Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Vancouver East.
I am really pleased this evening to speak to the main estimates. I am going to start with some remarks I imagine perhaps only the member for Edmonton West will get excited about as they have to do with the estimates process. In fact, members may recall from the last Parliament that I was quite involved in some discussions around the estimates process.
We are considering the main estimates far later than would normally be the case under the rules of the House. One of the things that was surprising to me when the main estimates were retabled this fall was that they were in exactly the same form that they were when they were tabled just prior to the pandemic, because obviously the pandemic has had significant consequences for government spending.
The point about the process that I would like to make is on one of the take-aways from the discussion around the estimates process in the last Parliament. There was widespread agreement that ideally, if the budget and the estimates could be presented at the same time, if the government could undertake to change its internal process so that those two documents were presented together and in tandem, we would have a far better and far more transparent financial process in the Parliament of Canada that would give Canadians and parliamentarians a far better understanding of how their money is spent.
One of the major obstacles to that was the government's refusal to allow for a fixed budget date. I and others made the argument at the time that, in the case of a really extraordinary event that prevented the government from being able to deliver a budget according to a fixed timeline, Parliament would very likely be willing to make accommodations for that. We saw this year, despite the fact that there are fixed dates for the estimates process, in extraordinary circumstances Parliament was willing and able to arrange for the government to not meet those deadlines and, nevertheless, be able to flow funds in ways that were needed and to continue, as we are now, to have an examination of the estimates in due course. I submit that the same would be true in the case of a budget.
For those who are interested in this process, they should note that this year's experience shows very well why we can have a fixed budget date in order to be able to sync, so to speak, our estimates and the budget so that we can have a well-functioning financial process that is not kind of ridiculous. Under the normal process we have, in a normal year we would be considering estimates that are already out of date pretty much as they are tabled. I wanted to put that on the record for the benefit of parliamentarians who continue to take an active interest in how the government spends money and the important oversight role that Parliament plays with respect to government spending.
We have heard many references tonight to the massive spending that the government has undertaken and, indeed, the government has spent a lot of money as part of the pandemic response. I do not object in principle to the government having spent a lot of money. It was important that the government be there to support Canadians who were struggling and it is important for members of the House to remember that when the government spends money in Canada, its deficit is somebody else's surplus.
There were some problems this year and Parliament rose to the occasion in terms of holding the government to account. It was a problem when the government's deficit was to be a sole-sourced surplus for the WE Charity. It was a problem when the government's deficit was to be a windfall for former MPs like Frank Baylis, without proper oversight and scrutiny, but let us make no mistake that the overwhelming amount of the government deficit was a surplus for Canadian households.
Until the pandemic, over 50% of households were within $200 every month of insolvency because they did not have enough money to pay the bills. That was a product of a social security net and an economy that already was not working for Canadians and had no allowance for a stress test. The pandemic most definitely stressed the Canadian economy and Canadian households, and it was important, as it will continue to be important, for the government to step up and support Canadians.
I am quite proud of the track record of the NDP in terms of making sure that an important percentage of government spending went directly to Canadian households and Canadian workers who needed that support, instead of, as we saw in 2008, going predominantly to banks and large corporations in the hope that somehow it would trickle down to Canadian households. The NDP played an active role in negotiating an adequate CERB, in getting workers paid sick days and a number of other initiatives that I have put on the record.
One of the things that continue to be a problem when we talk about government spending is the distinct lack of concrete dollars and a concrete plan for child care. We have heard the government announce it recently once again, and not for the first time. Liberal governments in Canada talk a good game when it comes to child care, but the evidence is really in the follow-through and it is about the money they are willing to commit. We have main estimates that we are considering with no real commitment to child care spending, because these are estimates that were tabled prior to the pandemic.
This is indicative of the complete lack of understanding that we had on the government benches, at least in cabinet, about what a crisis Canadian child care was in. The pandemic has really highlighted that. It is another Canadian system, for lack of a better word and I think it is speaking pretty loosely to say we had or have a child care system in Canada, that just had no ability to survive any kind of stress test. We saw that in the pandemic.
I am glad to hear commitments, but it would be much better to see action, to see the federal government convene meetings with the provinces to talk about how we put a proper child care strategy in place across the country, how we fund it, what that looks like and what dollar amounts the federal government is willing to commit to that strategy, not just one time this year because we are in extraordinary circumstances but ongoing year-to-year dependable funding. I do not mean the kind of dependable funding that was promised in the initial years of health care across Canada, where the federal government first came to the plate and then slowly dialed down its commitment to funding health care. That is another problem in terms of the general course of the government, which has been to continue a pattern and a long-term trend of not providing enough leadership on health care funding.
We need it on child care. We need a framework and a strategy, but we also need it when it comes to health care. We have seen now, particularly as a result of the pandemic, just what a strain and how fragile and vulnerable our long-term care system is. However, before that we knew that Canadians were having serious trouble accessing the prescription medications that they needed to be healthy. We know and have known this for a long time. Once again Liberal governments in the past have committed to doing something about this and then did not get the job done. In some cases, they have not really taken meaningful steps. We have seen some steps, at least rhetorically, in the direction of pharmacare by the current government over the last five years, but that says it all. It has been five years, four years in which the government had a majority and no pandemic to contend with.
Many Canadians would have been far better off had the Liberal government in the last Parliament actually done what it often said it was going to do, which was to get a national pharmacare plan in place. That would have meant that the millions of Canadians who lost their jobs during the pandemic, and subsequently also lost their drug coverage, would have at least been able to have some support to continue getting the prescription drug coverage that they so desperately needed. We are proud of our health care system and the fact that access to basic health care does not depend on a person's employment situation, but prescription drugs are basic health care and that continues to be a function of employment for far too many Canadians.
I would be remiss if I did not add that were we to implement a national pharmacare program, this initiative would save money to Canadian taxpayers. What appears as a deficit on the federal leger, appears as a surplus elsewhere. It appears as a surplus in provincial government budgets, which are asking for more money from the federal government that has not held up its end of the bargain when it comes to health funding. It appears as a surplus in the household budgets of Canadians who right now are paying exceptionally high costs for prescription drugs.
Likewise, with child care, we know that child care is one of the best returns on investment spending decisions that a government can make because it helps a lot of workers, particularly women, get into the economy and earn wages on which they then pay taxes.
When it comes to government spending, we have work to do on how the government spends and reports on its spending. We can do that good work as parliamentarians. We have a long way to go to have budgets and spending programs that really reflect the priorities of Canadians and put money back in their pockets without robbing them of the services they need.