large deficit after another, missing the target set by the former minister of finance three times. Then, it ended its first term with an accumulated debt of more than $100 billion.
The Liberal Party was elected on a promise of running small deficits and then eliminating the deficit entirely. That is not at all what happened. The government ran four deficits in a row. That was the Liberal government's record even before the pandemic and current economic problems caused concerns.
When the pandemic happened, we all realized that an emergency situation called for emergency measures, which was likely to bring about deficits. When we were in power in 2008, 2009 and 2010, our country, like every other country, grappled with the worst economic crisis since the great recession of 1929. Very reluctantly, our government ran deficits because we had no choice under the circumstances. However, starting in 2015, our government managed to balance the budget. Canada was the first G7 country to get back in the black thanks to sound management of public funds. That is what responsible government looks like.
They Liberal government ran massive deficits during a period of growth. When the pandemic happened, emergency measures were needed and money had to be spent. We knew that would result in deficits, but we did not know the deficits would be this big.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer recently concluded that $205 billion of the $500‑billion deficit had nothing to do with COVID-19. In other words, over 40% of the debt accumulated under the current government over the last seven years was in no way related to the pandemic. Those folks over there say that these were emergency measures and no one knew for sure what was going on, so it was important to be vigilant.
A few months into the pandemic, when there was a bit of a lull in the summer, I remember very clearly talking to people in my riding, as we probably all did, and when I spoke with entrepreneurs or business leaders, I was always asked why parliamentarians had decided to pay people to stay at home and do nothing. People commented on the fact that CERB, which served a purpose during the emergency, was paying people $2,000 to stay at home, even though activities had resumed in the summer and workers were needed. That was the sad reality. That was the reality, but it was also our responsibility to sound the alarm about it. The government was attacking us and calling us names, but that was the reality.
That is why we now know that the inflation that is hitting people rather hard all started with the current government's mismanagement.
I hear my friends across the way say that the entire planet is experiencing a period of inflation. That is true, of course, but let us not forget that the future leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Carney, said that it was mainly a national issue, and therefore a Canadian issue. The Minister of Finance finally opened her eyes and said that the government may need to tighten its belt a bit and cut down on spending.
I sincerely hope that this government will vote in favour of our motion so that Canadians can learn the truth behind the ArriveCAN financial fiasco.
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- Nov/1/22 1:49:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to join my colleagues today in speaking in favour of our opposition day motion. This motion seeks to, among other things, underscore how the government’s inflationary policies and overspending are driving up the cost of living.
For over two years, Conservatives have warned the Prime Minister about the consequences of his actions and how much they are hurting Canadians from coast to coast. Seniors are watching their life savings evaporate and having to delay their retirements. Families are downgrading their diets to cover the jump in food prices, and 30-year-olds, who did everything we asked them to do, are trapped in 400-square-foot apartments or their parents' basements.
The government has done little to solve these problems. In fact, its out-of-control spending has only made things worse, with Canadians now paying higher prices and higher interest rates as a result. As the motion states, “ it is more important than ever for the government to respect taxpayer dollars and eliminate wasteful spending”. That is why we put forward this motion that, “the House call on the Auditor General...to conduct a performance audit, including the payments, contracts and sub-contracts for all aspects of the ArriveCAN app, and to prioritize this investigation.”
The outrageous spending habits of the government have put the futures of Canadians at risk. Many times in this place, I have seen ministers of the Crown stand up and proudly tout the massive amounts of money they are spending, almost as if they were competing to see whose department could spend the most.
Recently, we saw the Prime Minister stay in a $6,000-per-night hotel room in London. I recall a time when the Liberals were outraged by such extravagant spending, with the member for Winnipeg North calling a $16 glass of orange juice an outrage. Now he stands silent while his fellow caucus members spend $6,000 a night on hotel rooms.
Will there be calls for these members to pay back to taxpayers the extra money they used on such luxuries? It is not likely. Will ministers be removed from their offices? Only if they stand on principle and do right by Canadians. They wastefully spend taxpayers’ money, and when they get no results, or even worsen the situation, they deflect.
The government continues to increase its spending, calling it necessary and urgent. As a result, at home I see the prices rising in grocery stores and at gas pumps, and I hear from constituents who are hit hard by rising interest rates. The government refuses to admit is is fuelling the problem it claims its spending is solving. I suppose it should not be surprising, coming from a government led by someone who thinks that budgets balance themselves and, as such, has no plan except to raise taxes.
The plan to triple the carbon tax during the winter months is so devastating to constituents in my riding and will have devastating consequences for Canadians across the country, particularly rural Canadians. Rural Canadians already pay some of the highest heating costs for their homes in this country. These costs were already significantly higher than those of Canadians who live in cities, but now the divide is becoming larger. This is true for those who live in my riding and are struggling, as these costs will only continue to rise.
I should mention I will be splitting my time with the MP for Cypress Hills—Grasslands.
Canadians need relief from the government’s inflationary policies, which are so focused on spending, it then raises taxes to cover its financial mismanagement. The government continues to brush off claims that its spending is out of control by saying it needed to spend in order to support Canadians during the pandemic, and that if one questions its spending, one must not care about Canadians.
As I mentioned, our motion reads, “the Parliamentary Budget Officer states that 40% of new spending is not related to COVID-19”. I will repeat that because it bears repeating: 40% of new spending since 2020, which is causing the steep rise in inflation and pushing hard-working Canadians towards the poverty line, had nothing to do with the pandemic.
As if this 40% of new spending, which has no link to COVID-19, was not bad enough. What is even more galling is the overspending the Liberals committed to while using the pandemic as a cover. The ArriveCAN app is one of these cases of overspending, with $54 million for an app, which at the end of the day, was not only unnecessary but also exacerbated the situation at the border.
In committee, we heard from the president of the union for border workers that frontline border services workers were not consulted on the development or implementation of the ArriveCAN app. Instead, the idea was pulled together by the elites of this government with a contract awarded to GCstrategies, a small, Ottawa-based, IT staffing firm. These are individuals who had no idea what it is like to work at a border crossing, the challenges that workers deal with every day or how their situation would be made exponentially worse through the introduction of this app.
CBSA agents were forced to troubleshoot the app with travellers when they had not or were not able to complete the app. This caused significant lineups at the border, as the agents at each border crossing were forced to deal with the consequences of the Liberals' unnecessary intervention.
For all the money that was spent on the ArriveCAN app, which was $54 million by the way, and it was an app that could have been built for $250,000, it could have been replaced by a simple piece of paper with a QR code, like those already being used by provinces, to show proof of vaccination. On the ArriveCAN website, it is still described as saving time for travellers. The only way it has saved time is by being removed from mandatory use.
The overspending that plagues this government is very apparent with ArriveCAN. It is a complete lack of respect for taxpayers and their money. In fact, the government is so careless, it does not even keep proper records about who it gives money to.
In response to an Order Paper question, this government stated that it paid ThinkOn $1,183,432 for experimentation of mobile QR code scanning and verification. ThinkOn has since come out and said that it was not paid this money, nor does it do this type of work. Ernst & Young, with no other information about its contract aside from the amount, was said to have received $121,755; however, a spokesperson said that it had done no work on the app.
The misleading of Canadians and what has been done with their tax dollars needs to end. When $54 million is spent on a failed app without oversight or transparency, and taxpayer money is missing from the ArriveCAN scam, Canadians deserve to know what the Liberal government is hiding. The government needs to come clean with Canadians.
We will not back down from demanding answers and accountability for Canadians. We will get to the truth for Canadians, and that is why we are calling for the Auditor General to conduct a performance audit where the government cannot hide anything.
This government will continue to try to shift blame off of itself and onto the bureaucrats, but it is government members' signatures that are on the answers to the Order Paper questions, and it is their responsibility to ensure that the information they are releasing is correct.
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- Nov/1/22 3:16:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is very concerning that the government refuses to be transparent and has reacted the way it has when we have made what would be typical requests around a significant government procurement program or any other data that we need to ensure the way it is spending Canadian taxpayer dollars is done wisely. It shows that Conservatives are worried about transparency and the Liberals are worried about being held accountable for how they are spending Canadians' money.
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- Nov/1/22 3:19:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to speak to this great opposition day motion and I want to thank the Leader of the Opposition for moving it.
Many different things have happened over the last two or three years and that has brought us to where we are today, with a very particular focus on the ArriveCAN app. We need to show respect for taxpayer dollars, which is more fundamentally based on respect for the rights of our fellow Canadians.
An essential part of Parliament's role is to hold the government accountable for its spending along with its policy decisions regardless of the party that is in power. That is exactly what the motion calls for, nothing more. Hopefully all members from all parties in the House can agree with that idea, including Liberals who sit on the government side. We will have to wait and see the result of the vote, because the issue in question has to do with the controversial arrive scam app.
The motion calls for the Auditor General to conduct a performance audit, and that is something different from the House expressing our approval or disapproval toward a specific government policy. It is not even a committee study. Instead, this would be an independent review that would take the issue away from partisan debates between the government and the opposition.
It would address the need for some necessary accountability, though, because we cannot pretend that nothing really happened with the ArriveCAN app over the last two years. If government members are truly confident that they have made the right decisions along the way, then they should have no problem supporting the motion. In the end, it would prove their case with no problem, and I hope that point has been clearly understood.
We are here today, one month after the government eventually decided to drop the mandatory use of the ArriveCAN app, but that alone does not mean all issues have been resolved. We do not have the whole story, and many of the questions that Canadians have are left unanswered.
Why did the federal government mandate it in the first place? Why were Canadian citizens required to download and use an app to enter their own country? Why was there a lack of accommodation or flexibility? Why did it take so long for the government to finally drop the mandate? Why did it cost $54 million to create, when it has since been shown that it could have been made for as low as $250,000. It was originally projected to cost only $80,000. Who exactly benefited or profited from paying out all of these millions of dollars? This is what all members need to know on behalf of their constituents all across the country.
While we are having this debate, we also cannot forget all the impacts this mandated app has had on Canadians. The government has tried to claim that this was somehow about vaccination, to turn the issue against those who did not receive COVID vaccines. The reality is that we saw how this mandate affected different people regardless of their medical status. ArriveCAN took it a step beyond the other problems involved with vaccine mandates for work and travel. It created yet another barrier for new groups of people in our society, which relates to the technology used.
If the Liberals want to defend this decision by making it all about vaccines, then they are at least revealing part of the unfortunate truth by saying so. They have essentially admitted that their intention was to punish the unvaccinated, which came with the suggestion to the wider public that doing so would stop transmission. This might have worked to scapegoat and divide people during and after a snap election, but the mandate did not do what they said it would do. Of course, it is true that the app was clearly part of a broader policy that undermined and violated Canadians' right to medical privacy. What was the result?
Although the Prime Minister might not understand this fact, regular people have many reasons to travel besides taking luxurious vacations. These mandates devastated careers and relationships for people. Some of them were unvaccinated, while others did not disclose that they were vaccinated for privacy reasons, because that was the issue at stake. The government chose to keep it in place while it became more apparent over time that its excuse for it was flawed.
Again, the ArriveCAN requirement took all this to a new level. It made the situation more complicated and nonsensical. Some people could show their papers, but their personal circumstances did not allow for them to use ArriveCAN. Some did not have the right technology. Some just simply were not able to use it or maybe did not have ready access to it for practical reasons. In a lot of cases, we are talking about seniors or minorities who found that their government had added an arbitrary barrier under the vaccine mandate.
These are our fellow Canadians who live in my riding and in every other riding, including those belonging to Liberal members, and I am sure they have heard similar stories from constituents as I have.
For example, I had someone reach out to me by phone from one of the many Hutterite colonies. They do not use technology, do not have access to computers and their options for other access are limited. However, this individual was vaccinated and crossed the border into the United States, but upon returning to Canada was forced to quarantine simply because he was not using the ArriveCAN app and did not have the means to even have the app in the first place. It did not make any sense to him, and I agreed with him.
There are also a number of seniors in a similar situation who were forced to quarantine, even though they could otherwise prove their vaccination status under the rules. This had consequences that were more than a mere inconvenience. People were confined to their homes.
In the case of the constituent I mentioned, the community's lifestyle is based on agriculture and food production. This would have disrupted his ability to contribute to the important type of work that needs to get done. In fact, this constituent was down in the States getting the parts he needed for his agricultural machinery, his agricultural implements, to be able to perform what the government at the time had deemed to be an essential service, but he was told that he had to go home for 14 days anyway.
Farmers know they cannot afford to lose up to two weeks of valuable time. Their work, as we all know, is isolated by nature. There is one person driving a machine. Ranchers are out checking their cattle and herds. There is zero risk to the communities around them. This is another example of how the Liberals have zero understanding of what life is like in rural Canada.
Then it somehow got worse. Not only was the app intrusive, but it also had glitches. If people complied and used ArriveCAN, they still were not safe. There were people who were able and willing to use the app but who were still wrongly identified for quarantine time anyway. At one time, the Canada Border Services Agency said that these incorrect notifications went out to over 10,000 people. This is a disaster that was as embarrassing as it was confusing. It went right along with the government's failure to provide Canadians with passports and with notoriously bad flight disruptions at our airports, but the Liberals dragged it on nonetheless despite the calls to end it from border communities, tourism groups, border guard unions and the public. By the time they dropped this restriction, the travel season was all but over.
My riding is along the border we share with the United States, and tourism is an important part of our local economy. It also happens to be a rural area, which adds its own limitations to the situation. From that perspective, I can assure everyone there was real damage done to these communities because of these misguided policies. What makes it worse is we knew from common sense that the extra burden and impracticality for tourism, agriculture and other local industries was not necessary.
There were all kinds of Canadians who paid a price for the Prime Minister and the Liberal government to save face or score political points. Fortunately, the Liberals could not ignore the mounting pressure any longer and dropped the requirements at the border, which was the right thing to do. There are still some challenges remaining for our citizens and border communities. One such example is that the hours of operation still have not returned to normal.
A constituent of mine had a two-hour trip to make to the U.S. and back to get his cattle to the vet. It turned into a 14-hour trip because he was not allowed to come back over the border. There are regulations in this country that limit how long animals can be in a trailer, and this simple decision put him at risk. He had to spend even more time on the road away from home, risking the health of his animals as he was travelling.
Canadians can once again fully exercise the spirit of their charter right to remain in, enter or leave Canada. We also no longer restrict international travellers from coming here, but the United States still has a vaccine mandate at their border for our citizens. That is their decision to make. Our government obviously cannot make it for them. However, does the Prime Minister care to advocate and stand up for the same Canadians he has demonized and marginalized over the past two years?
The Liberals have not acknowledged what they did wrong. There has not yet been an expression of regret or apology. One way for them to show some goodwill would be to support this motion. There are a lot of strong opinions on these issues both inside and outside of Parliament, but if we at least agree to this, we could start to focus on getting more of the facts involved with a divisive policy.
That is something the Auditor General could provide. We could get a better idea of what happened and learn to do better in the future. Canadians could see some unity and leadership across party lines in this place. Hopefully, this would set a good example and help to heal the divisions we have in this country.
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- Nov/1/22 4:44:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us never forget that everyone in the House, everyone working here, is paid with taxpayer dollars.
That is why, as with any family budget, it is important to be accountable to the people who place their trust in us and whose taxes pay our salary, pay for this place and pay for all the services they then get back.
Demanding transparency and oversight is therefore perfectly legitimate, and the Auditor General of Canada is perfectly positioned to do that.
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