Honourable senators, I would like to continue with the response to the Speech from the Throne. I’m sure there are many of you who now wish we still had the two-hour supper break we used to instead of only one hour. Nevertheless, I want to speak a little bit. As I said the last time, I’m not doing it for the benefit of the people in the Senate; I am doing it for the benefit of the 750,000 people who viewed one of my recent speeches in which I talked about the failures of this government. I am doing this on behalf of the thousands who have asked me to continue with this. I am making this speech on behalf of my chiropractor, who, just this week on Monday, asked me, “When are you speaking again? I look forward to hearing from you.”

Today, I want to speak about the failed experiments of the “woke sorcerer’s apprentice.”

As I said, I’m rising to continue my response to the Speech from the Throne, focusing on Justin Trudeau’s legacy.

As many of my honourable colleagues know, or maybe don’t, a German poem from 1797 written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Der Zauberlehrling” — in English, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” — told the tale of an old sorcerer departing his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform.

Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic in which he is not fully trained. The floor is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the magic required to do so. The apprentice then splits the broom in two with an axe, but each of the two pieces becomes a broom of its own, taking up pails and continuing to fetch water, now at twice the speed. With this increased pace, the entire room quickly begins to flood.

When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell. The poem concludes with the old sorcerer stating that only a master should invoke powerful spirits.

In the poem, the sorcerer’s apprentice uses magic to lighten his workload, but because his knowledge and understanding are limited, his spell creates more problems than it solves. The poem illustrates the dangers of power over wisdom and the risk of human creations getting out of control. Likewise, I argue that Justin Trudeau, with all of the power and none of the required wisdom, has rolled out an ideology without deviation or constraint, making its pillars the law of the land, and has entirely lost control of his own creation.

Our Prime Minister has touted Canada as one of the world’s most progressive nations, leading the way on a variety of social issues. Yet, in reality, without the possession of foresight or the ability to demonstrate flexibility or nuance, he has lost control of the monster he has created with respect to almost every major policy file.

Allow me to highlight a few of the key policy areas in which our “apprentice” has hastily opened the floodgates, resulting in a complete loss of command for the government, often beyond recall. I’ll start at the beginning, with a promise Trudeau made before even becoming Prime Minister: that 2015 would be the last election under the first-past-the-post system. This was a pledge he made more than 2,000 times on the campaign trail. He committed to engage in consultations and to strike up a representative committee to determine the best path forward.

Quickly, however, it became very clear that the special committee, the town halls and the nationwide consultations were nothing more than excessively costly smoke and mirrors. He knew that a referendum would not deliver the results he was looking for, so he opted for a cloaked rubber stamp instead.

Immediately after taking office, the Trudeau government promised that regardless of how the consultations unfolded, they would be ending the voting system that had been in use in Canada since the beginning of our democracy. Additionally, the government’s “all-party committee” on electoral reform was unsurprisingly stacked with Liberals. Furthermore, the Green Party and Bloc Québécois were not even given voting rights. Then the committee was given an implausibly short deadline of six months to produce a report with recommendations. For Trudeau, everything was falling into place, and his dream of changing the electoral system to ensure Liberal governments forever was quickly becoming a reality.

The problem for the Prime Minister was that, while he was publicly stating that the government was wide open to reform options, he had — in reality — one specific electoral system in mind and was not open to any alternative.

The Prime Minister wanted a ranked or preferential ballot method — a system that would indisputably favour the Liberal Party. However, when none of the experts who testified at committee thought this was a wise idea, and when the committee subsequently recommended a national referendum, the Prime Minister was suddenly less passionate about upholding his campaign promise.

In June 2017, the Prime Minister announced that there was no path to bringing in electoral reform, because none of the other parties wanted to accommodate the Liberal preference for ranked ballots.

Justin Trudeau used the issue of electoral reform to obtain a majority, but when his plan to skew the system in favour of the Liberals failed, he cynically reneged on his promise.

You would think that Trudeau would accept the fact that when changing the electoral system, a certain level of consensus must be achieved. And you would think that since there was no consensus, he would do the graceful thing and retreat. No — not Justin Trudeau. He said in a podcast last week that he regretted not having used his majority in the House of Commons to ram his new system down the throats of Canadians. He candidly said that he regretted not rigging the system in favour of the Liberals.

Ironically, he also said that one of the biggest reasons for his wanting to run one more time was so that his 18-year-old son would be able to vote for him rather than because of what he would do for our country.

Electoral reform is not the only way Justin Trudeau wanted to tilt our democratic institutions in favour of the Liberal Party. The changes he made to the Senate were no doubt to ensure that his policies — even if rejected by a large majority of Canadians — would survive his impending electoral rout.

While the desire to reform the Senate is as old as the institution itself, any changes that risk compromising the very purpose of the institution have always been handled with tremendous care and caution. In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that any attempt by one prime minister to fundamentally change the nature of the Senate without consulting the provinces would be unconstitutional. In the past, when there was any doubt, prime ministers had the good sense to turn to the highest court to achieve clarity.

However, not this Prime Minister; care and caution are not his style. For the sake of political expediency, during what is now commonly referred to as the Senate expenses scandal, Trudeau decided to distance himself from Liberal senators — at least in the public eye — and to rebrand the new Liberal appointees as independents.

He even gave them some new, fun titles, which did nothing but cause uncertainty in our Rules and a burdensome process to accommodate the new made-up terms.

No matter what the government would like us to believe, these new senators were hand-picked by Justin Trudeau, not selected by some group. The 88 senators appointed since 2015 were chosen by Justin Trudeau personally. For nine long years, we have been hearing the purported narrative that the Trudeau Senate is apparently more independent than before. Nothing is further from the truth.

Last July, the CBC, of all media outlets, said:

Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to rid the Senate of partisanship and patronage, most of the senators appointed to the upper house over the past year have ties to the Liberals.

Those so-called independent senators have donated money to the federal Liberals or have worked with the federal party or a provincial Liberal Party.

Last July, The Globe and Mail put it clearly:

While it was always better for the health of the skeptical mind to put the words “independent senator” in quotation marks when it came to the political persuasions of Mr. Trudeau’s 82 appointments since 2016, the tenor of his latest ones makes it a medical necessity.

That was before the most recent appointments.

I want to make it clear: I support political appointments to the Senate. This is not a shot at any one senator here. I support political appointments. To do this job efficiently, you need to understand how Canada and its political institutions work. You have to be able to access a network, including a caucus, which brings you knowledge and perspective.

What I don’t like is the hypocrisy of using the label “independent” when you have been appointed by an ultra-partisan Prime Minister who is the leader of the party you have worked for a long time.

As I said, our new colleagues will join the dozens of senators appointed by Justin Trudeau, who vote 96% of the time with the Leader of the Government in the Senate.

Canadians have not bought into the facade of independence for Trudeau’s Senate, but his experiment is more than a problem of smoke and mirrors. For one, it has led to a substantial increase in costs. The Senate’s actual costs in fiscal 2015-16, before Justin Trudeau appointed senators, were under $75 million. The budget for the current year, after 82 Trudeau appointments, is $135 million, which is $60 million more for the Trudeau Senate. Those are facts, even if Senator Moncion would like to change the numbers.

It has also led to a lack of efficiency in the chamber. What used to be negotiated between the government and the opposition now must involve several leaders, making it much more difficult to reach consensus and maintain agreements, even if the other leaders will inevitably follow the government’s lead. With so many splintered groups and a lack of caucus cohesion, there is also a stark increase in senators rising to speak — it’s not just me for an unlimited time — just to repeat what has already been said. This is a tiresome burden on productivity.

Senators who have always exercised independence used to also have the support of and a working relationship with their respective national caucus. The discussions surrounding the drafting of legislation used to be hammered out in caucus meetings, where senators could weigh in on, for example, the regional impacts of a specific proposal.

A good case in point is Senator Prosper speaking about Bill C-49. If that had been left up to two caucuses, I think we would have crossed the finish line in a much better manner than we did now.

Now, when senators are looking at a legislative proposal for the first time and each senator has a very specific pet concern, the process gets bogged down and delayed. How many private members’ bills do we have in the Senate right now? You can add to this mess the fact that we have a record number of Senate public bills in front of us, which means committees no longer have the time to conduct studies.

Like all institutions that have existed for more than a century, the Senate has never been immune to the need for regular reviews of rules or processes. Yet, what was once an efficient institution of thoughtful review has now become a vessel for endless personal projects advanced through Senate public bills. What began as a hasty PR experiment for Trudeau has resulted in a radical shifting of an institution, with less productivity, less transparency and less value for taxpayers.

Again, as The Globe and Mail itself concluded last July:

. . . on top of being more expensive but no less partisan than it was before, the Senate is also now less productive.

It is now clear that the attempt to change the Senate is a failed experiment by our woke sorcerer’s apprentice.

On cannabis, Justin Trudeau approached the legalization of cannabis in the same manner: a mix of progressive ideology, political calculation and a desire to make his Liberal friends profit. It was a sure winner, or so he thought.

As journalist Susan Martinuk reported:

. . . he no doubt felt it would be one of his easiest and most rewarding tasks as Canada’s new and uber-cool prime minister. . . .

However, when problems with Bill C-45 were revealed, Trudeau persisted anyway. As Martinuk pointed out:

Trudeau’s determination to push the bill through clearly exposes the problem with Bill C-45: It’s a watershed moment that covers public policy, health care and Canadian law. Yet, the Liberals refuse to see it as anything more than an election promise that must be in place by August; details be damned. . . .

As Trudeau tends to do when facts get in the way of his ideology, he ignored the experts. He ignored the police, who said they were not ready. He ignored the medical experts, who said the legislation posed an increased risk for children. He ignored the experts who testified from Colorado and Washington and offered a strong warning to slow down, saying, “Don’t rush the process”; “Take your time — even when the public is clamouring for access.” He ignored the law professors who warned that the black market does not go away after legalization. And he ignored the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which said the illegal production of marijuana increased twentyfold in U.S. jurisdictions with legalization.

It has now been more than six years since cannabis was legalized. The promises — as many of us in this chamber remember — were that the new policy would, one, improve safety and public health and reduce access by youth; two, lessen drug-related crime and diminish or even kill the illegal market; three, create a new profitable and legal industry.

The first promise about health and safety for our youth has not been kept. For the fifth anniversary of the passage of Bill C-45, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, or CMAJ, undertook a wide study — one of the largest of its kind — and subsequently reported many disturbing findings.

First, the report notes an increase in the prevalence of cannabis use. This is confirmed by Statistics Canada, whose data shows that 14.8% of Canadians consumed cannabis before legalization in 2017, and the number stabilized at 22% in 2021. This means that there are roughly 50% more people using cannabis than there were before legalization.

And it is not only the increase in the number of users that is concerning; it is the severity of the results of this increased consumption. The CMAJ study showed that there has been a sharp increase in cannabis-related emergency department visits and in cannabis-impaired driving since legalization. The study also found that people who visit emergency departments for cannabis use are at a heightened risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia. At the same time, Ottawa mental health specialists say they are seeing a striking increase in patients presenting with significant psychiatric issues that appear to be related to cannabis use, a trend seen widely across the province.

The report notes that across Ontario, annual rates of cannabis-induced psychosis increased by 220.7% between 2014 and 2021.

As predicted by those of us who warned the government, there was a large uptick in cannabis poisonings among young children in provinces where edibles were legal. The increase in the availability also led to a surge in cannabis-attributable hospitalizations, particularly among people aged 25 years and older.

We have now reached the point that, according to StatCan, “many Canadians” are consuming cannabis before or at work, raising questions about safety on the job. StatCan also reported that 1 in 20 Canadians — approximately 300,000 people — who had consumed cannabis in the previous year scored high enough on the Severity of Dependence Scale to be considered at risk for addiction.

Thank you. I would agree with that. They probably — well, I probably can’t say that. I might have to retract that.

The outcomes we are seeing are the precise outcomes the Prime Minister was warned about. Yet, he did not have the wisdom or foresight to pause or pivot from this ideological tenet he held so dear. According to a recent CBC article — again, this is the CBC:

Five years later, public health experts say legalization hasn’t created any health benefits — but it has been linked to some serious concerns.

The second promise, the reduction of the role of organized crime in the cannabis market, has also not been kept. The black market now accounts for around 35% of sales, according to Statistics Canada, and faces virtually no risk from enforcement. A study by Deloitte suggested that the average price in the illicit market remains 20% lower than in legal retail stores.

As for the business side of the cannabis legal trade, it has also been a colossal failure. Too many companies entered the market, and the government failed to put in place a realistic tax scheme.

Paul McCarthy, the President of the Cannabis Council of Canada, quoted last July in the National Post, said 40% of all filings from companies seeking protection from creditors to restructure last year came from the cannabis sector. “The regulatory and taxation regime is suffocating this business,” he said.

For many Liberal insiders, though, this does not matter. They were the first to invest in the sector, sometimes way before the bill was tabled. They knew it was coming. Once Bill C-45 passed and cannabis became the new stock craze, they unloaded their shares before the valuation of the cannabis producers went tumbling down.

Instead of threading carefully, Justin Trudeau wanted his Canada to be the first country to legalize pot. He would then look across the globe like this cool dude that he thinks he is. All he managed to do is create more problems. This is another Trudeau failed experiment.

Now turning to dangerous drugs, the Trudeau government used the same far-left ideological approach vis-à-vis more dangerous drugs.

In 2023, 8,049 people died from opioid overdoses in Canada. Over 2,500 of them were in British Columbia.

Under Justin Trudeau, crime, homelessness and despair have reached unprecedented levels. This is fertile ground for increased drug use, and this is exactly what we see. There have been, colleagues, 45,000 deaths related to the opioid toxicity crisis in Canada since Justin Trudeau became the Prime Minister. The number of deaths has increased on a yearly basis by 184% since our woke Sorcerer’s Apprentice became the Prime Minister of Canada.

This year, the equivalent of half the population of my city of Steinbach will die of an opioid overdose in Canada. This is a national tragedy. And we are not talking about the ravages caused by other hard drugs.

What has been Justin Trudeau’s answer? First, he decided to make it easier for drug dealers to get bail and made sure there would no longer be any harsh sentences — I will come back to this later. Then the government embarked on a program to basically provide the drugs to the users. Instead of treating the addiction, the Liberals decided it would be good to fuel the addiction — same with assisted suicide, I guess.

This program has been a failure. Not only does it not reduce the number of people that are addicted, but it even increases it. Earlier this year, police conducted massive busts of diverted drugs in Prince George and Campbell River. The Vancouver Police Department has stated that around 50% of all hydromorphone seizures were diverted from Trudeau’s taxpayer-funded hard drugs program.

According to the President of the London Police Association, it is common knowledge among police officers that so-called safe supply programs are being abused and widely diverted into the community so that users can use profits from their sale to buy even more deadly fentanyl.

The hard drugs that the Trudeau government provides are frequently resold to teenagers and other vulnerable Canadians, getting them hooked on opioids and leading them into the destructive cycle of addiction.

Not only are those government-funded drug dens distributing drugs that are resold on the street, but they are also often located in residential areas, close to schools or kindergartens. For the Trudeau Liberals, there is no issue in having syringes in playgrounds or having the kindergartens ask the police to go with toddlers for their safety during their daily stroll.

The other wacko policy that the wacko Liberals put in place is the decriminalization of hard drugs. In British Columbia, where Trudeau — the Sorcerer’s Apprentice — began his experiment, the province saw a 400% increase in drug overdose deaths. Drug overdoses have become the leading cause of death for children in B.C. between the ages 10 to 18. That’s heartbreaking, colleagues. Heartbreaking.

This experiment also led to rampant, open drug use in playgrounds, public spaces and even hospitals. That is why even the NDP Premier of British Columbia had to ask the government to walk back this dangerous failed experiment.

If you don’t believe me that the Trudeau plan is just a failed experiment, you can turn to our former colleague Larry Campbell, who can be accused of a lot of things but being a Conservative, colleagues, is not one of them. Senator Campbell was a huge supporter of the Trudeau approach to illegal drugs. Last July, he said that the government made a mistake when it decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs without thinking through the impact on communities. He said the government made an even worse mistake when it started dispensing prescription opioids to drug users. According to Senator Campbell, the government has put too much stress on reducing the harms that come with using drugs and not enough on helping people quit using them altogether. It’s not often that I agree with Senator Larry Campbell, but I do here. This has been a failed experiment.

Now, Justin Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister has been marked by COVID. Such a pandemic had not been seen for a century, so, obviously, there was a lot of improvisation and experimentation by governments here and all over the globe. Let me summarize how Justin Trudeau’s government fared in this.

First, we can all deplore the fact that none of the lessons that should have been learned from smaller pandemics such as SARS‑CoV or the avian flu seemed to have been remembered by the federal government. It was as if we were caught completely flat-footed, with no material ready and no plan. I find that strange since it was made clear by the previous Conservative government — we had a minister here who wanted to remember the previous Conservative government. They had plans that were drawn up, and we had sufficient stocks of personal protective equipment, or PPE. It is obvious that the Liberal government failed to maintain our strategic PPE stocks and to adequately prepare for a pandemic that almost all experts predicted would come sooner or later.

So, left unprepared, how did Justin Trudeau and company react? First, they denied there was a problem. They believed every lie that the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization spewed until it became obvious that they were indeed lies. Even if our security agencies and our allies warned the Trudeau government that this dangerous disease was spreading rapidly, it did not treat the threat seriously. The Liberals refused to stop flights from China until it was too late, accusing those of us who proposed to act of being racist. The Liberals dithered before starting to stock PPE and medication, putting us at the back of the line for the purchases. When the Conservatives raised the issue in the House of Commons on January 27, 2020, the Minister of Health said, “that the risk to Canadians remains low.” That the risk to Canadians remains low. The Liberals didn’t do anything until it was too late.

Then, in March 2020, the government realized that COVID was indeed a serious threat. At first, the Liberals just improvised. They clearly had no clue what they were doing. Our health experts told us to wash our groceries but that wearing a mask would be useless since we were all too dumb to know how to wear it.

The Liberals panicked and did what Liberals do when there is a problem: throw money at the problem while, of course, allowing fellow Liberals to get rich. They bought millions and millions of dollars of equipment, always at inflated prices and, most of the time, for nothing. They signed contracts with friends of the Liberal Party, such as former Liberal MP Frank Baylis, who sold ventilators, colleagues, that were never used. In fact, the government spent over $750 million on ventilators, 95% of which were never used — $750 million.

SNC-Lavalin was awarded a $150-million contract for field hospitals that were never requested by Health Canada. No province asked for the supplies. On top of the equipment and supplies that were never used, there were some that were not even delivered. The government itself admitted that it paid more than $100 million for supplies that were never delivered. Because we do not have a truthful accounting of all the expenses, we can assume that this number is much higher than that.

At the same time, the Liberal government decided to close the border, something it deemed racist a few weeks before. They forced people to quarantine in disgusting conditions, all based on wrong information from “ArriveScam” and unproven tests.

Speaking of tests, Trudeau’s Canada was among the last countries to understand that testing was key and to buy those tests. We waited weeks and weeks before getting what other countries had. In February, Global News revealed that:

The Canadian government awarded two of the largest medical supply contracts of the pandemic to importers participating in an invitation-only federal program rather than to Canadian manufacturers offering lower prices . . .

It also revealed that the contracts were awarded despite the government being given incomplete data about the product’s accuracy.

The Liberals foolishly funded development of a vaccine, the CanSino, in collaboration with, of all places, China. The vaccine was never delivered.

They gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Liberal insiders to develop a vaccine at Medicago that they knew could never be approved since the company was connected to a tobacco manufacturer.

They gave $130 million to Biologics Manufacturing Centre to build a vaccine plant. Do you know how many doses have been manufactured there? Zero.

The Liberals had to turn to foreign companies to provide the vaccines. They did so late, so we were behind other countries. And the Liberals bought such massive numbers of vaccines that the Auditor General estimated that at least 50 million doses had to be wasted. How much did we waste? We will never know because the government is refusing to tell us. Because we overbought and overpaid, Canada was considered the worst global hoarder of vaccine doses, frustrating poorer countries.

Once they had vaccines, the Liberals decided that they would force people to get vaccinated. They forced vaccine mandates on people for whom it never made sense, such as public servants who were working from home, truck drivers working alone in their trucks and people with medical conditions who were warned by their doctors not to take them. They pushed vaccines, many times, to the detriment of those who were vaccinated. Transport Canada called its own vaccination mandate “. . . aggressive . . .” and “unique in the world . . . .” Courts have now found the mandates unconstitutional.

Finally, to top it all off, Justin Trudeau decided that he needed the Emergencies Act to put an end to the occupation of four or five city blocks in Ottawa by truckers, who apparently looked so dangerous in their hot tubs on Wellington Street. Canada was universally mocked, and Justin Trudeau looked like the arrogant, petulant brat that he is.

COVID was an excuse for the Liberals to enrich their friends. I will not get into all the details of the contracts awarded at the time, but the names WE Charity and “ArriveScam” have become synonymous with Liberal corruption.

And did the government deliver in fighting Covid? Let me summarize by reading some headlines: “Canada’s nursing homes have worst record for COVID-19 deaths among wealthy nations . . .” That again was the CBC.

“Canada doing one of the worst jobs in the world in fighting COVID.”

“. . . ’radical’ lockdowns had extraordinary costs.”

Last year, the British Medical Journal said that when Covid struck, Canada was an “ill-prepared country with out-dated data systems, poor coordination and cohesion and blindness about its citizens’ diverse needs.”

It was Canadians themselves who should be commended for winning over Covid. As the journal concluded, “. . . Canadians delivered on the pandemic response while its governments faltered.”

I could go on for several more minutes and go into details about the Liberals’ mismanagement of the COVID crisis.

I probably could. As usual, with the Liberals, you have a mix of incompetence, arrogance and corruption that makes them take bad decision after bad decision. I profoundly regret that there was never a true inquiry on or audit of what the government did, whether it worked and how we can do better next time — because, colleagues, we must do better next time. We must learn those lessons from all those mistakes of the Liberal “sorcerer’s apprentice.”

If the government ensured that there would never be such an inquiry, it is because they knew they had failed and that we would learn too much about their incompetence and corruption. The Trudeau Liberals failed to deal with the health repercussions of COVID. They also failed to deal with the economic repercussions.

When COVID struck, much of the world had to determine what financial measures would be put into place to address a global health crisis that we did not yet understand. Governments were forced to allocate tax dollars to support measures to protect the livelihoods of their citizens and the overall economy. With so much uncertainty at the helm, most countries proceeded in a restrained, cautious and targeted manner. But not our Prime Minister, our very own “sorcerer’s apprentice.”

Our government’s spending during the pandemic, while initially described by some as generous, quickly spiralled out of control. The data for this and the warnings from experts and financial institutions were present from the beginning.

In November of 2020, the CIBC warned Trudeau that the majority of his emergency support handouts were being spent on imported consumer goods and therefore leaking out of the economy to other nations. The economist who penned the report noted that the leakage could be easily fixed by focusing on programs that encourage consumers to spend on local services. He also warned that if nothing were done, Canada would have to spend even more on fiscal support. After all, Canada had already outspent all of the G20 nations on our pandemic response. As the CIBC report notes, this resulted in no additional benefit to employment or the GDP. This advice was ignored.

In March of 2021, StatCan reported that Canadians experienced extraordinary positive changes in their economic well-being during the pandemic as they gained thousands of dollars more from COVID-19 support payments than they lost in wages. They reported, in fact, that COVID-19 benefits outpaced earning losses across all five income classes studied by StatCan.

An economist at Scotiabank noted:

It underscores in a rough sense what the federal government did, which was to go big and go quick and overshoot . . .

Several economists and institutions warned the government that they needed to scale back their benefit programs, most notably the CERB program, stating that it was too generous and could be acting as a disincentive for people to return to work. They, too, were ignored.

In February of 2021, the Conference Board of Canada warned of the inescapable ramifications of record-high debts amassed during the pandemic, stating:

The lasting impact on revenues and expenditures suggests that governments in Canada will struggle over the near and longer terms to dig themselves out of this gigantic fiscal hole.

Also in February of 2021, the International Monetary Fund said that Trudeau lacked justification for his sizable spending plans and that any additional unnecessary expenditures could “weaken the credibility of the fiscal framework.”

In the same week, a report from the C.D. Howe Institute raised major concerns about Trudeau’s promised $100 billion in stimulus funds, saying that it “. . . remained unconvinced that a large stimulus package is appropriate at this time.”

Despite the warnings, our “apprentice” carried on, and the flooding began.

In fact, by early March of 2021, the Trudeau government had already blown past the $6.3-billion estimate they declared it would cost to run the Canada Recovery Benefit and had already nearly doubled the program spending to $11.1 billion.

Lest one be convinced that these warnings from experts and major banks did not make it across the Prime Minister’s desk, please keep in mind, colleagues, that Justin Trudeau’s very own Minister of Finance Bill Morneau who was tasked with the fiscal management of the country and the rollout of these programs, left one of the highest political offices in the country because Trudeau’s spending had gotten so out of control.

In his book, Where To from Here: A Path to Canadian Prosperity, Morneau wrote that he and Trudeau came to loggerheads on the matter of COVID spending. He noted that during the pandemic:

. . . calculations and recommendations from the Ministry of Finance were . . . disregarded in favour of winning a popularity contest.

He added that his role as Minister of Finance “. . . had deteriorated into serving as something between a figurehead and a rubber stamp.”

That’s our Prime Minister — arts instructor, snowboard instructor — telling an educated finance minister.

Yet, the Fraser Institute pointed out that:

In 2021, federal per-person debt reached a new record at $48,955. But COVID once again cannot be blamed for all of this debt accumulation. Without any COVID-related spending in 2020 or 2021, federal per-person debt would still have reached $41,340 in 2021 — the fourth-highest amount in Canadian history.

The authors conclude:

Clearly, federal debt was already on an upward trajectory and the pandemic only exacerbated the problem.

As it turns out, every economic expert and financial institution that warned of the disaster was correct. A devastating inflation appeared across Canada, and for all products and services. Canadians are still feeling the consequences. The former governor of the Bank of Canada Stephen Poloz said that the Trudeau government used a firehose approach and that a firefighter never gets criticized for using too much water.

I beg to differ. The reckless policies of the Trudeau government, in fact, flooded the Canadian economy with too much easy money. They created the inflation, as Trudeau was warned. Our floors were awash with water, and Trudeau continued to use the firehose long after the fire was put out.

The new Governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, confirmed that the government’s spending has gotten in the way of bringing down inflation. With inflation remaining high, the bank had no other option than to raise interest rates with devastating effects on businesses and homeowners.

In March 2023, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada confirmed that if it had to go through the COVID crisis again, the bank would not use the same strategy.

This reckless spending was motivated by the Liberals’ far left thinking that every problem can be solved by more government spending. As I said, for the Liberals, these radical experiments are always done with an eye on the political benefits.

Justin Trudeau thought he could surf on this wave of massive COVID spending and called an early election in 2021. He thought he could buy Canadians with their own money, and, as always with the Trudeau government, the negative effects of radical policies, combined with political cynicism, are compounded by the incompetence of this government.

The programs were too generous, but, more than this, it became an open bar. Last May, the Canada Revenue Agency confirmed that it had so far identified $10 billion of COVID payments to individuals who were ineligible under the government programs. Hundreds of public servants have already been fired for misappropriation of funds. This is in addition to the more than $15 billion identified by the Auditor General for another program, and this was only after scratching the surface:

Investigators in random checks uncovered problems with almost two-thirds of claims under the $100.6 billion Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, says Auditor General Karen Hogan. The rate was so high it “requires you to really look more,” said Hogan.

You would think that the government would aggressively try to recover these massive payments. Well, you would be wrong. This would be bad politics, wouldn’t it?

The head of the Canada Revenue Agency said it was not worth the effort. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, or PBO, said that such an attitude is disconcerting. This, colleagues, is an understatement.

Not content with having doubled the debt and created inflation, our sorcerer’s apprentice carries on with his experiments. This will be the last one that I will speak about tonight, colleagues. Trust me, there will be more to come, Senator Pate.

One of the darker and most glaringly obvious examples of the sorcerer’s apprentice is Canada’s out-of-control assisted suicide regime. As is often the case with slippery slopes, it begins with a denial and mockery of its existence.

In the case of assisted suicide, the denial of the slippery slope was loud and strong, both from the Trudeau government and the Supreme Court of Canada. Yet, it did not take long for the proverbial slope to come into view.

If you consider where we began with the initial legalization of assisted suicide, and look to where we are now less than 10 years later, it is nothing short of shocking. There were warnings from concerned experts in other jurisdictions that had gone this route and were currently living with the consequences.

In the Carter case, there was evidence presented by a medical expert from Belgium that a slippery slope was very possible, specifically, that by opening the assisted suicide floodgates, even in a narrow scheme in which terminally ill people are offered help in ending their lives, we would be opening the door to a system in which vulnerable groups like the disabled are offered death before they are offered adequate care.

The court rejected this, stating, “. . . the permissive regime in Belgium is the product of a very different medico-legal culture.”

This assertion was adopted and repeated by the Trudeau government, who stated that we would avoid this “. . . expansion of eligibility by setting up a ‘carefully regulated scheme’ that would keep its application narrow and exceptional.”

“Narrow and exceptional,” colleagues.

The number of Canadians ending their lives through assisted suicide has grown at a speed that outpaces every country in the world. We are very quickly becoming the world’s assisted suicide capital. Our most appalling reported cases are even getting international attention.

In just six years, the number of deaths from assisted suicide increased thirteenfold from 1,018 deaths in 2016 to over 13,200 in 2022.

It is shocking.

More Canadians die by euthanasia than from liver disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes or pneumonia. In fact, assisted suicide is now effectively tied as the fifth-leading cause of death in our country.

However, the numbers from the government do not reflect that. Why is that?

When completing the medical certificate of death, physicians are required to list the illness, disease or disability leading to the assisted suicide request as the cause of death rather than the medications administered, which are the actual cause. This is a strange and suspicious manipulation of the data. As Barbara Kay asked, “If MAiD is a public good, why the deflection?”

If the astronomical numbers are not enough to convince you that the government has lost control, perhaps some of the circumstances will.

A 54-year-old woman living in Vancouver is one of the more than 1.4 million Canadians with disabilities who live in poverty. That, colleagues, is 40% of the population. Due to the lack of adequate services to support her and her condition, she has relied on a credit card to cover expenses and has amassed $40,000 in debt. Due to a lack of research on her condition, the treatments she is seeking are considered experimental and, therefore, not covered by our health care system.

However, what is available to her, she discovered, is assisted suicide. After the expansion of our assisted suicide policies through Bill C-7 — which enabled access to those for whom death is not reasonably foreseeable — she applied and was approved for assisted suicide. Her friends started a GoFundMe page in a desperate attempt to keep her around for longer, but they admit they do not know if it will be enough. She reported that assisted suicide will likely be her only option.

From St. Catharines, Ontario, a 54-year-old man named Amir Farsoud applied for assisted suicide, not because he wants to die, but because his social supports are failing him, and he fears he may have no other choice. He told reporters, “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die.”

Another disturbing case involved Christine Gauthier, a retired corporal and Paralympian, who had been seeking help for over five years to get a wheelchair ramp installed. In an interview with CTV, Gauthier shared her disbelief when the government could not accommodate her request, but instead our government, colleagues, offered her assisted death. This is our government.

In a heartbreaking quote, she said, “. . . you’re going to be helping me to die but you won’t help me to live?”

This is our government.

We have all heard of a number of cases of veterans being offered assisted suicide to ease their mental and physical suffering. This is a group whom we are collectively — every one of us in this chamber and in our country — indebted to, and who should be able to depend on a steady network to help ease their transition back into civilian life. Yet workers under this system are suggesting to them that their lives are not worth living.

This past summer, a 37-year-old woman named Kathrin Mentler went to Vancouver General Hospital in the midst of a mental health crisis at the height of her suicidal vulnerability. A clinician informed her that there were long waits to see a psychiatrist and remarked that our health care system is broken and then asked her, “Have you considered MAID?” That was a health care professional. She was a vulnerable, suicidal patient asking for help to live, and instead was offered a way to die.

That, colleagues, is the kind of case that is at risk of becoming the norm in our country if the next phase of this slippery slope comes to fruition: that is, the proposed expansion of assisted suicide eligibility to include those whose sole underlying condition is a mental disorder. The policy is so far beyond what our society or our system is ready for, or even willing to accept, that the government initially enacted a sunset clause and has subsequently delayed it twice.

The repeated delays have resulted in a lot of opportunities for debate and for raising the myriad of moral and ethical concerns of offering death to mentally ill and suicidal patients. The Trudeau government and some of their Senate appointees have repeatedly tried to draw a distinction between assisted suicide requests and suicidality.

When former justice minister David Lametti was asked by journalist Althia Raj about ensuring our system actually offers people ethical choices, he replied:

. . . remember that suicide generally is available to people. This is a group within the population who, for physical reasons and possibly mental reasons, can’t make the choice . . . to do it themselves. And ultimately, this provides a more humane way for them to make a decision they otherwise could have made if they were able in some other way.

Colleagues, the best thing about David Lametti is that he has resigned from the Trudeau cabinet.

There is the admission as clear as day: The Trudeau government sees no problem with speeding up access to what they call a “humane” form of suicide to depressed and suicidal patients.

As Althia Raj pondered:

Is the government not in the business of suicide prevention? Should we not be trying to give people a reason to live?

You will have noticed that I do not use the term “MAID” to describe what is, at its core, assisted suicide. For me, the use of the cold acronym of “MAID” is part of the effort by some to detach it from the reality and to create a different concept that is not palatable. The trajectory that the Trudeau government is following reinforces the need to be clear — very clear — about what we are talking about.

Dr. Sonu Gaind, the highly esteemed former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying:

This expansion is not so much a slippery slope as a runaway train . . . . The government has [had] plenty of signs we should not be proceeding. You can choose to go ahead, but you can’t pretend you weren’t warned.

The public outcry on the outrageous reported cases has been profound and, in reality, is the real reason the government has not moved forward with the expansion to date.

How has the government responded to this growing public concern? Is it by improving access to mental health care, housing affordability or services for veterans? Of course not. In fact, on each of those measures, our system has become worse.

People are feeling broken. There has been a substantial increase in depression and generalized anxiety disorders. Access to mental health care remains abysmal. Yet we have a government who is remaining steadfast in their support of opening up the door to state-sponsored suicide for Canadians with mental illness.

The proponents know they have gone way too far. The Canadian public does not want this. The provinces and territories are not ready for this. Medical practitioners are not ready for this. Yet the Trudeau government is not willing to reverse it. They have made it clear that expanding access to assisted suicide to those suffering from a mental illness is not a matter of if, but of when. As Senator Kutcher, the original mover of this expansion amendment, has stated, the issue is decided.

When it comes to policy, I cannot imagine a more fitting reflection of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” metaphor than the trajectory of Canada’s assisted suicide regime, from opening the door under the guise and promise of a narrow and exceptional application, to becoming the assisted suicide capital of the world, to now finding ourselves beholden to a future policy so vile that even its top proponents must continue to delay its enactment — not reconsider, but simply put off.

Colleagues, I know you will be happy with this statement: This concludes the first part of my analysis of the failed experiments of Justin Trudeau. I invite all colleagues to stay tuned for the rest, but in the meantime, I will adjourn the debate for the balance of my time.