Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will get back to procurement.
Part of the procurement we see with the Liberal government is the issuance of Liberal press releases. It's a rebranding exercise. That's where I left off. If we look deeper into it, it's something familiar. It's Liberal spending. There's almost always—I won't say “always”—a Liberal insider involved. There are more Liberal excuses for why the problem exists. They can't look at themselves in the mirror. They have contempt for taxpayers and the everyday Canadians who are struggling to get by. They are giving a significant percentage of their hard-earned money to the federal government as taxes.
I'll go back to the example I was using. The Liberal government announced a 10-year, $200-million agreement to lease a dedicated space launch pad at the space port in Nova Scotia, near Canso. It is operated by Maritime Launch Services, which has a former Liberal staffer for a lobbyist. The government says that the facility will support the Department of National Defence—which is why we want the defence minister to come—as well as the Canadian Armed Forces and wider federal needs. It will support the defence industrial strategy, which is why we want the Minister of Industry to come. They say it's about sovereign launch capacity to address Canada's future needs in space.
Of course, sovereignty matters. I want to be very clear: As Conservatives, we support sovereignty. We also want to make sure we play a meaningful role in Canada's future in space. We support sovereignty to the point where we introduced a Canada sovereignty act as a motion a couple of months ago. It was voted down by every one of the Liberal members. We support Canadian science, but, again, we've seen our motions voted down at this committee, time and time again, by each and every Liberal member. We support Canadian research, but, of course, we see Liberals injecting their ideology, like DEI requirements.
It's gotten so bad now that it's about not just DEI requirements but also DEI quotas. If you're not a specific race or gender, you cannot apply. Explicitly excluding people on the form is a discriminatory hiring practice. The Liberals say they want to promote research excellence. How can you have research excellence if you're excluding a significant chunk of the population? How are we going to compete with other global actors in the space race?
Of course, we support real Canadian industry. Under the Liberals' own buy Canadian definition, which the government sets, you can say “buy Canadian” and put the buy Canadian label on something even if the vendor to the government, which is taking taxpayer money, is foreign-owned. How is that buying Canadian? Is it just because there is a domestic presence?
By the way, we've seen in contribution agreements that “domestic workers” doesn't mean hiring Canadian citizens. Let's say there's a foreign-owned firm that has a branch in Canada. We've seen this with many manufacturing contracts and contribution agreements the government has done. Not only is the firm foreign-owned, but it doesn't even have to hire Canadians. It just has to hire workers in Canada, so it can hire non-citizens—temporary residents or temporary foreign workers. The Liberals call that “buy Canadian”. The ownership is not Canadian, and the paycheques are not going to Canadians. That is something—