- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Calgary Rocky Ridge
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $131,868.27
- Government Page
- Feb/16/24 12:02:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary wants to help Canadians and help industry by raising their taxes eight years in a row. Canada's taxes on beer, wine and spirits are already among the highest in the entire world. Brewers spend more than twice as much on production tax as they do on wages for their well-paid unionized workers, proving that this Prime Minister is not worth the cost to Canadian jobs. If the current NDP-Liberal government cannot give happy hour back to Canadian consumers, will it at least axe the automatic tax increase on industry, exporters, small businesses, unionized production workers, retailers and restaurant servers?
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- Nov/27/23 1:14:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, since I was elected in 2015, I have spent most of my energy speaking up for the workers I represent in Calgary. They have been systematically crushed by the government, its NDP coalition partner and, sadly, from 2015 to 2019, by a short-lived NDP government in Alberta. Therefore, this bill is not one that is going to be a great prescriptive answer for workers in my riding. They have been punished by the government and it appears they will continue to be so.
I am passionate about the freedom of workers in my riding to work, about their freedom to organize and to bargain collectively through union membership. I am passionate about freedom of association. It is an essential and foundational freedom on which our country was built. Let there be no doubt about that.
Also, let there be no doubt that there is only one party in the House of Commons that supports worker, which is this party. The other three parties in the House have never supported the workers in my community. Everything the NDP-Liberal government and its fellow travellers in the Bloc do, every instinct they possess runs counter to the interests of the workers in my riding.
Let us examine the track record of the NDP-Liberal government as it relates to the workers in my community. The very first thing the government did, even before Parliament met for the first time, was to cancel the northern gateway pipeline by an order in council. This decision instantly killed thousands of jobs, union jobs, non-union jobs, indigenous community jobs, every kind of job one can imagine.
The people who would have been employed by that project were among the highest-paid workers in the Canadian economy. Had that critical infrastructure actually been built, it would have led to thousands of new jobs in extraction projects that never materialized for the lack of infrastructure that the government deliberately killed. It was literally the first thing it did when it took office.
It also denied the world access to Canada's energy products, leaving it vulnerable to dictator oil, much to our folly and what we see tragically happening in the world today as Putin funds his war machine with energy exports that could have been displaced by Canadian exports.
The Liberals passed Bill C-69, which ensured that no major project would ever be approved again. They used to have talking points that tried to deny that was case, but when the Minister of Environment was a candidate, he let the mask slip and admitted that killing the energy industry was exactly the purpose of Bill C-69. Who is paying for this? It is the workers who are paying for the destruction to the Canadian economy that has happened in this sector under the government. That bill ruined the lives of thousands of workers and their families. Under the NDP-Liberal government, 200,000 energy workers lost their job. I say that deliberately.
Let us not forget that before the federal NDP-Liberal coalition took place, there was a different alliance between the NDP and the Liberals, and that was the Alberta NDP and the federal government. Together they destroyed thousands of jobs and the lives that depended on them.
Again, these were union jobs, non-union jobs and indigenous community jobs. The callous way in which the NDP and the Liberals threw away all these jobs and made sure they would not come back is shameful. Therefore, we will take no lessons from them on protecting jobs for workers, whether they belong to a union or not.
I have said before in the House, especially between 2015 and 2018, that I had grown men in their fifties reduced to tears in my office over the loss of their livelihoods. These are highly paid, professional, proud people. Some of them were old enough that they had entered the workforce when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister. They told me that they had even managed to survive the NEP, but now they did not have a job. Women, who had reached the senior levels of corporate Calgary, were suddenly without a job.
I have knocked on doors. I knocked on one door where a mom said their family came to Canada 20 years ago. Her husband was working in the Middle East and her son was working in Texas. They had to leave the country for work in the energy industry. I will take nothing from the government on jobs.
What are the Liberals doing now? They are subsidizing replacement workers from foreign countries to come and take work away that should be given to Canadians. There was $7 billion for the Northvolt project with foreign replacement workers. There was $15 billion to Stellantis for foreign replacement workers. It is disgraceful and it is shameful the way the Liberals come here and try to lecture Conservatives on supporting workers.
We are now at the end of the year. The NDP-Liberal government tabled this bill banning replacement workers in federally regulated industries as per the demand put upon the government by the NDP. This is not what the Liberals campaigned on. This is something the Liberals voted against. The NDP has tabled this very policy in the House through private members' business.
The same Liberals who are speaking this morning in debate, who voted against this, would now have people believe that this is somehow part of their policy and what they ran on. This is clearly a long-standing NDP policy, but this is nothing more than the NDP tail wagging the Liberal dog. That is exactly why we call it the NDP-Liberal government.
The bill would ban workers from working in federally regulated industries if the workers who belong to a union go on strike. It is a bill that risks pitting workers against each other. Workers who choose not to join a union are workers too. Workers across picket lines are workers too, but not to the NDP-Liberals.
I even heard this morning the use of dehumanizing language. The Liberals referred to these workers as “scabs”. Let us think about that. It is a degrading, humiliating and dehumanizing word they used, not because this is about power for workers. It is not. It is about control and that is why they use this type of language.
The market is an amazing and undeniable force of nature, and it does tend to sort things out quickly. It allows the best decisions to be made at the bargaining table and incentivizes agreements. The government is presiding over a cost-of-living crisis where rent has doubled, mortgage payments are up 150% and a generation of young Canadian workers have given up on the dream of home ownership because they cannot afford to live in this country. We have seen food inflation. We have seen every kind of inflation fuelled by taxes paid by workers.
The NDP-Liberal government has nothing to teach Conservatives or tell Canadians about supporting workers. There is only one party that is supporting workers, the one party that stands for powerful paycheques that can be used to buy homes that people can afford in safe communities. That is what the Conservative vision is for this country. It is not spending billions of tax dollars, paid for by workers, to pay foreign workers to come and take their jobs away from them and bid up the price of homes in their communities. It is shameful.
I will take no lessons from the Liberal-NDP government on support for workers. The workers in my riding have seen the sharp end of the Liberal government. I saw desperation at people's doors, especially in the 2019 election. The community I represent is full of talented, hard-working, ambitious workers who have been crushed by the government.
The good news is they see hope. They know workers are increasingly turning to the Conservative Party, and it is the workers in Canada who are going to elect a Conservative government that will deliver powerful paycheques that Canadians need to be able to afford to live, and rein in the wasteful spending and corporate welfare that has become endemic under the government.
It is only the Conservatives in this place who are standing up for workers in Canada.
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- Mar/3/22 12:09:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Putin's war machine is being funded by their energy exports to various places around the world, but in particular the almost half of Europeans who rely on natural gas to heat their homes. In a report to the European Parliament, “A Framework Strategy for a Resilient Energy Union with a Forward-Looking Climate Change Policy”, the European Union, itself, sought to further its partnerships with countries such as the United States and Canada.
Would the member agree that it is the European Union, itself, that has stated that it needs Canada's energy to be able to transition and get off Russian energy?
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