Madam Speaker, we of course believe that government should compensate the businesses and workers who it has banned from working. When we ban people from earning an income, we have to replace that income somehow, and that is what governments across the world have had to do.
Unfortunately, the Liberal government has created the highest unemployment in the G7. Why? Because the programs it created were designed to punish people for working and businesses for operating, even those that had approval from lower levels of government to reopen safely in the COVID-19 period. It punished people for earning more than $1,000. It punished businesses for recovering more than 70% of their pre-COVID revenue. Therefore, it is no surprise that our unemployment is the highest in the G7. The government designed programs expressly to make it so. It was as though it was setting out to suppress the economy, to punish entrepreneurs and workers, and it succeeded in all those objectives.
We had different objectives over here, which is to unleash the power of our workers and entrepreneurs to go back and bring our economy back to life. That is what we will continue to champion on this side of the House until we get to that side of the House and start implementing it.