Debates of June 7th, 2023

Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

What would I do? Well, I have been telling them what to do for the last three years, and if they had listened, they would not be in the mess they are in today.

What can be done? Obviously, we have to find a way to bring rates down before those mortgages come up for renewal. As I said earlier, why did the rates go up in the first place? Government deficits led to higher inflation, which led to higher interest rates, which will lead to higher defaults. How do we reverse that? We bring down the government deficits so we can bring down the inflation, which allows the Bank of Canada to bring down interest rates, and this will allow us to bring down the defaults. That is my IKEA instruction manual for the hon. member today. That is obviously what we need to do to avoid the crisis that is ahead of us.

However, make no mistake, this is a crisis, and it is one that is coming quicker and quicker. It is like a train that is coming down the track, and if we do nothing to prepare ourselves to get off the track now, we will face that very real threat. Now, the member across the way might say “Oh, the debt crisis, who cares? That's something accountants and economists will fray about. They'll wring their hands and it will be discussions on business channels about what that means. Why should anybody really care?”

Well, let me tell members that a debt crisis is a massive humanitarian crisis. The human toll of debt crises are staggering. They produce massive unemployment, which leads to increased depression, suicide, alcohol and opioid addiction, overdoses and other miseries that we are already beginning to see.

Two Harvard economists who studied over 800 years of debt crises, Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, found that debt crises typically bring a 35% decline in house prices, leaving people with mortgages that are worth more than their homes. On average, GDP falls 9%, roughly twice the GDP drop during the COVID recession of 2020. Unemployment rises, on average, 7%, which lasts, on average, four years. That means not just a loss of livelihoods but also a loss of lives.

A University of Calgary study found that a 1% increase in unemployment increases the suicide rate by 2.1%. A paper by the British Journal of Psychiatry estimated that, in Europe and North America, the great recession is associated with at least 10,000 additional economic suicides between 2008 and 2010. There were 10,000 people who killed themselves. More people killed themselves during the great global recession in the United States than would otherwise have done so absent that financial crisis.

The same thing happened in Asia. According to researchers in the British Medical Journal, it is estimated that the 1997 economic crisis in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong resulted in over 10,000 excess suicides.

The long-term job loss from a financial crisis would be at least as bad as what we experienced during the COVID lockdown with the devastating personal consequences. Unemployed men and women would have no job to go to in the mornings and nowhere they could afford to go in the evenings for recreation.

As a result, they end up isolated and alone. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. We are already seeing these pernicious mals exacting themselves on our people today.

Calls to one national suicide prevention line rose 200% over the period of COVID, according to CBC. That prompted one of our members, the member for Cariboo—Prince George, to introduce a bill creating the 988 suicide prevention line. Make no mistake, the forced unemployment that happened during COVID led to more suicides, and if we do have the kind of financial crisis I am trying to avoid, I am afraid to report to the House, then there will be similar desperation.

The number of overdose deaths in B.C. alone in 2021 was by far the highest on record, and more than twice as high as it was in 2019. In Ontario and Alberta, opioid deaths spiked almost 50% during the lockdown periods. All of this could be associated with unemployment. Researchers have found that, when unemployment in a country rises one percentage point, the opioid death rate jumps 3.6% and opioid overdose emergency room visits jump 7%.

When the greek debt crisis happened, there were problems with wages, pensions and social programs, and desperate people flooded into the psychiatric units across the country. The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe wrote in a report, “Most patients admitted under this regime are unemployed persons, bankrupt businessmen, or parents who have no means of taking care of or feeding their children. Most are reported to be over 40 years old and have never shown previous signs of mental illness.”

Then there are the painful government policies that follow debt crises. Some of the harshest austerity measures, of which we have been warned by the Prime Minister, happened in Greece under a Marxist government. It was led by something called the coalition of the radical left, an alliance of communist, eco-socialists and anti-capitalists.

Why would a party, that has an ideology that believes in boundless government programs, slash public spending so dramatically in Greece? It is for the same reason that the federal Liberal government slashed health care and 45,000 public servant jobs in the 1990s. It is the same reason that the Saskatchewan NDP, a party that credits itself with inventing Canada's medicare program, shut down 52 hospitals in Saskatchewan in the 1990s.

Why? They ran out of money. That is what real austerity is, it is when we run out of money. That is the result of major debt crises like the one I am trying to warn against right now, which proves that debt crises actually do not care about ideology. Numbers are not partisan. Merciless mathematics trump political philosophy in a debt crisis.

When the money is gone and no one will lend more, where the funds have been exhausted, how do we pay the wages of the public servants, the pensions of the retired, the hospital bills, the schools, the food and other essentials? As Pythagoras said, “numbers rule the universe”. Austerity is almost never a choice. It happens when irresponsible governments, like that one over there, make it mathematically unavoidable.

Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, also found that financial meltdowns cause government debt to further explode. It is an explosion within an explosion, and a crisis on top of a crisis. That is why it is always most humane to protect the country's finances in advance to avoid the need for austerity. That is what we, as Conservatives, do. We protect the finances, not just so that an accountant can be happy with the balance sheet, but because we care about health care, education and the social safety nets that we desperately need.

That is why we want to protect our finances. That is why we want to avoid the nasty and ruthless cuts that the Prime Minister has in store for this country if he succeeds in bankrupting the nation's finances. We have seen these ruthless mathematics under his father, who gave us not just inflation, but also stagflation. He was successful at delivering both record highs in inflation and unemployment at exactly the same time.

Look at the years of 1980 and 1983. During those years of the Trudeau debt crisis, unemployment and inflation both hit 12% at the same time. That means we had a misery index of 24. Inflation plus unemployment is the misery index. That drove interest rates up to an almost unimaginable 19% a year. I remember those days. In fact, some of my earliest memories—

[An hon. member]

You would have been in diapers.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

That is pretty close, actually. A member says I would have been in diapers. I was born in 1979. I just turned 44.

My earliest memories started to appear around 1982-83. I remember the horrible strain and stress my parents faced. There was actually the national energy program, whereby the Trudeau government demolished the Alberta economy, where I was growing up. We were largely protected from that because my folks were teachers, so they did not lose their jobs, unlike many of the unfortunate but greatly patriotic and courageous Albertans and Saskatchewanians who were hit directly. However, my folks had a few little rental properties that my mother had scrounged and saved to make possible, and we were all hit with the higher interest rates, rates that could not be paid with the rent the tenants were paying. We could not pay our mortgage, so we had to move to a smaller house.

That period was very stressful. There was massive dislocation. It is no wonder that the misery index reached its highest level, because misery is the best way to describe it. Some people cannot take the misery. During that time period, the suicide rate reached a record high. In 1983, when I would have been four years old, the suicide rate hit 14.8 per 100,000 people, an 8% increase from 1980. Seven of the eight worst years for suicide rates in Canada happened when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. That is because people's lives were coming apart.

Members can just imagine. It is not just money. It is not just the desire to have more stuff. It is the shame of coming home to one's kids and saying, “You can't go on that little camping trip. I'm cancelling your hockey. We have to leave this house and move into a tiny, little apartment.” That is the real, human anxiety, the guilt, the pain and the frustration that literally break families apart and cause divorce and suicide. People lose hope, and everything falls apart.

When I talk about the possibility of a very real debt crisis, with all of these mortgages that were locked in at low rates three years ago, two years ago, even one year ago, I am not talking about an accounting phenomenon. I am talking about a human phenomenon, one that we have a duty to avoid. We have a duty now to foretell the dangers that are coming and to protect our country against the ravages they would mean for our population. We know how to do that. We know there are simple, common-sense decisions that we can make in order to avoid such an eventuality here in our country, as we have seen all around the world and that we could replicate if we do not change course now.

We know what the necessary steps are today. It is about spending less and creating more. The member across the way will instantly assume that if something costs less, it must be of less value. This is a fundamental breakdown in his understanding. The Prime Minister is the worst for this. He thinks that if something costs more, it must be worth more, as though the half-billion dollars he wanted to give to WE Charity was worth more than, for example, just having a passport actually delivered to people on time. Just because something costs more does not mean it is better.

For example, the government has a housing program. It has spent $89 billion on it. In fact, the number one bragging point it has is that its housing plan is really expensive. One can almost imagine a restaurant running an advertisement: “Come dine with us. We have terrible ambiance; the service is garbage; the food is rotten. It might even make you sick, but guess what? It costs 1,000 bucks a plate. Therefore, it must be the best, because it is the most expensive.”

Let us take this back into the government realm. When I was employment minister, we had a program, which I believe is still in place today, to help visually impaired Canadians read books by sending them CDs with the books on them. They could then put them in their computers, hit play and listen to them. One of my constituents was actually capable of listening to books at four times the speed, because she had trained herself. To the rest of us, it would sound like gibberish, but she had trained herself to speed read using audio players. It was a wonderful program.

However, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind said there was one problem, which was that it did not use CDs anymore, so we did not have to pay Canada Post to ship these CDs to people's homes. It had come up with a technology that would allow the Canadian government to simply pay the cost of having radio personalities go into an audio room and record the book, and then it could be sent as an audio file, a particle of light through cyberspace, and people could read the book without having to have a cassette.

It turned out that this reduced the cost of the program by about 80%. Furthermore, we signed a deal with the other countries that had the same English-speaking and French-speaking books as we had. We said we would waive copyright on all of our recordings, and all the authors would agree to waive copyright if the other countries did the same. That way, the other countries could give all the books they had to us and we could give all the books we had to them. Therefore, everyone would have more books, and because there was no longer a physical copy of any of these books, we were going to massively increase the number of books by something like 500,000, all of a sudden.

The cost of the program went down by 80%. Using Liberal logic, Liberals would say that was a savage cut and ask how we could do such a thing, even though it meant more convenience, more books and a faster turnaround in customer service for people. Just because it cost less did not mean it was not worth more. This is common sense.

Let us think about it this way. We have had these arguments with the Prime Minister. He says that my time as housing minister was no good because I did not spend $89 billion on housing, but housing cost half as much. When I was housing minister, the average mortgage payment was $1,400 and the average rent was $900 for a single-bedroom apartment. The average down payment needed for a house was $22,000. Now it is double, double and double.

However, the Prime Minister would say that his is a success, because even though nine in 10 young people believe they will never be able to afford a home, he has the most expensive housing program in Canadian history; therefore, it must be the best. He thinks that the price is equal to the value. There is a difference between value and cost, a distinction that the government never makes. That is why it has spent so much to achieve so little.

How can we organically impose discipline on government to ensure that it gets more for less? One way is to impose the simple law of nature, called scarcity. Every creature in the universe, every bird in the trees, every fish in the sea, must live with the law of scarcity: maximum use of scarce resources. They can have this or that, not this and that, or they can find a bargain on this and that. The single mother who wants to build a new porch might pass up on the vacation, or she might go to the local lumber yard to see if she can get a bargain on the lumber to build the porch for a lower price and maybe get a bargain on kids' camp so that she can do both. That is the common-sense budgeting that families do every single day.

Politicians are the only creatures in the universe that do not have to live by the universal law of scarcity, because by using inflation, taxes and debt, they externalize the scarcity on everyone else. They push austerity out of government and into the living rooms of the people, into the small businesses and onto the farm gate, where someone else has to deal with more scarcity because government is pushing its costs onto everyone else.

What if we internalized that scarcity? What if we required that government make the same trade-offs, the same common-sense bargains that the single mom, small business person or farmer makes every single day? What if we passed a common-sense law, called the “dollar for dollar law”, that required a politician to find a dollar of savings for each new dollar of spending?

I promise, by the way, to be conservative in my remarks, if members promise to be liberal in their applause. That is my idea of a bipartisan speech: Conservative content and Liberal applause.

This—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The hon. member for North Okanagan—Shuswap is rising on a point of order.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Madam Speaker, I did not say anything previously, but I just noticed another government member coming into the House actually eating something, and as we all know, especially members who have been here for a long time, we are not allowed to eat in the House.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I want to remind members that they are not to eat in the House. From what I understand, the member was finishing up what he already had in his mouth, so he did not have it physically in his hand, but I want to remind members that they are not to be eating in the House.

The hon.—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Order.

Now it is becoming a bit of a debate or discussion, and I would just ask members to let the official opposition leader finish his speech.

The hon. leader of the official opposition.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member across the way accused one of our MPs of sleeping during the remarks, but what he does not understand is that it was mindful meditation—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I would ask the leader of the official opposition to stick to his speech and not to address what is going on behind him or try to have a conversation with the hon. members.

The hon. leader of the official opposition.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, thank you. I will obey that edict and stick to my speech.

I was speaking about the common-sense idea of a dollar-for-dollar law. I would love to be the originator of the law, but it came into place during the Clinton era in the United States of America. Members will recall that during that time, the American government had racked up massive debts, so Congress passed a law called the PAYGO law requiring the U.S. administration to find a dollar of savings for every new dollar of spending.

What happened? The American government balanced its budget for the first time in half a century. It paid off $400 billion of debt. We are always being told that when we balance budgets and pay off debt, as the Liberals say, it will just shrink the economy. Actually, the economy underwent one of the most spectacular expansions in American history, with unemployment dropping to its lowest level in the postwar period. Inflation stayed low, and the American government was able to restore its solvency and its financial foundation.

The bad news is that when the law lapsed, the U.S. government went right back into deficit and has not emerged ever since. Why is that? It is proof that politicians need legal limits on their spending; otherwise, they will find it impossible to control themselves. They will want to spend more and more of other people's money to aggrandize themselves and buy votes. We need to impose legal limits on government spending, the same limits that every other Canadian imposes on themselves.

That is one common-sense idea that would cap the cost of government while the economy and the taxpayer catch up. The solution is not only to control spending, but to ensure that the size of government grows more slowly than the size of the private economy. We know that all prosperity flows from the production of goods and the free exchange of product for payment, investment for interest and work for wages. That is the miracle of the free market economy.

Let me talk a little about this incredible miracle. I was in a coffee shop the other day. I walked up, bought a cup of coffee, paid for it and said thanks. Do members know what the lady said back to me? Does anyone want to guess?

[Julie Dabrusin]

I cannot imagine.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, she cannot imagine. Well, it does not take much imagination. Some people might think she said, “Thank you. You're welcome.” That is the sequence we are taught as kids: “Thank you. You're welcome.” However, what she said was, “Thank you.”

Does anybody ever notice that when they make a transaction or a purchase in the free market, it is never “Thank you. You're welcome”? It is always “Thank you. Thank you.” It is the double “thank you”. Why? It is because both participants in a voluntary transaction are better off than they were before. Each of them has something worth more to them than they had before the transaction occurred. If they did not, they would not have agreed to the exchange.

If I have an apple and someone has an orange, and I want an orange and they want an apple, we trade and we are both better off, even though between us we just have an apple and an orange. Why? It is because we each have something worth more to us than what we had before. Thus is the miracle of the free enterprise system, the voluntary exchange of work for wages, product for payment, investment for interest. It is voluntary, so we know that everyone entering into the transaction is better off, because otherwise they would not agree to do it.

What is different about government? Every transaction is done by force. Everything the government does, even the good things, is done by the coercive force of taxation, a gun to the head. People cannot get away from paying the price. Even when government does perfectly justifiable things, like funding the military or building a hospital, it has to force the money out of the pockets of the people. We all admit that some force has to be applied, but it is force.

As Conservatives, we believe that it should be the minimal amount of force and the maximum amount of freedom. That is the fundamental difference. When people are paying government taxes, it is done by coercion, and that is why no one writes “thank you” on their tax forms. Is that not true? However, should they not, if it is just a transaction like mine at the coffee shop, with people buying all these services off the government? Would the Liberals tell people that they should be writing “thank you” because they are doing this wonderful transaction and are getting back more from government than they are paying? Well, we do not know that because people have no choice in the matter.

Every time the government creates a new program that purports to give people more than they paid for it, the government has to impose it by force. That can never be a relationship that favours the weak. Always in relationships of force it is the powerful who benefit.

This is the great lie of the socialists. They always claim they want to aggrandize the government because they want to protect the weak from the strong. However, since when, in relationships of force, is it the weak who benefit? We know that it is always the strong. We know that in societies where governments get big and powerful, the small group of wealthy elites gets more and more powerful themselves. Why? It is because they have more proximity to the power that controls the money. If all the money is in the vaults of the state, the people with the keys to the vault are the ones who are going to get rich.

For example, they will say that we need for G to take from A in order to give to B, because G has determined that B does not have enough and A has too much. What happens then? Well, then A goes to G and says, “I want some back so I am going to make a donation to somebody who is part of G” in order to get G to give money from B to A. Before they know it, it is not A or B who are benefiting; it is G, because it is G who decides who gets what. That is ultimately what government does when it gets too powerful. It does not take from one to give to another; it takes from everybody to give to itself. That is what we see with the current government: an ever-increasing size of the state, an insatiable appetite for other people's money. We see that playing out with very real human consequences for the people who can no longer pay their bills.

Those with power and influence are better off than ever before. Why? It is because they can hire lobbyists. Other than marijuana, lobbying is probably the biggest growing industry in Canada. We have seen under the Prime Minister a 100% increase in registered lobbying interactions. Why is that? It is because businesses have judged that the way they get rich is not by investing in new product but by investing in political influence. It is the best return on investment they can get anywhere in the Canadian economy today.

There is a company in New York that did a study on the amount American business spends on Washington relative to the size of the U.S. government. It found a near-perfect correlation between the amount of money that Wall Street and businesses spend lobbying Washington and the amount of spending that Washington does as a share of GDP. As government gets bigger and more powerful, businesses shift their focus from making profit by serving customers to making profit by influencing politicians and bureaucrats. The number one commodity goes from being a product that people buy, food they consume or entertainment they enjoy to the most important commodity of all in a government-controlled economy, which is power and influence. So it goes, and so we see today that the very rich and the very powerful get richer and more powerful every single day.

Look, for example, at our friends at McKinsey, or I should say the Prime Minister's friends at McKinsey. He gave them over $100 million in contracts, and we do not know what they did. We investigated. We cannot figure out what value they provided anybody. However, they have proximity to power, and they were able to get close to the Prime Minister throughout his entire political career and ultimately dominate his political agenda. They therefore get the money, but not only that. They avoid culpability.

This is a company that helped bring about the opioid crisis. It designed plans to have bonuses for distributors of opioids, which caused overdoses. Literally, they had a plan to supercharge the opioid crisis because they knew it would profit their powerful clients. What has been their reward for their friendship with the Prime Minister? The federal government has thus far not sought or received a single penny in settlements from McKinsey, despite the fact that Canadian taxpayers are paying a fortune for the opioid crisis that this company helped to cause.

In the United States of America, the U.S. government has obtained awards from McKinsey and other companies for having caused that crisis, but because of the immense political influence of that company, the government in Canada has not been able to do that. Some $600 million is what 49 jurisdictions have taken from McKinsey because of the opioid crisis that it caused, but here in Canada, the Prime Minister has not been able to get a single solitary cent, or perhaps more accurately has not wanted to get a single solitary cent, back from this corrupt enterprise, which helped cause an immense misery and loss of life.

All of this is to say that in a socialist or government-controlled economy, those with political influence are always better off because they can pull strings and get what they want, and the working-class people, the families whose lives have been destroyed by the opioid crisis, get nothing at all.

I try not to assign ugly motives to the Prime Minister for the decisions that are so obviously destroying our working-class people. I try to never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. However, sometimes, when we look at the ideology to which he adheres by his own words, we have to wonder if some of the damage he is doing is by design.

This is a guy who said he admires the basic Chinese Communist dictatorship. Those were his words. If one of us had accused him of that, It would seem totally and utterly ridiculous, but he accused himself of it. He said it. He was asked not if he admired the Chinese Communist dictatorship, but what government in the entire world he admired most. He volunteered that it was the basic Chinese Communist dictatorship.

Ever since that time, we have seen the reciprocal admiration that Beijing has for his regime, having intervened in two successive elections to help him win and having donated $140,000 to the Trudeau Foundation. The Prime Minister has said he admires Fidel Castro too. Therefore, when we witness the policies he unleashes on the Canadian people, we wonder whether it is really just incompetence or because he subscribes to an out-of-touch ideology that is radically different from the common-sense norms that everyday Canadians believe in.

As he destroys our money with reckless deficits, he does so knowingly. I used to think he just did not know any better, that he was perhaps naive. Having been raised with a trust fund bequeathed to him by his multi-millionaire petroleum grandfather, perhaps he just did not know how money worked because he had it all given to him. He did not come up through a working-class family, where scarcity is a daily guest in the house. He lived in a place where there was no scarcity, where things were provided to him at will, so perhaps he just does not know any better.

Six months ago, his own finance minister admitted that deficits cause inflation, an admission that I would have found quite encouraging if she had stuck to it. Then the Prime Minister tapped her on the shoulder and told her that they may cause inflation, but that is fine because they are going to go with $60 billion more in deficits. Is this his design? Is this part of his ideological objective?

The great John Maynard Keynes said:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

Is that the Prime Minister's purpose here? Is it to enrich a small group of people who can protect themselves by holding onto assets that are inflation-proof and protected, while ripping away the purchasing power of Canada's working class? Is it all an accident? Is it a function of his total incompetence? Is it just because he is a naive trust fund baby? Or is it because he deliberately believes in an ideology that concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands? I want to know.

What does my caucus think? Do they believe that it is incompetence that has led to this inflation or that it is the Prime Minister's malice?

[Some hon. members]

Both.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, there is a third option. It is both incompetence and malice.

I always said I was a democratic leader, and we hold votes right here in the middle of my speeches in the House of Commons to get these answers.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The members opposite in the government do not know what it is like to sit in the front row, but their voices really carry from there, and I cannot hear the member—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I have just asked for order, and I would repeat the request that we maintain decorum and let the hon. Leader of the Opposition proceed with his speech.

Order, please.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

I am immensely enjoying the remarks of the leader, but the members in the front row this evening are repeatedly interrupting with regular points of order.

I actually had another point of order I wanted to raise briefly while I am on my feet, regarding—

[An hon. member]

Point of order.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I will deal with one point of order at a time.

The hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan has the floor.

Government Response to Order Paper Questions

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to briefly, while I have chance, raise concerns about the response I received to Order Paper Question No. 1398. I think that I did not receive a response to this question, so I wonder if the Chair could review the matter and return to the House about it. It was a question regarding gender parity among staff. The question identifies a number of specific areas where I am looking for information about the gender parity among chiefs of staff, directors of policy, directors of communications and other political exempt staff.

The response I received does not provide any of that information. It says that the government is steadfast in its commitment on the—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I will definitely take it under advisement. Could the hon. member just provide the number of the question?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate your taking it under advisement and returning to the House at the appropriate time. The question is Question No. 1398, and the response was tabled on April 13.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The Chair will take that under advisement.

The hon. member for Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies is rising on a point of order.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Madam Speaker, there has been a changeover in Speakers, and the previous Speaker has seen them acting like this for a couple of hours now. Considering the financial situation we have in our country, we are talking about a very important issue with the budget, as well as the impacts to regular Canadians and the possible defaults that could happen to thousands of Canadians. That is what our leader is trying to say. The group across the way, government representatives, is being extremely disrespectful. For the benefit of all Canadians watching tonight and who are concerned, who are losing their homes—