I have been very critical of them, and not because I'm opposed to helping people who need help. Of course we help them. That is the Canadian way. We have been doing this my entire life. As my late mother, who grew up in the Depression in Saskatchewan, reminded me, there was no public health care. There was no old age pension in the thirties. There were none of the programs we have now.
This is not about dismantling the social programs for people who need help. However, universality, which is giving money to high-income people and upper-middle-class people like professors, is simply wrong. It is just wrong to say that I should be getting free medicine from the taxpayer when I have a private insurance plan.
We should be targeting it to people who need help at the bottom, not privileged people like members of Parliament, professors and public servants. That's squandering desperately scarce public funds, when we should be targeting them and then focusing on growth to create the economy and growth of the future. That is going to generate, by the way, tax revenues for governments to then redistribute among various consumption programs.