Parliamentary Speeches

Madam Speaker, this is a bill that is very personal. It is an issue that is very personal. Through the course of the work of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, we heard from a number of experts who have worked with patients going through challenges, much like those I went through 15, 16 years ago, people who felt that they were better off dead than alive. These are people who deserve support. These are people who deserve treatment. These are people who should be welcomed into wanting to live, not assisted with end of life. The bill from my colleague from Cloverdale—Langley City, who so eloquently called it the right to recover act, is a bill that would do exactly what the title says. It would offer people a right to recover. It would offer hope. It would offer light to people in the darkest moments of their lives. I was so honoured, with my story, to be able to be a champion for this, even before my colleague introduced her bill. I was equally honoured to be named to the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, at which we were able to tackle—

Mr. Speaker, I may remind the House that, unlike the member prior, only my tie is red today. It is very important for us to stand up in the House for affordability for Canadians. A new Royal Bank of Canada survey found that more than half of parents with adult children aged 18 to 40 provided financial support over the past year, contributing an average of $6,151. It is not just that generation. I met with a group of seniors in St. Thomas a couple of weeks ago. One of them said that she does not eat lunch because of the price of groceries. More shocking was when almost every other senior at the table said that they did not either. This is a fact of life in Canada, the same Canada of which the Prime Minister says affordability is the best it has been in a decade. Would the Prime Minister like me to tell these seniors that, or will he do it himself?

Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege and honour, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin County, St. Thomas and London, although, despite our absence from this chamber over the last few months, I note that not much has changed with the Liberals. They are still out of alignment with where the majority of Canadians are right now, which is finding that they cannot afford life in this country after 11 years of the Liberals. They are still unwilling to look in the mirror and recognize that they themselves are the problem and, therefore, not the solution. More importantly, they must be dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing. The bill they are coming forward with today is a step in the right direction, but only a step, and only a little nudge towards where we ultimately need to be. Back in April, when we were seeing the rising high gas prices in this country, Conservatives said we need to cut all of the federal taxes on fuel for Canadians to give them a break. The Liberals eventually came around, but they offered a fraction of the tax relief we were pushing for, for a fraction of the time. Even this proposed extension does not go nearly far enough when Canadians still cannot afford to fill up their fuel tanks. I will say that is especially clear in ridings such as mine where driving is a necessity and not a luxury. If someone is living in Vienna, Fingal or Port Stanley, Ontario, they have to drive to get around. Oftentimes, workers have to drive to get to work. Students have to drive to get to school. This is a reality. High fuel prices and high fuel taxes bear a disproportionate weight on rural Canadians, the people who the Liberals have often looked down upon and have not really acknowledged. We know this by looking at what the Liberals themselves have said about fuel taxes in the past. Now, interestingly enough, going back to April, when we originally called for this fuel tax cut, the bigger one, not the Liberal one, Liberals pooh-poohed it. They kind of brushed it off. The finance minister said, when we asked if they were going to cut the fuel taxes, “we will not take lessons from the Conservatives.” That was on Monday. On Tuesday, they took our policy. We have had other examples of this where people have risen in the House of Commons on the Conservative bench and asked the Liberal government when it was going to provide tax relief at the pumps for Canadians, and the Liberals said anything other than yes, because they fundamentally do not believe in it. We know this. For example, the member for Winnipeg North actually said that it was “far right” to oppose the Liberal carbon tax. Mark Holland, the former Liberal health minister, rose in this chamber and, believe it or not, said that if a family takes a road trip, they are letting “the planet burn” because they are filling up the tank to go on a nice, affordable family vacation. This is what we have heard from the Liberals, time and time again, about their true allegiance. They actually support fuel taxes because they do not want people to fuel up their cars. Steven Guilbeault, a former Liberal cabinet minister, said opposing the carbon tax is a plan “to let the planet burn. It is immoral.” This is what we get from these Liberals who, when it is politically to their advantage, decide to pretend that they are actually against the carbon tax and that they are actually against fuel taxes. A fuel tax is a tax on productivity. It is a tax on anything that needs to be shipped. It is a tax on groceries. It is a tax on transport. It is a tax on literally anything in a productive society, but when Liberals see taxes, they see opportunity. Funnily enough, going back to April, when we were calling on the Liberal government to cut fuel taxes, the Minister of Jobs and Families rose in the chamber and saw dollar signs. She said there was “a generational windfall.” Her response in question period to my colleague, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, was that Liberals would spend the money better than Conservatives would. That is what the Liberals see. They see opportunities. They see Canadians as a cash cow, while Canadians see a life that is unaffordable and has only gotten less and less affordable under the Liberals. That is why we reiterate our call to eliminate all federal taxes on fuel. We think it should go until at least Canada Day, but I would personally say that we need to be looking at ways to get federal fuel taxes off entirely. This is a lever the government has at its disposal. It is a direct way to make life more affordable for Canadians and to ease the pressure, not just on rural Canadians, but on industry, students, single parents, seniors and anyone who needs fuel to live, either directly or indirectly. This is common sense. The Liberals have already come part of the way. Why do they not come the whole way? Why do they not actually take a stand for a real, concrete affordability measure that would support Canadians where they are right now? This is where I go back to my thesis from the beginning of my comments. The Liberals have to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing. This was true with the consumer carbon tax, and it is true with the federal fuel excise tax holiday. It will probably be true with the industrial carbon tax. At some point, they will come along with us because they realize the error of their ways, and they will pretend that they were with us the whole time. Ironically, gaslighting comes without a carbon tax when the Liberals do it. I do not know how they have managed to make that work, but why do they take so long? I do not know if it is that they had to see the polling. I do not know if it is that they were waiting to find out if it was politically to their advantage, but it is the right thing to do. It is interesting that all the deficit hawks somehow emerge from the Liberal benches when we start talking about the need to give Canadians a break on fuel. These folks are nowhere to be seen when the Prime Minister is posting $70-billion dollar deficits. They do not care about the deficit then. Just to pre-empt a potential question that may come from one of my colleagues opposite, this is because of heightened fuel prices due to things that are matters outside the government's control. No one is claiming the government is responsible for some of the global factors, but it is responsible for taxes. This is because of a sudden surge in prices, which means that the fuel tax revenue the government is going to get was never actually budgeted for. Unless the government's previous budget was based around this war, which I do not think it was, the government never foresaw the increase in fuel revenue, so it is not actually hurting the government coffers, of which there is a lot that needs to be trimmed, but that is a topic for another day. This measure would not actually hurt the government coffers, but not doing it is hurting Canadians. Not doing it is putting pressure and strain on families who already cannot withstand it. I mentioned earlier today in the House a story that was actually very difficult for me to hear. It was not as difficult as it was for the people sharing it. A group of seniors I met with spoke about the fact that they are literally skipping meals because of food affordability problems, and ever since I posted that clip on social media, I have had other people reach out to share very similar things, heartbreaking things. They are the human faces that go along with the stats we have seen about the millions and millions of Canadians who are now using food banks, who have never before had to. People who are employed, people who have jobs and careers, are finding that that is not enough to survive in Canada after 11 years of the Liberals, who do not put affordability front and centre, who are not devoted to saving Canadians money, who are not putting forward a concrete plan to save Canadian jobs and who are following their Prime Minister, the very model of all talk and no results. The results are that the Liberals have to put forward this bill because they have failed Canadians. The Liberals have to put forward this bill because Canadians cannot afford the price at the fuel pumps after the Liberals have driven up the cost of absolutely everything. We are the party that is fighting for Canadians. We are the party that is fighting for Canada. We are the party that is going to make sure that fuel taxes are not driving more people into untenable situations with household finances that are sending them to the food bank. It is a sad reality that most people would never have thought possible in a G7 country, that food bank stats would become the norm. We are not even surprised. The Liberals smirk and chuckle when we raise them because it is just window dressing to them, but we will continue to stand up for that. I want to say to the Liberals now that I would be happy to support any measure that saves working Canadians money, but I want to know, if they are going to take our policy on this, why they are not taking the whole thing. They should get rid of the federal fuel taxes once and for all, not just for a few months, but in a way that is meaningful in the long term. If it is right for Canadians now, it is right for Canadians always.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith has been doing tremendous work on the affordability file, and it is an honour to be sitting near her once again in my new seat in the chamber. Stability is absolutely important. I have already heard from businesses that have dealt with the lack of ability by the Liberals and the Prime Minister to get a deal that will protect Canadian jobs. They are already having trouble planning ahead with not knowing what tariffs and countertariffs are going to be in front of them. Fuel costs are another great example of this. They do not know how to possibly budget for something when the Liberal government is trying to provide this incremental approach without dealing with the totality of the problem. What I said in my initial remarks holds true here. Governments need to use every lever available to them to protect affordability for Canadians. The government is only pushing that lever just a bit and not telling Canadians what they can expect in the future.

Mr. Speaker, I am a student of history, and I have really venerated this chamber. I have a great deal of respect for the loquaciousness of my colleague from Winnipeg North. For example, in December 2023, he said that anyone who opposed the carbon tax was “far right”. In February 2024, he said Conservatives were “climate deniers” for opposing the carbon tax, and later on that same day, he said opposing the carbon tax meant we wanted to let her rip. I do not know what he meant by “let her rip”, but I think he was catastrophizing about something that the Liberals are now claiming credit for. They have no credibility on this issue whatsoever. The sooner they come around to our position, the sooner Canadians will get the break they deserve.

Mr. Speaker, whatever our policy disagreements, I know that my colleague is tremendously consistent and clear in her position, which, as she alludes to, is more than can be said for the Liberals. The Prime Minister is for pipelines in Alberta and is against them in British Columbia. He has people in his caucus who are very much against pipelines and others who claim they have turned over a new leaf. Sooner or later, Canadians are going to wonder where the results are. The reason the Prime Minister is all talk and no results is that delivering results will mean having to pick a side on these contradictory positions. I am glad there is some moral clarity on this issue from one side of the aisle. We are certainly not getting it from the Liberals.

Mr. Speaker, it is time once again. All of the G7 leaders are gathering together, and our Prime Minister has lots to talk about. He can brag that he is the only one of them to lead his country into a recession in the time he has been in office. In fact, he is the only leader in the G20 to do that. The fact that Canada is in a recession is just one measure of the way things are not going well for so many Canadians. We have families living in RVs in parking lots, we have seniors sleeping in Tim Hortons because they have nowhere else to go, and we have food bank usage at record highs, yet the Prime Minister says affordability is the best it has been in years. If this is the best, will he tell us what the worst would look like?

Mr. Speaker, we have heard the Prime Minister's announcements before. What we have not seen is real action. Again, the Prime Minister has travelled around the world and failed to deliver a single new free trade agreement, while Canadians suffer. Even the Liberals' so-called surveillance pricing announcement yesterday will not even be in effect until at least 2028, meaning it is yet another announcement that is not delivering results for Canadians. Of food bank users in Canada, 2.2 million in a single month last year, one-third are children. When will the Prime Minister reverse course and stop driving Canadians into the food banks?

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present today. It is with great pride and pleasure that I present a petition on behalf of representatives of the Elgin County Drowning Prevention Coalition, including Briar McCaw, Linda King and Nathan MacIntyre of the RIP Current Information Project. The signatories of this petition point out that there are an average of 485 drowning fatalities in Canada every year, and non-fatal drowning incidents are nearly four times as common as fatal drowning. Drowning has one of the highest cost-per-case figures of all unintentional injury types, leading to estimates of over $191 million spent on drowning-related care, as reported by Parachute Canada. Drowning is a public health issue with a very significant impact, especially in communities like mine. Petitioners call for the development of a Canadian drowning prevention strategy.

Mr. Speaker, my second petition urges the transport minister to do the work of making CN reconnect the tracks between St. Thomas and London, which CTA order 1990-R-673 said it did not have the right to remove. The London and Port Stanley Railway was one of the first railway lines built in Ontario. It has historical and cultural significance to Elgin County and, specifically, to the communities of Port Stanley and St. Thomas. The national transportation agency, as petitioners point out, ruled that CN Rail could not sever the connection to the southern Port Stanley line and ordered this restorative action. Petitioners want to restore railway heritage in my community and have the transport minister reconnect this line.

Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege, as always, to rise and speak on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. It is a particular privilege to speak to a bill such as this one, which speaks directly to one of the most persistent concerns I hear from people in the rural communities in my riding, scattered across Elgin County from Rodney to West Lorne, Straffordville, Vienna and Port Burwell. Oftentimes, they do not have dropped calls because they live in dead zones where they cannot even make a call. They cannot so much as send a text message or load a web page on their phone. Obviously, we cannot have coverage everywhere we go in the country, but we look on the coverage maps that are published by many of the large telecoms companies and realize that much of what is on those maps is pure fiction. They will claim full coverage, as we see across southwestern Ontario in particular, when everyone who lives there knows that is just a joke. I thank my colleague across the aisle from Compton—Stanstead for introducing this very important discussion. I have actually spent some time in her riding in the past, and I know it is very rural. Parts of it are very similar to my own riding. I know her constituents see many of the same challenges that mine do and that members across the aisle have seen in their own communities. It is something we encounter. One of the things I love the most about my role is getting to criss-cross all of these different parts of these ridings and communities where people have to be on the go. Sometimes, it is a great privilege to be in areas where no one can call me. That is sometimes a convenience. Sometimes, it is an inconvenience. I am sure that we have all had periods when the whip could not get a hold of us because we were in an area without cell coverage. Still, for a lot of Canadians, that is incredibly important. I want to explain what cellular service is, fundamentally. We can often trivialize the idea of being connected, and for good reason. In this world, we are overconnected sometimes, but we are not talking about the ability to download a game. We are not talking about the ability to idly scroll the Internet. For people in rural communities, the ability to connect to a cellular network is absolutely critical. As technology evolves, we see farmers incorporating more and more technology into their work that requires cellular connectivity, especially if they are out in the field, far from the Wi-Fi routers they may have in their homes or, increasingly, in their barns. In our work on the justice committee, we heard from Liz Brown of Valora Place, which is an abused women's centre in St. Thomas, about how domestic and intimate partner violence in rural communities can be aggravated by not having the cell signal to make emergency calls. I do not wish to be overly dramatic or alarmist, but sometimes, a lack of cellular connectivity is literally a life-or-death issue if a person cannot get a signal to make a call. That is the case not just in an intimate partner violence situation, but in any emergency. If a person cannot call 911, they cannot get the help they may need in a crisis. We also have, in general, the economic needs of travelling around rural communities. Stores increasingly want to use QR codes to load a menu at a restaurant, for example, or to redeem a coupon someone may have found. These rely on cellular connectivity that, increasingly in rural communities, is not available. One important point I will raise here is that rural communities have, for much of the last 10 years, felt very ignored by the Liberal government. We see announcement after announcement devoted to big cities. We have people in rural communities truly feeling left behind. While there has been leadership from provincial governments and, in some cases, from the federal government over the past years on rural broadband, this idea of rural cellular connectivity seems to have been almost entirely ignored. I go back to two things that I believe need to change fundamentally. One is something that I hope and am optimistic this bill could address, which is the accuracy of coverage maps. The bill would require the CRTC to establish a process to ensure the accuracy of mobile network coverage data provided by Canadian carriers. This means that when people in Sparta, Iona, Iona Station or Dutton look at the coverage areas for a company that might want their business as a cellular customer, there has to be accuracy in those maps. It is important to note that I am not talking about situations where, every once in a while, a call drops in an area. I am talking about perennial dead zones, where the telecoms companies are claiming they offer coverage, but the people attempting to use their phones there are not receiving it. That is a very important distinction. We know that there are always going to be glitches and down points. We know that there are going to be slight variances and variations in coverage from day to day. We know that the weather can affect this. We know that there are going to be technical issues on the coverage maps. However, we are talking about establishing, as a baseline, an expectation that a lot of Canadians have that they are not going to pay for a service they are not receiving, and that they are not going to pay for a service that is not available to them at all points, especially when they may need it most. It is interesting that the bill happened to come up today. Last week, I rose in the House and asked a question in question period about this very issue, which was about what the industry minister would do to ensure accuracy in telecom maps. I was very pleased that the parliamentary secretary to the industry minister rose to answer my question, but he did not actually address the substance of the issue. He talked about affordability, which again is a very important issue, but I would love to see concrete action from the government on the actual question of accuracy in the coverage maps. Here is where I hope we can go if Bill C-268 is referred to committee. The bill requires a process for ensuring accuracy, but that is only the first step. We also have to be able to expand that coverage. In that sense, I hope this can be the beginning of a longer-term discussion about not just identifying where these dead zones are, but also fixing them. I do not wish to be biased, but actually I do wish to be biased towards my part of the country, because it is a beautiful place. However, the regions I am talking about are not even insanely rural and remote areas. We are sometimes talking about communities that are 15 to 20 minutes outside of very large cities, like London or St. Thomas, which are still seeing these coverage dead zones. If we cannot have full coverage in an area as densely populated as southwestern Ontario, we are certainly not going to have it in areas of the country that are far more sparsely populated and far more rural. We know that the telecom companies have tried to respond to some of these concerns by saying that we can move ahead with satellite technology. We have seen Rogers, in particular, Bell as well, advance satellite phones as an answer to some of these problems, but again, if people are near the Canada-U.S. border, as the vast majority of Canadians are, this satellite technology is not available to them. We still have the same problem, which is that we have people looking to a new technology, but that not solving the problem, which is applicable to not just the farmers in my riding, but all the people who live in these rural communities who want to work in these communities, want to study in these communities and, as my colleague for Avalon said a few moments ago, hopefully want to stay in these communities. We do not want people having to leave the place they call home because they feel they do not have the technical capabilities they need to live their lives there, to feel secure there and to feel like they can be on the go and run their businesses there. I want to see from this Liberal government a real commitment to rural communities, like the ones I have the great privilege and honour of representing. I want to see us identify ways to ensure accuracy in telecom coverage maps in rural Canada, but I also want to see us fix and expand those areas where we know the coverage is not there. This is a crucial issue, and it is one that has wide-ranging implications for the economy and business, for connectivity and well-being, and yes, even for public safety and justice. Conservatives will always stand in support of transparency and accountability. I believe that companies have a moral obligation to provide accurate information, and I believe that government, given the manner in which it regulates telecom companies, needs to do its job and ensure this. My question I would like to leave everyone with is this: We have a framework proposed here. What do we do to turn this into real action? That is what I would like to see. I appreciate my colleague raising this issue. It is about time we get some attention for rural Canada from the Liberal government.

Mr. Speaker, what a mess this is. I actually feel bad for the Prime Minister that this is the cabinet he has to deal with. The fisheries minister shrugged because she did not even know what a question was about, before winging it anyway with a non-answer. The foreign affairs minister just said she is consulting to cover up three years of inaction. The public safety minister is refusing to listen to Canadians' concerns on Bill C-22 and is hell-bent on ramming it through. I thought we actually had an overperformer with the treasury board president's finding his notes today, but then the Liberals did not let him answer a question anyway, because he did not have the answer. Is the Prime Minister happy with his front bench? Canadians sure as heck are not.

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. We disagree on many things, but he was right to point out that the Liberals have a tendency to impose their own solutions on the provinces and on Canadians. As for Bill C‑30, the Liberals cut the debate short. They refused to give important witnesses the opportunity to appear before the committee and they tried to push through ideas that they did not campaign on. What does the member think that says about the Liberals' commitment to accountability?

Mr. Speaker, we know how bad inflation has gotten in Canada. We know grocery prices are through the roof. Fuel prices are skyrocketing, and even the cars that Canadians need to fuel up are becoming more and more unaffordable for the middle class. The prices of used cars have doubled in the last seven years in this country, and the government is still putting the federal sales tax on them each and every time they are sold, sometimes collecting double, triple or quadruple revenue off the backs of Canadians. Conservatives come armed with solutions. We have Bill C-285, which would take the GST off of used cars and save Canadians thousands. Will the Liberals support it?

Mr. Speaker, if we took the tax off all used goods, their talking points would be tax-free. We asked the question four times, and got zero answers. We came with a solution: a Conservative bill to save Canadians thousands of dollars by taking the GST off used cars, which are taxed two, three and even four times, as many times as the Liberals avoided answering the question. It is a very simple question: In my part of the country and for MPs across the House, driving is not a luxury but a necessity, so will the Liberals join us and take the GST off used cars?

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, Standing Order 57 says that: Immediately before the order of the day for resuming an adjourned debate is called, or if the House be in committee of the whole, any minister of the Crown who shall have given notice at a previous sitting of his or her intention so to do, may move that the debate shall not be further adjourned, or that the further consideration of any resolution or resolutions, clause or clauses, section or sections, preamble or preambles, title or titles, shall be.... It is a long sentence. The point of this is that Standing Order 57 is clear that a minister of the Crown must do it. This is the Secretary of State for Combatting Crime, who does not have a department and is not the minister sponsoring the bill. I believe that the standing order does not actually permit her to move this motion of closure or to introduce this motion today.

Mr. Speaker, I am grateful that the secretary of state just admitted that the government is thinking of this bill as a limit on freedom of expression. That means we are actually just debating whether it is reasonable. That is a very important concession, and it is the first time we have heard section 1 of the charter from the government in the context of Bill C‑9. I will note that the secretary of state put on notice her intent to seek closure 12 minutes after the debate on this bill began. She and her colleagues have no interest in listening to Canadians, and there are a lot of them. For example, 4 My Canada, led by Faytene Grasseschi, shares that there have been 194,000 phone calls; 1,000 organizations that have signed a declaration against Bill C‑9, representing 1.4 million Canadians; and 240,000 pieces of mail. When the secretary of state says that this is all Conservative misinformation, is she saying the United Church of Canada, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Canadian Muslims are misinforming, or is it just anyone they disagree with? This is a very important point, and the Liberal government has refused at every stage to listen to Canadians. Will it start now?

Mr. Speaker, I will start with a quote: “[Bill C-9] has the potential to criminalize peaceful protesters and legitimate dissent. This bill, in its current form, gives too much discretionary power to law enforcement, allowing for subjectivity.” That was from the Liberal member for Nunavut a couple of months ago. I have a question for the Secretary of State for Combatting Crime. Her colleague, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, is a lawyer. He said the following: “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, there are passages with clear hatred.... There should...be discretion for prosecutors to press charges.” Is he right or wrong in his interpretation of hate speech laws applying to scripture?

Mr. Speaker, I am grateful the minister is here. He and I worked at the same time in Canadian media, and I have a good relationship with him. However, his government's record on civil liberties and freedom of expression could not be worse. He talks about the horrors that have been inflicted upon the Jewish community, in particular, and I share those concerns. I have been sounding the alarm about those concerns when there has been a failure to act in enforcing existing laws. It is illegal to incite genocide. It is illegal to obstruct someone from entering a house of worship. It is illegal to threaten violence and harm. If existing laws are not being enforced, why does the minister think these ones will be?

Mr. Speaker, I cannot thank my colleague from York—Durham enough, not just for his speech tonight but for his tremendous leadership on Bill C‑9, meeting with faith communities, members of the Jewish community, the Muslim community, the Christian community, all across the country, people who have raised concerns, people whom the government says it is protecting but who feel the opposite is true. One of the comments that stuck out from what my colleague said was with regard to the selective nature of how we define hate and how hate laws are applied. I will note that, earlier in the House, a member of the Liberals gave an enumerated list of people who have experienced hate in this country, and both times he did that, he left out Christians, despite the fact that 123 Christian churches have been burned or vandalized over the last five years. As I say that now, Liberals are groaning and laughing, which speaks exactly to what I am saying. What does my colleague think about the fact that, even right now, the Liberals are laughing at the idea that Christians could be the target of hate?

Mr. Speaker, Canadian food banks continue to see record increases. Back home, the St. Thomas Elgin Food Bank's demand has tripled in just five years. Canadians do not need Liberal talking heads on TV or members across the aisle to tell them that we are in a recession. They feel it every day when trying to feed their families. We have two out of five Canadians struggling to put food on the table, 60% feeling anxiety about their personal finances and 40% literally losing sleep wondering how they are going to make ends meet. At the same time, the Prime Minister has spent nearly $1 million on inflight catering over the last year, a catering bill that could feed a Canadian family for years. Clearly, when the Prime Minister told Canadians to make sacrifices, he was talking about common people feeding their families and not his mile-high caviar and champagne menu. Why is it that we always get lectures and gaslighting from the elitist net-zero banker class while ordinary people who build the country are the ones who have to pay the price?

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-285, An Act to amend the Excise Tax Act (used motor vehicles). Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to rise for the first time as a member of Parliament to present a private member's bill. I will give a little bit of context. Since 2019, the price of a used car in Canada has doubled. Even though new automobiles are taxed at the full rate, when cars are resold, Canadians have to pay tax yet again, being doubly taxed for something, and potentially being taxed triply or quadruply. For most Canadians, especially in rural areas, driving is a necessity. This is a very important affordability measure I am putting forward in the bill, which would cut the GST on used cars, saving Canadians thousands of dollars and standing up for the middle class. It is a great honour to present this private member's bill. (Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

Mr. Speaker, do any of the ministers over there know their files? Telecom coverage maps rely on industry claims, but in Elgin County and across southwestern Ontario, these maps do not reflect actual service, with persistent dead zones in areas where companies claim full coverage. What precisely is the industry minister doing to ensure that rural Canadians are getting the cell service they are paying for?

Mr. Speaker, my Conservative colleagues and I have zero issue with putting in the work and putting in the hours. We will work on weekends. We will work during the summer. We will do whatever we can to support Canadians. The problem we have is that the bill is about elections. All 343 members of the chamber would be affected. All the millions of people whom we collectively represent would be affected. It is a bill about the nature of democracy. The Liberals have allowed, I believe, two members to speak to the bill about the most fundamental institution in a democratic country, and now they are trying to shut down debate. They are trying to silence members of Parliament who may have a lot of things to offer about this. This is perhaps not surprising, given the way the Prime Minister has decided to try to circumvent Parliament, circumvent the House of Commons and not rise during question period. Is the member the House leader because he shares the Prime Minister's contempt for Parliament?

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. It is in the same vein, with a heavy heart, that I have to rise once again on one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation the government has ever introduced. Bill C-9 is a bill that has been litigated in the media, across kitchen tables and in town halls across the country. It has been litigated almost everywhere, except in this House and at committee, where the Liberals have availed themselves of a myriad of parliamentary tricks to shut down debate and silence the voices of Canadians. We are, at this exact moment, I believe, about 25 minutes into the debate on the Senate amendment to Bill C-9. A little over 12 minutes ago, the Secretary of State for Combatting Crime walked in and said that there had been no agreement on this bill and the government would be moving to silence debate once again on this motion. Less than 15 minutes into the beginning of this debate, the Liberal government is already trying to shut it down. It is perhaps very poetic that it is once again censoring debate on its censorship bill. Let me repeat in this House what I have said in this House, at committee and across the country multiple times: Hate is real and it is a scourge on this country. I come from London. Just the other day, we had the five-year anniversary of the heinous and hate-motivated murder of the Afzaal family, who were killed for no other reason than their Muslim faith. We have seen the absolutely despicable hate on Canadian streets and streets around the world targeting the Jewish community, with synagogues and day schools being shot up, and posters trying to find a missing Jewish girl being ripped down. We have also seen, and I say this as a Christian, 123 Christian churches in the last five years burned or vandalized. Interestingly enough, when Justin Trudeau was prime minister, he was asked about this and said it was “understandable”. Some would say that is hate from someone who is supposed to be a unifying figure in this country, a prime minister. Then we have, of course, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who literally said at a meeting of the justice committee, before he was promoted to cabinet, which gives a pretty good indication of what the Prime Minister welcomes among his closest advisers, that people should be criminally prosecuted for quoting certain verses of holy scripture. He mentioned Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans. Two of those are books in both the Bible and the Torah, but he said it could extend to other things as well. He said, and I have the direct quote, if any of my Liberal colleagues would like to call this misinformation, as they so often do, that some verses of scripture are so inherently hateful that they should warrant criminal prosecution. Some Liberals may say that it is not true and that is not how it is going to unfold. However, if Liberal members cannot even agree on what constitutes hate, how can police, prosecutors, civil society groups and others who are going to be responsible for implementing what is in Bill C-9, if and when it receives royal assent and becomes law? This is important because that same minister, just yesterday, introduced Bill C-34, with sweeping reforms to Internet regulations. I have not read through the entire bill myself yet, but I will point out that one of the things the Liberal government has tried to do with its two previous online harms bills is weaponize the state against what Liberals view as hate speech, not actual criminal hate speech, but what the Liberal government views as being speech that should be banned and restricted. Therefore, this Liberal government does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on anything to do with speech or conscience. Canadians see through that. That is why Canadians have been so resoundingly clear that they do not want Bill C-9. That is why Canadians have, through hundreds of thousands of phone calls, contacted the Liberal members, who have in some cases listened to the concerns but clearly not taken them to heart, because they have not only forced through Bill C-9 at every stage, but silenced debate and silenced the voices of Canadians. In the Senate, we saw this on full display within the last week and a half, when 240,000 postcards urging senators to reject Bill C-9 were sent to members of the Senate. What happened? The Senate mailroom said there were too many and that it could not deliver them all to the senators' offices, so it would send a couple of samples their way and put the rest in a warehouse in Gatineau. Eventually, due to public pressure, and I thank my colleague, Senator Denise Batters from Saskatchewan, for her efforts on this, the postcards were moved to a Senate office room. Even so, senators were told to come on down if they wanted to get their postcards. Most did not. The very same senators then voted the bill through without seeing the scale of response from Canadians who do not support it. This is coming from Canadians of a very diverse array of political, religious, ethnic, philosophical and ideological backgrounds. One of the things I found so fascinating, as someone who had the opportunity to meet with so many Canadians about Bill C-9, is how the strange bedfellows, as the old saying goes, were forming. There were evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims and non-religious civil liberties actors. I cannot say I have had many opportunities in the chamber to link arms, metaphorically, with my colleagues in the NDP and my colleague the leader of the Green Party, but on Bill C-9, both the left and the right saw that the Liberal government cannot be trusted with matters of civil liberties. The Liberal government members, when facing any of the criticism, of which there has been much on Bill C-9, resort to the same old tired lines. They say that the bill cannot affect someone's charter rights, because the charter protects their rights. If that sounds familiar, it is because that was the identical argument they used to insulate themselves from criticism when they invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022. They said that it could not violate someone's charter rights because the Emergencies Act says it has to be charter-compliant. What happened in the aftermath of that? Bank accounts of political protesters were frozen. The mobility rights of people engaging in peaceful protest were banned. It was so Orwellian and draconian that the federal court said it was unconstitutional, that it violated the civil liberties of Canadians. The government appealed. It went to the Federal Court of Appeal, which said once again that it violated the civil liberties of Canadians. Then, in the last hour of the last day on which the Liberal government could seek leave to the Supreme Court to appeal that decision, it appealed it, once again telling Canadians that it would defend its right to violate their rights. That is what the Liberal government would be doing with Bill C-9. Perhaps someone will be wrongfully charged under Bill C-9, will avail themselves of the legal process and be exonerated, but as we have seen in the Emergencies Act case, that is likely to take years. In anything to do with freedom of expression, the issue is not what decisions the state will make in totality. It is also a question of what chilling effect the legislation would create. Faith leaders all of a sudden are not confident about their ability to preach the totality of their holy book, and for them, not the government, to be the arbiter of which scriptures mean what. No faith leader should ever have to vet their sermons through the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, which is effectively the benchmark we are told must exist because it is the minister who would decide which verses of scripture are hateful and which verses are not. We looked at the bill, and we saw that the Liberal government would be removing long-standing protections for religious speech, or what is often called the religious defence. This was an agreement between the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois that would remove long-standing protections that have been on the books for over 50 years. These are protections that say good-faith religious expression is not hate speech. It is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for expressing hate. Someone cannot rob a bank, run down the road and yell, “God is good” and expect that the religious defence will save them. I do not recommend anyone tries. What the religious defence says is that if someone is making a good-faith religious expression or citing a religious text, that cannot meet the definition of hate speech. Calls for genocide and calls for violence, calls that are themselves criminal, were illegal, are illegal and will always be illegal. The religious defence does not protect against criminally hateful speech. It simply sets out what is not and should not be construed as hate speech to protect against authoritarian censors, like the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who wish to say that good-faith religious expression can and may be hateful. Canadians are so alarmed by this because when we remove good-faith protections that apply only to people who have made good-faith expressions, the only people we are protecting are those who were engaging in good-faith debates, whether they were on a religious matter or an academic matter, or whatever else may come about from them. The removal of the religious defence is not the only problem with Bill C-9. It certainly became a flashpoint in the discussion. It was one of the most significant points for people of faith, who, I would note, have already seen a litany of attacks on their rights from the Liberal government. Going back a couple of years ago, there was the threat of removing their charitable status. That was an endorsement given by Liberal and New Democrat members. Going back years earlier, there was the ideological and religious litmus test the Liberal government put on organizations that wanted to receive Canada summer jobs funding, as though their ability to hire a summer student to help out should be contingent on their religious and moral beliefs. This is not new. It is why people were, rightfully, so concerned about it. In the end, we also had the process before us truncated. Efforts to bring in the testimony that the Minister of Justice claimed he would listen to and did not were stymied. Efforts to read letters from faith leaders from very ecumenical backgrounds were not permitted. I wonder why. Even now, I wonder why, just a few minutes into our discussion, the secretary of state for combatting thought crime decided to rise and try once again to shut down debate on Bill C-9. The Liberal government lacks the courage to even defend the totality of what it is doing. I repeat that this is not a rejection of the existence of hate and the need to respond to it. I will specifically recognize hate against the Jewish community. I remember that one of my colleagues, the member for Mount Royal, who has been very outspoken in standing up for the Jewish community in his riding, was at one time entertaining leaving the Liberal caucus because of the Liberal caucus's anti-Semitism problem. Irwin Cotler, a renowned human rights advocate, was urging my colleague from Mount Royal to leave the Liberals because they were not standing up against the hate facing our Jewish community. This is why I do not take the Liberals seriously when they say they have the solution to a problem they have allowed to fester, and it is why Canadians do not trust them. Interestingly enough, one of the fascinating conversations I had in the course of our deliberations on Bill C-9 when it was before the House was with the Rabbinical Council of Toronto, which is a group of Orthodox rabbis, not just in Toronto, but actually across many parts of the country. These are men I met with who face tremendous discrimination and hate. They do not even feel safe walking around parts of Toronto looking visibly Orthodox. They said hate is real and anti-Semitism is real, but they are not going to be protected by laws that limit their ability to preach their faith and read their scriptures. Religious freedom for one is religious freedom for all. That is why faith groups like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the United Church of Canada, the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council, some of which are more liberal with a small "l" and some of which are more conservative with a small “c”, but all of which represent different faith groups, have all found problems with Bill C-9. In some cases, they have found problems with the entirety of it. In others, they have found problems with the parts dealing with removing long-standing protections for religious speech. We do not protect anyone from hate and we do not protect anyone from persecution if we take away their rights. This is why Bill C-9 and the Liberal government's insistence on forcing this through have been such a clarion call for people across this country. I will speak specifically about the section of the bill criminalizing hate symbols, because this is what is at issue in the amendment that has been returned to us from the Senate. The amendment would add a noose, a symbol with a tremendously hateful history, which actually did not get much exploration when Bill C-9 was before the justice committee and was not part of the original list the Liberal members put forward. I do not actually recall whether there were any questions from Liberal MPs, or any MPs, on this. I could be wrong on that point, but I certainly know it did not take up any substantive amount of time in our committee's study on this. However, the problem that did arise on the hate symbol section was twofold. One part was a question of redundancy. Displaying a hate symbol in Canada is already a crime if someone is doing it for an illegal purpose. I can give a very recent example of this. In the fall, there was a man whom I find to be utterly despicable, actually, in my part of the province, sadly, who decided to inflict hate on the community by mowing a Nazi hakenkreuz, often referred to as a swastika, into his front lawn. He lived on a main highway. It was very jarring for people, certainly those in the Jewish community, who had to see it. Police investigated. They did amazing work. They determined it did meet the standard of wilfully promoting hate, an existing Criminal Code offence. The evidence was the fact that he was displaying a hate symbol in a manner to wilfully promote hate. The law worked. The idea of needing to ban hate symbols is utterly redundant, because they are already illegal, as is much of what is in Bill C-9 in general. The offences relating to obstruction, intimidation or blocking access are things already covered by existing laws. If we have a problem with existing laws not being enforced, we need to deal with that, but new laws are going to fall victim to the same cultural attitudes, which, again, I would attribute to a lack of political leadership more than to anything else. However, the problem when we do prescribe specific hate symbols is that now all of a sudden we have introduced a new layer of ambiguity into the law. We have introduced a new problem, which is, does the displaying of what the Liberals say is a hate symbol, alone, constitute a criminal act? The Liberals claimed this was not the case. The justice minister claimed this was not the case. However, the testimony actually said otherwise. For example, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group said that the offence is written in such a way that the “simple display” of one of the symbols included would in and of itself “be considered a wilful incitement to hatred.” A plain reading of the offence by police or the courts could reasonably be that it is the simple display of an image that in and of itself promotes hatred. Intent does not matter. The “simple display” is all that matters. We also heard something very similar from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, pointing out the redundancy, that “public display of a hateful symbol can already be part of a broader pattern of behaviour that leads to criminal conviction.” The CCLA gave another example from 2010, where someone “was convicted of public incitement of hatred for burning a cross”, and “ In 2012, an individual was convicted of mischief for, among other things, drawing symbols associated with the [KKK] in front of a Black family's house.” Existing laws were used to go after, in that case, anti-Black racism, which is very real, does warrant a response and should be prosecuted, as should all other illegal forms of hatred in this country. The problem when we start enumerating hate symbols is that we are going to end up with a never-ending process of people wanting to add more symbols onto it. If we are going to go down that road of enumerating these symbols are illegal and these ones are not, we have to be prepared to look at all the symbols that cause people hate. We actually explored this at the justice committee in the House of Commons. I moved an amendment to add the hammer and sickle to the list of hate symbols. It is a symbol associated with Communism, responsible for claiming 100 million lives. The Liberals voted this down. The Liberals are interested in only some types of hate. They are interested in going after only some types of violence. What about the logo for antifa, again, a network, a philosophy, a belief system, an organization, however we want to refer to it, responsible for demonstrable violence, threats of violence and hate? Where is that on the list? With respect to the list of terror entities that the Liberal government has put as the main focal point of the hate symbol section, a list that is subject to change and that the government could effectively change unilaterally, there were issues raised by witnesses about, if not the veracity, certainly the integrity of that list. I think getting into that would probably be something that takes up more time. I guess I have unlimited time, but it would take up, theoretically, more time than the House would like to spend on the technicalities of it. However, it was a point that we did not get the opportunity to really interrogate about much further, because of the Liberals' desire to shut down debate on the bill. As fascinating as I am sure a lot of Canadians find the inner workings of Parliament, or as fascinating as I wish they found them, it is actually quite frustrating. I go back to the reason I came here. One of the things I said in my maiden speech was that I came to Ottawa and Parliament to make Canada a freer place. I was so focused on the things the Liberals have done to erode these freedoms that needed to be undone. It was shocking to see how many more things they continue to heap on and how many more bills and pieces of legislation have come forward that attempt to put the government more in control of things as fundamental as what Canadians say, what scriptures Canadians read and what religious beliefs Canadians can share and exhibit with each other. This idea of control is so deeply ingrained in the Liberal ethos. It is shameful. I remember that many years ago, freedom of speech was a non-partisan concept. I remember how the great Senator Jerry Grafstein, a Liberal senator who was one of the champions of freedom of expression, was one of the champions of opposing section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act as it was used against people for their opinions. Where are those Liberals? Where are the freedom-of-speech-loving Liberals? I see Liberals who love censorship, and I see Liberals who love silencing people. I see them all the time. Where are the Liberals who are prepared to stand on principle for freedom of expression? Interestingly, when the Bill C-9 debate was first going on in this House, I heard from a number of Liberal MPs who were very quietly supportive of what we were saying on the bill. They were hearing from their constituents from the Muslim community, the Christian community and all communities, raising issues about this. Those Liberal MPs seem to have been silenced by their own party, their own whip or their own Prime Minister. When push came to shove, they were whipped into voting for this bill, which their communities and constituents did not want. As an aside, I am very interested in seeing, when this particular motion goes to a vote, how my colleague from southwestern Ontario, the member for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong is going to vote, because I stood in this House with her as she eloquently railed against Liberal assaults on civil liberties. She stood up and talked about how the Liberals wanted to put her in jail for her religious beliefs. Will there be room for that member to stand and vote her conscience in the Liberal Party? I do not know. History would indicate no. I know people of faith are watching. Perhaps they are praying for a miracle. I do not know. I look at the discussion that took place in the Senate. As someone who has been a member of Parliament for a little over a year, there is a lot I need to learn, and a lot we can all learn, about how the procedures and mechanisms work in this place. I have not had the opportunity to delve too much into how Senate procedure works. I was watching some of the debates that took place at the Senate human rights committee, which was reviewing Bill C-9. I was actually heartened that it had many witnesses testifying who had been barred by the Liberals from testifying when the bill was before the House, like Lisa Bildy, who is a tremendous human rights lawyer from the Free Speech Union of Canada, Professor David Millard Haskell, from Wilfrid Laurier University, and a great many others, including The Democracy Fund's Mark Joseph. These people all said something very similar, which was that as the bill is written, the only assurances we can take that the wrong people would not be charged are the government's assurances that that is not what it is trying to do. I realize that we are getting late into the evening. Even if we take the Liberals at their word, which I do not think people generally do, and certainly not these Liberals, we are relying on every single person in the country reading the definition of hate the same way. We are relying on every police officer, every provincial attorney general, every civil society group and every faith leader to read this the same way and understand it. Hate is a subjective concept. One of the changes that I am glad was made to Bill C-9 was an amendment to the original Liberal definition, which everyone agreed significantly lowered the threshold to charge someone for their speech. I am glad that we were able to change it. However, there were other amendments that the Liberals rejected. One that I was actually quite shocked to see them reject was an amendment to remove the applicability of the Liberals' new stand-alone hate offence to all federal laws and limit it to just the Criminal Code, because the new stand-alone hate offence is a criminal law. Under Bill C-9 as written, that law would apply to even non-criminal statutes like, for example, the Canadian Human Rights Act. Someone could be criminally charged with a Liberal-defined hate crime for breaking a non-criminal law. The Liberals had no interest in fixing what many people assumed might have been an accident or a drafting error. They had no interest in fixing that. Then we can look at some of the other arguments that were put forward in the Senate. Now, the Senate human rights committee originally added more amendments than just the one that we are discussing today. Some of those attracted a great deal of swift response from people across the country. For example, the Senate proposed a specific criminalization of residential school denialism: Everyone who, by communicating statements other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous Peoples by condoning, denying or downplaying the Indian Residential Schools System...is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or...is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction. This is an amendment that passed the Senate human rights committee. It almost passed the Senate but was rejected at report stage, ultimately. This is an amendment that has actually been denied and decried by a great many indigenous leaders, who fear that something like this would bar them from even telling their own stories and discussing their own approach. Interestingly enough, we heard from the government's representative in the Senate. I am not just saying she is a Liberal senator because Justin Trudeau appointed her, but she actually bears the title of the government's representative in the Senate. She said that the reason she voted against that amendment was because it did not go far enough. She thought it did not go far enough, and she said the government was instead working with a member from the NDP, the member for Winnipeg Centre, I believe, who has a private member's bill that attempts to do something very similar. The only reason the Liberal government's representative in the Senate said no to that amendment was that it did not go far enough. That is worth noting. The original amendment that dealt with the noose issue was an amendment that would have actually prohibited a noose, a burning cross or a white pointed hood, or any other symbol that is used or associated with the promotion of ideological violence based on race, ancestry or ethnic origin. Nobody wants to see hate in this country. No one wants to see hate symbols. No one wants to see the proliferation of burning crosses, nooses, things used to traumatize and terrorize people, things associated with very real historical harms. I remember some years ago, there was a Liberal member of Parliament, the member for Vancouver Centre, I believe, who spoke. It ended up being completely made up, but she spoke about some rash of cross burnings in a community, which ended up not being accurate. I do think that for people who have actually experienced these things, it is horrible, and we should condemn it. We should use existing laws that deal with hate. Then I look at when the discussion came to the Senate human rights committee on the religious defence, the most contentious part of the bill. This was the part of the bill that was ultimately responsible for the hundreds of thousands of phone calls to Liberal MPs, for the hundreds of thousands of postcards, for the emails that I have gotten and still continue to get about this bill, and for the conversations that, in my riding, real people have with me because they have heard what the Liberals are doing and cannot stand it. It was the removal of the religious defence. The Senate human rights committee voted against reinstating the religious defence. It was focused more on adding more restrictions and more layers and less on preserving the fundamental nature of freedom of expression and freedom of religion that should underpin all work we do here, upholding the fundamental values that are enshrined in our charter but definitely predate the charter. Then, when those amendments were rejected at report stage, we had another discussion, at third reading in the Senate. Conservative Senator Yonah Martin tried a much more modest way of telling faith communities in this country that their rights would not be targeted, and that was to take the Liberal pablum that was inserted to try to pacify people. I will read that. This was after the justice minister said he was going to canvass faith communities and said he was going to listen to their concerns. Some people called us and said, “Hey, great, we won. The justice minister said he's going to fix it.” They then saw the text and realized that, once again, a Liberal had written a cheque that could not be cashed. The line that the Liberals put into the bill, referring to the section to do with wilfully promoting hate, was this: For greater certainty, nothing in subsection 319(2) or (2.?2) of the Criminal Code shall be construed as prohibiting a person from communicating a statement on a matter of public interest, including an educational, religious, political or scientific statement made in the course of a discussion, publication or debate, if they do not wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group by communicating the statement. To put that in plainer text, what the “for greater certainty” clause says is that one is not wilfully promoting hate if one is engaged in a religious or political or educational discussion, unless one is wilfully promoting hate. I am not sensing the clarity there. It is circular reasoning if ever there was some. We had lawyers, scholars and faith leaders who weighed in on this, who said they know how we can salvage this. We can take off that last line, the circular line, “if they do not wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group”. That was rejected when we tried to do it at the House justice committee, and it was rejected when Senator Martin tried to do it in the Senate. Again, the government's representative in the Senate refused to budge on any of this, refused to give even an inch on sending a signal to faith communities in this country that their rights and freedoms will be protected. I mean no disrespect to our colleagues in the Senate, but it was interesting hearing the debates both on the Senate floor and in the Senate human rights committee, when none of the thorny issues that one would think would have to be addressed when dealing with these definitions was actually asked about. For example, when the amendment on criminalizing residential school denialism or downplaying was being discussed, nobody that I heard asked what that means. Nobody asked how we define it, how we distinguish academic inquiry on a subject of historic significance from downplaying in a way that is, as the legislation defines it, hateful. Even when talking about the noose, no one actually interrogated the point of what a noose means. That may sound silly to some people, because we can all in our minds imagine what that is. When we are talking about the point at which a symbol becomes illegal, it is a very different question. The point at which a symbol becomes illegal needs to have a very clear definition, especially if we weave it into the dialogue we heard from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and others, that a display of a symbol is inherently hateful regardless of intent. I do not wish to sound glib here. I do not wish to do what the Supreme Court does, which is to concoct all these reasonable hypotheticals to try to rewrite law. I will point out that there have been stories where someone has thought something was a noose and it was not. I could see situations in which someone sets up a really terrifying Halloween display on their home, for example, and someone may misunderstand the intent and call the police. This is the problem. When we are enumerating symbols and we are separating out intent, which is what lawyers have said the stand-alone hate symbol ban does, we are going to have a chilling effect on discourse, which is precisely the problem. Just as when we remove long-standing protections for religious speech from the Criminal Code, we are sending a signal to people of faith that their sermons, their beliefs and their scriptures are now fair game for prosecution. That is the message that we are sending. That is the message that is being sent when the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture says that some verses of scripture are so inherently hateful, they should attract prosecution. That is the message we can draw when Justin Trudeau says it is understandable that someone would want to burn a Christian church. All of this is part and parcel of why Canadians were so alarmed. If I try to find the silver lining in all of this, it is that I have had the opportunity to have discussions with people I would not find myself on the same side as politically. I have had a great many discussions with people where we can disagree on nine out of 10 other things, but on this, we are united. I do not actually think that is any testament to my ability to attract friends and whatnot. I think it is a testament to how well the Liberals have mastered creating enemies, because the Liberals do not have the goodwill from these communities either. The Liberals know they do not have the benefit of the doubt, and we have seen this in the context of other legislation too. The Liberals' Bill C-8 and Bill C-22 were both subject to their same pre-emptive defence that they made with Bill C-9, which is, “Don't worry. You can trust us.” Canadians look at that and say, “Oh no, we can't,” and I agree with those Canadians. The Liberal government has to make its case that it is trustworthy and that it is not going to abuse its power and its authority. Let us imagine a parallel universe here in which the Liberals do not want to weaponize their authority against political dissidents. I know that seems like a very fictional, hypothetical scenario, but let us just imagine that world for a moment. What is to say that the next government would not? This is the problem, and we can look at the Emergencies Act as an example, with laws that give the government power that is supposed to be constrained only by its goodwill. This is why we are so concerned about other legislation in which ministerial discretion is so central to the powers and authorities vested in the laws. It is because we do not trust these ministers. Quite frankly, earlier today during Oral Questions, a very influential, powerful minister, the minister responsible for the public service, the President of the Treasury Board, was asked a simple question about his file, and he looked through his papers for 30 seconds to find the answer and could not. In the end, he sat down and let someone else answer the question. We can imagine a minister like that put in a role where they get to decide what Canadians say online, or what telecom companies have to do. We can imagine the power that other people in the Liberal government would have, with a minister who will just read whatever is on the page and, if it is not there, will just sit down. That is why we have to restrain government power, and it is not just because of a distrust of the Liberal government. It is because of a distrust of the state in general that Canadians have. We should not be happy giving the Liberals any power that we would not want Conservatives to have, that we would not want the Bloc to have, that we would not want New Democrats to have and that we would not want the Greens to have. It is not that all of these parties have an equal likelihood of forming government, but I am just using them as an example here. All should agree with that. All should understand that. We can think of the Emergencies Act. Did anyone honestly think that the Liberals would be so gung-ho to use the powers that they used that act for? What if a Conservative government was doing it against a group of protesters that they felt were more aligned with the left? All of this is speaking to what I believe is the most central reason that Bill C-9 was so vociferously opposed by so many Canadians. It was not because of all these dog whistles that the Liberals like to use: conspiracy theories, obstruction or certain people wanting a licence to hate. People want freedom in this country. They want to know that their rights and freedoms are protected. They want to know that the Liberal government is not just going to pay lip service to the charter but is actually going to live and embody it in all it does. The values of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to privacy, all of these things, are not just slogans that the Liberals can discard at their whim when they run up against a policy they want to champion. These are central things not just to Canadian identity but to the human experience. Freedom of expression is, in many respects, the most important freedom. This is not my thought, but it is one that I have shared a great many times: If all other freedoms were stripped away but one, the freedom of expression, we could use that to fight to win all the others back. I am standing up today, in what will more than likely be my last opportunity in the House to address Bill C-9, to say that we cannot let our freedoms be eroded. We cannot. It is not just about whether people believe a faith, beliefs or values to be hateful. I do not believe that the majority of people in this country are hateful people. I believe it is is a small minority, and I believe that small minority needs to be addressed. When their expressions and their actions rise to the criminal level, they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. However, I also believe that the issue is not about whether people themselves want to use their freedom to spread hate. It is about whether those who disagree with them will agree not to use the word “hate” to malign them or silence them. I am so grateful for the leadership of some people who now find themselves in the Liberal Party. I mentioned, for example, my former colleague from Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong, who was a fierce crusader against Bill C-9. I also have to recognize the Liberal member for Nunavut, who was a tremendous crusader against Bill C-9. I applauded her second-reading speech, when she spoke about the powers the Liberal government was trying to give itself. I hope the member will remember her roots and vote against this.

Mr. Speaker, I hope she will remember and actually respect the core fundamental freedoms and values that led her to giving such an impassioned speech previously. Many Liberals probably wanted Bill C-9 to skate through. Several Liberals are probably quite unhappy that it has come back to the House and that once again they have to address it. However, they have the opportunity to do the right thing. I am about to introduce an amendment to this bill. It is actually an olive branch to my Liberal colleagues. My amendment would give the Liberals and all members of the House one final opportunity to do the right thing: to end the division, to end the assaults on liberty and to end the attacks on people who just want to live their lives free of government intrusion and censorship. The amendment would end this charade once and for all. I move: That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: “the order for the consideration of the amendment made by the Senate to Bill C-9, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (hate propaganda, hate crime and access to religious or cultural places), be discharged and the Bill withdrawn”.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his important work on this. I actually had the opportunity to meet with people in his riding in Newfoundland, including faith leaders, back in January who were very concerned about what the Liberals are doing. One of the questions that at least one person asked me was very much in line with what he just said there and was from a place of fear: “If we have Liberal government ministers saying that certain verses of scripture are not allowed, what am I allowed to preach? What am I allowed to do?” That was, interestingly enough, before he was a minister. He was just the chair of the justice committee at the time, and he was promoted after making those comments. I go back to how it is clear that the Prime Minister welcomes that very divisive and anti-free expression thinking on his team.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague very much for his support on this and for the work he has done in standing up for freedoms. I will say two things on this. The first is that where the problematic parts of the bill are coming from is itself a signal. It shows that the Liberal government does not fundamentally respect the role that faith plays in society, and religious freedom. When that is the frame the Liberals have already established for their outlook, we have to be very concerned about how that is going to unfold in other ways. The second is that all of us see, or should see, in our constituencies the work that faith groups and people from across the faith spectrum do, from food banks to homeless shelters, all of this. If we take away the right for faith communities to live out their values and beliefs, we also have to be prepared to give up that philanthropic benefit that gives us so much in this country.

Mr. Speaker, I am so grateful to be able to work alongside my colleague from Yorkton-Melville. I believe I said it in my remarks today, but it bears repeating: Religious freedom for one is religious freedom for all. It includes the right of people of all faiths to live out their values. It also includes the right of people of no faith to criticize religion. Sometimes I may find that hurtful, but I do not trust the government, nor do we want a society in which the government is the arbiter of values and beliefs. Often people will bring up the idea of the separation of church and state. By opposing Bill C-9, we would actually be protecting that sacred separation by keeping the state out of places of worship. I hope my Liberal colleagues will support our amendment to the motion, to get rid of this bill once and for all.

Mr. Speaker, it is such an honour to work alongside my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley. I have been such an admirer of his work for a great many years. I look across the aisle, and the eye rolls I see and the giggles I hear make me think that perhaps we do not have a huge amount of faith that the motion will succeed, but I hope that the Liberals who are not perhaps listening to this right now will do the right thing. My colleague has made some tremendous observations, in and out of the chamber, about the government's history with indigenous peoples, and this is something I value learning more and more about. I think the takeaway is that regardless of someone's beliefs, regardless of their identity, the very worst thing the government can do is impose its value system and its belief system on them. That is what we need to stand up against quite firmly and irrevocably.

Mr. Speaker, I recall that in one of my earlier interventions in this House, I wanted to do a history of Liberal censorship, but I had only 20 minutes and I knew I would run out of time. We have now seen four iterations of the online harms act: Bill C-8, Bill C-22, Bill C-11 and Bill C-18. It may sound like I am rhyming off numbers in a bingo game, but all of these bills would restrict the rights of Canadians. I mentioned censorship, and the Minister of Public Safety appeared. It is like Beetlejuice. At the end of the day, we all have to stand firm for freedom in this House and this chamber. We need to fight against 10 years of a Liberal record of pushing against it.

Mr. Speaker, Canada is the only G20 country in a recession right now, and it is no surprise why, with the Liberal Prime Minister's record. The economy has shrunk in three of the last four quarters. Labour productivity is getting worse. Investment is leaving the country. Government spending and debt are up. Even the Prime Minister's own hand-picked economic watchdog has had to downgrade the forecast for this country. A government that will not acknowledge the problem sure as heck cannot fix it. Will the Prime Minister admit that Canada is in a recession?

Mr. Speaker, I wish the minister were as interested in the jobs of Canadians as he is in his own. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said the Liberal government has a 1% chance of meeting its fiscal anchor, which is still better odds than getting a straight answer from the government in question period. Behind these numbers are people: people in food bank lines, people going on unemployment, young people who cannot get that critical first job. The London region, which includes St. Thomas and Elgin, has lost another 600 jobs in the last month, bringing it up to over 21,000 in the last two and a half years. Maybe the minister will not tell me there is a recession, but will he tell these Canadians there is?

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is also on the justice committee, and I was hoping he could elaborate on the problems that emerged during our committee study, because we actually put forward a lot of amendments. It was shocking how many amendments the Liberal government put forward to its own bill, which I think reinforces the point that even the Liberals saw the flaws in this. We were prepared to work across party lines to protect victims, but can my colleague answer what happened when we tried to put forward concrete amendments that would keep offenders behind bars, where they belong?

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be working with my colleague on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. During committee proceedings, he spoke with several witnesses about the issue of criminals recruiting young people. In Canada, we are seeing an increasing number of cases of youth crime, including serious offences such as murder. I would like to ask him why, in his view, the government has not taken this problem seriously.

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. It is also a privilege to rise, as I always do on matters of justice and the Criminal Code, in support of victims. That is one thing that distinguishes the approach my Conservative colleagues and I take to crime and justice matters from that of the Liberals. We look out for the rights of victims, and they look out for the rights of offenders. We root our approach in the facts on the ground, what law enforcement advocates say, what members of law enforcement say and what victims advocates say. They rely on legal theory and, so often in doing so, ignore the gruesome realities of some of the most heinous acts of crime we see in our country. A lot of the discussion about mandatory minimums for sexual offences, for example, such as child sexual exploitation and abuse material, was exacerbated when there was, last year, a horrendous Supreme Court of Canada decision called the Senneville decision. In that decision, the Supreme Court ruled that for someone possessing thousands of images and videos of children as young as four being subjected to brutal sexual acts, a one‑year mandatory minimum sentence in that case was cruel and unusual punishment because of some “reasonable hypotheticals” in which someone else, in an entirely different set of circumstances, might be charged, under what the court said were more sympathetic terms, with possessing child sexual exploitation and abuse material. Conservatives offered a very reasonable solution: to reinstate the mandatory minimums for people trafficking in and possessing child sexual abuse and exploitation material; and to defend them with the notwithstanding clause, a tool in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms given to legislatures to ensure that the will of the people and, indeed, basic decency are upheld in our laws. Now, Bill C‑16, the government has said, was its answer to this. To be fair, members of the Liberal Party have certainly expressed disgust with the facts of the Senneville and Naud case, but where we diverge is that their answer to this is a bill that would give all judges a so-called safety valve, to say that a mandatory minimum sentence seems like it might be cruel and unusual punishment in a certain case and, therefore, they will not apply it. “Mandatory minimum penalty” has three words. The first is “mandatory”. If we give judges a safety valve to unilaterally declare, on their own terms, that they do not need to uphold the mandatory minimum, it is no longer mandatory. It is not even a minimum. In some cases, it is not even a penalty. Why that is so important here is that in the Senneville and Naud case, the trial judge made that very determination. The trial judge thought that the mandatory minimum penalty for these two men, who between them possessed thousands of images of young boys and girls being subject to acts I will not read in the House, was cruel and unusual punishment. That judge would have availed themselves of the very safety valve the Liberals are now seeking to enshrine in Bill C‑16. Why is this so particularly troubling? I am very proud of some of the work that the justice committee, on which I have the great privilege of sitting, did on Bill C‑16. In fact, I am proud of some of my own amendments, which have been adopted into this bill. An example is the way the bill deals with those who are victimized by intimate images being distributed. This is a horrible crime that we see affecting more and more Canadians, especially young Canadians. I have spoken about this with high school students, who just accept this now as a fact of life. This is something that we need to have a very strong response to in the Criminal Code. We also see, through emerging technologies and artificial intelligence, the dissemination of deepfakes, or deepnudes as they are sometimes called: artificially generated images and videos that look very real, showcasing someone in a state of undress or engaging in a sexually explicit act. These things are disseminated and shared and victimize people in much the same way that the sharing of actual non-consensual intimate images does. This is important because the law needs to catch up with the technology. I heard from witness testimony. I spoke to women's advocates in particular, like Liz Brown from Valora Place in St. Thomas, and Jennifer Dunn from the London Abused Women's Centre. I spoke to Chief Thai Truong, chief of the London Police Service, and Chief Marc Roskamp of the St. Thomas Police Service. I spoke to people including a personal friend of mine who was herself a victim of an artificially generated nearly nude image's being shared. What happens is that these images are shared, and oftentimes the most important thing is for the image or video to be taken off-line, so one of the amendments I put forward at the justice committee would force tech giants to remove this material within 48 hours. I am grateful I had support for that from my Liberal colleagues. Another amendment I put forward was one making it so that the definition of “intimate image” would not exclude things based on a technicality. We changed it to include “nearly nude”. This was, again, something that was brought forward in testimony we heard from witnesses. We also added, and this came from previous work that my colleague the hon. member for Calgary Nose Hill did in her bill, Bill C‑216, a definition specifically of artificial intelligence-generated material, which would ensure that new technology is captured by what we are trying to do here. We would not need to come back as members of Parliament to the drawing board because we find that the law does not actually capture all the cases we are seeing. As we were working on this, I was very proud. This was an example of all parties working together to support victims. However, as we got through the clause-by-clause process on Bill C‑16, we realized that the big sticking point remaining was the Liberals' own poison pill, making it so that their so-called restoration of mandatory minimum penalties would not be, in fact, a restoration at all. They would be allowing any activist judge who fundamentally does not even believe in carceral sentences, which, sadly, we have seen a fair bit of in the justice system, to unilaterally declare that they do not think a mandatory minimum is appropriate. This would take away the “mandatory” of mandatory minimum sentences and ensure that the very people who commit these heinous acts we are talking about, and not just acts of a sexual nature but breaking any criminal laws really, are actually able to get a pass. This is something that I feel we need to say, in the strongest possible terms, we will not stand for, and it is with a great deal of regret that I say this is what the Liberals have done to Bill C‑16. I have a great deal of regret that these provisions that I am very proud of and that I can stand up here and say would help victims are embedded in a bill alongside other things that would actually make things far worse for victims of crime. The bill now has this poison pill that the Liberals would not address, which would basically take any mandatory minimum sentence, including minimums that have not even been declared to be unconstitutional by a court, and subject it to the so-called safety valve, which means it would become optional. It would become discretionary. Interestingly enough, I spoke about what some of these circumstances would be at committee with justice department officials. When judges are formulating their picture of the circumstances of an offence and an offender, the officials indicated that one's immigration status could actually be captured by the bill. If a mandatory minimum sentence would jeopardize someone's status as a resident of Canada, someone who is not a citizen and is convicted of a criminal act, that could be factored into a judge's saying that a mandatory minimum is no longer appropriate. The justice minister said something different, and herein lies the problem. If the minister and the department officials are not even on the same page about what this safety valve would do, how can any judge looking at it, even in good faith, take it and make laws and decisions that are going to support victims? We will always stand up for victims. That means listening to them and advocating for them, but it also means advocating for a justice system that does not let perpetrators and offenders, including those behind some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, get a pass. It is regrettable that this is what this Liberal bill, Bill C‑16, would now do.

Mr. Speaker, it was not that long ago that the Prime Minister got up and said he was the grand economist who would turn things around, the guy we could go to in a crisis. Well, here we are: Canada is the only G7 country in a recession, and where is he? He is nowhere to be found. He ran from a reporter who asked about it. He does not rise in the House of Commons to speak to it, while Canadians are suffering, struggling and paying the price. When will the Prime Minister admit that Canada is in a recession and that he is the one to blame?

Mr. Speaker, we are never going to get to net zero with that level of gaslighting. My goodness, the London economic region, which includes Elgin and St. Thomas, has the highest unemployment rate in Canada, at 9.2%, with 1,800 jobs lost in April. Does he expect me to go to my constituents and say, “Don't worry. You can sell all that uranium you've been working on”? Families are struggling. Families are suffering. The government keeps spending more and more money and will not even acknowledge the consequences of its actions. When is it going to get serious and account for the fact that it has put Canada into a recession, the only country in the G7 to be there?

Mr. Speaker, I shudder to ask this question after the very kind praise from my colleague toward the Conservatives, but I cannot help but recall, in light of her criticism of the budget implementation act, of which there is a great deal to criticize, that she actually supported the Liberal budget based on promises from the Prime Minister on what the government would do. I do not actually criticize my colleague for this, but I wonder if she might have any cautionary words for others who are similarly being given these grand promises from the Prime Minister and the Liberals and what happens with those when it comes to the actual legislation they put forward.

Madam Speaker, it is always my great pleasure and honour to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, who, like all Canadians right now, are grappling with an affordability crisis. The cost of food has gone up. The cost of fuel has gone up. The cost of rent has gone up. The cost of housing has gone up, and yes, the cost of the Liberal government continues to go up. This is not just an abstract national issue; this is something we see particularly in the London economic region, which includes St. Thomas and Elgin. London unemployment is the highest in the country, at over 9%. This is a massive problem for people. We see youth unemployment pushing up against 15%. When I asked in the House, in question period, whether the government would commit to a very real and tangible measure to make one aspect of life more affordable, to cut all federal taxes on fuel until the end of the year, all I got from the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources was bluster. I believe “hot air” was the comment I may have made in my original attempt at getting a response. In the opposition, we are about solutions. We continue to hold the government to account and offer ideas for things that will make life more affordable. As our leader has said time and time again, and as I have said, we welcome when the government steals our ideas. We wish it would go further and steal the whole idea, because Canadians need relief. When we asked the government to take all federal taxes off fuel for the entirety of the year, as a starting point, because it would save Canadians 28¢ a litre at the pumps, what did the Liberals do? They said, “Okay, we will tell you what we can do: We will take a third of the taxes off for a third of the year.” Something is better than nothing, but it is not nearly enough. I look at the challenges that have been aggravated now that we have learned Canada is in a recession, two quarters of negative growth. We hear, of course, from the defenders of the Liberal government and the media that it is just a little technicality; a technical recession, they call it. I believe a technical recession is what the media calls it when a Liberal government is responsible for it. That is what $2 billion of taxpayer money will buy in terms of coverage. However, it is not theoretical or merely technical when we talk to Canadians who cannot afford to fill up their gas tank, when we talk to Canadians who are skipping meals, as I have heard of several constituents doing, when we talk to Canadians who are using a food bank now for the first time in their life, or when we talk to people at the food banks who say they are struggling to keep enough food on the shelves. Canada lost 112,300 jobs just in the last three months. We are seeing a couple of conflicting narratives from the government on this. They say it is just a technicality in numbers, and on the other hand they say the recession we are in right now is the fault of the U.S. That does not explain why we are the only G7 country to be facing this. All countries around the world are dealing with the same global instability, the same tariffs and the same trade threats, but only Canada is in a recession. Why is the Liberal government not taking seriously measures that it has within its authority to do, at a minimum dropping all federal taxes on fuel for the duration of the year, but far beyond that, stopping the inflationary spending that is driving life more and more unaffordable for Canadians?

Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate my colleague from the north's acknowledgement of the problem. I did find it a little odd that he touted the government's removal of the consumer carbon price, when in 2024 he actually devoted a member statement, a rare opportunity to rise in the House on any subject of our choosing, to defending the carbon tax. It is funny that he is now getting up to claim credit for dismantling it. If the Liberal government truly does acknowledge these concerns, truly realizes the affordability crisis facing Canadians, why will it not get rid of all federal taxes on fuel and give Canadians full relief for the entirety of the year?