Mr. Speaker, I will continue the question of privilege that I began earlier.
As I have demonstrated, the government's decision to use printed money to pay its bills has driven up the cost of living for Canadians and increased inflation of key essentials, effectively creating the exact same conditions as a tax would on the population. Before we hear responses from the government, claiming that this money printing is for some purpose other than generating government funds for spending, let me quickly address the false pretext that the Bank of Canada and the government have ostensibly used to justify this money-printing bonanza.
First, the Bank of Canada told the finance committee in the spring of 2020 that the program of purchasing government debt was designed to restore order in credit and capital markets. In fairness to the bank, there was disorder in the markets at that narrow period of time, in March 2020, as the world was responding to the sudden shock of the COVID closures. The bank officials noted at the time that there was a large bid-ask spread in bond markets, which effectively means that sellers of bonds were asking significantly more than buyers were willing to pay and as a result these markets were seizing up, threatening the ability of governments to raise cash and for markets to function. That was the case in late March 2020, but it only lasted about 10 days. That bid-ask spread vanished by early April, at which point bond prices not only began trading freely on public markets but also began increasing at an extraordinary pace. The bond prices began to inflate as central banks in general, but our central bank in particular, began buying them at an unprecedented pace.
Furthermore, capital markets, while they did take a sudden drop in late March of that same year, had more than recovered by summer. In fact, today, our capital markets are higher than they have ever been. In fact, the Standard & Poor's TSX, which is the largest index of Canadian stocks, rose in market value above the size of our entire GDP for the first time in Canadian history and now stands somewhere around 125% of GDP, reaching record heights.
Furthermore, as I have demonstrated, mortgage issuances have reached records and they rose faster than ever before in our history. The amount of cash in people's and businesses' bank accounts has increased by $200 billion. In other words, the absence of liquidity or the seizing up of capital and credit markets can no longer be used as a justification to continue printing money and pumping it into the financial system. Now we have more cash circulating in markets, both credit and capital, than ever before and more liquidity in the hands of businesses and households than ever before. Therefore, the claim that money printing is just designed in order to protect the liquidity of capital and credit markets is demonstrably false.
Further evidence that it is false is the fact that the central bank has since changed its explanation for why it needed to continue printing money. It claimed then that it wanted to avoid disinflation or deflation. Apparently, they told us, this was the great risk that would result from COVID. However, as the evidence I have already presented demonstrates, there is no disinflation or deflation anywhere except perhaps in movie theatre and airplane tickets because people are effectively banned from buying either of them. Therefore, aside from those areas of the economy in which purchases are actually banned by local authorities for public health purposes, everything is actually increasing in price—