Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup.
Before I begin, I want to share some very bad news with the House. After nine years of this Prime Minister, the cost of housing has never been higher. Rentals.ca reports that rents have increased 9.3% year over year. That means the average rent reached $2,202 in May. This is an all-time high for rents paid in Canada. In Vancouver, rent costs $2,671; in Toronto, $2,479; in Halifax, $1,925; in Montreal, $1,763; in Winnipeg, $1,416. No one has been spared.
The cost of housing keeps soaring because this government is not building enough of it. Only the Conservatives have a plan for building homes, not bureaucracy. I wanted to take this opportunity to pass that message on. Why? We witnessed something quite incredible this week. We received not one, not two, not three, but four damning reports about this government's management.
A damning report has been released on this government's management of foreign affairs. We learned about it this week. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians also released a scathing report, which revealed that the Prime Minister repeatedly tried to cover up, deny and then downplay the impact of foreign interference on Parliament and on our elections.
It was probably a terrible day for the Liberals, but I would say that it was an even worse day for Canadians when they saw the Auditor General's reports on McKinsey, the Liberal green fund, which we are talking about today, and cybersecurity.
There have been three reports showing that this government is simply incapable of managing the affairs of the state and the money that Canadians entrust to it. It is not the government's money. It is Canadian taxpayers' money. Unfortunately, the government no longer deserves the trust of Canadians when it comes to managing the money people earn by working hard day after day, and night after night for some folks, seven days a week. Reading these reports, one cannot help but wonder how the Liberals manage to do so much so poorly.
Why am I mentioning that? The reason is that the government continues to spend freely with $61 billion in new inflationary spending that was supported by the Bloc Québécois in the last budget. What did that do? It drove up the cost of housing in a way that has never before been seen in Canada.
Food also costs more. All a person has to do is go to the grocery store on a daily or weekly basis. One has to be there to see people passing up the nicer cuts of meat for something cheaper. People have to make tough choices like that, and sometimes they cannot even buy food that is essential for staying healthy. Why? They cannot afford it. They are worried that, when they get to the register, they will find out they do not have enough money in their bank account to cover their groceries. That is what things are like now in Canada after nine years of this Prime Minister.
Last week, we moved a motion that neither the Bloc Québécois, nor the Liberal Party, nor the NDP supported. We asked the government to suspend the gas tax this summer to give a little breathing room to Quebeckers and Canadians who have been struggling with the cost of living and inflation over the past year. We wanted to give them a break and a chance to dream of taking a little vacation. Unfortunately, the other three parties rejected the idea out of hand. For purely ideological reasons, those people no longer want us to use cars. They want us to travel by bike, through bike paths or whatever, even though they know perfectly well that we do not have the infrastructure.