Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I am happy to present a petition today on behalf of residents of Fairhaven, Meadowgreen, Parkridge and Confederation Park in Saskatoon, all of which have faced significant challenges as crime, chaos and disorder take over the neighbourhoods. Violent crime is up 10% in Saskatoon, with increases in assaults, murders and robberies, and Saskatoon residents feel unsafe in their homes and o…
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Mr. Speaker, he forgot scurvy in his riding, check mark. The Prime Minister says things are under control, but with seven ministers in 11 years, the system is getting worse and worse. Yesterday, the justice minister issued a fake apology for his failed tenure as immigration minister by blaming the provinces, as if he held no responsibility. His successor, the current Minister of Culture, oversaw t…
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister stood in this place and tried to tell Canadians that immigration is under control. Well, here are the facts. The temporary foreign worker program has ballooned by 178% since 2015. The Auditor General revealed that 97% of student fraud cases are not even being investigated, and the asylum backlog is a staggering 300,000 cases. However, Canadians cannot find jobs, hou…
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal incompetence in our immigration system keeps getting worse. Yesterday, the Auditor General revealed widespread fraud in the Liberals' international student program. Even worse, of the 150,000 suspected fraud cases, the department reviewed less than 3% of them. This is only part of the Liberal immigration mess. Did the Liberal Prime Minister fix this? Not at all. Besides ke…
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Mr. Speaker, unlike that member, I do not work for the PMO. The truth is that the immigration minister is so incompetent that her own Liberal colleagues told CBC that she was not fit for the job. The mess created by the previous two is self-evident, yet Liberals are pushing ahead with hundreds of thousands of new foreign work permits with no plans to remove the millions of expiring foreign visa ho…
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to present a petition on behalf of residents of Fairhaven, Meadowgreen, Parkridge and Confederation in Saskatoon, who are all concerned about the significant challenges they are facing because of crime, chaos and disorder in their neighbourhoods. They are concerned about the drug use and homelessness that have overrun their neighbourhoods, making public area schoo…
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to our motion. I am going to talk a bit about the interim federal health program and then a few other things. The first point I want to make clearly is that the program creates a two-tiered health system in our country. It has a Cadillac benefits system for failed asylum claimants and a basic system for regular Canadians. That is the design of t…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on something the member said in that question, which are the accusations from the other side that we do not care about immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. We absolutely do. What we are trying to do here is find a way to make the system work better so legitimate refugees and legitimate asylum seekers who come to our country are treated well, so regular Canadians …
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Mr. Speaker, we have never said that; it is the Liberals who keep saying that. I want to highlight that it is bogus asylum claimants we are focused on. I will give the House a really good example. In B.C. recently, there were 15 people who were going down the road of being convicted of a crime. Guess what they did. Every single one of them claimed asylum as a way to avoid the results of their acti…
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Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago we had a stable immigration system that Canadians were proud of. Now the Liberals have transferred to automated approvals and have abandoned security checks from certain countries. People can enter Canada, make a claim for asylum and receive approval in the mail without even talking to a government official. It is auto-approval. The countries listed will shock members. Ir…
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Mr. Speaker, it is definitely in poor taste to put forward incorrect information, which is what we have been hearing all day from the other side. The PBO did his analysis of $1.5 billion. The Liberals are going to do a copay system, so maybe the number is going to be a little smaller. It is still a billion-dollar program. What we have seen from the government is not a reduction in the number of re…
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Mr. Speaker, six million Canadians do not have access to a family doctor, and it takes 30 weeks for the average Canadian to see a specialist. However, the Liberals use Canadian taxpayer dollars to fund a Cadillac health care system for asylum claimants, including free access to glasses and contact lenses, physiotherapy, nursing homes and hearing aids. These are free benefits that regular citizens …
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Mr. Speaker, I guess I will give credit where credit is due. The Liberals finally figured out that they should restrict this to building in Canada. I congratulate them for realizing that. Now the Liberals need to move on to the inputs, as my colleague identified. Of course, we should be focusing on Canadian inputs where we can, and there are many opportunities for that. This industry is great for …
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Mr. Speaker, it does not change the fact that the Liberals have created a two-tier health care system that disadvantages ordinary Canadians. The Liberals continue to betray Canadians, putting bogus asylum claimants first by giving them access to health care benefits that regular citizens do not get. We just learned that the government automatically gives residency to refugees from North Korea, Afg…
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Mr. Speaker, the member is not a very good student of history. The Conservatives built lots of houses. That is clear. The member also was not listening to what I was saying. What I said, especially right at the end of my speech, and he could have recalled that, is that is exactly what we need to do. We need to go to municipalities. We need to go directly to them with the bureaucracies that we have…
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Mr. Speaker, of course we should not trust Build Canada Homes. It is like anything else with the Liberals. The bureaucracies that they create are inefficient. They do not work, and ultimately, there are no results. My colleague is right to talk about working together with municipalities, and he mentioned an example where there has not been a lot of progress. I also want to caution that this is not…
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek. I am going to start by making sure that everybody is aware that I was a home builder in my previous life. I was a small home builder, but I still believe that I built more houses in 10 years than the government has built in 10 years. Conservatives want to build homes. We do not want to build bureaucracy, where…
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Mr. Speaker, apparently the minister was not around on Tuesday. Extortion is real, and newcomers to Canada are the ones who suffer. Here is an example of an extortion letter from Abbotsford: WARNING...we are Indian gang members, we want our share from your business like protection money.... We are asking only 2 million...in cash...we have links all over do not ignore us, it will efect you realy ba…
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Madam Speaker, I am actually very excited to hear about all the co-operation from the Liberal side to allow things that we want to do to come through the House. We are excited to propose good amendments. We are excited to work with the government on legislation that works for Canadians. We will be helpful. We are doing our best to get good legislation. We are not going to pass bad legislation. The…
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Madam Speaker, the member just commented that the secretary of state does not even understand or know some of the contents of bills. It makes me think of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75, two bills that made house arrest possible and took away mandatory minimums. I wonder if the member has some comments on those two bills and how they are affecting this situation.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today on this motion we put forward in the House. I have had the privilege of travelling to Rwanda multiple times. It is a beautiful country. When I say I am going to Rwanda or have been to Rwanda, people look at me with shock on their faces, because they have an image of a country that was rocked by genocide 32 years ago, which it was. It was a tragic thing…
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Madam Speaker, there are a lot of very specific cases that can be cited, and that is why we have the system that we have. We have to make sure, though, that we are also able to deal with those people who do commit serious crimes in our country. It needs to be very clear that the system cannot be abused. That is what is happening today. People are taking a system that had a very legitimate purpose …
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Madam Speaker, that is the million-dollar question. There is partisanship in this place. It is alive and well today. When we propose something that is good and constructive, it gets rejected. That is the mode of operating of the Liberal government. We want to see this country work. We want to see legislation that affects people in a positive way passed. We want to be helpful. We want to do what we…
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Madam Speaker, the bad news is that a significant minister of our country is very confused about her own legislation. It is Bill C-12 that is doing this. We were actually very co-operative with the government on the bill. We wanted to see it passed. We supplied many good suggestions and many good amendments, some of which were adopted. Most were not, as I described in my speech. This is what we ha…
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise today and speak to this legislation, Bill C-10, an act respecting the commissioner for modern treaty implementation. This legislation is presented by the government as a path to improved indigenous relations and accountability, yet when I look closely at both the text of this legislation and the lived realities of the people I represent, I must say that sadly…
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Madam Speaker, within the member's question was the whole point of this. People, whether they are indigenous people or all people in Canada, quite frankly, are asking for results. People want to see results. People want to see their lives get better. They want to see better job prospects. They want to make more money. They want to have a roof over their heads. They want to have their families prot…
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Madam Speaker, the government has obligations to fulfill things like treaties, but another bureaucracy would not solve that problem. We already have ministers. We have two indigenous departments in the government. We have an Auditor General. There are many, many ways that these kinds of things can be enforced and implemented, and that is what needs to be done. We need action on these things. We ne…
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Madam Speaker, it is important for us to consult all people, whether for a new pipeline or whatever the project might be. Once again, I am coming back to the point that this legislation would not actually help that. We already have the mechanisms in government. We have departments and ministers. We have an abundance of bureaucrats. We have an Auditor General. We have so many different ways that we…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague hit on a wonderful point here, that ultimately there need to be teeth in legislation. When we do things around here that are meant to help people, there should be ways for those reports or mechanisms that come back from commissioners, or whoever it might be, to actually generate results, because, ultimately, that is the goal. We want results. We need results in this count…
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Madam Speaker, of course it is important. We have laws in this country that need to be enforced and things that need to be done. The government has obligations to all kinds of people—
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Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's speech. She spoke quite a bit about the one-year ban on asylum claimants, and she cherry-picked a couple of stories. I am sure we can always think of somebody who has been badly affected by any of the legislation we have. However, there are many cases of people abusing the system. Just today, I read that in her home province of British Columbia, there were 1…
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Mr. Speaker, Bill C-2 is sitting there; it has not moved forward. There is a reason that it has not moved forward, which is that it was bad legislation, which is just indicative of the way I see the government. As I said in my speech, the bill is the very first one the government brought forward. It is the Liberals' marquee legislation. After the election, it is what the Liberals focused probably …
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The member for Lac-Saint-Jean and I work well together on the committee. We do not always see eye to eye, but we are able to work very well, and that is what Canadians want to see when they look at Parliament. They want to see people who may not agree, and different ideas that come forward, but also that we can work in a constructive and positive way. I certainly believe we have that kind of relat…
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Mr. Speaker, yes, indeed, we were elected at the same time, and it has been six years of seeing very little accomplished and six years of longing for something different, and we are hoping the day will come soon. We have put forward so many amendments. The one I just want to highlight goes back to the issue of criminality. So often, non-citizens are charged with a crime, go before a judge and are …
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Mr. Speaker, I request a recorded division.
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Mr. Speaker, it is certainly a great time to get up to speak. We are into the Christmas season now and kind of in that spirit. I was reading this morning about something the NDP interim leader, the member for Vancouver Kingsway, said yesterday. Apparently he had asked the Prime Minister to grant party status again to the NDP in order to, in his words, make the House “function better”. I do not thi…
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a good day to be Brookfield under the Liberal government. Why is that? Canadians for Tax Fairness called Brookfield Canada's “runaway leader” in tax avoidance, and estimated it has skipped out on paying $6.5 billion in Canadian taxes. It is clear that when the Prime Minister was running Brookfield, he would rather dodge its tax bill than contribute to Canada. Canadians de…
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Mr. Speaker, when the new Minister of Culture was the immigration minister, he said, “I don’t see a world in which we lower [immigration targets].... Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at. But certainly I don’t think [we will]...lower them”. Then in 2024 he made history by allowing nearly 500,000 permanent residents into the country, the highest number ever in a…
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Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the House and speak on behalf of the citizens of Saskatoon West, the greatest riding in all of Canada, I have to say. I know there are other members who may not quite agree with me, especially the one sitting beside me, but I am very proud to represent Saskatoon as a whole and Saskatoon West specifically. We are talking about the budget today, and I h…
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Mr. Speaker, this bill would reduce taxes for people, yes. We have already heard it is probably like $20 a month, so it is not a really big deal. If this government was truly serious about saving money and saving taxpayer money, I wonder if the member would consider changing the federal interim health benefits that asylum seekers get when they are denied asylum in Canada but are trying to stay on …
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to speak again in the House about this issue. Bill C-3 has been before the House a number of times already, so here we are talking about it again. One big reason that we are talking about this comes back to the fact that the immigration system has been messed up by the Liberals over the last 10 years. In the bill, Bill C-3, in particular, we are talking about the value…
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Madam Speaker, there is so much to talk about in that question. I will talk about the Ukrainian people, and I would frame it a certain way. Right now, we can imagine that the member opposite had a temporary permit to work in Canada and was worried about the fact that it was going to expire in, let us say, two months. The government is not very good at renewing permits. Anyone who has worked in the…
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Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely correct. The Bloc members at our committee were very co-operative and helpful with creating good amendments, particularly around the issues of language and knowledge of Canada. This was the work of the committee. This work was delegated to the committee by the House. The Bloc members had very good responses and reasons for why we want to protect language. Of…
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Madam Speaker, I think my colleague's question points to a broader problem on the other side of the aisle in the government, and that is a lack of creativity and a lack of ability to create good legislation. We can see that in the current legislation. This is a carbon copy of Bill C-71, which was a carbon copy of the highly modified Senate bill that came to the House prior to that. There is not on…
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Mr. Speaker, every dollar the Liberal government spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians in the form of higher taxes and inflation. At CMHC, executives each received bonuses of $43,000. Even more ridiculously, Via Rail executives got $110,000 each. While the Liberals reward insiders, they are asking young Canadians to sacrifice more, driving many of them to food banks. In Saskatoon, food bank…
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for attempting to explain the Liberals' position on this. First off, I want to once again mention that it was very silly of the government not to challenge the lower court ruling to be able to be in control of the situation. It just demonstrates the government's typical desire to let the courts make the decisions so it does not have to make the hard decisions. The…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned in his speech that there was a court ruling from an Ontario court that precipitated this whole discussion, so I have a two-part question here. First, why does he think the government did not appeal the decision? That seems like a strange decision from the government. Was it smart or not smart? Second, there needs to be a substantial connection according to the c…
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Mr. Speaker, trying to understand the reason and logic behind the Liberal government is something I have struggled with the entire six years I have been in Parliament. It is very difficult sometimes to understand the logic behind decisions. As I just said, the government does not know how many people this bill would affect, yet it is moving ahead with this legislation. It does not understand the p…
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to be in the House today speaking to the bill before us. Fundamentally, we are talking about Bill C-3, which is a chain migration bill. It is a bill that would allow parents who were not born in Canada to give their children who were not born in Canada citizenship forever and ever. From my perspective, that is not a good thing. How did we get to this place? Originally,…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague referred to the member for Lac-Saint-Jean, who is a very good and diligent member of the committee. He does very good work and has been very helpful to the committee as a whole. He asked an excellent question. We and the member for Lac-Saint-Jean asked it of the government as well. We asked how many people this would impact, and the government is incapable of knowing the …
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