Madam Speaker, the short answer is no.
The long answer is that I agree it is important, but I do not think its inclusion in a fairly modest piece of legislation, which has only a few parts, diminishes the ability of parliamentarians to debate it, particularly given the extensive debate that it has received on the floor of the House of Commons and the delay that has cost about four months in its passage.
Good governance demands that we monitor the spending of the Government of Canada, and that we plan for it accordingly.
If the member is arguing that the debt limit should not be increased because we should be limiting government spending, I would ask the member to make that argument directly. It is clear to me, frankly, that the Conservative position seems to be to cheapen the economic response to the pandemic when our decision has been to invest in Canadians.
The reality is that the pandemic created serious costs. The government made the decision to cover those costs and is planning accordingly for the future. We laid out all the details, by the way, in our fall economic statement—