Mr. Chair, the leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, will do anything to secure his pension and the pension of soon-to-be-defeated NDP MPs. The leader of the NDP got caught going behind closed doors to concoct a scheme to push the date of the next federal election back by one week so that he and his soon-to-be-defeated NDP MPs would secure their pensions.
Now, they represented, or at least the Minister of Democratic Institutions represented, that the reason for pushing the date of the next election back was twofold—to avoid conflict with Diwali and to avoid conflict with the Alberta municipal election. Okay—except for the fact that the date of the election could easily have been moved forward rather than back. According to the representative from the PCO, moving the date ahead by one week would conflict with Thanksgiving, and moving yet a week ahead from that might conflict with summer and the Labour Day weekend, even though these Liberals had no problem calling an election in 2021 in the middle of August that conflicted with the Labour Day weekend. That doesn't make sense.
As far as pushing the date back by one week to avoid conflict with Alberta municipal elections, well, in fact, by pushing it back by one week, it conflicts with territorial elections in Nunavut.
They tried to misrepresent the reason that this election date was pushed back. Ms. Barron, in her submissions earlier today, said that this was just inadvertent. It was inadvertent that NDP and Liberal MPs who soon face defeat would qualify for their pensions when they wouldn't qualify if the election were held on the current fixed date. I would submit that it wasn't inadvertent. It was very clear. It was very calculated. It was designed to secure their pensions and they got caught.
Now, the bottom line is that Canadians just want this government to stop. They want this government to stop the inflationary spending that is driving up the cost of living. They want this government to stop job-killing tax hikes. They want this government to stop putting Canadians in debt. They want this government simply to stop. Canadians are tired of the disastrous record of this costly and corrupt NDP government. Canadians want a carbon tax election. They want a carbon tax election now.
The leader of the NDP has, on the one hand, criticized the Liberals. He has, on the other hand, seized every opportunity available to prop this Liberal government up. The leader of the NDP entered into the coalition agreement with the Liberals more than two years ago. For the past two years, NDP MPs have carried water for this Liberal government, including working hand in glove with the Liberals to cover up Liberal scandals and corruption.
In September, the leader of the NDP said he'd finally had enough and that he was ripping up the coalition agreement with the Liberals. The timing of the announcement was interesting insofar as it happened to be on the eve of the by-election in Winnipeg.