Mr. Speaker, it is wonderful to join the debate today, albeit not from within the House itself but from within my constituency of Edmonton Strathcona. I will be splitting my time today with the member for Timmins—James Bay.
This is a long motion, so I am going to speak about a number of different portions of it. I am going to start by talking about the committee work and the important, vital role committees play in our parliamentary democracy.
We heard from the government that it is the opposition that is causing problems and preventing committees from doing their work. I have to flag that I just do not see this as accurate. We know committees must be empowered and we know they must be independent, but they are not able to do their work right now because of obstruction from Liberal members of these committees. A perfect example is the committee on which I sit, the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Sitting on this committee for the last few weeks, I have been listening to members of the Liberal Party talking about their cats, about cutting their lawns and about a number of different things in order to not have to discuss the very important issue of global vaccine equity.
At the committee I would like to talk about vaccines, about how they are being dispersed around the world and how we are making sure dangerous variants appearing around the world are not endangering Canadians. I want to talk about why we do not have national capacity to develop vaccines in Canada. I want to talk about why we are the only G7 country taking vaccines from poorer countries through the COVAX program, despite having negotiated 10 times what we need through bilateral agreements. However, we cannot talk about that because the Liberals have been filibustering.
What is even more disturbing is that while I would love to talk about what I think is one of the most important issues of the moment, which is the equality of vaccine distribution, the committee also needs to be talking about all the things happening around the world. The committee needs to be talking about arms sales to Saudi Arabia. It needs to be talking about what is happening with China, Hong Kong and Myanmar, and what is happening with Yemen, which is named as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. We cannot do that work either, because of the obstruction by the government.
When we hear the government say it is in fact the opposition that is preventing it, it is very clear to me that this is in fact not the case. It is the filibustering, the withholding of documents, the redacting of documents and the obstructing of work. Our democracy is in a very sad state when we are not being enabled to do the work we need to do. Because the NDP strongly supports anything that adds to the transparency and accountability of the government, I will certainly be supporting this legislation.
The next thing I want to talk about is the WE scandal and some of the things that have happened around the WE scandal. As an NDP member, I have been very pleased over the pandemic to see the support we have been able to get the government to agree to for Canadians. The CERB was always just going to be a tweak on EI, but the NDP was able to convince the government to make it $2,000 and extend it into the CRB. We knew the wage subsidy was going to be 10%; we convinced the government to get it to 75%.
The rent program was a deeply flawed program because it was landlord-driven, but we were able to convince the government to fix it. Of course, we were not able to get it applied back retroactively to April, so many constituencies and many businesses in Edmonton Strathcona really suffered, but we were able to get a program for people. We were able to get support for seniors and for people living with disabilities, and we are really proud of that.
We were also able to get some support for students. There was the CESB and there was a moratorium on student loan repayments, but we lost the thread there. In June, there was a huge announcement that there was going to be all this money for students. It was going to be great and help students. We knew they were suffering. We knew that not every student came from a wealthy family and that not every student was getting the support they needed, and they were not able to work over the summer, something they needed to do, so we were delighted to hear about the supports.
However, I was very concerned when I heard the organization being used to develop this program was the WE Charity. As someone who has worked for over 25 years in international development, I was very disappointed when I heard Mr. Trudeau defend the partnership, saying that WE was the only group with a countrywide network capable of operating—