I appreciate that, and I am sure the employment insurance appeal board will go after “eel-legal" things in the act.
Mr. Chair, these are just some of the reasons that this is a huge piece of legislation and that we need to see the minister for two hours. I noticed that the government members have refused to commit to two hours.
I'll just remind members and, for the sake of the interpreters, the minister's mandate letter was signed by the Right Honourable Justin Trudeau on December 16, 2021. It says here on Prime Minister's Office letterhead:
Dear Minister Freeland: Thank you for continuing to serve Canadians as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance.
If I go to the bottom of page 2 of that letter, if you'll bear with me, I'll just read these very important words that the Prime Minister instructed the Minister of Finance to follow:
The success of this Parliament will require Parliamentarians, both in the House of Commons and the Senate, to work together across all parties to get big things done for Canadians.
As I said last time, it doesn't say big and little things, just big things. The big things and big government are the things that we get done. We don't worry about passports or approving health cards so that we don't have a shortage of pilots. We don't worry about the little things like immigration approvals while we now have 2.2 million and visas and processes. We don't worry about those little things. We just worry about the big things done for Canadians. It's very impressive language.
I've always maintained, by the way, that the first priority of any government is to look after the ante up at the poker game. If you're a municipal government, and you're not providing adequate fire service, don't bother me with bike lanes until you've got adequate fire service. It's the same for the federal government. Unless you're delivering the basic services that Canadians expect, all those other nice-to-do things that are contained in the 42 or so acts that this thing either creates or amends should be done first.
The Prime Minister goes on to say:
I expect you to maintain constructive relationships with your Opposition Critics and coordinate any legislation with the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons.
I assume she did that with this bill, or we wouldn't have it here today.
This is the really important part of this mandate letter from the Prime Minister to the Minister of Finance. This is a critical part about what we're talking about today, which is ministerial accountability:
As Minister, you are accountable to Parliament both individually, for your style of leadership and the performance of your responsibilities, and collectively, in support of our Ministry and decisions taken by Cabinet.
It then goes onto reference this document from 2015 called “Open and Accountable Government”. The letter continues that this document "sets out the rules and core principles both in standards of conduct expected of you as Minister of Finance and your office."
If you do as the Prime Minister says.... The Prime Minister says here:
I expect you to familiarize yourself with this document, which outlines my expectations for each member of the Ministry.
Just recall from that document that it says that ministers must be available to answer questions in Parliament, and that is the root of the question here, that MP Blaikie's original amendment and the subamendment propose two hours, not one hour, and we can't seem to get a commitment on the two hours. Two hours is a small price to pay. We do know that the minister is busy.
I'll give you an example of the minister's recent schedule this past weekend. The minister this past weekend had two very important appointments, very important appointments. This past weekend, she was at the Shaw Centre not far from here, and I suggested in the previous meeting that perhaps we reconvene this committee at the Shaw Centre in order to give the minister a greater amount of convenience to show up, because she was at the Shaw Centre for the weekend. The minister had on the first day of her meetings there a keynote conversation, a fireside chat, so to speak, with Hillary Rodham Clinton, former senator and first lady. I know that it was a big and important meeting, because I'm told by the media reports that the Minister of Finance was almost moved to tears by this.
I'll tell you what moves me to tears. It's a $490-billion budget, the biggest in Canadian history, other than during COVID. It's a $490-billion budget that never projects a balanced budget and says we're going to spend $130 billion and add more to the debt, so that the two Trudeaus combined, senior and junior, will have added $1.1 trillion in debt. That's what moves me to tears. It's that and thinking about the future generations of Canadians who are going to have to pay for that long beyond any of us are even still here on this earth.
That was an important hour-long conversation. It was probably equivalent to the only amount of time the minister is willing to spend at this committee. Apparently, she's willing to spend an hour here. It was said she spent at least an hour. I think the proper pronunciation in the past is that she spent a maximum of an hour in this committee.
We're simply asking that the time that she gave for two panels at the convention on the weekend be allocated to her $490 billion budget. The second panel, which I'm sure was just riveting, had a big crowd. I don't think it made her cry, but it made me cry just reading the title because of its “wokeness”. It was called “Made-in-Canada: Innovation for middle class jobs and a cleaner economy”.
I'm sure there was great insight in that. Insights like that led party members of the Liberal Party to pass a resolution—I'm sorry. They defeated a resolution. They did not pass a resolution. They defeated a resolution, perhaps bravely put forward by some Liberal Party members, that they should have a plan at some date to balance the budget.
The collective Liberals in the room—including, presumably, all of the caucus members here—said, “Absolutely not. We don't ever want to balance the budget. We think it's perfectly fine to spend forever and ever on the credit card.”
I'd love to see the way each one of those Liberals runs their own personal house finances. I'm sure that when the bank calls and says, “You owe us money on your mortgage or your credit card,” they say, “Don't worry about it. I don't need to worry about that. We can keep doing that. Increase my limit. Just increase my limit.”
The $130 billion...that's a big number. We're now in the position that by the end of this five-year projection in this budget, the debt servicing costs alone are going to be more than what the government transfers to the provinces in health care. It's more important to pay interest to bankers by increasing the debt for those inputs with little outputs.
Is your health care any better?