Madam Speaker, we do support backdating the rental assistance to September, and that is why we will be allowing this to pass. That said, this entire mess related to the rent subsidy program is highly suspicious.
The Liberals said that CRA could not administer the rent assistance program and that, therefore, they had to go over to CMHC which does not do commercial real estate and is responsible for mortgage insurance. CMHC officials said they could do it either, and that they had to contract this out to a company whose vice-president is married to the Prime Minister's chief of staff. Now, the Liberals admit that they could have just given this to CRA all along and that there was nothing stopping them from having CRA do it.
The only reason we can assume that the Liberals ever punted this over to an outside company is that their Liberal friends and family members were intimately involved in its original delivery. It is quite a sad thing that so many businesses suffered for so long because the government put as its priority the helping of insider Liberals rather than small business owners and workers.