Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for New Westminster—Burnaby. I actually referenced the same figure in my speech. The fact that the billionaire class has raked in another $53 billion since COVID began is a shocker. We do need a wealth tax.
Also, I think we should look at the profits of the large commercial banks, which are taxed less in Canada than in some of our competitor nations, such as the United States. We are looking at the banks who have had record profits, and the billionaires have had record profits. Goodness knows, there are the digital companies, and as we approach the Christmas season, we endorse the campaign not to buy anything from Amazon, because those big offshore digital giants are eroding our bedrock of small businesses across Canada, whether they are hotels affected by Airbnbs or newspapers affected by news services that do not even pay for what they are getting.
I am very much in favour of looking at future revenue sources. Let us continue to push the Minister of Finance. At some point, we have to find a new source of revenue. We cannot imagine going through the kind of austerity program that I remember, and that I know the member remembers, from the early 1990s when we lost something like 30% of our hospital beds in a misguided approach to cut spending. It really hurt us long term. We have to be prepared to find other sources of revenue so that we can keep building the kind of society that we know we can. We are a wealthy country. We just have to get our priorities right.
