Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my colleague would talk about this idea of “Don't worry about it. Students can still access loans. They just don't qualify for grants.” Could he give me a bit of a thought on that?
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, today's concurrence motion is about more than just student grants. It is about whether this country still respects the kind of work that actually keeps the country running. Buried in budget 2025 is a decision that says if a young Canadian chooses a public institution, such as UBC, McGill or U of T, they can receive a federal student grant, but if they choose one of many provincially r…
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Mr. Speaker, I would talk about the fact that instead of giving support, the government has actually put a barrier between the two types of training. Budget 2025 changed the eligibility for the Canada student grant so that students at many regulated career colleges no longer qualified. It is not because their school is unaccredited or because their program is substandard, but simply because of the…
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Mr. Speaker, I think that shows, very clearly, the bias against the lower-middle-class student. This policy hurts those students who can least afford it. Career colleges disproportionately serve lower-middle-income Canadians who need a faster, more direct path to employment. These are not students with a safety net. Many of them choose a career college specifically because it is the practical, aff…
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Mr. Speaker, we should not need an opposition motion day to defend students against Liberal cuts.
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I held a town hall with business leaders in my riding, and I expected to hear about tariffs and red tape. Instead, the number one concern by far was this: Do we still even own our own homes? Decisions such as the Cowichan ruling and the Liberals' secret Musqueam agreement are shaking confidence in property rights. Investment is freezing, builders are backing off and uncertainty is gro…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, what makes this worse is that the government makes more money the higher gas prices go. Every time the price at the pump rises, the GST rises with it. More pain for Canadians means more revenue for Ottawa. This is not just about high prices. The government is profiting from them. Families are cutting back. Farmers are warning food prices will climb again, and the Liberals are quietly …
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, there was a time in this country when the path to owning a home felt clear. If one worked hard, showed up every day, did their job, raised their kids and tried to put a little aside they could build a life. They could buy a home, they could plant roots in a community and they could look at their children and believe with confidence that their children's future would be just a little b…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, it is a strange and troubling thing in a country as prosperous and progressive as ours that a woman at risk can do everything she has been told to do, to seek help, speak truth and place her trust in the law, and still find herself dead at the hands of her own partner wielding a bloody weapon, in what can only be considered a completely avoidable murder. Bailey McCourt is one such sto…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, if these programs were working, if they were truly delivering, we would not be here tonight. We would not see families spending over half their income just to afford a place to live. We would not see housing starts projected to fall. We certainly would not see something even more troubling, which is that a growing number of the very people who invest in this country, who create jobs, …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, affordability has gotten so bad that farmers in my riding are taking to social media begging the Liberal government for gas tax relief. This is planting season, which is one of the most fuel-intensive times of the year. Tyler Heppell, a very popular Cloverdale farmer, said it plainly: When fuel costs go up, food prices go up. It is that simple. Families are already struggling at the g…
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Mr. Speaker, it is not just the abuse of our refugee system that has people in my riding shaking their head. They are hearing about situations like this: a young woman going about her life, when a stranger violated her by groping her not once but twice. He was charged, he was convicted and then he was given a discharge by the judge, and no criminal record, because without a record he can stay in t…
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Mr. Speaker, I have been hearing something troubling from people in my community. They tell me that the international students whose visas have expired are being told by immigration consultants, “Just claim asylum. You'll be able to stay.” Now people are gaming a system that was meant for people fleeing real danger, and this is clogging the line for genuine refugees who actually need protection. T…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, there is a deep irony in the heart of the bill. The government claims it is about protecting Canadians from harm, yet the first thing the Liberals did was remove the good-faith protection that ensured Canadians could express their religious beliefs without fear. I would ask my colleague why he thinks the government is so determined to remove good faith from the law and from this debat…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition regarding Bill C-9. The Canadians who have signed this petition want to remind the government that it has no authority over sacred texts or teachings of any faith community. That boundary is not negotiable. Bill C-9 would overstep the boundary, stripping away long-standing protections that have allowed Canadians to speak and live their faith in good faith.…
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Mr. Speaker, I spoke with a man in my riding who works at a local cabinet manufacturing shop. He works hard and pays his taxes, but his hours were cut because students with expired visas take his shifts for cash under the table. This is the direct result of a system the previous Liberal immigration minister let spiral out of control, where international students came without proper oversight and t…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, what we are seeing today did not come from one mistake. It came from years of mismanagement by multiple Liberal immigration ministers. One opened the floodgates without oversight. Another failed to enforce the rules, and now the current minister is continuing with more permits, with millions of visas sitting expired or unchecked. Even Liberal MPs have said this minister is not up to t…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the families and seniors in my riding who are carefully studying grocery flyers deserve a straight answer about why food keeps getting more expensive. We often hear the government members say it is a global problem, but if that were true, every country would be feeling it equally, and they are not. Canada now has the highest food inflation in the G7. When we look at where Canadians ar…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I want to begin with something that happened in my riding, because sometimes the most honest way to understand an economic problem is simply to listen to the people living with it. A woman named Amy from Cloverdale wrote to me recently. She works hard, pays her bills and tries to live responsibly, but she told me that grocery shopping has become something that she now dreads, not beca…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister claims that this Indonesia trade deal is a major breakthrough, yet his own government says the economic impact will be just 0.012% of the GDP by 2040. That is about the value of one tanker's worth of LNG. At the same time, the United States has negotiated billions in the Indonesian purchases of American goods, including energy, agriculture and aircraft. Why does my …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek. Bill C-9 did not start out as a debate about religious freedom. It was presented as a modernization measure, a technical reform that we were told would strengthen protections against hatred while ensuring that Canada remained a country defined by tolerance, pluralism and mutual respect. That, at least, was the …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, when the IRGC shot down flight PS752, 55 Canadians were murdered. In the days that followed, I stood with those grieving families in my riding and promised them that Canada would be a place of safety, not a place where people connected to that regime could live freely. However, yesterday at committee, officials admitted that they cannot deport the Iranian regime officials already here…
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Mr. Speaker, this threat is no longer distant. It is happening right here in Canada. Last week, three synagogues were shot at. Now an Iranian activist has gone missing. Police are investigating it as a homicide while the Iranian community fears Tehran's involvement. Meanwhile, hundreds of people linked to the IRGC are living freely in our country. I stood beside PS752 families in my riding and pro…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, with respect to the issue before us, it is not about supporting protections against hatred. We all support protections against hatred. However, on whether the government should remove a safeguard that has protected the good-faith expression of religious beliefs for decades, the question Canadians are asking is very simple: If religious expression is already protected, why remove the p…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, as we have repeated many times, the tools are there, and they have not been used correctly. What I have been hearing from Canadians is not political theatre, but genuine concern. Over the past weeks, thousands of people, rabbis, pastors, imams and ordinary citizens, have taken the time to write and call their members of Parliament because they fear the good-faith expression of their b…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague gave a wonderful explanation. The thing that really strikes me the most is that the government told Canadians not to worry because it just added in a clarification clause, yet when we read that clause, it simply says that speech is allowed as long as it is not hate speech. That is not really a clarification. It is just circular reasoning. The previous safeguard actua…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, when I look at my grandchildren, I think about the life they should be able to build: going to university, buying a first home, raising a family of their own and believing that hard work will allow them to get ahead. However, today their parents are struggling just to cover everyday costs, and saving for their own future is slipping out of reach, with household debt now at $2.6 trilli…
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Mr. Speaker, all five of my children are married and raising a family of their own. Like so many young Canadians, they are working hard just trying not fall into debt. Home repairs, music lessons, cadet uniforms, gas to drive kids to activities, and the everyday cost of raising a family all add up. Saving is nearly impossible right now, and 64% of millennials are worried about their future. Parent…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, after years of failed EV mandates, to the tune of $52 billion in subsidies from Canadian taxpayers, the government now wants to spend another $2.3 billion to boost the sales of cars that Canada does not build. The fact is that nearly all previous rebates went to vehicles manufactured outside Canada. If the goal is to strengthen our auto sector, why is subsidy money going to support Am…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, we spent $52 billion trying to force an EV transition. Production targets are failing, 5,000 workers have been laid off, and now the government wants another $2.3 billion in subsidies, even though most of its past rebates went to foreign-built vehicles. Is this about helping Canadian workers or saving face after a failed policy experiment?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Liberals finally removed the EV sales mandate, which was a common-sense thing we had been begging them to do, but then they imposed a tailpipe emissions standard so strict that only electric vehicles would realistically qualify. As such, the mandate disappeared in the press release, but it reappeared in the regulations. Does my colleague think that Canadians appreciate these kinds…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, picture a city with gangs demanding protection money from small businesses, where shots are fired at home, where families fear going out at night and people are forced to change their cars and their routines. It sounds like I am describing a slum in a third world country, but it is my hometown of Surrey. What is worse is that when these thugs are caught, they are right back on the str…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, Canadians do not need another process or another framework. They need a pipeline. We are a resource-rich country watching other nations move ahead while we debate conditions and caveats. A pipeline to the Pacific is not an experiment. It is not a theory. It is basic infrastructure, the kind Canada has built before and the kind for which they should already be moving dirt. Under a Cons…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, Canada needs a pipeline. We are a sovereign, resource-rich nation. We produce energy the world wants, yet instead of building the infrastructure that would allow us to sell that energy at full value, the Prime Minister has tied our economic future to a net-zero framework so complex, so conditional, that we are assured it will take forever and cost the max. It goes without saying that …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I just attended an event hosted by SPEATBC in a room full of highly trained engineers and technologists. They were asking whether the next round of manufacturing investment will stay here in Canada or go to the U.S. They want solutions so that their jobs are secure. StatsCan says that we lost 28,000 jobs last month in manufacturing alone. That means fewer shifts, tighter budgets and m…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I have noticed over the last 10 years that the Liberal government has always been very quick to apologize. I am just wondering why the government suddenly seems to be so incredibly hesitant to apologize for something that we know really should not have happened.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, over the years, I have noticed that the Liberal government is always very quick to apologize. It makes me wonder why the government suddenly seems so incredibly reluctant to apologize for something that we know full well should never have happened.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Tobique—Mactaquac. Early in the morning at Heppell's potato farm in Surrey, before most of us are awake, the work is already under way. The ground is damp, the equipment is running, trucks are being loaded, and rows of potatoes that will end up on dinner tables across this country are being pulled from the soil by people who have done t…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I had hoped my speech would help Canadians better understand how these hidden taxes are driving up prices. Farmers, truckers and grocery clerks do not set prices. Government policy sets prices. We tax fuel, fertilizer, packaging, all these things, the cost of travel for food all the way to the checkout. Our motion says to stop adding costs to the potato and start taking them off by re…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I think the most important part right now is to focus on our farmers. Giving people a tax rebate, for example, is not a great solution, because it makes our food more expensive. It is not a food affordability plan. We followed a pound of potatoes from a local farmer and saw where the costs were added. Instead of removing these costs, the government borrows billions to send some of tha…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is right. We need to focus on the real problem, which is government inflationary policy, if we want to fix this. The Liberals offer excuses, but Conservatives offer solutions. A potato grown in B.C. faces the same climate change as the one grown in Idaho: same sun, same rain, same drought. However, the Canadian potato costs more because government policy adds costs a…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, 20 minutes from my place, people can look across the Canadian border at affordable homes that look exactly like the ones selling for double the price in our country. Nearly half of young Canadians now say they have considered leaving their province just to afford housing. Two of my daughters moved out of B.C. to afford a home. Now they want to come back, but prices are worse than ever…
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Mr. Speaker, this did not happen by accident. Homes did not just suddenly become unaffordable on the Canadian side of the border. Government policy made them that way, and that is why sales are collapsing. Builders are laying off workers, and young Canadians are forced to leave. Will the Prime Minister admit that his housing policies are the reason young Canadians can afford a home 30 minutes acro…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister wants to talk about the gap between rhetoric and reality. Well, last week reality came in the form of two police cars in my driveway investigating a report of shots fired on my street. My neighbours are wondering if we are now in the line of fire of some extortionists. Surrey's mayor, Brenda Locke, is asking the government to declare a state of emergency. Conservati…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, the second petition is from Canadians who are expressing great concern about the assault on religious freedom and freedom of expression contained in Bill C-9, which would remove the long-standing good-faith safeguards for religious expression, raising the risk that Canadians could face investigation for expressing sincerely held beliefs on a religious subject or for citing certain r…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I rise today to present two petitions. The first is from Canadians who are profoundly concerned about the government's plan to expand medical assistance in dying to people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness. The petitioners make their position clear. They state that mental illness is by nature treatable and recovery is possible. They warn that expanding MAID in thes…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, when I was growing up, I learned a core Canadian value: Canada succeeds when people are free to make choices for themselves. In Davos, the Prime Minister signalled different values. He believes markets should not follow people's choices but be set by regulators, banks and global institutions. He believes that individual choice should be replaced by imposed outcomes decided by a small …
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has basically just admitted he is failing with regard to affordability. It is so bad that he just had to announce another temporary boost to the GST credit. If prices were actually under control, Canadians would not need another recycled Trudeau-era rebate to put food on the table. Canada now has the highest food inflation in the G7. Food bank use is at record level…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister said something at Davos that sounded like pure common sense. He said, “A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options.” Most Canadians heard that and thought, “Well, of course,” and yet the Prime Minister does the exact opposite here at home. He talks about fuelling ourselves, and then his government blocks energy projects. He talks …
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister sold himself as a master negotiator. People elected him to get a deal with the U.S., and now he is telling everyone that our old relationship with it is finished. I have spoken to local business owners, manufacturers, exporters and family-run companies. They are scared to death about what happens if CUSMA negotiations fail. These are not abstract fears. These are pa…
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