Parliamentary Speeches

Government Orders

Mr. Chair, on what date will the budget be balanced?

Government Orders

Mr. Chair, so will the number remain at seven or lower? Will it exceed 7%, yes or no?

Government Orders

Mr. Speaker, the government has certainly signalled that it would like to do that, which is using accounting trickery to deceive Canadians about the true nature of the deficit. This has been tried at the provincial level. It does not work. It is a mistake if the government wants to go that route.

Government Orders

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on the opposition motion, which calls for the government to table “a fiscally responsible budget before the House adjourns for the summer, that reverses [the] inflationary policies” of the past nine and a half years under the Liberal government. Let us be clear about a few things. The government most assuredly is not a new government. There has not been…

Government Orders

Mr. Speaker, this is so typical of what we saw throughout the entire last Parliament. A government that prorogued the House, dissolved Parliament and forced Parliament to sit idle for six months now demands to know whether we can we drop everything and just rubber-stamp its legislation. The member seems to suggest that the Liberals can ignore Parliament for months at a time, and that then somehow …

Government Orders

Mr. Speaker, the member raises a great point. It was a disturbing and chilling bit of political theatre when we watched the Prime Minister sit down as if we were in a presidential system, and sign some paper. I do not even know what was on that piece of paper, but he felt that he had the power to usurp what is normally the prerogative of the House. Maybe it was just his ignorance of parliamentary …

Government Orders

Mr. Speaker, no, I have not.

Speech from the Throne

Madam Speaker, I welcome the member for Calgary Signal Hill to this House. He is another Calgary MP. It is great to see him here. I share his thanks to his predecessor, Ron Liepert, who is a good friend and known to all of us in this House. We wish him the best in retirement. The member spoke in response to the last question. I would like to give him more time to fully explain some of the points t…

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, while I share many of the member's ideals of democratic government and elected parliaments, I would like to discuss the actual matter at hand, the Speech from the Throne. This is a Speech from the Throne that contains no plan or map forward for the government, through these admittedly very difficult times that we face, and there will be no budget tabled in the spring session. Parliame…

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, it is true, thankfully, that over nine and a half years was not long enough for the government to actually completely kill the industry. We are thankful for that. There are a number of points that the member brought up. He brought up TMX, and it still astounds me, the credit that the Liberals want to seek for driviPng private capital out of the oil and gas business. They had to take o…

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, I did not comment on this in my remarks. I was hoping for questions and comments that were related to the speech I made. We will see what is proposed, and we will examine legislation as it is proposed.

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, it certainly would have been better to have not had a carbon tax at all, industrial or consumer. We would not have had this series of bureaucratic difficulties that the member mentions. From roughly 2017 to 2019, I was the shadow minister for the CRA. I would hear, every day, staggering examples of the challenges Canadians face in dealing with that agency, often made more complicated …

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, although this is not my first intervention in this Parliament, this is the first opportunity I have had to take a moment to thank the voters of Calgary Crowfoot. I am getting used to the riding name change. Many riding names have changed, but I thank the voters of Calgary Crowfoot for sending me to this place for the fourth time in nine and a half years. I want to thank my opponents i…

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, I am glad I was able to catch your eye. I would like to express my congratulations to you. I wonder if the member for Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke could comment further on the extent to which the Liberal Party campaigned on its purported plan, yet it has tabled a Speech from the Throne that contains no concrete plan whatsoever and no budget.

Oral Questions

Mr. Speaker, when the Liberal government was first elected in 2015, it killed 16 major resource projects and chased $176 billion out of the Canadian economy. This resulted in thousands of lost jobs in my city alone, and Bill C-69 continues to make it impossible to build the pipelines needed to unleash our resources and to restore our economic independence. Will the Prime Minister commit today to c…

Speech from the Throne

The subamendment is in order. Questions and comments, the hon. member for Beauce.

Speech from the Throne

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the new member's speech, and I congratulate her on her election to the House of Commons and welcome her to this chamber. She represents a suburban riding that I imagine has much in common with my own. I wonder if she could talk a bit about some of the things she heard at the door during the campaign. She knocked on 100,000 doors during her campaign, I understan…

Routine Proceedings

Mr. Speaker, on the same point of order, I drew a straight line from the substance of the debate, which dealt with international trade, and the election results. I am quite interested to hear more about the connection between international trade and the election results last night.

Oral Questions

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has lost the confidence of his cabinet, of his Liberal MPs and of Canadians, while desperately clinging to power. Yesterday, they found a random Liberal minister to table the disastrous fall economic statement after he fired his former finance minister, who would not sign off on smashing through her $40-billion fiscal guardrail. That was all in order to make room fo…

Oral Questions

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister's failure to table a timely fall economic statement goes to the core incompetency of the government. Canadians need a government to axe the carbon tax, build more homes by exempting the GST from new home construction and fix the budget by getting spending under control. Canadians are tired of waiting. Can the finance minister confirm whether she will keep her prom…

Oral Questions

Mr. Speaker, it is nearly Christmas and we are still waiting for the fall economic statement and the public accounts, both of which should have been tabled in October. That is just basic management. Canadians need to know how much debt the government is piling on. If the government cannot even manage the basics, like giving Canadians the straight facts about the public's finances, will it call an …

Government Orders

Madam Speaker, the previous government did no such thing. I reject the premise of the member's question.

Government Orders

Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely right. It was an excellent but leading question. She suggested that this whole system is arbitrary and strange and will benefit wealthier Canadians. People who perhaps buy large quantities of things in January, such as a year's supply of beer or wine, and warehouse it, can do so, but these are the better capitalized Canadians who have more money, not the peo…

Government Orders

Madam Speaker, it was a heck of a lot easier to administer an across-the-board cut on all products for one month than this bizarre, cobbled-together laundry list the Liberals have created, but that is beside the point. The point is that I have no confidence in the government. I will not vote in favour of a budgetary tax measure, a money bill. I am not going to vote for it and I am proud to oppose …

Government Orders

Madam Speaker, I am sharing my time with the member for Simcoe North and look forward to his remarks. What we are debating is the outcome of a desperate gimmick announced by the government a few days ago, for which, somewhere on the back of a cocktail napkin, it cobbled together some kind of desperate ploy to buy Canadians' votes. The plan originally had more components than what is going to be vo…

Private Members' Business

Madam Speaker, I request a recorded division.

Government Orders

Madam Speaker, I answered his question. It contains a ridiculous premise that I reject, and so there is no answer for that question. It is a non-question.

Government Orders

Mr. Speaker, over the last nine years, and in particular over the last three, we have watched the NDP enable all of the corruption and incompetence of the Liberal government. It has really been on display with how this bill came into being. The NDP and the Liberals seemed to be somewhere writing on the back of a cocktail napkin, trying to cobble together some kind of a bill that could distract Can…

Government Orders

Madam Speaker, what we have before us tonight, as I mentioned before, is part of a broader, desperate gimmick that the Liberals cobbled together on a napkin somewhere with the hope that the NDP, the Bloc and their backbench would sustain the government a little longer. They cannot, so we are down to this GST bill. I will vote against it. I oppose the government's agenda. We need a serious governme…

Orders of the Day

Mr. Speaker, while the member for Chilliwack—Hope was giving an answer about the supremacy of Parliament in a democratic society, where the sanctity of votes in this chamber have to count for something as an expression of the democratic will of people, the parliamentary secretary was heckling the member and disagreeing that votes in Parliament were the final say in this matter, that Parliament was…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, I apologize to my colleague from Kelowna Lake—Country for interrupting her speech, but the Standing Orders of the House of Commons insist that more than one party House leader sign an order to extend a House sitting. I am certain that the Conservative House leader has signed no such order, and I just wanted to confirm that the request for an extension is in order.

Statements by Members

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Deputy Prime Minister said she wanted to “help Canadians get past that vibecession”. I am not exactly sure what that means, but I do know that the Deputy Prime Minister has unleashed nine years of economic vandalism on Canadians. Canadians are poorer now than they were nine years ago. She might think that this is just bad vibes, but it is a fact from Statistics Canada. …

Routine Proceedings

With regard to the proposal to increase the capital gains inclusion rate to two-thirds for certain taxpayers: (a) how many taxpayers realized capital gains of $250,000 or more in each tax year from 2003 to 2023 inclusively; (b) how many of the taxpayers in (a) realized capital gains of $250,000 (i) once, (ii) twice, (iii) more than twice, (iv) every year; and (c) how many of the taxpayers in (b) w…

Orders of the Day

Mr. Speaker, it would seem to me that, with the declining per capita GDP, Canadians are getting poorer, and with $400 million going out the door to Liberal insiders, Liberal insiders are getting richer. This happened because of the deliberate choices the government made. It was Navdeep Bains who made the choice to clear out the existing board and appoint his own hand-picked chair, and then, under …

Routine Proceedings

With regard to the difference between the membership of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) (all branches) as of October 1, 2024, and the CAF’s total authorized strength: (a) how many new members does the CAF need to recruit to reach authorized strength; (b) how many recruitment applications can the CAF process each month; (c) how many Canadians applied to join the CAF each month between October 1, 20…

Orders of the Day

Mr. Speaker, I have to say that I was astonished by what I saw in question period today. I have seen a lot of personal attacks and a lot of vitriolic debate, but that was quite exceptional. To get to the point, I think that this member needs to be given a further opportunity to really address that and to call it for what it is. Those were the actions of a deeply insecure bully that we saw this aft…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, I would be delighted to comment on those things. I would say that the cost to operate this Parliament is a small price to pay if we are debating a motion that goes to the democratic accountability of the government, but that also has the side benefit of preventing the government from introducing more bad laws that will harm Canadians. I talked about that in my speech. I noted that o…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely right. The $400 million was misallocated by Liberal insiders, who were deliberately appointed by the previous minister. The misappropriation of that money could have gone to any of a number of things, including housing our troops. There is a base housing problem, in which our men and women in the armed forces do not have access to housing. That is just one t…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend, and indeed the member for Saint John—Rothesay is my friend. The member asked me to comment on the commissioner's views. I disagree with the commissioner, but that is not the point. The time to have made that argument was back in June when we voted on the motion. This is no longer a debate about whether the House should request the documents; the House has requeste…

Mr. Speaker, my point of order is different. Yesterday, you made a ruling and informed the House that you would come back. I am just confused because, this morning, you have allowed debate about that on which you had already made a ruling. Mr. Speaker, I wonder which rulings you are allowed to revisit and keep talking about and which are actually firm and have to be complied with.

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, Canadians are getting poorer while Liberal insiders are getting richer. That is not my opinion; that is a fact. Per capita GDP is declining. It is lower now than it was nine years ago when the Liberal government was first elected. The total value of all the goods and services produced in Canada, divided by all the people in Canada, is shrinking. It is not shrinking in the United Sta…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, this is amazing. I am being heckled by the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader, who is chirping from the sidelines and telling me they do not have to follow the votes of the House of Commons and that the votes in the House of Commons do not need to mean anything. That might have been what the Prime Minister was getting at when he admired the dictatorship of the PR…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, there is a bit to unpack there, but I will start with this. If the votes in this chamber are to mean anything, they have to be respected. It is to—

Adjournment Proceedings

Madam Speaker, Adjournment Proceedings are where we debate unsatisfactory responses to questions raised in question period, and tonight I rise to follow up on a question asked on June 14. That day, I asked two questions of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change. The questions were about the suppression of his department's information proving that the carbon tax costs the Canadian economy $…

Adjournment Proceedings

Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary has misrepresented and mis-characterized both me and our party. We know that the industry will lead the way in best practices and in technology to reduce or be able to produce more efficiently while doing its best to minimize emissions. He has ignored the question again, which was about the suppression of information. The current government ran on a platf…

Orders of the Day

Madam Speaker, we are talking about $400 million in the green slush fund. Liberal insiders got rich by voting to give themselves money at a time when the government is, once again, waging war on the western economy. I know the member has some very strong feelings about the energy industry. We even heard about some of the things today in question period, just nonsense from the other side about the …

Statements by Members

Madam Speaker, Monday is Remembrance Day, the day when we pause to remember those who serve, those who continue to serve, those injured in body or mind, and those who gave their lives in service to Canada. Canada was built on eternal foundational values, values that include freedom, democracy, the rule of law, pluralism, peace and orderliness, yet our way of life has often been threatened or attac…

Adjournment Proceedings

Point of order.

Adjournment Proceedings

Madam Speaker, in Adjournment Proceedings, we debate questions that were not answered properly in question period, when members of the opposition ask a question and the government refuses to answer or provides an unsatisfactory answer. This, indeed, is the case with the question that I asked on June 14. I noted that the Liberals had promised to be the most open and transparent government in histor…

Adjournment Proceedings

Madam Speaker, I can assure the member that I am speaking to the question that was presented before the late show. It was about the carbon tax. It was about the suppressed report. The reason I asked the question on June 14 was that the Minister of the Environment had suppressed a report. That led to the access to information system, which the minister was using to suppress and prevent the release …