Mr. Speaker, when members of Parliament go back to their ridings on the weekend or during their constituency weeks and when they go to community events, or to their local arena, or to the local community centre or legion, wherever they go, I am sure they get the same comments that I get, no matter what political party. Sometimes we are a little amazed at what people want to talk about. If we are at an arena, seldom do they want to talk about hockey. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about corruption. They ask me who is going to jail.
I was at an arena on Saturday and an elderly couple asked me who would go to jail for all of this. They wanted to know what was happening. I think this is at the core of what really upsets the Canadian public, certainly it is in my area.
I think back to years ago, when I worked for a foundry, and how hard the workers worked, grinding castings, pressing castings, working hours in the hot summer days inside the furnace room, slagging furnaces. Workers were working in eight-hour shifts and then working four hours overtime afterward. I can remember sitting at the lunch table in the cafeteria. As they were looking at their paycheques, they were talking about their overtime and how much they had left. Sometime these individuals would go into work at 3 a.m. to work a four-hour overtime shift from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. Then they would work their regular shifts from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. The same thing happened for afternoon shifts. When they looked at their paycheques, they had about 52% left over of what they should have made in overtime.
These people are working hard every day. They then read in the newspaper or on the Internet, or they see it on the TV at night, while watching the news with their family, about this waste, the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that, after nine years, have accumulated well into the billions. When they see this, they want to know what is going on. This is not what they want. Nor is it the Canada they were hoping to have. This is when the frustration boils over.
I think back to the 2015 election. In a few debates in which I participated, I said that the same people who ran the government in Ontario, Gerald Butts, Katie Telford, and we all know the names, who picked the pockets of the Ontario taxpayers for years, scandal-ridden abuses, were coming to Ottawa to pick the pockets of the Canadian taxpayer now. That is right out of a debate. I am not taking credit for my foresight, but those are the facts.
Why is the culture of that party, the Liberal Party, like this? I know that not all the members are like that, but why is there a culture behind the scenes and in senior leadership? Some of the big hitters cancelled gas plants. That was a billion-dollar debacle. People went to jail for that and ended up being the contributing factor as to why we are so tight on electricity in the province of Ontario.
A lot of people have forgotten the 600 school closures in Ontario during the Wynne-McGuinty years. In my area, I remember going to the reviews, and people were very upset. As it turns out, if they did not close the schools, those schools would be almost full today because of the population growth. I would consider that a big waste. Kids who used to walk to school are now taking buses. There is nothing wrong with a bus, but if they could walk or ride their bikes to school, they would be a lot better off.
Let us talk about the doubling of the debt. In those years, the world's economy was pretty good, and the Liberals ran a deficit the entire time. There are higher taxes and fees, like the hiking of the aviation fuel tax, the beer and wine taxes, sin taxes. It sounds familiar. They did that first in Ontario and then they brought it to Ottawa. There are new taxes on small businesses—