Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, a year ago this week, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences released a report commissioned by the Liberal government that identified significant gaps in diagnosis, coordination and access to supports for Canadians with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD. Since then, virtually nothing has been done to address the critical issues raised by the experts. Why pay for this report in…
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Mr. Speaker, it is an ironic debate. I do not think we have quorum, because there are not very many of his colleagues around.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, it was interesting to hear the hon. member, in response to a question from our side, very clearly distance himself from the 10 years of government that he was a part of. Here are some facts on those 10 years. Since 2015, human trafficking has increased by 84%, sexual assaults increased by 76% and violent crime increased by 55%. I wonder if the hon. member might want to take this oppor…
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Mr. Speaker, actually, there are not. This is the Liberals' bill.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, there was another speech made today, probably a little more watched than this one, from our leader, in Calgary, talking about national unity. When I look at the financial situation facing Canada today, one of the things I cannot help but think about is how different things would be had pipelines, which were already under way in 2015, been built to completion. Right now, we are in a ci…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, in 2015, the last year of the Harper government, Canada's national debt was $616 million. Today, under the Liberals, it is an astonishing $1.4 trillion, and Canada is the only G20 country in recession. In 2015, Canada had a balanced budget and the richest middle class in the world. Today, we spend more on federal debt interest than we do on the Canada health transfer, and we are now f…
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Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to the hon. parliamentary secretary's speech. At one point she did ask what we would cut. Let me be very clear, because she also referenced my home province of Alberta in kind of a flippant way. The first things we would cut would be Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, which have made it impossible to compete in the global environment where, believe it or not, oil coming to Ca…
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Mr. Speaker, in 2015, The New York Times reported that Canada had the richest middle class in the world. In 2015, we had a balanced budget and the richest middle class in the world. Fast-forward to today. We have more than doubled our national debt. The Liberals brag about the fact that we are subsidizing groceries for a third of the population. That is the situation we are in. We are spending mor…
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Mr. Speaker, one thing that would help Canada's fiscal situation substantially and would help our national unity situation substantially is if we were allowed to sell our resources from Alberta around the world. Currently, because of policies put in place by this member's government over the last 10 years, oil shipped from Alberta is subject to more rigorous emission standards than oil imported fr…
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Mr. Speaker, I would point out that while spending as much money as the government is spending right now, perhaps we could at least maintain quorum in the House of Commons. I do not think there are enough members.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have shortened debate on this really important amount of spending they are doing, and they cannot even be bothered to show up to have quorum. I would like to make sure we have quorum.
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Mr. Speaker, all I can say is that, in 2015, we had a balanced budget and the richest middle class in the world, and we are a long ways from there today.
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I know the member is heckling me, Mr. Speaker, but I do want to talk about something fairly serious to me. She made the assertion that Conservatives do not care about the most vulnerable. The member is new to the House and is mocking me as she smiles. The member might not know that I have a son with autism. He is 30 years old. I talk about this a lot in the House. In 1995, when we were in a simila…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, in a mythical Liberal world, budgets balance themselves. In the current Prime Minister's theoretical world, the national credit card has no limit and the bill never comes due, but we live in the real world, where the Liberal government's addiction to borrowing has real consequences. This Prime Minister is now spending more on interest than on the Canada health transfer. According to h…
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Mr. Speaker, in 2015, Canada had a balanced budget and the richest middle class in the world. Coming out of a global economic meltdown, Canada's federal debt stood at $616 billion. Yesterday, we found out that after a decade of Liberal economic experiments funded on the national credit card, our debt this fiscal year will hit $1.4 trillion. The Liberals are trading away Canadians' future prosperit…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, April is World Autism Month, and it has now been 28 years since my son Jaden was diagnosed. Today Jaden is 30 and an enthusiastic extrovert, but back then he seemed almost completely stuck in his own world. Our instinct at the time was to try to help him by pulling him into our world, and it did help. I have since gravitated to a slightly different approach. These days I spend more ti…
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Mr. Speaker, speaking of misinformation, let us talk about the Liberal promises in the last election. Ten months ago, Canadians trusted the Liberal Prime Minister when he promised a budget deficit of only $62 billion. Five months ago, that number ballooned to $78 billion and, again this month, they added billions more, which is a promise clearly broken. Ten months ago, Canadians trusted the Libera…
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Mr. Speaker, real leaders take ownership of their mistakes. They learn and they change. Contrast that with the daily Liberal approach in the House of blame, blame, blame. The fact is that the Prime Minister's signature election promise was to “build the strongest economy in the G7.” That exact phrase appeared, word for word, 10 times in the Liberal platform. Today we learned that Canada has the on…
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Mr. Speaker, less than a year ago, the Liberal election platform promised that the federal deficit would be limited to an already eye-popping $62 billion. That deficit exploded to $78 billion in the fall, with billions more added since. Our federal debt is now nearly two and a half times what it was just a decade ago. Meanwhile, the Toronto Star is warning this morning that Canadian household debt…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I would point out that there was not even an attempt to answer my question. To put it in context, if we want to contrast, in 2008 we faced a global economic crisis, and our government at the time put in place a plan to spend money to get through the crisis, but with a plan to get back to a balanced budget by 2015, which we did. We had the richest middle class in the world, according t…
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Mr. Speaker, under the Liberals' new leadership, Canada's multifront economic crisis has gotten objectively worse. The Liberal Prime Minister himself promised the $62-billion deficit. Their own budget shattered that promise, adding $16 billion in new debt, and they have added billions more in recent weeks. Young Canadians are taking on record personal debt to pay the bill. According to RBC, “64% o…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, hopefully the parliamentary secretary does a better job with this question than the last one. It is interesting that he is here again today to pad his word count. I noticed that the challenge he had just now was that he was answering questions the Liberals knew were coming from the shadow minister for health. Rather than have the parliamentary secretary for health answer the questions…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, 20 years ago, Canada elected a new Conservative government led by former prime minister Stephen Harper. The Harper legacy is one of true progress. It was a government that cut virtually every tax Canadians pay. It negotiated a record number of trade deals that are more critical now than ever. It navigated a global economic meltdown guided by the world-leading Harper-Flaherty economic …
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Mr. Speaker, less than a year ago, the Liberals were elected on a platform that included an already astounding $62-billion deficit and lower food prices for Canadians. That deficit grew to $78 billion in the fall. This week, the Liberals announced $12 billion in new spending to deal with the ongoing food inflation crisis they created. This is a massive bill that will inevitably be passed on to the…
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Mr. Speaker, I did not note an answer to the question there. Earlier this week, CTV's Vassy Kapelos pointed this out to the Liberal House leader: “What you announced yesterday is more than $11 billion of additional government spending, but nobody from your government has said how you will pay for it.” As he does daily in the House, the House leader completely ignored the question, twice. Now that …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, a few days ago, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Stephen Harper Conservative government. After a decade of being in power, the Harper government left with a balanced budget and what The New York Times referred to as the richest middle class in the world. I would ask our hon. leader to reflect on what we did well under the Conservative government that led to those circumstance…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, today being a late show, I get a chance to follow up on a couple of questions I asked on November 3. Going back to that time, I asked questions, interestingly, about bonuses being paid to executives. Of course, the responses to those questions had nothing to do with the questions I asked at the time, so we expect we will get a chance to hear some of those answers today in the response…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I do not know the last time the hon. member was actually at committee. Somehow the member talked about taking potshots. I do not know how he defines a potshot. I pointed out that he ran in an election in which his leader promised an already devastating budget deficit of $62 billion. We are talking about record-level budget deficits. Then, a few months later, the Liberal government put…
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member talked about the Liberal decision to kill this pipeline back in November 2016. Of course, the biggest beneficiaries of that decision were Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries around the world. How important would this pipeline be in accruing benefit across Canada, instead of in those oil-producing dictatorships?
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Madam Speaker, while members of the House may sometimes get confused when they see the two of us standing up, let us be assured we could not be further apart in terms of our views on this issue. This is probably more of a comment than a question, because I do not know where a question would even go. The comment would be that the wish list for my constituents, and probably his, would include the st…
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to get up on behalf of the hard-working constituents of Leduc—Wetaskiwin to weigh in on debates, particularly debates about fiscal issues. When listening to the debate today, and ultimately after listening to the debate over the last 10 years, it seems that there is an increasing number of Liberals who are standing up to praise their own government, to pat th…
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Madam Speaker, there is quite a bit of irony in the question, because if anybody who spends any time watching CPAC were to put a face to the words “talk, and talk, and talk”, it would be the member's face. Nobody takes up more time in the House than that particular member, talking, talking and talking. People can trust that, as the government spends billions and billions more, and takes billions a…
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Madam Speaker, I would say that the obstruction from the government is at a level we have not seen before in the House. The member and I have both been members for a long time. There are a lot of things we would not agree on, including some of the most topical issues today. However, the government has tools to move things through the House. It has all the control when it comes to moving things thr…
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Madam Speaker, that is a great question. We would like committees to be doing the work they do. When we do see footage from committees, we see why the Liberal members are trying to shut them down. It is because ministers are having a really hard time at committee explaining what it is they are actually doing. There is another thing: The “just trust us” mentality the Liberals have was sort of the t…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, a decade ago, the Liberal government killed the northern gateway pipeline, which would have shipped 525,000 barrels of Canadian oil per day to Asian markets. The value of that oil would have been billions of dollars coming annually into the Canadian economy. Instead of that economic supercharge, the Liberals enacted crushing policies with no environmental benefit, while doubling Canad…
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Mr. Speaker, back to the actual topic, the Liberal MP for Victoria defiantly stated that he is “decisively not in support.” The Liberal member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville has said that it must have B.C.'s consent. The Liberal MP for Fleetwood—Port Kells went further, saying that any pipeline must have the consent of the Premier of British Columbia. Without support from that one Canadian,…
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Mr. Speaker, it is pretty safe to say the hon. member cannot count on my support for this budget. Right now in Canada, the debt is more than the budget, so the amount of debt we owe is more than the entire budget of the federal government. Every dollar spent is a dollar borrowed from Canadians and future Canadians. According to Fitch Ratings, right after the budget was announced, “Canada's...propo…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to discuss this important motion from the member for York South—Weston—Etobicoke. I will start by commending the member. We get one shot to move a motion or a private member's bill if we are lucky to be drawn early enough to have it debated in the House. It can be tempting to put something forth that is partisan and that makes it difficult for other parties …
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, in the spirit of chatting about family, I will say that I was elected almost 20 years ago. My kids were 10 and six years old at the time I was elected. It has been a long time. A couple of weeks ago, my son celebrated his 30th birthday. I have talked about Jaden a lot in this place. My daughter, in a couple of weeks, is getting married. Time flies. There is a little bit of applause fo…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the hon. member led off his comments by quoting a former PBO, somehow in defence of the government, saying, “Our economy is weak”. If the Liberals have a confidence problem, just about the worst advice that I can imagine is to spend their way out of it. They call it investment, but it is really just spending. Here is what happened in February 1994 according to a Reuters summary: The..…
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Mr. Speaker, ratings are always great until the day they are not. Here is a quick review of the early nineties from Reuters. In February 1994, it said, “The...Liberal government brings down what it considers to be a tough budget.... It nonetheless still has spending rising slightly, and immediate public and market reaction is it did not go nearly far enough.” In January 1995, it said, “A biting ed…
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Mr. Speaker, speaking of experts, according to Fitch Ratings just yesterday, “Canada's...proposed budget, announced in Parliament on Nov. 4, underscores the erosion of the federal government's finances...[and] persistent fiscal expansion and a rising debt burden have weakened its credit profile and could increase rating pressure over the medium term.” This has happened before, with crushing impact…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, for decades in Canada, Conservative and Liberal governments alike have been steadfast leaders in the global fight to end polio. Partners include Global Citizen, Results and the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children's Health, but the undisputed leader in this mission is Rotary International, where there is no bigger champion than Canada's own Jennifer Jones, who became its first …
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Mr. Speaker, in 2015, The New York Times reported that Canada had the richest middle class in the world. Just a decade later, our country is in an economic tailspin. What happened in 2015 was that the Liberal government took power, and many of its current ministers, including the finance minister, were elected. Here is where we are today: During an epic housing crisis, 99% of CMHC executives got b…
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Mr. Speaker, let us remember that Santa Claus is not spending taxpayer dollars. Every single dollar the Liberal government brags about spending comes from the pockets of hard-working Canadians, in the form of higher taxes and inflation. While Canadians line up at food banks in record numbers, their own money is being used by the Liberal government to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in exe…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, I rise to honour one of the most incredible organizations in the history of sport. While others will no doubt pay tribute to our beloved Blue Jays this afternoon, I am here to celebrate the many Special Olympics athletes joining us in Ottawa today. For six decades, the Special Olympics has changed the lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities worldwide, inc…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health, or CAMIMH, and to highlight the importance of Mental Illness Awareness Week, which is taking place October 5 to October 11. CAMIMH has spent the last 25 years ensuring mental health and substance use health remain national priorities, advocating for awareness, reducing stigma and demanding life-changi…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to hotels and accommodations paid for by the government for asylum seekers, since January 1, 2022 and broken down by month: (a) what are the names and locations of the hotels and other accommodations which the government has paid to accommodate asylum seekers; and (b) what are the details of each hotel or accommodation in (a), including, for each, (i) the owner, (ii) the monthly amount…
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Mr. Speaker, I will note that the Liberal members seem incapable of using the words “pipeline” or “oil” in the House of Commons. Let me keep this simple: It is a fact that the emissions reporting requirement on Saudi oil being sold in Canada is less stringent than for Canadian oil being sold in Canada. Who in the Liberal government wants to stand now to defend this incomprehensible policy?
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Mr. Speaker, this week, Canada hosted the G7, and one of the people on the Prime Minister's invitation list was the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia currently has a sweetheart deal with Canada, shipping over two billion dollars' worth of Saudi oil a year to our Canadian east coast. Alberta oil, shipped to the same place, would face extremely onerous reporting requirements on upstream and…
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