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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 9:22:03 p.m.
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The hon. member for North Okanagan—Shuswap is rising on a point of order.

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Jun/7/23 9:22:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I did not say anything previously, but I just noticed another government member coming into the House actually eating something, and as we all know, especially members who have been here for a long time, we are not allowed to eat in the House.

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Eating
Eat

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 9:22:28 p.m.
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I want to remind members that they are not to eat in the House. From what I understand, the member was finishing up what he already had in his mouth, so he did not have it physically in his hand, but I want to remind members that they are not to be eating in the House. The hon.— Some hon. members: Oh, oh! The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes): Order. Now it is becoming a bit of a debate or discussion, and I would just ask members to let the official opposition leader finish his speech. The hon. leader of the official opposition.

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Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Jun/7/23 9:23:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member across the way accused one of our MPs of sleeping during the remarks, but what he does not understand is that it was mindful meditation—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 9:23:15 p.m.
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I would ask the leader of the official opposition to stick to his speech and not to address what is going on behind him or try to have a conversation with the hon. members. The hon. leader of the official opposition.

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Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Jun/7/23 9:23:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, thank you. I will obey that edict and stick to my speech. I was speaking about the common-sense idea of a dollar-for-dollar law. I would love to be the originator of the law, but it came into place during the Clinton era in the United States of America. Members will recall that during that time, the American government had racked up massive debts, so Congress passed a law called the PAYGO law requiring the U.S. administration to find a dollar of savings for every new dollar of spending. What happened? The American government balanced its budget for the first time in half a century. It paid off $400 billion of debt. We are always being told that when we balance budgets and pay off debt, as the Liberals say, it will just shrink the economy. Actually, the economy underwent one of the most spectacular expansions in American history, with unemployment dropping to its lowest level in the postwar period. Inflation stayed low, and the American government was able to restore its solvency and its financial foundation. The bad news is that when the law lapsed, the U.S. government went right back into deficit and has not emerged ever since. Why is that? It is proof that politicians need legal limits on their spending; otherwise, they will find it impossible to control themselves. They will want to spend more and more of other people's money to aggrandize themselves and buy votes. We need to impose legal limits on government spending, the same limits that every other Canadian imposes on themselves. That is one common-sense idea that would cap the cost of government while the economy and the taxpayer catch up. The solution is not only to control spending, but to ensure that the size of government grows more slowly than the size of the private economy. We know that all prosperity flows from the production of goods and the free exchange of product for payment, investment for interest and work for wages. That is the miracle of the free market economy. Let me talk a little about this incredible miracle. I was in a coffee shop the other day. I walked up, bought a cup of coffee, paid for it and said thanks. Do members know what the lady said back to me? Does anyone want to guess? Ms. Julie Dabrusin: I cannot imagine. Hon. Pierre Poilievre: Madam Speaker, she cannot imagine. Well, it does not take much imagination. Some people might think she said, “Thank you. You're welcome.” That is the sequence we are taught as kids: “Thank you. You're welcome.” However, what she said was, “Thank you.” Does anybody ever notice that when they make a transaction or a purchase in the free market, it is never “Thank you. You're welcome”? It is always “Thank you. Thank you.” It is the double “thank you”. Why? It is because both participants in a voluntary transaction are better off than they were before. Each of them has something worth more to them than they had before the transaction occurred. If they did not, they would not have agreed to the exchange. If I have an apple and someone has an orange, and I want an orange and they want an apple, we trade and we are both better off, even though between us we just have an apple and an orange. Why? It is because we each have something worth more to us than what we had before. Thus is the miracle of the free enterprise system, the voluntary exchange of work for wages, product for payment, investment for interest. It is voluntary, so we know that everyone entering into the transaction is better off, because otherwise they would not agree to do it. What is different about government? Every transaction is done by force. Everything the government does, even the good things, is done by the coercive force of taxation, a gun to the head. People cannot get away from paying the price. Even when government does perfectly justifiable things, like funding the military or building a hospital, it has to force the money out of the pockets of the people. We all admit that some force has to be applied, but it is force. As Conservatives, we believe that it should be the minimal amount of force and the maximum amount of freedom. That is the fundamental difference. When people are paying government taxes, it is done by coercion, and that is why no one writes “thank you” on their tax forms. Is that not true? However, should they not, if it is just a transaction like mine at the coffee shop, with people buying all these services off the government? Would the Liberals tell people that they should be writing “thank you” because they are doing this wonderful transaction and are getting back more from government than they are paying? Well, we do not know that because people have no choice in the matter. Every time the government creates a new program that purports to give people more than they paid for it, the government has to impose it by force. That can never be a relationship that favours the weak. Always in relationships of force it is the powerful who benefit. This is the great lie of the socialists. They always claim they want to aggrandize the government because they want to protect the weak from the strong. However, since when, in relationships of force, is it the weak who benefit? We know that it is always the strong. We know that in societies where governments get big and powerful, the small group of wealthy elites gets more and more powerful themselves. Why? It is because they have more proximity to the power that controls the money. If all the money is in the vaults of the state, the people with the keys to the vault are the ones who are going to get rich. For example, they will say that we need for G to take from A in order to give to B, because G has determined that B does not have enough and A has too much. What happens then? Well, then A goes to G and says, “I want some back so I am going to make a donation to somebody who is part of G” in order to get G to give money from B to A. Before they know it, it is not A or B who are benefiting; it is G, because it is G who decides who gets what. That is ultimately what government does when it gets too powerful. It does not take from one to give to another; it takes from everybody to give to itself. That is what we see with the current government: an ever-increasing size of the state, an insatiable appetite for other people's money. We see that playing out with very real human consequences for the people who can no longer pay their bills. Those with power and influence are better off than ever before. Why? It is because they can hire lobbyists. Other than marijuana, lobbying is probably the biggest growing industry in Canada. We have seen under the Prime Minister a 100% increase in registered lobbying interactions. Why is that? It is because businesses have judged that the way they get rich is not by investing in new product but by investing in political influence. It is the best return on investment they can get anywhere in the Canadian economy today. There is a company in New York that did a study on the amount American business spends on Washington relative to the size of the U.S. government. It found a near-perfect correlation between the amount of money that Wall Street and businesses spend lobbying Washington and the amount of spending that Washington does as a share of GDP. As government gets bigger and more powerful, businesses shift their focus from making profit by serving customers to making profit by influencing politicians and bureaucrats. The number one commodity goes from being a product that people buy, food they consume or entertainment they enjoy to the most important commodity of all in a government-controlled economy, which is power and influence. So it goes, and so we see today that the very rich and the very powerful get richer and more powerful every single day. Look, for example, at our friends at McKinsey, or I should say the Prime Minister's friends at McKinsey. He gave them over $100 million in contracts, and we do not know what they did. We investigated. We cannot figure out what value they provided anybody. However, they have proximity to power, and they were able to get close to the Prime Minister throughout his entire political career and ultimately dominate his political agenda. They therefore get the money, but not only that. They avoid culpability. This is a company that helped bring about the opioid crisis. It designed plans to have bonuses for distributors of opioids, which caused overdoses. Literally, they had a plan to supercharge the opioid crisis because they knew it would profit their powerful clients. What has been their reward for their friendship with the Prime Minister? The federal government has thus far not sought or received a single penny in settlements from McKinsey, despite the fact that Canadian taxpayers are paying a fortune for the opioid crisis that this company helped to cause. In the United States of America, the U.S. government has obtained awards from McKinsey and other companies for having caused that crisis, but because of the immense political influence of that company, the government in Canada has not been able to do that. Some $600 million is what 49 jurisdictions have taken from McKinsey because of the opioid crisis that it caused, but here in Canada, the Prime Minister has not been able to get a single solitary cent, or perhaps more accurately has not wanted to get a single solitary cent, back from this corrupt enterprise, which helped cause an immense misery and loss of life. All of this is to say that in a socialist or government-controlled economy, those with political influence are always better off because they can pull strings and get what they want, and the working-class people, the families whose lives have been destroyed by the opioid crisis, get nothing at all. I try not to assign ugly motives to the Prime Minister for the decisions that are so obviously destroying our working-class people. I try to never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. However, sometimes, when we look at the ideology to which he adheres by his own words, we have to wonder if some of the damage he is doing is by design. This is a guy who said he admires the basic Chinese Communist dictatorship. Those were his words. If one of us had accused him of that, It would seem totally and utterly ridiculous, but he accused himself of it. He said it. He was asked not if he admired the Chinese Communist dictatorship, but what government in the entire world he admired most. He volunteered that it was the basic Chinese Communist dictatorship. Ever since that time, we have seen the reciprocal admiration that Beijing has for his regime, having intervened in two successive elections to help him win and having donated $140,000 to the Trudeau Foundation. The Prime Minister has said he admires Fidel Castro too. Therefore, when we witness the policies he unleashes on the Canadian people, we wonder whether it is really just incompetence or because he subscribes to an out-of-touch ideology that is radically different from the common-sense norms that everyday Canadians believe in. As he destroys our money with reckless deficits, he does so knowingly. I used to think he just did not know any better, that he was perhaps naive. Having been raised with a trust fund bequeathed to him by his multi-millionaire petroleum grandfather, perhaps he just did not know how money worked because he had it all given to him. He did not come up through a working-class family, where scarcity is a daily guest in the house. He lived in a place where there was no scarcity, where things were provided to him at will, so perhaps he just does not know any better. Six months ago, his own finance minister admitted that deficits cause inflation, an admission that I would have found quite encouraging if she had stuck to it. Then the Prime Minister tapped her on the shoulder and told her that they may cause inflation, but that is fine because they are going to go with $60 billion more in deficits. Is this his design? Is this part of his ideological objective? The great John Maynard Keynes said: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. Is that the Prime Minister's purpose here? Is it to enrich a small group of people who can protect themselves by holding onto assets that are inflation-proof and protected, while ripping away the purchasing power of Canada's working class? Is it all an accident? Is it a function of his total incompetence? Is it just because he is a naive trust fund baby? Or is it because he deliberately believes in an ideology that concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands? I want to know. What does my caucus think? Do they believe that it is incompetence that has led to this inflation or that it is the Prime Minister's malice? Some hon. members: Both. Mr. Pierre Poilievre: Madam Speaker, there is a third option. It is both incompetence and malice. I always said I was a democratic leader, and we hold votes right here in the middle of my speeches in the House of Commons to get these answers.

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Ms. Melissa Lantsman

Jun/7/23 9:38:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The members opposite in the government do not know what it is like to sit in the front row, but their voices really carry from there, and I cannot hear the member—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:38:33 p.m.
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I have just asked for order, and I would repeat the request that we maintain decorum and let the hon. Leader of the Opposition proceed with his speech. Order, please.

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Mr. Garnett Genuis

Jun/7/23 9:38:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I am immensely enjoying the remarks of the leader, but the members in the front row this evening are repeatedly interrupting with regular points of order. I actually had another point of order I wanted to raise briefly while I am on my feet, regarding— An hon. member: Point of order.

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:39:21 p.m.
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I will deal with one point of order at a time. The hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan has the floor.

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Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)

Jun/7/23 9:39:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to briefly, while I have chance, raise concerns about the response I received to Order Paper Question No. 1398. I think that I did not receive a response to this question, so I wonder if the Chair could review the matter and return to the House about it. It was a question regarding gender parity among staff. The question identifies a number of specific areas where I am looking for information about the gender parity among chiefs of staff, directors of policy, directors of communications and other political exempt staff. The response I received does not provide any of that information. It says that the government is steadfast in its commitment on the—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:40:19 p.m.
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I will definitely take it under advisement. Could the hon. member just provide the number of the question?

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Mr. Garnett Genuis

Jun/7/23 9:40:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate your taking it under advisement and returning to the House at the appropriate time. The question is Question No. 1398, and the response was tabled on April 13.

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:40:45 p.m.
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The Chair will take that under advisement. The hon. member for Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies is rising on a point of order.

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Mr. Bob Zimmer

Jun/7/23 9:40:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there has been a changeover in Speakers, and the previous Speaker has seen them acting like this for a couple of hours now. Considering the financial situation we have in our country, we are talking about a very important issue with the budget, as well as the impacts to regular Canadians and the possible defaults that could happen to thousands of Canadians. That is what our leader is trying to say. The group across the way, government representatives, is being extremely disrespectful. For the benefit of all Canadians watching tonight and who are concerned, who are losing their homes—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:41:38 p.m.
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I have repeatedly asked the hon. members to please keep order and give the hon. Leader of the Opposition the chance to complete his speech. The hon. member for Peace River—Westlock is rising on a point of order.

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Mr. Arnold Viersen

Jun/7/23 9:41:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, earlier this evening I was voting via hybrid Parliament. I just want to bring to the attention of the House that, when I went to vote this evening, when clicked the camera on, my screen did not light up. My stock image stayed there, and actually—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:42:18 p.m.
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It was brought to the attention of the Speaker who was taking the vote at the time that there were technical difficulties. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès): May I hear the rest of the hon. member's point of order?

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Mr. Arnold Viersen

Jun/7/23 9:42:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was just interesting that, when I turned my camera on, I had the grid of members of Parliament up there. Another member of Parliament's picture disappeared and my picture appeared there, and my stock image was still there. When I— Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Jun/7/23 9:42:59 p.m.
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I have just informed the hon. member that I cannot resolve that issue. IT services can, and it has been brought to the attention of the Speaker and will be looked at. The hon. Leader of the Opposition has the floor.

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