Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Huron—Bruce.
Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, and that perfectly encapsulates this government. The Liberals knows the price, the very high price, that they have made Canadians pay, but they confuse that high price with value. Instead of judging our performance in government during COVID based on the mortality rates, the unemployment rates or the vaccination rates of our country, all of which are among the worst, they think that they should be rewarded just because their programs are the most expensive. Today they were literally bragging that their programs are big and fat—not smart and effective, but big and fat, and not as a means to an end but as ends in and of themselves.
One would think that we would judge the value of the government's actions by, for example, the percentage of people who have been vaccinated, but if the Liberals did that, of course, we would find that Canada is the worst in the G7. They might want to judge the performance of the government on jobs on the basis of the unemployment rate, but of course if they judged the value of their actions on that basis, they would again find Canada worst in the G7, so instead the Liberals tell us not to worry about the value of their performance but to congratulate them simply because they have delivered this bad performance at the highest possible price. They are literally like a used car salesman's dream. They show up and they say, “Give me the most expensive car on the lot. The make, model and condition do not matter. I want whichever one will add the biggest bill to my credit card, because that must be the best one.”
What if other countries thought like this? Taiwan, for example, has a COVID mortality rate of 0.04 per hundred thousand. We have a mortality rate of 59 per hundred thousand. In other words, our mortality rate here in Canada is more than 1,400 times higher than in Taiwan, but that does not matter, because Taiwan has a smaller deficit. Taiwan's deficit is 4% of GDP, whereas ours is about 17% of GDP. The Liberals would say that their plan and their performance is three times greater because it is three times more expensive. Can members imagine the Taiwanese people holding a protest and saying, “Sure, you kept our mortality rate down, and sure, fewer people died, but you were not as expensive as the Canadian Liberals, so you obviously do not care as much as they do.” That would be how the Taiwanese people would look at their success in managing COVID if they were judging simply on the basis of how expensive their government could be. However, this is the approach the Liberals have taken on everything.
Let us take infrastructure. The Parliamentary Budget Officer found, when he looked, that the $180-billion infrastructure program that the Liberals have been bragging about has no associated plan. Now, we know it is the best, because it is the most expensive. The government brags all the time that it is twice as expensive as the previous government's infrastructure plan, and therefore it must be twice as good. When I asked how we could spend $180 billion without a plan, the then infrastructure minister stood up and said something to the effect that “Well, we got 20 buses in Halifax”, to which I replied, “How much does that work out to per bus? Are they all made out of solid gold?”
Then we went over to the finance committee, and I asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer if he had seen a list of the projects that had been funded through this $180-billion plan. He told me that, yes, they had a list, but it only accounted for half the money spent. I said to him that if I came home after spending a lot of money for groceries and said, “Honey, I want you to congratulate me; I have spent more money on groceries than anyone in the history of the world”, and if she asked what I had bought and I said that I only had receipts to account for half of what I had spent, I can tell members that I would be sleeping in the doghouse that night.
The reality is in most human existence, people do not judge their performance by how expensive they can be. They judge it by what they get for their money. They judge their success by the value they obtain, not just the price they pay. Only in government would we advertise ourselves as the most expensive product around and expect to get more business. Imagine a restaurant operating that way. Come dine with us: the service is terrible and the food is not very good, but we charge more than anyone else, therefore we must be the best.
It is not just in infrastructure. In housing, for example, the Liberal member for Spadina—Fort York stood in the House and said, “We have a $70 billion housing plan,” as though we were supposed to congratulate the Liberals because it was really expensive, not because of what it does. What has it actually delivered? Vancouver is now the second most expensive place on earth to buy a house, if we compare average income to average house price. Toronto is number six. We are one of the most sparsely populated nations on the planet. We should be the most affordable place to buy a home but somehow, under the government, housing right here in Canada has become one of the most expensive things to buy anywhere in the world.
Think of this. Singapore has a life expectancy over a year longer than Canada. It ranks better than us on the United Nations Human Development Index. Its government costs 14¢ for every $1 of GDP. In Canada, it is 41¢. Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, the U.K. and New Zealand all outranked Canada on the United Nations Human Development Index even though the cost of their governments, as a share of GDP, is less than here in Canada.
In other words, they delivered some combination of longer life expectancies, more schooling and/or higher GDP per capita for their populations at a lower cost. That is because they judge success based on value, not on price. They do not go around bragging that they have the most expensive programs around. They work to make their programs successful in delivering results for people.
Here in Canada, we could do the same if we would stop bragging about the billions we can push out the door, saying, “My program has more billions than your program”, for example, and start talking about the good the programs could do. We should unleash the power of our free enterprise system to deliver more for less and make life more affordable for people, including for taxpayers. That would be a new and different approach by which we could judge success in this place. Perhaps when we judge things by the right metric, which is to say value, rather than the wrong method of price, then we would get better results and a higher standard of living for people.
For a house to be affordable, it cannot take up more than one-third of a family's income. The average house takes up 50% of the average family's income in Canada. In other words, the average house is two-thirds more expensive than the average family can afford here in Canada, one of the most sparsely populated places on earth. We have more spaces where there is no one than we have places where there is anyone.
According to a leading poverty group, in the home town of the member bragging about the $70 billion worth of spending the Liberals have done on housing, there is 98% occupancy in homeless shelters, and 330,000 people are on waiting lists for affordable housing. Ten thousand homeless people are in that member's home town. Where did the $70 billion go? Maybe if he doubled that budget, there would be twice as many homeless people. That is what happens when success is judged not based on what is done, but on what it costs other people to do it. If we think it is impossible to get more for less, look at other countries that do exactly that.