Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this bill and to go through our concerns about being asked to approve another $7 billion-plus. I will be splitting my time with my friend, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. I appreciate his contributions and look forward to his speech.
We often hear the Liberals say that they have a plan for the economy, but I think we all know that means a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats sitting around a table and coming up with yet another government program on which they can spend money.
We are being asked to scrutinize legislation that asks for over $7 billion in additional funding. We have said many times in this place that the printing of money, the $400 billion, is causing massive inflation problems right across the country. It is causing the price of pretty much everything to go up, making things more expensive, such as everyday goods, hurting those who are living off their paycheques and struggling to get by every day.
As we all know, every time a new plan is constructed, it eventually fails. Then we have the government saying that something is going wrong and it needs to come up with another program to fix the program it just had. It is like going to the doctor for high blood pressure and the doctor prescribes a pill. Then it is dry mouth and the doctor prescribes another pill. After that, it is high blood pressure again and that is another pill. The list goes on. It is the exact same issue we are dealing with here.
In this case, the government is talking about a new day care program, a program that, on its merits, looks like it will be deficit financed well into the future. It is a program that is going to cause significant issues for parents trying to access already limited spaces. What the government does, as we all know when it comes into the marketplace, is it eviscerates competition. It creates an uneven playing field with other operators.
We are talking about people who operate day cares from their basements, which are regulated but are provided in that neighbourhood home. The government, by putting in dollars and distorting the price, causes those spaces that would otherwise be provided in the free market to go away, causing more problems and more wait-lists. If people think day care is expensive now, wait until the government gets its hands on it fully.
It seems the government has two speeds: big government and bigger government. The day care is one, but we are talking about the expansion of a number of these programs.
We have said all along, as my friends have already pointed out, that when the government was telling people to stay home and businesses to close because we were dealing with the pandemic, and no one really knew what was going on, they deserved to be compensated, and we supported those programs. There were some problems with those programs, such as the wage subsidy, the rent program and many others, that we in the opposition brought to the government's attention. In some cases, changes were made and in some cases they were not made. A number of businesses were not able to qualify for these programs despite attention being given to these programs.
We are now finding out that possibly CERB money was given to organized crime potentially contributing to the already growing crime problem in some of our major cities. That deserves a level of scrutiny. That deserves responsibility by parliamentarians to do our job to find out what is going on, what is working and what is not working with this program.
As we know, the government does not have divine resources. The only thing the government has is the taxes we pay and if the government borrows money, it puts us in debt. If it prints money, it is the back door to taxing people. It is taxing savings and making the savings of many in the working class worth less.
As was pointed out many times in the House, those who are sitting in big mansions or on massive assets have seen their wealth grow. However, there are those people who are struggling to get by, struggling to find a house, struggling to even get into the housing market, struggling to pay their bills or even just going to the grocery store and realizing their cart is not as full as it used to be but the price at the till is the same. That is because the government has thrown all this money up into atmosphere and refuses to change course.
During the height of the pandemic, the first thing the government did was to try to seize absolute power to tax and spend on whatever it wanted for two years into the future.