Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by acknowledging my colleague and thanking her for her intervention and her positive comments.
It is true that we manage to find solutions, improve bills and suggestions and, ultimately, make things better for people because we do our job well.
Right now, we have a government that is spending like no government has ever spent before. It has to spend because the situation is very serious. However, at the same time, as we saw in the spring, the government is asking lawmakers to back off a bit because the situation is so serious. The government passes bills under closure and accelerates the process, and it asks lawmakers to take shortcuts and not bother it. Then it shuts down Parliament and asks us to trust it. At the beginning, that is what happened, but we got some surprises. It passed the emergency wage benefit. Political parties were not listed under the wage subsidy program, but the Liberal party claimed it anyway.
Some friends of the Prime Minister's family own an organization. Public servants say that they can administer the program, but they are told that it will be administered by the organization's owners. The friends stand to make about $10 million, because a friend is a friend. We learn that the organization is WE Charity but that there are so many hundreds of billions of dollars in play that it is impossible, under the current circumstances, to scrutinize everything. We must take it on trust. However, given the track record of the party in power, we no longer trust it.
We must continue to put programs in place, but there needs to be more transparency and oversight. For that to happen, we need a special committee to study the spending. That idea has been requested and debated since the House resumed sitting after prorogation, but the government does not want to talk about it. It does not want to explore issues of transparency.
We remember the sponsorship scandal. We thought the government had cast off its old habits. Just because the Liberals have a younger leader does not mean that the old habits have disappeared and that the people behind him have changed their ways. This is unacceptable. That is why we need an oversight committee, a special committee that will look at all of this, because we need to be able to trust them.