Madam Speaker, before I address the question, regarding the member's preamble that everyone in the House supports these kinds of business supports, I would direct him to comments of his own party's finance critic at the outset of this pandemic, who explained that the kinds of measures we were putting in place would not gain the support of the Conservative Party. He described them as “big, fat government programs” that did not seemingly serve his ideology, so I would dispute his preamble.
In any event, with respect to the question, the hon. member ought to know that, despite the fact that Canada may have a lower employment rate than some of our G7 comparators, it entered this pandemic with literally the lowest in the history of our nation since we started keeping track of those statistics in 1976.
The member is criticizing, seemingly, the fact that we have had the most ambitious support program when he talks about our spending. What he is really saying is that he does not support the fact that Canada has had the most aggressive COVID-19 economic response of any developed economy in the world.
If he is curious about the unemployment rates today, I think Canada is at 9.0% compared with about 8.6% in the United States. If he would like to make up that 0.4% by paying for it in the lives that have been lost in the United States, rather than the rates we have experienced in Canada, I invite him to show me which public health measures he would erode in Canada to put Canadians' health at risk in order for that 0.4% rate of unemployment to match Canada and the United—