Mr. Speaker, I thank my tireless colleague for the question. He has an excellent attendance record in the House.
Unfortunately, inequality is reaching an all-time high in Canada. Over the past 30 years, Canadian workers have helped grow our economy by more than 50%. Productivity and wealth creation have gone up, but workers' income has stagnated. Their purchasing power has not gone up, but their debt has.
We live in a country where inequality is growing faster than it is in the United States. We live in a country where the CEOs of the 100 largest companies in Canada earn the equivalent of the average Canadian's annual salary by the morning of January 2. I hope that those CEOs were not too hung over from new year's eve and were able to wake up and realize how privileged they are.
We have a Liberal government that is doing nothing to address this problem. On the contrary, they are keeping tax loopholes open for CEOs, which is costing us $800 million a year. They are still there. Despite their election promise, the government is doing nothing about this. The 100 wealthiest Canadians have more than the 10 million least fortunate Canadians. This is nothing to brag about.
Unfortunately, all too often, any jobs that are created are low-paying jobs, with no benefits or retirement plan. When these jobs do have retirement plans, the Liberal government attacks them, rather than protecting them. If the Liberal government really cared about workers, it would change the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act to make sure that situations like the one with Sears never happen again, so that the pension funds of workers who gave 25, 30, or 35 years of their lives to a company cannot be stolen by a major corporation like Sears. That is the result of the Liberals' inaction.