Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise again to speak to the subamendment. Every time I get up, I want to thank my constituents for sending me here. It is an honour and a privilege for all of us to be here, but we can never take it for granted. Every day we walk into the House, we are reminded of how amazing this place is.
I do not know if I will be up again before Christmas, so I want to wish everyone a merry Christmas, a happy new year, season's greetings and safe travels. I hope people get a chance to spend some great time with family.
Before I get started, I want to mention briefly how horrified I was to see what happened in Montreal this past weekend. I know our deputy leader spoke to it yesterday, and she did a very good job talking about it.
I am completely amazed at what I see happening in Canada. In fact, I have people reach out to me every day. They are telling me that Canada is not the country they remember it being. When I look at what has happened over the last nine years of the Liberal-NDP government, I see the reasons.
The question of privilege that we are talking about today is indicative of the things that the Liberals have done and the fact that they are not overly concerned about the rule of law and about dividing people. They have divided people in a number of different areas. When I look at what happened this weekend and if we asked anyone in the House or any guests in the gallery if they ever thought they would see this as part of their Canada, if anyone would have said they saw it coming, I do not think it was on the bingo card for 2024. It shows the government's lack of respect and how it does not treat these kinds of things seriously.
When we have a Prime Minister who is the great divider, who divides us on race and a whole bunch of issues, vaccine status being one of these things, who calls everyone a racist who does not agree with the government's policies or the concerns people have raised, it should be troubling. It should be troubling for Canadians to see such a lack of leadership. It is indicative of what is happening and what we are talking about today with respect to these documents. I know the last time I talked about these documents, I talked about the Winnipeg lab.
However, my colleague, the member for Chilliwack—Hope, said it best. We have an order of the House requesting that these documents be produced, and the government tells us not to worry about it, that it will give us some redacted documents that it thinks we need to see.
I am reminded of what happened with the Winnipeg lab in 2021. The government said that there was nothing to see there and not to worry about it at all because it was handling it. What did we see happen in Winnipeg? Dangerous vials were being sent by FedEx to China. If we want to talk about a government that is out of control, a government that has something to hide, it is the government on the other side and what it has done over the last nine years.
Let us review a bit of what has happened, and I know my colleagues have talked about this before. We are talking about the $400 million and how that was handled. Members in the House have accusations against them. We have the two Randys story. We are not really sure where that is at moment. We have other ministers who have been involved possibly. The people in the gallery should think about this for one second. Their taxpayer dollars were sent to the government. They were then funnelled back to the Liberal Party of Canada. I wonder how that makes people feel? I know it does not make me feel very good.
Our job here is to represent our constituents. When I think about that, I think of the $400 million now. I think of the sponsorship scandal. In fact, we have had so many scandals over the last nine years, I do not think I would have time in my 20 minutes to go through all them. When we are talking about one, another one drops off and we forget about the things that happened before. It is our job to remind voters of how incompetent the Prime Minister is at handling our economic affairs, not to mention our GDP per capita and the fact we are going to be at the bottom of the OECD countries over the next 20 to 30 years. We have a worse GDP than Mississippi.
All of these things are incredibly troubling when we think of all the great resources, abilities, people and talent we have in our country. We have the most educated citizens in the world, yet we have lost so much and made so many mistakes over the last nine years. It is troubling, but indicative.
When we look at what went on with the green slush fund, we find that a number of policies were not followed. Those policies were set in place so that people would not take advantage of the system. I know some of these numbers have been mentioned before, but we need to continue to talk about them. When we look at what one audit found, there were 10 ineligible projects for almost $60 million, along with 96 cases where conflict-of-interest policies were not followed for $75 million. The list goes on and on.
There were just under 200 conflicts of interest, where, once again, people with the inside track were able to take money from taxpayers and use it for their best interests. The Liberals say that we should not to worry about, that there is nothing to see. It is our job as parliamentarians to ask those questions and to get to the bottom of it. It is our job to request documents and not have them redacted, so we can see what went on.
The reason I say that is because we saw what went on before, such as with the Winnipeg lab. If we think about it, we had researchers in Canada who were working for the Chinese Communist Party. People who were trusted were working in a level 4 laboratory. When we requested documents, coincidentally just before the election, the Liberals basically said that we did not need them, that it was not our concern, that we did not need to worry about it. To me, that is very troubling.
If we look at what happened with the Winnipeg lab and if we look at what is going on with the SDTC, it gives us an indication of some of the challenges we are having with the economy. I am talking about where we are right now when it comes to GDP per capita.
The other challenge we have right now is that small businesses are hurting. Small businesses help create jobs in our country. I have a number articles in front of me. If we look at them, Canadian businesses are struggling big time. Business closures are up almost 5% over historical averages. Business openings are down 4.5%, below historic averages. The number of active businesses that are down are over 2,000. Business failures went up in 2023. Small businesses have had the highest numbers of insolvency in the last 36 years.
Small businesses have never recovered from the pandemic. They took on additional debt. Two or three small businesses took additional pandemic debt. They were promised a rebate, and we just learned this week it will possibly go out two or three years late. In fact, a number of businesses will probably not get that because they have already closed.
This shows us just how out of touch the government is when it comes to the economy, when it comes to how we create jobs, when it comes to what we do to help grow our economy and ensure people have food on their table. I have not even started to talk about what is going on with food bank usage. I have not even talked about the fact that people are skipping meals. There is not one part of the economy on which the government would get a passing grade. It is failing on almost every account.
When I come back after question period, I want to talk a bit more about some of the challenges we are facing.
