Those are the contents of the motion, Mr. Chair.
Look, we're gathered here today in the middle of summer not because I think everyone loves spending time in Ottawa in July but because Canadians have very real concerns about the Liberal plan to bail out billionaire condo developers in the fifth-most unaffordable housing market in the entire world.
It starts with the fact that during the last election, the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party never campaigned on this. They never campaigned on spending more than $1 billion in taxpayer money to give a handout to their wealthy developer friends. They never campaigned on using the taxpayer dollars of hard-working Canadians to buy more than 2,000 condos in greater Vancouver so that developers wouldn't have to lower prices and, God forbid, sell at a loss. They never campaigned on artificially propping up what are already extremely unaffordable housing prices and on preventing the market from moderating to a more affordable and sustainable level.
All of this begs some pretty obvious ethical questions that I think deserve answers. If the Liberals didn't campaign on this policy, why are they suddenly deciding to pursue it now? Whose idea was it? Who lobbied for it? Is this being planned for more Canadian cities? Maybe most importantly, which well-connected developers, big banks and foreign investors stand to benefit the most?
I want to take a moment to share with members of this committee a particular dictionary definition that I think describes the direction of economic policy in Canada over the past year. It's an economic system where business success depends heavily on close ties between corporate executives and government officials. Instead of competing in a free, meritocratic market, companies thrive by securing political favours, such as bailouts, tax breaks, subsidies or specialized regulations that block competition. That, colleagues, is the definition of crony capitalism. It increasingly, in my view, represents the official economic policy of the Liberal Party of Canada. It's rewarding insiders, well-connected corporations and party loyalists while everyday Canadians fall further behind. It's privatizing the profits of the wealthy, and then bailing them out should something go wrong.
As one of the millennial members of Parliament, I also have to point out how insane the generational inequity of this policy truly is. It's handing out huge sums of money to developers that have made billions over the past 20 years. It's paid for with tax dollars by those who are still trying to enter the housing market for the very first time. It is yet another generational transfer of wealth that creates no new units of housing while rewarding those who have built and priced condos nobody can afford. It's not only bad economic policy; it's unethical, it's immoral and it's wrong.