Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise representing the New Democratic Party on Bill C-544 put forward by my colleague from the Liberal Party. This bill is very important to re-establishing some level of trust with the Canadian public.
The other day in the House of Commons, I heard a Conservative backbencher stand to say that he was proud to be in the greatest House in the history of Parliament. I am hoping that was a case of exuberant naïveté because the opposite is true. What we have seen under the current government is a debasement of participatory democracy, the debasement of public institutions, and the corrosive effect on public trust from the increasingly blurry lines between what is supposed to be serving the public interest and the very narrow party interest of the government.
We have seen so many examples of this corrosive impact, but, for me, it was during the hockey playoffs. I saw an ad for a young woman who was getting a job, being retrained in the trades, and how important it was that she was starting her life over. On Monday morning, I was getting calls in my office from unemployed people asking me how they could benefit from this program. I had to tell them that this program did not exist, that the ad was lying to Canadian people, that taxpayers' money had been used to promote a program that did not exist.
How does one explain to the Canadian people that the government is so cynical that it would lie to the unemployed and use millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to promote something that does not exist? This is the level of cynicism we see from the government.
Instead of serving the public interest, we have seen an increasingly dumbed-down message box from which the Conservatives believe they can spin the public. All members on the government side stand like marionettes, repeating the same dumbed-down talking points that are often misrepresentations and lies and completely contrary. If the sun is high in the sky, they will say it is a dark night. If it is a dark night, they will say the sun is in the sky, and they will repeat that message again and again. It is like All the King's Men, and the politician Willie Stark, who believed that if a lie was repeated often enough, it would somehow be true. To protect those lies—