- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 60%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- Feb/15/24 12:16:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we certainly know that the Conservative record on the Senate is pretty dismal too. I mean, they put Mike Duffy, the Come-From-Away senator, in there. Why was that? Was it because he was a hack who raised money for Stephen Harper? Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau can be included in a rogue's gallery of people who are not accountable.
The issue today is that we now have, as a Parliament, a democratic body, the obligation to fix something very profound. I would love to debate and talk about how we deal with that unelected, unaccountable lot where it seems that, if they flipped pancakes for the Liberal or Conservative parties, they get a job for life. There has to be a better way of running a democracy.
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- Feb/6/24 12:56:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on the point of order, I appreciate that and I appreciate the intervention by my Conservative colleague.
I just want to be clear, because we have rules. A male who is not wearing tie should not be recognized. We have had rules where, let us say there was a hockey tournament and a team wins, members wear their jersey. However, we do not have a rule where someone, just because they are supporting a team or an issue, gets to come in and wear it. We have a very narrow window.
I just want to make sure that those are terms under which someone could wear something that is not business attire. It is in that specific instance that perhaps Regina has won or, God help us, the Toronto Argonauts finally win, on that day we give them that one moment. Other than that, we have to have respect for the Chamber.
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- Dec/4/23 4:34:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am apologizing to Luke and Steve for the fact that their Conservatives were bragging about seventies muscle cars; talk about entitlement. Poor Luke and Steve are asking how come the member they voted for will not support offshore wind.
No, the Conservatives do not want to. They want to talk about seventies muscle cars. Let us talk about boomer entitlement. While we were talking about workers and offshore wind, they were talking about muscle cars. No wonder Luke and Steve are so upset and fed up with the Conservative lot.
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- Jun/13/23 12:03:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her passion for fighting on the issue of housing.
In Timmins right now, a community of 45,000 people, we have almost 1,000 homeless people. This is creating a serious social crisis and a policing crisis, as well as exacerbating the opioid crisis. We have no place to get people into safe housing. We have no support for single moms. What we need is mixed housing and co-operative housing of the kind that built much of the community housing that we have in our region, which is sustainable for families. We see the Liberals making lots of promises with respect to housing, but we are not seeing it on the ground. What does my hon. colleague think about the need to guarantee that we have mixed co-operative housing in all our communities, whether it is in northern Ontario or in downtown Vancouver, so we can maintain sustainable communities and people can live humane, decent and hopeful lives?
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Madam Speaker, the question of Canada's ability to deal with our situation in an increasingly unstable world raises serious questions about priorities. For example, we are years behind on the frigates that are supposed to be brought forward by the navy. The cost overruns are staggering, yet we have just seen in Ukraine that the Russian flagship, Admiral Makarov, was taken out by drones.
Do we need to completely reassess our thinking? This is the 21st century. We are investing, often, in 20th-century solutions in a world of warfare, cyberterrorism and cyber-power that is completely transforming the nature of warfare and democracy's ability to defend itself.
Does my colleague think we need to do a larger rethink across the board in terms of our strategies and our ability to defend ourselves?
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Mr. Speaker, given the high levels of poverty people with disabilities face, the fact that they are often living shadow lives of what they should be able to because of the fundamental inequities, I am very wary about making promises that cannot be delivered. My question to the member, in terms of this legislation, is about a credible plan to actually get it to people and ensure, particularly in my region of Ontario, that it will not be clawed back by the Doug Ford government. We have seen it go after poor people relentlessly. People are not able to pay their rent. People are not able to live in dignity. What steps can we see in this legislation that would protect people on disability from suffering these provincial clawbacks?
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- Jun/14/22 3:51:07 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, in a younger life, my wife and I lived and worked with men coming out of prison, and we worked with people on the streets.
What we saw was the enormous amount of public money that gets wasted when police sit all night in an emergency ward with people who should be in detox or when people were jailed over the weekend. There is a failure to deal with the mental health issues we see in people on the street and in marginalized communities.
We talk time and time again about fixing this, but it always thrown at us that we are being soft on crime or that we are hugging the thugs. I would like to ask the hon. member about the larger sociological issues of a society that treats people as disposable, locking them away in places such as the jail in Thunder Bay, without the support networks to actually get people off their addictions and back into civil society?
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- May/17/22 11:37:00 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened to my colleague with great amusement. I have great respect for him. It was getting kind of out there, but that is okay. He has a job to do.
I would like to ask him about some work we did together while he was committee chair trying to get accountability on the Kielburger brothers because this issue has been brought back up in the public media. I am very concerned about the fact that, in 10 months of trying to get the basic financial information of how many corporations there are, who had the finances and who owned what, we could not get a single clear picture. This was a parliamentary committee and what was obstructing us the whole time was their chief financial officer, Victor Li. We kept being told that he was off sick some place, but they had nobody else to replace them.
The hon. member was the chair of that committee, and this was the frustration he faced. This is a children's charity. Children's charities should have pretty clear books. Why were we not able to get basic answers from their chief financial officer, Victor Li, and the rest of that group?
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- Mar/22/22 10:38:11 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I was surprised to hear the Conservatives say there is no evidence of price gouging. I invite the hon. member to come north of Highway 17, where we often pay 30¢ more a litre in towns such as Kirkland Lake and Timmins than they pay in southern Ontario. In 2019, the British Columbia Utilities Commission, under the New Democrats, found out there was price gouging of at least 13¢ a litre.
Does the hon. member agree that we need to push the Competition Bureau to start making sure that in isolated, northern communities, we are not getting ripped off at the pumps because of these arguments that we are a little further away from the centre? If we deal with price gouging, people will at least have a fair chance, especially with the outrageous prices we are paying because of Putin's war.
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