- Sep/29/23 11:43:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we learned yesterday that the Liberals are cutting another $1 billion from our armed forces. This is in addition to the $2.5 billion they already let lapse last year.
The Prime Minister has no problem wasting taxpayer money and running up massive deficits on things like the $116 million for McKinsey, $54 million on the ArriveCAN app or $20-million bonuses for the Bank of Canada executives. Let us not forget that the Liberals allowed $4.6 billion of abuse under their COVID programs. The Liberals waste money on just about everything but do not spend it on our military.
Why does the Prime Minister cut spending only when it hurts our troops?
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- Sep/29/23 11:01:50 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, fall is upon us, and in my rural Manitoba riding, farmers are wrapping up harvest with most crops safely in the bin. The fall calf run has started with roundup under way on our ranches. Commercial fishers are busy landing their catch on Lake Winnipeg.
This should be a time of Thanksgiving, but sadly, Canadian farm, ranch and commercial fishing families are being overtaxed and over-regulated by the NDP-Liberal government. This costly coalition is quadrupling the carbon tax, making it more expensive every time hard-working families fuel up their tractors, combines, trucks and boats.
These misinformed Liberals have unilaterally implemented draconian trucking and fertilizer regulations, which will lower farm productivity and increase food insecurity. When we tax the people who grow the food and tax the people who truck the food, it costs us more to buy the food.
After eight long years, Canadians cannot afford this Liberal mismanagement anymore, but better times are ahead. Soon there will be great Thanksgiving and celebration across the land when we get rid of these out-of-touch Liberals and replace them with a common sense Conservative government, which would put Canadians first.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his great intervention on bail reform.
With the Liberal's Bill C-75, which was soft on crime, they allowed so many criminals back on the street. They went back so far in time that they actually reversed a lot of the bail requirements for things such as committing a crime with a firearm, which started under Pierre Elliott Trudeau. They even undid things that were done on mandatory minimums going back to the Liberal era of the seventies and eighties.
I would ask my colleague if he really believes that, because of Liberal ideology in Bill C-75, the hug-a-thug approach, it has ultimately resulted in what we have today with an increase in violent crime of over 32%. The city of Winnipeg, where I come from, is now one of the most dangerous cities in all of North America. It all has to do with the bail reform, and how the Liberals have always stood up for the criminal and never stood up for the victim. It is time for jail and not bail.
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Madam Speaker, that is incredibly rich coming from a minister who used to decry any closure motions when he was in opposition.
I want to point out that, from the time of Tommy Douglas to the time of Thomas Mulcair, over those 14 Parliaments, the NDP only supported closure 17 times. With today's vote, we are at over 40 times in the past two years that the NDP has supported its Liberal partners in shutting down democracy and debate in this Parliament.
That is shameful behaviour. How can the NDP members stand over there and decry and heckle me now, while they are supporting one of the most unethical and most corrupt governments that we have seen in Canadian history?
On the issue of the bill, I will just say this: The minister stands here and says he is supporting local media. The Liberal government has not supported our local community newspapers or stood up for the local content creators. By going forward with this bill, it is putting more power in the hands of Rogers, Bell and the CBC, rather than actually supporting those local content creators. They are demising our democracy in this country by shutting down freedom of the press through this bill, by cutting off the voices of those who want to be independent on the Internet. That is—
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- Jun/19/23 8:57:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, just to go on with the letter from CDAI, they said:
Russia's brutal war...in Ukraine...as well as the continuing expansion of the military arsenals of authoritarian regimes...should have prompted a re-assessment of our defence posture.
The reality is that well-connected consultants, big bankers and wealthy bondholders get more from the Liberal government than our troops. We know that the deficit that is going to the big bankers is over $40 billion. We know that McKinsey and other Liberal-connected consultants are getting billions of dollars every year, while our troops do without.
In this fiscal year that just ended in March 2023, we had $2.5 billion of lapsed military spending that will never be available again. That has dropped our GDP ratio, which was supposed to be at 1.33%, down to 1.29%. The difference between what was supposed to be spent on military expenditures and where we are at relative to the 2% of GDP shows that we are actually $20 billion short.
That is unacceptable. People cannot buy house insurance when their home is—
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- Jun/19/23 8:50:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be able to stand today and address a question I originally raised on April 17. It is based on a letter that came from the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, where 60 plus prominent Canadians who are military leaders, former ministers of defence and other parliamentarians from both sides of the aisle, both Conservative and Liberal, as well as a former chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, all wrote a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, which was published as an open letter. It says, “There is no more important responsibility for the federal government than protecting Canadians against all threats—foreign and domestic”. Then it goes on to say, “Now is the time to fully discharge the commitments we have made to our allies and partners in sharing the burden of collective security, commitments which are essential to safeguard our peace, prosperity and way of life [for all Canadians]”.
In that quote, they are referring to the commitment we made to NATO, at the Wales Summit in 2014, that we would spend our 2% within 10 years. That was nine years ago. We know the NATO summit in Vilnius is coming up this July. Of course, there is going to be extra pressure on the Government of Canada, under the Prime Minister, to come up with that 2%. We know from the Pentagon leaks that happened just recently that the Prime Minister said there is no way Canada is ever going to reach that 2% commitment.
Our other collective security agreement that is important to us is NORAD and NORAD modernization. We know the Americans are concerned about that. The letter from the Conference of Defence Associations Institute further reads, “Years of restraint, cost cutting, downsizing and deferred investments, have meant that Canada's defence capabilities have atrophied.” They have atrophied so badly under the Liberals that, today, we are 10,000 troops short of where we should be to be able to fulfill the commitments we have here domestically, and for what we are able to do in NATO, especially the missions we have undertaken as the leadership in the enhanced forward position in setting up a battalion in Latvia and leading that battalion. We are slow in getting our numbers up to over 750 troops.
We know we were not able to participate in the recent military air force exercises that 26 nations of NATO participated in. Canada was a no-show because we do not have the equipment or the personnel to fly the planes we have today; we are short on pilots.
We know that we are short on military procurement, although there have been some announcements which have recently come from the government, and we are going ahead with the Canadian surface combatants that were originally ordered by the former Conservative government. We know that the F-35s are finally being bought. The Prime Minister said, in 2015, that he would never buy the F-35s, but finally, we are purchasing them. However, we do not necessarily have the right people doing the procurement; according to the Conference of Defence Associations Institute and other sources, we know we are short 4,200 military procurement experts within the Department of National Defence, as well as at PSPC Canada.
We see this happening. We are hearing stories coming from the front in Latvia, where our troops are actually having to go out and buy their own helmets, hearing protection, radio communications equipment and flak jackets because the kits they are getting from the Canadian Armed Forces under the Liberals are inadequate. In a letter that was recently leaked, one commander wrote to Ottawa saying that it is embarrassing, as they have seen the Danes walking around in new Canadian equipment that was purchased from Canadian companies, the very equipment that our troops should be using and wearing. Unfortunately, the government has not been able to carry off those procurements, leaving our troops vulnerable and embarrassed. Of course, we also know that our troops in Poland were not provided with any meal vouchers, and they are out of pocket for thousands of dollars that the government has not been able to reimburse them for. That is shameful.
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- Jun/13/23 8:10:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Edmonton West for his well-argued presentation in the House just now. We have also experienced the same problem at the national defence committee, where we have had meetings cancelled because of a lack of resources.
I want to ask the member for Edmonton West if he would really get down to it, especially as he talked about how this virtual Parliament is impacting the health of our interpreters and how the government is not here with a full cabinet to defend its record. Is that happening because the government wants to avoid accountability; has a lack of respect for members of Parliament; lacks compassion for those who work in the House of Commons, such as the interpreters; or is it all of the above?
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- Jun/13/23 7:05:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to my colleagues across the way, they might want to see the flexibility that hybrid brings, but in reality, as they just pointed out, it can be abused as well.
The sense of honour of being in this chamber has always been to protect the individual member and to ensure that changes to the rules were done through consensus of every member of this House. I have been here for 19 years and I have actually seen, when changes to the Standing Orders were attempted, one member deny that change. We went for unanimous consent, and it was not there. In light of the fact that these changes to the Standing Orders, the way our Parliament functions, have nothing to do with party affiliation, they should be done through consensus and not through this hammer-fisted unilateral move that we are seeing right now from the Liberals and the NDP.
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- Jun/13/23 6:47:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am quite disturbed that we are sitting here having this debate tonight on changing the Standing Orders through a forced vote. I have been around this place for some time, since 2004. Whenever there have been changes to the Standing Orders, they have been done through consensus, not by having one party or its collaborators, this time the NDP, ramming it down the throats of all the other parties. This is a dangerous precedent that the Liberals are trying to set. The member mentioned that we needed to do this during the pandemic. First of all, if she missed the news, the pandemic has officially ended, according to the WHO.
Second, we know there was an opportunity during the pandemic, when we were all here, to make the changes that happened to ensure that Parliament can exist through virtual Parliament.
Third, the one thing that happens in virtual Parliament that does not happen here is that there is a lack of empathy. We cannot interact with other members on Zoom like we can in the House. We miss out on the sidebar conversations that happen between all members of the House, not just within their own caucuses. That is the way we build personal relationships. Those relationships were destroyed because of the pandemic, especially for those who were elected after 2019. I can tell members that if we want to repair that and make this place a more inclusive, collaborative chamber, then we need to get rid of virtual Parliament and work side by side on dealing with the issues that are important to all Canadians.
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Mr. Speaker, it is again a shame that we are moving to closure. We are undermining the parliamentary democracy we have, and the most shameful thing is that the government is being supported by the NDP, which is supposed to be an opposition party but is acting like it is a bunch of Liberals.
Throughout history, normally a government that moves closure can count on only maybe once or twice during a parliamentary session getting the support of any of the opposition parties to support a closure motion like we have right now, stymying debate. In fact, if we look back, since the time of Tommy Douglas under the NDP until Thomas Mulcair, the NDP supported closure only 14 times in the 17 Parliaments during that time span. However, here we are today, under the leadership of the NDP leader, the member for Burnaby South, and the NDP is going to support closure for the 35th time. What has happened to the NDP that it has squandered its principles under Tommy Douglas, of being an effective opposition, and is instead supporting the Liberals and undermining our constitutional right to debate all the bills they bring before the House?
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- Jun/5/23 5:12:00 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary knows full well that we are debating the budget bill. This has nothing to do with the budget.
Second, because this has relevance, the Speaker, on Friday, committed to looking into all the problems we had during that vote.
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- May/17/23 2:19:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today, on the 79th commemoration of Sürgünlik, the genocide of Crimean Tatars, we look back with horror and sadness as we remember how Joseph Stalin and his Communist thugs forcibly deported over 200,000 Tatar men, women and children by packing them into cattle cars and shipping them off to the gulag.
Nearly 10,000 people died during this brutal journey, and many more died under inhumane conditions when they were relocated. This genocide stands out among the many atrocities carried out by Stalin and his henchmen, and we remember all the victims.
Although the Crimean Tatars heroically returned to their homeland by the thousands during the 1980s and 1990s, Vladimir Putin, just like dictator Joseph Stalin, is again waging a genocidal war against Ukraine and the Crimean Tatars. Since his illegal invasion in 2014, Putin has targeted the Tatars and shut down their mosques, their independent press and their legislative assembly, the Mejlis. Moreover, he is carrying out a slew of horrific human rights abuses against them.
Putin and his barbarians must get out of Ukraine. Crimea is and will always be Ukraine, homeland of the Tatars.
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- May/12/23 11:30:48 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that member does not get it that we get to sit in here because of the sacrifice made by our veterans. The brave Canadians who served at Vimy Ridge are not the only ones who are getting caught up in the Liberals' cancel culture. From Terry Fox to Nellie McClung, famous Canadians are being erased from our passports. With our rich history and culture, one would think that the iconic beaver might actually get a mention in the passport, but instead the government went with a squirrel holding a nut. Does the government really think that all Canada has to offer are under-represented rodents?
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- May/12/23 11:29:44 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, instead of addressing their passport and immigration backlogs, these Liberals are disrespecting our veterans and Canadian Armed Forces who protect our sovereignty and freedom. The government's useless and unnecessary passport redesign will erase the image of Vimy Ridge, the place where Canada came of age and first fought as a unified force. How do these Liberals explain to our veterans and Canadians who served our country that their sacrifice is not even worth one page on our passports?
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- May/8/23 5:26:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for his role as chair of the national defence committee. I appreciate his support for the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and for the ruling that was made earlier today.
This situation was originally brought to the attention of the government two years ago, and the government failed to act. We know that the national security adviser at the time in the Prime Minister's Office received this report. We know that the family of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills was targeted by a diplomat in the PRC consulate in Toronto. However, I would like to get the member's opinion on why the intelligence was not acted upon by the government side of the House, where he sits, to address this very scary situation for the family of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and, more importantly, the attack on democracy.
How was Zhao Wei allowed to continue to operate here for the last 48 months unimpeded with his diplomatic immunity? How many other Canadians was he able to intimidate over that time?
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- May/4/23 5:14:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is important to lay out what the national security adviser to the Prime Minister, Jody Thomas, said at committee back in December of 2022.
She said, “The Prime Minister is briefed regularly. He's very interested in this subject and has directed work for agencies to do...We are briefing regularly, and those briefings are received and acted upon.” This is in relation to the Prime Minister getting briefed. Jody Thomas also went on to say that their are constant briefings to the Prime Minister. She said, “He's briefed on foreign interference when we have issues to raise to his attention. He has a daily foreign intelligence brief, and he has a weekly Prime Minister's intelligence brief.”
I am not saying Jody Thomas was involved in this, because Jody Thomas was not the national security adviser at the time, and I know that before her, there was a revolving door of national security advisers in the PCO.
The Prime Minister does get briefed. If he did not get this briefing, then shame on him. If he did not act upon it, he has responsibilities under our parliamentary process to make sure he gets that information as part of accountable government. He has not acted. He has failed Canadians, and he has not kept us safe.
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- May/4/23 5:13:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I can quote the parliamentary secretary to the House leader for the government—
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- May/4/23 5:03:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am rising today in my role as the shadow minister for national defence for the official opposition. I agree with my colleague who just spoke that this is an issue that all members in this House should be engaged with. It is an issue that is definitely impacting each and everyone of us and our ability to represent our constituents without the fear of a foreign entity trying to intimidate us by threatening our families abroad.
As everyone knows, I have been an incredibly outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. I was in the original tranche of 13 members of Parliament and parliamentary Canadians who were sanctioned by Russia back in 2013. We are now witnessing a situation where one of our fellow colleagues, my friend, the member of Parliament for Wellington—Halton Hills, has been targeted by the Communist regime in Beijing and its foreign agents here in Canada, threatening him and his family back in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, what we see from the government is just dithering and delaying in the typical Liberal way when it comes down to doing things that are important to each and every Canadian.
National security and national defence responsibilities are paramount to the Government of Canada, yet we see a government that has not taken this issue seriously. It knew for two years that there was a legitimate threat made against the family of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. We knew that the Communist regime in Beijing did not like the way he brought forward a motion to call out its activities against the Uyghur population in China as genocide, for which it decided to intimidate and sanction his family in Hong Kong.
The motion we have before us today lays out a path for our House and the government to finally act. It would create a foreign agent registry, similar to what we see in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. I would say, with respect to all the comments coming from the other side during the debate earlier today claiming that as Conservatives we did not do anything, that it only became an issue toward the end of our time in government, and that our platform for the 2015 election campaign called for the need to establish a foreign agent registry.
The second part of the motion calls for the establishment of a national public independent inquiry on the matter of foreign election interference, which we have been dealing with here now for several months once we found out that the Prime Minister had been briefed that seven MPs and their ridings had been targeted for foreign interference by the Communist regime in Beijing. Instead of having that independent public inquiry that the majority of members in this House have been asking for, the government went with a Liberal insider, someone who is a family friend of the Prime Minister's, with direct ties to the Trudeau Foundation, who is the former governor general David Johnston. Everyone is questioning the independent advice that will come from that process. That is why we need to move forward with a public inquiry to establish public confidence.
The motion also calls for the government to shut down all of the People's Republic of China's police stations that are operating in Canada. We know there are a couple in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal that are still open to this day. They may be observed by the RCMP, but we know for a fact that operatives of the Communist Party of China are using their diplomatic immunity in those stations to intimidate Chinese Canadians. That has to stop now.
Yesterday, the Falun Dafa, who are Falun Gong practitioners, were on the Hill standing for their rights and liberties that are being denied to them in mainland China, to stop the genocide against Falun Gong practitioners, and the illicit harvesting and trafficking of organs across the planet. Of course, the source of those organs are persecuted, executed and butchered Falun Gong practitioners.
Why have they been targeted by the regime in Beijing? It is because they had the right to assembly, which was denied them. They had their faith, which was denied them. They could not even come together to practise a faith that promotes tolerance, truthfulness and compassion, which are the founding principles of the Falun Gong doctrine.
The fourth and final part of this motion calls for the expulsion of all diplomats from the PRC who are responsible for the affront to all Canadians, including the member of Wellington—Halton Hills, for their attack on democracy and foreign interference right here Canada. Again, the government has made the argument that it cannot do it.
However, I can tell members for a fact that, under Stephen Harper when the Conservatives were in government, we had a similar situation with the Iranian regime here in Canada where it was using its diplomats to target and intimidate the Iranian diaspora right here in Canada. What did we do? We expelled every single diplomat. They were declared persona non grata. We shut down its embassy here in Ottawa. We shut down its consulates in Toronto and Vancouver. Now we have its properties that we will hopefully be able to use to actually compensate the Iranian families here in Canada who lost loved ones on the Ukrainian International Airline Flight PS752, which was shot down as a terrorist act by the Iranian regime. Of course, we continue to fight in here on having the government honour the motion that was passed in 2018 to call the IRGC a terrorist organization and that this entity should not be allowed to operate in any way, shape or form in Canada.
What we are living through right now is an affront to our democracy. It is an attack not just on the member for Wellington—Halton Hills but an attack on every single minister, every single member of Parliament and every single Canadian. If we are going to protect our democratic institutions, then we have to act now. Enough is enough. Yet, we have not seen a single diplomat from Beijing expelled by this government. We have not seen the government carry through on its promise to shut down the police stations that the PRC has opened across Canada. The government has not taken a single step forward in establishing a foreign agent registry.
What we saw earlier today was disgusting when the member for Winnipeg North played the victim blame game and tried to blame the member for Wellington—Halton Hills for not doing anything on information that he never received two years ago. We know that this government received information from CSIS, and we know that the government did not act upon that intelligence. CSIS said that the family of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills was being threatened through information that it had gathered through signals intelligence, and yet the member for Winnipeg North stooped to a new low by trying to say that it was the fault of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. That is ridiculous.
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- May/1/23 3:15:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am proud to present a petition today on behalf of Canadians who are very concerned about the unprovoked and illegal war Russia is waging against Ukraine. They are concerned about those Ukrainian refugees who have come here seeking asylum and are being shut out of the Canada summer jobs program.
A lot of the youth who are over here are not eligible to apply to the Canada summer jobs program. The petitioners are calling upon the Government of Canada to open it up to the children of those Ukrainians who were authorized for emergency travel to come here, work and be safe, as their children should be given the same opportunities.
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Mr. Speaker, I would say this: The one thing I detest about the student loans program is that it is very much prejudiced against kids who come from farms and small businesses, especially in rural areas. Because of the assets owned by their parents, they do not qualify for a student loan. That works against their ability to get an education, which often ends up costing a lot more because they have to travel great distances and move into cities, where those universities are located. I want to make sure those barriers are removed for all rural students.
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