Madam Speaker, I am rising tonight to call out the hypocrisy of the government.
In the way it treats Canadians and the way it treats itself, there is, needless to say, a profound dissonance between those two things. On the one hand, we have a Prime Minister who clearly loves to travel. He went to London this year and he or a member of his entourage spent $6,000 a night on a hotel room. We have actually tried to get information from the government about the carbon emissions associated with all the Prime Minister's travel, because he is raising the carbon tax. In fact, he plans to triple the carbon tax on Canadians, while he benefits from a whole bunch of publicly funded travel.
It is part of his job to travel, but the government was not even able to provide to the public accounts committee information about the level of greenhouse gas emissions generated by the Prime Minister. We would think he would be willing to be transparent about the cost and the carbon emissions associated with his own personal travel, but he does not want to do that. Instead, he wants to impose burdens and extra costs on Canadians by tripling the carbon tax that they have to pay when they travel, on their own dime, to visit family members, to go to essential functions or to have some time away. Therefore, we see the hypocrisy already from the government on that.
While the Prime Minister has been travelling all over the world and staying in outrageously expensive hotels, we have the government imposing the ArriveCAN app on Canadians, which was making it very difficult to travel. The ArriveCAN app was full of glitches and, in cases I hear from constituents, people who met all the rules such that they should not have had to quarantine were nonetheless ordered to quarantine by this piece of technology that did not work. This app, despite all of its problems, cost $54 million.
The government spends $54 million on an app that does not work and that forces many Canadians to stay home, including, in certain cases, even Canadians who have complied with what are supposed to be the rules and are still being forced to stay home. Meanwhile, we have the Prime Minister being able to take advantage of all this publicly funded travel, so that is more hypocrisy from the government. The government is grounding Canadians, increasing their taxes and imposing the ArriveCAN app on them, while the government's own largesse is truly out of control.
In response to my questions about the government's outrageous spending, about the ArriveCAN app and other things, we were told by a member of the government that this app saved lives. He claimed the app saved lives, which is particularly bizarre because we have specifically asked the government, in a written question, to show us the data that supports the travel restrictions it put in place. It turns out, according to the government's own responses to questions, that it did not even track the travel-based transmissions of COVID.
Regarding the various restrictions the Liberals imposed on Canadians with respect to being in airports, being in train stations and going back and forth, on which they imposed all sorts of restrictions, we asked how many cases of transmission they had seen in these environments that would justify the restrictions they put in place. It turned out that the Liberals were not even gathering data on the level of transmission in airports, train stations, etc.
In other words, the government is making these outrageous claims that this glitchy $54-million app saves lives, and it does not even have the data. Will the government account for this complete hypocrisy?