Government Orders
Madam Speaker, of course we all stand behind the age-old principle of the presumption of innocence and the right to reasonable bail. However, I am going to talk again about the 40 people who have been responsible for 6,000 interactions with the police, which is 150, on average, per person. At some point, perhaps they lose their right to be free on bail. The problem with Bill C-75 is that it gutted…
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Madam Speaker, I agree with my colleague completely. The problem with Bill C-75 is that it favoured the criminal and did not find the right balance between the rights of the accused and public safety. Also, there is the perception that the public has in the fairness of our criminal justice system, which is the problem. In Vancouver, and this stat has been mentioned a number of times, 40 people wer…
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Madam Speaker, the bill is a step in the right direction. I think it does respond in a manner to what the premiers have been asking for, but it is very narrow. The premiers have also asked for a much broader discussion on bail reform, and I feel that this legislation does not capture that. However, the bill is a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to judicial vacancies: what is the number of vacancies, as of May 16, 2023, broken down by province or territory and level (Federal Court, Superior Court of Justice, etc.)?
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With regard to projects funded by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) in Africa for human rights or humanitarian issues since 2016: what are the details of all such projects, including the (i) location, (ii) funding recipient, (iii) detailed project description, (iv) organization overseeing the project, (v) amount of funding provided by GAC, (vi) start date, (vii) end date?
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With regard to government funding for the management of aquatic invasive species: (a) what is the total amount of funding provided, broken down by year and by department or agency, between 2016 and 2022; (b) what is the total amount of funding budgeted for 2023, broken down by department or agency; (c) what is the breakdown of (a) by province or territory; (d) what are the details of all such fund…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned the data, which says that 70% of incarcerated people in provincial jails are in pretrial detention. They have not even been tried or convicted yet. He says that in his opinion, this counters the false narrative that the Canadian judicial system is lenient. However, maybe it is evidence that our courts and Crown prosecutors are under-resourced. Accused people h…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Madam Speaker, I give a big shout-out to the dedicated staff at Langley Memorial Hospital, who continue to deliver top-quality health care despite many challenges, such as a lack of personnel, space and resources. Despite our Prime Minister doubling the national debt, our hospitals and clinics are suffering more than ever. Conservatives will cut the waste, speed up approval for foreign-trained doc…
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Madam Speaker, I just want to set the record straight. The member for New Westminster—Burnaby was suggesting that my colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands was spreading misinformation. I want to read into the record a quote from his colleague, the member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, from December 9. This was after he came back from committee for third reading, when we voted unanimously. He said:…
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Madam Speaker, I am surprised and shocked that the debate on something as fundamental as the way this House operates is now going to be cut off. If we are going to have a hybrid Parliament, we need to come to an agreement on how it is going to operate. I recall many years ago that Chuck Cadman, a member of Parliament for Surrey, in my area, came here to vote even though he was undergoing cancer tr…
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague referenced Chuck Cadman, whom I knew. He was from my neck of the woods, and I know that when he was seriously ill, he came here to vote, but an alternative option would have been for the government side of the House to have paired somebody with him so that he would not have had to go through the trouble and pain and inconvenience of travelling. Is that a way forwar…
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Madam Speaker, we agree that it is high time that Bill C-9 becomes law. I am disappointed to hear that the government is rejecting an amendment put forward by the other place that we think is very important, and that is the right to appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal. Right now Bill C-9 says that there can be an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, but that is really just a right to apply for…
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise here this evening to engage in the debate on Bill C-9, a bill to update the Canadian Judicial Council review process for judges’ conduct. The last time I spoke to Bill C-9 was in December 2022, when it was here for third reading. At that time, I used an example of a case that had gone through the court system. I think the Minister of Justice referred t…
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Madam Speaker, this is very important legislation, and it has been dragging on for a long time, so some of my colleagues want to speak to it. This is important legislation, and we have important things to say about it. As for the amendment I just put forward, it says to accept all the amendments put forward by the other place. We think they are important. One of them is actually our own, which the…
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Madam Speaker, some of the Senate amendments we would be approving speak to exactly that, so we are on record as saying we want to go forward with that. As for there not being enough judges, that is another point I could have raised. I did not, but the shortage of judges is an issue Chief Justice Wagner raised as well in his press conference. There are 80 vacancies right now. At the justice commit…
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Madam Speaker, once again we have a colleague saying we are delaying things. We are not. On December 9, we passed this unanimously. It went to the other place, which came up with some amendments, and we think they make a lot of sense. One of the amendments is one of the amendments Conservative members put forward at the justice committee. If it had not been ruled out of scope, and if the Liberal m…
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Madam Speaker, I would completely agree with that. As the Minister of Justice said, there was an appeal process built within the four walls of this legislation and likely that is the end. However, the experts who came to committee said there must be that one appeal into the court system that everybody recognizes as being fair, judicious and generally accepted by the Canadian public. I do not think…
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Madam Speaker, I do not even know where to start with that.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I am not going to speculate on that. This has come back from the Senate with amendments, and we think they are good. One of them is an amendment that the Conservatives put forward initially, and the Senate picked up on that. I do not know why the member would impute bad motives to the senators. They are just trying to do their job to the best of their ability. After a reflection of …
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Madam Speaker, I completely agree that the appointment of judges and people to the Canadian Judicial Council should be non-partisan. One of the problems we have seen is that it has become too partisan, so I completely support that.
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Madam Speaker, I have been asked this question a few times. We think these amendments make a lot of sense. They improve the legislation. That is exactly the way the process is supposed to work after the other place looks at it, and we think the House should accept those amendments.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her well-thought-out speech on this very important topic. One of the amendments the Senate is recommending is that there be one more appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal because the appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada is really a faint hope, likely never to happen. One of the reasons the minister has given for there not to be an appeal to the Federal Cour…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the budget adds more than $60 billion in new deficit spending, meaning more taxes, more inflation and higher interest rates. The former Liberal finance minister John Manley said that the government is stepping on the gas with new spending while the Bank of Canada is stepping on the brakes with higher interest rates. Ordinary Canadians are getting caught in the middle, like Jeff from L…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Bloc Québécois for a very impassioned speech. I want to refer to a comment made by the member for Winnipeg North. We have heard many times from the Liberal side that there has never been a government that has done more for housing than the current government. I have been around for a long time. I have never seen a crisis in housing like there is right now…
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Madam Speaker, I am presenting a petition signed by a number of Canadian citizens, including those in my riding. They call on the Government of Canada to publicly and unequivocally support a private member's bill, Bill C-314. This bill is sponsored by my colleague from Abbotsford; it would clarify that MAID, medical assistance in dying, should not be available to those whose only underlying health…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague's speech was well thought out. We are talking about economic sanctions against people who are essentially terrorists. The intention of that is to inflict financial and economic pain on them. If the whole western world comes together on that, it can have a very positive effect. Unfortunately, on the other hand, we are still doing business with Russia. The Prime Minister …
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Mr. Speaker, the police needed a conviction. There had been four widely reported sexual assault cases already in the city, and now a fifth one that ended with the murder of a young woman on her way to work on a cold January morning in 1969. She had been stabbed in the chest and her throat had been slashed with a knife that a city resident many years later reported as having gone missing from her k…
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Mr. Speaker, the minister talked about the two-step procedure under the new regime. Would he be open to having the lower standard, where miscarriage of justice may have occurred, for the first step, but the higher standard, where it was likely to have occurred, for the second step, before the commissioner sends it back into the judicial system?
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Mr. Speaker, I am in full agreement. Worker safety is number one. Safety is always number one for any company, and I applaud any company that has a good safety record. This bill does not do enough. As I said, it needs a major rethink. It needs to go back to the drawing board. That is one of the issues that needs to be addressed.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands and I are just going to have to fundamentally disagree on that. If members talk to grain farmers in the Prairies, and I am surrounded by a number of them, they had a bumper crop, and the problem was getting the grain to port. There are not enough trains, not enough people working on trains and not enough railroad capacity. These are the problems, an…
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Mr. Speaker, this evening we are talking about Bill C-33, an act strengthening our ports and improving rail safety. One of the stated objectives of this bill is to improve supply chain disruptions, which are causing inflation. It looks like a very substantial bill, more than 100 pages long, and amends six or seven acts of this Parliament, but when we read through it we notice that it does not say …
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Madam Speaker, it is my understanding that the train in the Lac-Mégantic tragedy was carrying oil. I do not know if all the cars were carrying oil, but that added to the gravity of the disaster. Can my colleague comment on whether pipeline construction would be a safer option than transporting oil by train?
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Mr. Speaker, one of the objectives that the Minister of Transport gave in his introductory speech on Bill C-33 was to combat inflation caused by supply chain disruptions, yet it seems to do very little of that. I was at a round table discussion with marine operators and they said the new regulations are just going to make things more expensive for them and that this does not tackle inflation at al…
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Mr. Speaker, the motion is pretty self-explanatory. I do not know what more I could say in depth. We think that Bill C-33, as well-intentioned as it is, just does not do enough. It needs a major rethink. The people who drafted it need to go back and read this report, which I was just referencing, and the very good, well-written reports coming out of the transportation committee.
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Mr. Speaker, the member's question underlines how complicated it can be to tackle the problem of money laundering. If I understand the question correctly, it relates to money coming into Canada from a foreign corporation that is registered, let us say, in Barbados, which maybe does not have the same transparency rules that we have. However, we have FINTRAC rules, so the money coming in would have …
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Mr. Speaker, that is a good question. It goes right to the very heart of what the problem is and what this bill is trying to tackle and remedy. I agree with the member's analysis that snow washing and pumping money into the Canadian economy is forcing up real estate prices for the people who want to get into a home. We already have a housing affordability crisis. This is making it so much worse, a…
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Mr. Speaker, ultimately, we will be waiting to see what comes up at committee and what the study will be, but a couple of things come to mind. One is that this system has to be efficient. It cannot be overly bureaucratic. Before I was elected to Parliament, I was practising corporate law. I was talking to my law partners the other day, and they were saying that the rules are just too complicated, …
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Mr. Speaker, I am here today to talk about Bill C-42, an act to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act, to create a beneficial ownership registry to combat money laundering. I have the honour today of sharing my time with my friend and colleague, the member for North Okanagan—Shuswap. Canada has a big problem with money laundering, and nowhere is that more evident than in metro Vancouver where…
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Madam Speaker, one of the most disturbing comments, I think, in the Johnston report is right here in the conclusions, on page 5. It says, “There are serious shortcomings in the way intelligence is communicated and processed from security agencies through to government”. Clearly, the government is not doing its job. This, I believe, is negligence. I believe that a minister should resign over this. …
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Madam Speaker, we listened to a 20-minute speech from the member for Kingston and the Islands, and unfortunately, it was more heat than light. Now he is accusing us, all the opposition parties, of creating this conflict of interest that David Johnston finds himself in. We are not creating it. We just uncovered it, and it was a pretty easy job to do. The fact he is a member of the Trudeau Foundatio…
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Madam Speaker, we hear the Liberals talk a lot about Mr. Johnston's respectability. Canadians respect him. I was one of those people until he accepted the appointment to be a special rapporteur when he was a member of the Trudeau Foundation, which had clearly become part of the foreign interference scandal. He was clearly in a conflict of interest. Would the member agree that there are probably hu…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's tax-and-spend policies are driving up the cost of everything, and now he has plans to push the tax on gas to 41¢ a litre. What happened to his promises to help the middle class? Brandon from Langley wrote to me recently and said, “I am one of many middle-class citizens getting pushed down to the lower class”. My question for the Prime Minister is this: Will he rev…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague talked about social housing and the problems of Quebec. British Columbia has similar problems. Despite massive, historic amounts of spending by the Liberal government, the problem seems to be getting worse. Could he comment on that and compare Quebec's problems to British Columbia's problems?
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Thornhill talked about the evaporation of the dream of home ownership for so many young people, but I have talked to businesspeople. One of their challenges is getting workers, and that is tied to the lack of available housing close to where the jobs are. This goes right to the very heart of our economy. Could the member comment on that?
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Madam Speaker, the member said that the ratio of housing costs to income should be roughly 25% to 30%. Unfortunately, it is about twice that much in Canada, despite the best intentions of the current government and all its spending. Does she have any comments on what ideal housing affordability is and what has gone wrong with the government's plans, which have obviously failed the mark?
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Madam Speaker, on this side of the House, we were pointing out early on, during the pandemic debates about the economy, that inflation was a real threat. The Minister of Finance said, well, no, it is not, that deflation is the bigger threat and that, as a matter of fact, it would be irresponsible for the government not to engage in deficit spending because, after all, money is free or almost free …
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member and I might not agree on the importance of having this pipeline built, but we agree that the government has mismanaged it. It is inexplicable that costs have risen from $7 billion to $30 billion. The government should just get out of the way. It does not know how to run a business.
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Madam Speaker, today we are talking about budget 2023, the budget that the Minister of Finance had signalled would be a budget of restraint. Let us take a look at what “restraint” means for our Minister of Finance. This is what it means: $63 billion in new spending. That does not look much like restraint. To put it into a number that people can understand, that works out to about $4,300 per averag…
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Madam Speaker, the fact that public service workers feel they have to go on strike to fight for inflation-adjusted wages just goes to show us the insidious harm that inflation can inflict on the people of Canada. That is why it is so important that the government manage the economy in a way that is going to bring inflation down. It is no answer to say that, well, every other country in the world h…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, 150,000 public service workers are out on strike and once again Canadians are paying the price for the Prime Minister's total incompetence. He had two years to do a deal, but he dropped the ball and failed to bring it home. Instead, he is spending $20 billion a year more on federal bureaucracy, yet delivering poorer services. To top it all off, he has caused the biggest strike in a ge…
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