Madam Speaker, to correct my Liberal friend, it was the Speaker ruling on this and some other Liberal omnibus bills, chastising the government for cramming things into them that had nothing to do with the budget. The government then had to break up the omnibus budget bill. This was something the Liberals criticized very strongly, as New Democrats did too. There are some bills that have to be more extensive in dealing with the budget, but governments tend to fall for the temptation of sneaking things in. The Harper government did it before. The Liberals have now been chastised twice within this session alone.
I have a specific question about General Motors, because it is very much in all of our hearts and minds. Thousands of jobs were affected today by the decision by GM. I think it is a cowardly decision and showed very little respect for the community in Oshawa and the people of Ontario in its timing and the way it was done.
In 2009, the Canadian and Ontario governments loaned GM $9.5 billion and acquired some of its shares. Then it ended up losing almost $3 billion in reselling those shares. In 2014, the Auditor General of Canada found out that GM could not account for how than more than half a billion dollars of that money was used. The whole point of the public bailout was to save jobs.
In October, Export Development Canada showed a one billion dollar outstanding loan to General Motors that now apparently is going to be written off.
With all of these billions and billions of dollars going to sometimes profitable, sometimes not profitable, companies which then decide to pull up their stakes, Canadians are wondering what accountability there is. What responsibility is there back to the taxpayers who only loaned or gave this money with the intent and the knowledge that it would somehow be protecting jobs, particularly when a company like GM decided today to pull out and leave two and a half thousand families without work or income?