Madam Speaker, to my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill, those were great remarks that really reflect what, if people are at the doors talking to individuals, they will recognize as being an issue. It boils down to the fact that Canadians have lost hope and they feel like they are drowning, and there are a number of factors that contribute to that.
One of the things I have noticed about the government over the last number of years since the Liberals have been in power is that it loves to talk a great game. It is amazing the number of promises the Liberals continue to promise to deliver on that they do not actually deliver on. It is all summed up in an article that was in the paper in April 2016. It was titled “'Deliverology' guru schools Trudeau government for 2nd time at cabinet retreat”. I am guessing that he or she was there for a second time because they were having a hard time delivering the results, although it is pretty easy to make promises.
One of the things that concern me about the government is not just the spending. The member for Calgary Nose Hill laid that out very well in terms of the constant spending, and there have been other members in the House who have talked about the spending. However, one of the challenges is that the government continues to make promises that it has no intention of keeping, no intention of delivering on or no idea how they are going to begin. I can give hundreds of examples, and I am going to give a couple of examples tonight during my speech.
One of the members of the Liberal Party spoke earlier. We are in a housing crisis, so the Liberals talk quite a bit about their commitment to build 3.9 million homes over the next seven years. We can hear this number, and they talk about it all the time. They talk about all this money that they are contributing to the cause, yet we are not seeing any results. I know that we have had colleagues ask the question, and I want to break down the numbers for people at home, just to realize how absurd this number is.
Building 3.9 million homes by 2031, which is seven years away, is almost 560,000 homes a year, which works out to over 46,000 homes a month, over 10,000 homes a week, over 1,500 homes per day and over 63 homes per hour. Therefore, we are looking at pretty much a home needing to be built every minute in this country.
When we look at what the current building situation is in this country, we see that this past year, we only built 240,000 homes, and part of the reason for that is the whole issue of red tape and regulations. The fact remains that there is really no plan. Once again, there is a promise for what we would like to see happen. That is what the Liberal government does oftentimes. The Liberals talk about what they promise or what they would like to do or what they would love to see happen. I am going to make my point tonight that the government is completely incompetent and does not have any idea how it is going to deliver any of the things that it actually promises individuals.
To help them try to deliver this stuff, the Liberals do spend a lot of money on consultants. That has been a theme here in the House over the last little while. We see that there was over $15 billion spent in 2021-22. We see the McKinsey situation. Originally, we thought that the company had been given $100 million in contracts. It turns out that number is actually $200 million in contracts. We have seen the size of the bureaucracy increase by almost 40% since the time we were in government.
It was interesting that, right after COVID, people were going to get their passports renewed, and we remember the challenges they were having. They were waiting for hours and hours. We thought, okay, the government is hiring more people to help make this happen. In talking to my constituents, I have to say that the service is actually as bad as it was back then. I talked to someone the other day who went in for a passport and they waited for over three hours. Let us think about that. We are not in post-COVID times. We have a bureaucracy that is 40% larger than when we were in government, yet the government has no ability or competence whatsoever to deliver those things. We have not seen services improve at all.
As a matter of fact, government regulations are the other side of that coin. The reason we cannot build homes is that government regulations are pretty tough at all levels. I am not going to say that it is just at the federal level, as they are certainly tough provincially and municipally as well. Some people are not so lucky as I am. I come from an area in Niagara where we actually have four levels of government. We have a regional level of government that adds a layer of complexity to that. CFIB said that it costs small business owners nearly $40 billion a year for them to deal with regulations. CFIB representatives also said that probably 30% of that $40 billion a year is unnecessary, redundant and overly burdensome regulation.
That leads me into talking about small business. I think that the government's record has been horrendous on small businesses. As a matter of fact, I think small businesses are being crushed under the government. I think that if we go back to COVID and see some of the unfair restrictions that happened with restaurants and the hospitality industry, those hangovers remain. We look at it right now in terms of large multinationals, global consulting firms and billion-dollar companies, which have never had it so good under the government. I mean, they are laughing. Their pockets are stuffed with cash, but small businesses continue to get crushed.
I had a chance to talk to an individual restauranteur in my riding. I was at an event in Grimsby, Ontario, on Friday, and I had a chance to talk to Mark. Mark owns a couple of restaurants. I asked him how he has been doing since COVID. I asked him if he has been able to rebound since COVID. He said, “As a matter of fact, I am still killed. I am still crushed. I am struggling to make the bills. I am struggling to be able to maintain what is happening. I had to try to sell one of my other restaurants because of the issues there.”
He is not unique. If one goes to Restaurants Canada, it will tell members that almost 42% of businesses went insolvent. The number is around 41% for businesses in general. When one adds in restaurants, that number goes up to literally 44%. The year before, coming out of COVID last year, we saw that only half of restaurants were losing money. That number, currently, this year, is probably up to 62%. When the government says to us that we have never had it so good, I would challenge that, and I would ask members to go to talk to a small business person to see if they actually feel the same way.
One of the challenges is that people are losing hope. They are losing faith. Once again, the member for Calgary Nose Hill did mention the fact, and one of the questions mentioned this, that people are leaving this country in record numbers. We are seeing that all the time because people are trying to go to places where maybe they would have some hope. I think that is the sad part. We have a great country. I just think it is tremendously mismanaged.
When I think about what is going on right now, I could stand here all night and just talk about the mismanagement. I just want to give members a couple of highlights. I look at the most recent Auditor General report. It said that there were over 180 conflicts when looking at contracts: 186 times there were conflicts of interest. The Treasury Board said that there were over 160 conflicts when it came to dealing with consultants and contractors. That is for the people who self-disclosed. Imagine the people who did not mention it. It was 163 times.
Blacklock’s Reporter does a great job. I encourage people to have a look at this news organization. It is a subscription, but it has great information. It came up with a story. This was done with some OPQs. We were able to figure this out. There were a couple of sole-source contracts during COVID. We do not have to go back too far. We see a sole-source contract for StarFish, which had new ventilators and was given $170 million. Some of them were scrapped even while the pandemic was going on. Others were sold for as little as six dollars. We certainly will never forget the juicy contract that Frank Baylis, a one-term MP here, got for ventilators for $237 million.
These are the things that I think really frustrate people. This is what we are talking about. We are talking about a government that has a spending problem, and I think we have a government that is absolutely incompetent when it comes to being able to deliver the things it talks about.
I would love to talk a bit about the Winnipeg lab story. It is kind of ironic. It is sad that we had a couple of scientists who were actually getting packages from Amazon. They were getting stuff from China, and they were sending stuff back. That is unbelievable. The government then covered it up. That is absolutely insane. It did not want to realize how incompetent it was. We also found out they were working for the Chinese military.
Once again, there are many things I could go on about. One thing I will tell members is that the government is just not worth the cost. When we get a chance, we are going to give people hope, give people faith and give people a chance to have a better life once again.
