Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you very much to everybody for being here this morning.
This is an exceedingly important time in Canadian history, when we begin to look at the spending of this Liberal government in cahoots with the NDP. We know very clearly that Canadians have had a significant difficulty with the reckless spending of this Liberal-NDP coalition government. We also know very clearly that Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada, said that domestic inflation is related to this government's pouring their inflationary spending fuel on a fire.
We also know very clearly that Canadians are paying the price for that. We know that the cost of housing in this country has doubled. We know that interest rates have gone up more quickly than at any time in history. We know that inflation is at a 40-year high. Canadians cannot heat their homes, feed their families and keep a roof over their head.
We also know very clearly, from conversations with those very important people we represent, that this is not going to change, because the Liberal-NDP government continues to do its dirty deeds with respect to inflationary spending.
Mr. Chair, we hear from the people we represent every single day, and I know that you do too. In P.E.I., you hear from them, telling you exactly how difficult it is to pay their bills. I know that those other members sitting across from me hear from the people they represent in this great nation as well.
We also know that the visits to food banks are at an all-time high. Millions upon millions of people are visiting food banks every single month. In the small town where I live, Truro, Nova Scotia, they have 1,800 people on their list who come to the food bank regularly. Things have gotten so bad that when I spoke to the mayor of the County of Colchester on Friday, he said that the food bank has reached out to the county to ask them to pay their mortgage. They continue to have to buy more food and figure out ways to feed the 1,800 people, including children, who are on their list.
The reason we're here, of course, is the spending of $150 million by this government on a failed business plan with Medicago. We also know that, realistically, the business dealings with this company were actually over $300 million. They originally spent $172 million for infrastructure and building, etc., and then they entered into contracts with this company for another $150 million. Talk about throwing bad money after good, potentially, or just more bad money after bad money.
Chair, we also know that in 2003, Canada was one of the signatories of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, or as they call it at WHO, the FCTC. Very clearly, Canada was one of the signatories on this. This government should have known that when they were part of a company with Philip Morris International, a tobacco company, there was no way this vaccine was going to be accepted. Therefore, of course, what did they do? They continued to spend more money.
We also know very clearly that they've spent money on a multitude of other examples, such as the ArriveCAN app, colloquially known as the “ArriveScam” app. When you watch some of the testimony that's happening at the current time with respect to that particular app, it appears to me—now, I've obviously never developed an app and I don't really know that much about it—to be two guys in their basement, who didn't even develop an app but acted as intermediaries and took a lot of money, $54 million, from this Liberal-NDP coalition and then farmed it out to some other people. We now know very clearly from the media stories that have come out that it was possible to develop this app in a weekend. It was that simple to actually do it.
Therefore, when all of this came out, we know that some people got very rich in doing this. That's an absolute travesty, I would suggest.