Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the hon. member for Thornhill put forward a Conservative opposition day motion on ending COVID-related restrictions on travel. Consistent with my prior two votes on February 14 and March 24 in favour of ending all vaccine mandates and COVID restrictions, I logged into the app to vote in favour of this motion and in favour of ending COVID travel restrictions. I did attempt to…
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians have lost control of their own lives. Whether we are talking about the individual who lost their job because of a medical decision, the single mom who cannot afford to feed her children because of food inflation or the 32-year-old who is living in his mother's basement because of real estate inflation, people cannot pay their bills because the government is making life too e…
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With regard to the Output Based Pricing System (OBPS): (a) how much has the federal government collected from industry; and (b) how much has the federal government paid out under the OBPS in direct rebates to businesses (excluding project-based funding and corporate welfare grants) since it first came into effect?
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With regard to the carbon tax fuel charge: (a) how much has the federal government collected in revenues from the carbon tax fuel charge; and (b) how much has it paid out to households in rebates for that same carbon tax fuel charge since it first came into effect?
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, there is indeed an emergency in this country. Indeed, there are a series of emergencies. There is the emergency of the family whose 14-year-old daughter has attempted suicide after two years of isolation from sports, social interaction and other healthy activities that sustain a happy and heartful mind. There is the emergency of the federal public servant who, for unrecognized medic…
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Madam Speaker, we can remove all of the blockades. Let us remove the mandates and restrictions that are blocking people's livelihoods today. Let us end the blockades on freedom of speech that the government is trying to erect with its online censorship bill. Let us end the regulatory blockades so that builders can provide affordable homes, first nations can develop their economies and escape pover…
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Madam Speaker, am I concerned about the people who have been harmed by blockades? Absolutely. That is why I am so disappointed the Prime Minister caused these blockades in the first place. I am concerned about the businesses that were affected and I am also concerned about the governmental blockades that remain in place today, the attacks on the freedoms of Canadians to have a job, go to work, fre…
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Madam Speaker, the answer is yes. In addition to taking action to deal with the problems the protesters raised, the Prime Minister could have avoided provoking these protests from the start. He is the one who attacked the jobs of the truckers, public servants and others, even as the rest of the world was lifting these restrictions and vaccine mandates. Now he can take action to lift these restrict…
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Madam Speaker, from the very beginning I stated that every single person who acts inappropriately, makes racist comments or engages in unlawfulness or blockades should be personally responsible for their conduct. That is something I would uphold as leader and as prime minister. I would not tolerate any of the racist behaviour we have seen from the current Prime Minister, whether it is his ugly rac…
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Mr. Speaker, I took my mask off to speak. I note the member had his mask off while he was very quickly condemning others for not wearing a mask. It is ironic.
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The minister wants us to trust his government to regulate what Canadians see and say online. Let us look at how the government uses the powers it has. This very week, it decided to invoke the never-before-used Emergencies Act, an act with vast powers. It was not used after the attacks of 9/11. It was not used when a gunman came into the parliamentary buildings after shooting a Canadian soldier dea…
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Mr. Speaker, one person is responsible for this mess, and that is the Prime Minister. He caused this mess by attacking Canadian citizens and taking away their freedoms. The rest of the world is moving on. Other countries all around the world are lifting restrictions. Provinces across the country are doing exactly the same, but we have this holdup. The Prime Minister is hunkering down and, out of s…
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Mr. Speaker, everyone has a story, and I have been hearing a lot of sad stories lately. The story I hear most often from Canadians is that people think they are losing control of their lives. It is not just the pandemic. This story is also about 30-year-olds living in their parents' basement because they cannot afford the $800,000 price tag on a typical house in Canada today. They have done the ma…
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Mr. Speaker, freedom is never pertinent to the Bloc Québécois. The same thing is happening in Saskatchewan. The premier announced that he was going to eliminate restrictions and the vaccine passport. The Quebec premier made an announcement about health measures. Prince Edward Island is also starting to give its citizens their freedoms back. Now we are even hearing Liberal members starting to rise …
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Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that the Bloc Québécois is afraid and is trying to silence me. That is a good sign. We are going to give Canadians their freedom back and make them the authors of their own stories. That is the approach we will take as Conservatives. Everybody has their story, and the story that I am hearing right now is that people feel like they are losing control of their lives. There…
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Mr. Speaker, I do not want any of this to continue. In fact, the truckers themselves have said they will not stay here one minute longer after the Prime Minister ceases to impose measures against the freedoms of Canadians. As for the member insulting the people who have spoken up, I encourage him to listen to his own member of Parliament, the member for Québec, a Liberal MP who said he went to the…
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. My position is that I am in favour of freedom. I want to end the blockade that this government and the other governments have forced on Canadians. That means putting an end to the vaccine mandates, giving the legitimate public servants who were fired over their vaccination status their jobs back, and repealing the vaccine mandate for the truck…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, just because the Prime Minister dressed up in racist costumes so many times he cannot remember them all does not mean every single Liberal is a racist. Just because the Prime Minister tried to help a corporation avoid prosecution after it stole from some of Africa's poorest people does not mean all Liberals are racist. Just because about a half-dozen Liberal MPs who are racial minorit…
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Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more. I was at an overpass as the truckers went by, and what I saw were cheerful, patriotic and optimistic Canadians who want their freedom back and want their livelihoods back. They are standing up for their fellow Canadians: the 60% of families who fear they cannot feed themselves, the 28-year-old kid living in mom's basement because he cannot afford a home and the…
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Mr. Speaker, the problem is that the Liberals have shown no respect for the people. This country right now is like a raw nerve, and the Prime Minister is jumping up and down on it again and again with his inflammatory rhetoric. We are talking about people who have 14-year-old kids who are suicidal after two years of lockdowns. I just spoke to a waitress whose business was wiped out by lockdowns. I…
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Mr. Speaker, I agree. We should always call out evil symbols and the individuals who are individually responsible for putting them up. I remember a January 2018 event at which the Prime Minister stared straight at a swastika and, instead of condemning it, said, “Thank you for coming, sir.” We on this side condemn evil symbols whenever they are used. I respect the member. I just wish his government…
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday, we learned that housing inflation hit a record 25%. Bloomberg says we have the second-biggest housing bubble in the world. However, where is the money coming from? After all, the wages with which Canadians buy housing are down in real terms. The number of immigrants is also down. For the Minister of Finance, if the number of people and the amount of wages needed to buy home…
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Mr. Speaker, the finance minister has gone into hiding on this housing-inflation question. Her officials tell The Globe and Mail that she has been skipping her briefings, so perhaps she did not have the answer, but I will ask it again. Housing price inflation is hitting a record 25%, even though the wages with which Canadians buy housing is down and the GDP is still down from 2019 levels. Given th…
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Mr. Speaker, I refer to the $100 billion of new and unnecessary spending as a slush fund. That is $6,600 in new costs for every single family in Canada. We know those families cannot afford to pay it, even if the finance minister is in hiding from this question. The reality is that house prices are up 25%, the worst housing inflation on record and the second-worst housing bubble in the world. With…
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Mr. Speaker, on the same point of order, I note that the whip seems to have impaired one of his ministers, who was not here in person, from answering a question. The Minister of Finance was deprived of the chance to answer housing inflation questions, and I think it is inappropriate for the whip—
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Mr. Speaker, let me correct the member. Every single Canadian needs housing that is geared to their income. By definition, people cannot pay their mortgage on a house that is out of line with their income. However, that is exactly the problem the government has created. When the government started printing cash in the spring of 2020, housing prices were dropping. Then suddenly it reversed course a…
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday we learned that Canada's inflation rate is at its highest point in 30 years and that the 4.7% inflation rate is growing about 2% faster than Canadians' wages. For the average Canadian, that is equivalent to a pay cut. We talked about “just inflation” and said the government was behind this inflation rate. What the Liberals said in their own defence was worse than the allegat…
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Mr. Speaker, I will take responsibility for the fact that someone could buy an average house in Canada for $450,000 when our party was in power. I will take full responsibility for that. Right now, that price is $720,000. It is 58% higher today than it was when the Conservatives were in office. The member is quite right that in his province, the problem is the worst. There is an NDP mayor in Vanco…
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that it is not the Liberals who are doing the most for oil consumption, it is the Bloc. The Bloc Québécois wants us to subsidize Bombardier. What fuels Bombardier aircraft? Is it oil? Are these aircraft fuelled by solar energy? What do we find at the refineries in Montreal and Quebec City? Oil, but oil from the United States. We need to pay attention to that.…
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Mr. Speaker, I can say objectively that was the best question we have had so far. There is no doubt about it. The member is absolutely right. We were the last to go into the 2008 recession and we were the first to come out of it. Why? It was because our spending was timely, targeted and temporary, because we cut red tape and taxes to stimulate investment and growth, and we did so while balancing t…
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Mr. Speaker, because of the Bloc, foreign oil companies are able to sell more oil in eastern Canada. That is a fact. All of the oil coming from the Atlantic Ocean, in eastern Canada, comes from foreign oil companies, and the Bloc supports—
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Mr. Speaker, because there is no pipeline to carry oil from western Canada, eastern Canada has to get its oil from the Middle East. Given how much they support Saudi Arabian oil, they should be called the Saudi Arabian Bloc instead of the Bloc Québécois. I do not know why. Maybe they can explain it.
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Mr. Speaker, asked about the $120,000 year-over-year increase in housing prices, the top economists for The Canadian Real Estate Association say this is the biggest gain of all time and that certainly in dollars it is far larger than anything that has ever happened. Why is this? We cannot blame supply chains, because land does not have supply chains. We cannot blame COVID, because almost all of th…
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Mr. Speaker, the question is: Why did housing prices go up so much with wages, GDP and immigration down? With all of the housing supply being right here in Canada, not linked to a so-called global supply chain, what is causing this eye-popping record increase in the cost of owning a house? It just so happens that prices started rising right when the government began printing $400 billion of new ca…
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We did, because they all failed, Mr. Speaker. The proof is in the pudding. Housing prices now are higher than ever before. It costs $720,000 for the average house, not a fancy mansion like the one the Prime Minister inherited or the one taxpayers pay to house him in. An average house costs $1 million in Canada's biggest city. This is broadening the gap between rich and poor. He cannot blame the re…
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Mr. Speaker, what makes sense to him is to give cheap debt to investors to buy their buildings. Investors have doubled the amount they have been able to borrow on the cheap because of the Prime Minister's money printing. I am sorry that the Prime Minister took my question personally, but the 30-year-olds who will be celebrating Christmas in their parents' homes are taking that personally as well. …
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Mr. Speaker, I guess with all the money-printing deficits, the Liberals did not have enough paper left to print these documents. I want to thank the minister of inflation for her presentation today. It reveals that inflation is in fact 50% higher than she promised in the budget, and the deflation she said we would have a year ago has definitely not materialized. A half a trillion dollars of inflat…
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Mr. Speaker, the only thing they are doing for seniors is driving up inflation to vaporize seniors' savings, increase the cost of home heating and increase the cost of groceries by $1,000 a year. What is the minister doing about it? According to her favourite Liberal newspaper, she is not attending her briefings. In fact, she has not spoken to many of her deputies in months and is spending her tim…
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Mr. Speaker, when the finance minister told committee that she did not know how much debt was in Canada or how much a 1% increase in interest rates would cost the federal government, or when she predicted that there would be deflation right before the biggest run-up in inflation in 20 years, we assumed it was just more media manipulation like Twitter found she had already done. Now we learn, in he…
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Mr. Speaker, the finance minister refuses to rise and defend herself against this report, even though it was in her very favourite newspaper, The Globe and Mail. The Globe further said that her department is in total disarray. This is while inflation is at a two-decade high, we have a housing bubble that could lead to a housing crash and the national debt is over a trillion dollars. Before she cau…
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Madam Speaker, the member is forgetting that debts repaid by Canadians, whether they are from Quebec, Alberta or anywhere else in the country, are not paid by a group or a government. Those debts are paid by working people. We need to stop thinking about identity groups and starting thinking about individual working citizens. Every person is responsible for themselves, and every person must have m…
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Madam Speaker, I find it very interesting that the NDP does not seem to care about the effect on seniors of government-created inflation. Of course, inflation hurts savers the most. Seniors, because of this incredibly high inflation, get rates of return on their savings that are inferior to the rise in the cost of living, which means that every single year they are becoming poorer. Meanwhile, the …
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Madam Speaker, the question I asked was, “How much debt do Canadians owe, publicly and privately?”, and the finance minister said she could not say. This is the person responsible for the finances of the nation, so I asked the top bureaucrat she had on the panel with her. He said he did not know either, so I went to Statistics Canada, which just by chance updated that number today. Therefore, I an…
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Madam Speaker, one example of a fossil fuel subsidy would be the taxpayer-funded plane ticket that the member receives to fly here on a petroleum-burning airplane in order to sit in the House of Commons, but speaking of corporate subsidies, she raises a good point in general. I believe we should let businesses keep more of what they actually earn instead of providing them with government handouts.…
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Madam Speaker, that is right. We all learned that in grade school, but apparently some lessons need to be learned and relearned here in this House of Commons. What happened was by the early 1980s, inflation had risen to 12% in Canada. The government claimed that if it kept printing money, this would stimulate the economy and create jobs. What it delivered was 12% unemployment and 12% inflation. It…
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moved: “That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Finance that it have the power to divide Bill C-2, an act to provide further support in response to COVID-19, into two bills: Bill C-2A, an act to provide further support in response to COVID-19 (business support programs); and Bill C-2B, an act to provide further support in response to COVID-19 (benefits and leave), provided that (a) …
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Madam Speaker, it is because the member forgets the other side of the equation, which goes back to the very first question I asked at the outset: Where does the money come from? He has another $7 billion of expenditures that he wants to impose on Canadians. I very helpfully explained to him how a pencil is made. I thought he would take out his pencil to scribble some notes so that he could finally…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, it says it right here in the platform: “Review the extensive real estate portfolio of the federal government—the largest property owner in the country with over 37,000 buildings—and release at least 15% for housing, while improving the Federal Lands Initiative.” There are 37,000 buildings that are underutilized, and with an increased tendency to work from home, more of that space wi…
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Madam Speaker, not only do we care about it, but we are the only party that has a solution to it. The approach of the NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc is all the same: more big, fat government programs in Ottawa that do nothing for first nations people on the ground. Our approach, if I could continue, is that we believe in empowering local first nations to give their people the opportunity to have t…
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There could be a little less conversation and a little more action please, as Elvis would say, Madam Speaker.
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