Cheryl Gallant

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to present a petition signed by the law-abiding property owners of Carleton, Kanata, Nepean, Nipissing, Timiskaming and my great riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke. The petitioners are raising awareness over the lack of legal protections for homeowners and landowners when they try to protect themselves, their property and families. Violent criminals have been emboldened by a decade of Liberal soft-on-crime policies. That is why Conservatives have introduced Bill C-270, the stand on guard act, which will clarify the legal standards around self-defence on one's property. That targets crime where they would not be punished for fighting back to protect what they cherish.

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite went on and on about socialized dentistry and Maoist food programs, but it used to be that Canadians could afford to pay for their own dentistry, and they could afford to buy groceries and feed their children what they wanted. The Liberals have not paid down any debt since 2015, when they were first elected, and that interest keeps on accumulating. It results in taxes, more taxes and unaffordability for Canadians. Why does the member opposite want Canadians to be dependent upon government for everything?

Mr. Speaker, I recently received a handwritten letter that I would like to share with the Canadians. It reads, “Hello, I'm 11. Yes, I'm young, but my mom said I can voice my future economy concerns to you.” This young girl's letter shared some of her family's experiences in struggling with rent and food. Her family is spending $2,000 a month to rent a one-bedroom apartment. She ends by writing that all she want is for prices to go down so t-shirts and sweaters are $5 combined and pants and socks are $6. She just wants to go to school without repeating her outfits the same week. It is important to hear directly from Canadians on the front lines of the Liberals' war on affordability, but it is heartbreaking to know that all the government has to offer this young girl is more debt to fuel inflationary spending. Renaming the GST does nothing to put clothes on her back.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of my hard-driving constituents in the expansive riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke to speak to Bill C-38, an act to amend the Excise Tax. Yesterday, the finance minister told the House that the Liberals would take no lessons from the Conservatives. Today, class is in session, and the lesson plan is lower taxes. Conservatives have been calling for gas tax relief for months, while Liberals enjoyed vacations in Tuscany. They left the decision to extend the gas tax holiday until the last minute in an effort to maximize uncertainty. The Liberal decision to end this tax break in the middle of winter is perplexing. The Prime Minister has claimed he speaks to the United States President regularly. Does the Prime Minister have secret knowledge about when the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz will end? Based on the legislation before us, it appears the Liberals think the oil shipments through the strait will be at 50% of pre-war levels by January 31, and the entire strait will be open by the end of March. Of course, the Liberals have no idea when the conflict will end. The government wants to provide as little relief as it can get away with. Hiking the tax by 50% on February 1 is its way of boiling the frog slowly. It takes a certain level of Liberal arrogance to call a bill that schedules tax hikes the Canadian fuel affordability act. This is all part of a plan with the Liberals. They call the bill, which would hike taxes, affordability. They call inflationary spending affordability. They call doubling the deficit fiscally responsible. Despite their elbows up rhetoric, the Prime Minister is adopting the exact same form of state-led capitalism we see coming from the White House. The fact that the Prime Minister copied the U.S. President's plan to launch a sovereign debt fund is very telling about how both view the economy. The U.S. President has often compared himself to a mall manager, while the Prime Minister acts like a bank manager. Neither of them should be so intimately involved in the operations of any particular business. This is exactly why Norway's actual sovereign wealth fund does not invest in Norway. It is the exact opposite of the sovereign debt funds in Canada and the United States. These debt funds are specifically designed to pick domestic companies. The temptation to politically interfere in the operations of companies or on behalf of the companies is too great. We have too many examples of this already happening in Canada, even without the sovereign debt fund. The company formerly known as SNC-Lavalin is a perfect example. The last prime minister tried to bully his justice minister into letting SNC off the hook for bribery and corruption. When that did not work, he fired her. Then he replaced her with a man whom the current Prime Minister made our UN ambassador. Now SNC has a new name and new business partners who together have formed the consortium Cadence. When the Liberals released a request for proposals to build Via's high-frequency rail system, Cadence submitted a proposal that called on the Liberals to scrap this popular plan and replace it with a much more expensive high-speed rail line. One of the partners in the consortium is the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, whose former president just so happened to be the Clerk of the Privy Council. Together they cooked up a secret plan to privatize the most profitable parts of Via while taxpayers pay for the rest of Via. If the Liberals are going to hike taxes, the least they could do is not actively make every alternative form of transportation more expensive, yet that is the plan they cooked up with their billionaire buddies last week, to privatize our airports and to privatize Via Rail. Now, their first bill back proposes to hike the gas tax in the middle of winter. To defend these choices, the Liberals have already started to point to examples of Europe. The Liberals want Europe's private airports without its robust airline competition. They want a French company to build their high-speed rail, without France's transparency laws. They want European levels of gas taxation to force us all into Chinese cars running on an electric grid powered by Brookfield. What the Prime Minister really wants is to partner with Europe to impose carbon tariffs. The legacy media may have memory-holed the fact that the very first policy the Prime Minister ever proposed when he was just a Liberal leadership candidate 20 months ago was to impose carbon tariffs on Canadians who dared to purchase products from countries without a carbon tax. Is it any surprise the carbon tariff Prime Minister appointed the only Liberal MP to acknowledge carbon tariffs are coming as his parliamentary secretary? This is all part of the Liberals' war on affordability. From their ban on plastic food packaging to their inflammatory deficit spending, everything they touch becomes more expensive. When the U.S. President endorsed our Prime Minister, he said it was because they agreed on many things. When President Trump attacked our Conservative leader, it was because we did not support the President's agenda. What the Liberal Prime Minister and the Republican President agree on is that they should be at the centre of every consequential economic decision in the country. They both agree that the government should serve the interests of the investor class. Now the Liberals even have one big, beautiful omnibus bill to make Bay Street great again. Even Liberal-funded reporters are calling this latest move Trumpian. We would think they would have caught on to the similarities when the Prime Minister literally borrowed an oversized novelty page from the U.S. President's playbook on his first day in office. Fortunately for Canadians and Americans, there is still one political party on this continent that actually believes in freedom. As our leader ably demonstrated last week, there is a clear path to long-term sustainable economic growth, and that is to empower the free people in a free market. The Prime Minister and the U.S. President have a faith-based approach to running a country's economy. They have the faith that their business acumen is more than enough to pick winners and losers. Conservatives put our faith in the Canadian people. We trust Canadian entrepreneurs to out-innovate and out-compete the world. We trust Canadian consumers to buy the products and services that work best for them. We reject the tired idea that a president, a prime minister or even a king can decide who we can trade our property with. We believe in cutting red tape for all businesses, not just the ones that hire the best Liberal lobbyists. We believe in cutting taxes for all businesses, not just for the ones that invest in projects that Liberals find politically acceptable to support. Conservatives trust and believe in Canadians because we have confidence born of true patriotic love. The Liberals and Republicans have succumbed to the siren song of economic nationalism and protectionism. That is rooted in insecurity. It saps confidence. It breeds corruption. It makes life less affordable. Is it really any coincidence that the sectors of our economy protected from foreign competition are the most expensive, such as domestic air travel, cellphone bills, insurance rates and broadband Internet? Canadians can reasonably blame the U.S. President's actions for the high price of gas, but Canadians have only the Liberal Party to blame for the high cost of everything else. While the finance minister can pretend not to copy our policies, he cannot ignore reality for long. Canadians are being squeezed, and the Liberal plan to hike the gas tax in the middle of winter is not the solution. The Liberals are already raking in GST windfall from higher gas prices. They do not need to compound the pain with a frosty tax hike on February 1. Instead of teasing Canadians with temporary tax relief, the Liberals could do the hard work of committing to substantial tax reform. Of course, this would actually force the Prime Minister to spend time in Canada rather than hitting the globalist gala circuit. It is clearly more enjoyable for the Prime Minister to spend all his time in Europe re-reannouncing our partnership strategy for a new future alliance for a strategic future. Instead of introducing a bill to raise gas taxes and calling it a fuel affordability act, maybe the Prime Minister could use some of his international rizz to negotiate an end to the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz. With any luck, that would earn him a Nobel Peace Prize, which we could trade off for tariff relief, or instead, he could spend his time helping his former colleagues at Brookfield partner with a Crown corporation he controls to launch a new maple-flavoured investment fund. Barring any attempt to subvert the fixed elections act, Canadians will get to render a verdict in October 2029 on how they think the Prime Minister has spent his time in office.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. colleague for his comments, but I did not enter the chamber or the House of Commons at all in my life before I became a member of Parliament. Unfortunately, he must have me confused with someone else. I have the right to speak on behalf of the people I represent, and they are telling me they cannot afford to live. The grocery store is almost out of bounds. It used to be a place to socialize, but now it is a place they dread. I believe that my speaking on behalf of the people who are trying to get the message that they need more affordable prices to government is duly acceptable.

Mr. Speaker, the expansive size means they need to have transportation to go to work or to the grocery store. We do not even have a bus system. We have no public transportation available, save for a new start-up service in the city of Pembroke, which helps no one living outside the city area. In fact, there are people living in rural areas who cannot even afford to get a car to get a job or to keep their job. They are having to give up their jobs because they cannot afford to get there. Seniors have to be masterful at planning their week out to get groceries or to see the doctor, because every cab ride costs them a minimum of $10. When one is on a very low fixed income, that takes up the entire month.

Mr. Speaker, to bring back the spirit of former prime minister Harper in the House, he used to be reviled, but now he is seen as one of the best prime ministers we ever had in Canada. Like Prime Minister Harper, who made decisions based on what was right, this party does also, and we will do our job in Parliament in looking at each proposal that is made. If, like Mr. Harper, he supports certain things and we support certain things, we will vote in favour of them.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the constituents struggling to make ends meet. I want to begin by congratulating the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance for responding to my question without engaging in personal insults or cheap partisan attacks. This is a significant improvement over his last response, yet he declined to answer the actual question. Still, the response to my question was illuminating. Given the Prime Minister's central pitch to voters was that he alone could save the Canadian economy, the news that economic growth is near zero is devastating to his brand. Canadians thought they were getting a technocratic central banker. Instead, we got an investment banker using taxpayers' pensions as leverage to catalyze a growing debt crisis. The parliamentary secretary's answer reveals the dilemma the Liberals find themselves in. Unlike some of the more fanatical colleagues who describe the economy with unrealistic exuberance, the parliamentary secretary spoke about “signs of progress” and “building foundations”. A shrinking economy destroys the Prime Minister's brand. A booming economy destroys the justification for deficit spending. An anemic economy is just what the Liberals want. It was Justin Trudeau's justification for turning Canada back into a deficit country. It is this Prime Minister's justification for doubling Trudeau's deficit. Unfortunately, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer made clear in June, there is just a 1% chance Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio will go down. This public debt is being used for the largest corporate welfare spending spree in Canadian history. This debt binge is happening at the exact same time investors are demanding higher interest rates for government debt. The Liberals want us to ignore the slow growth, the job losses and the debt spiral. At the same time, they accuse us of ignoring the May jobs report. I looked at the jobs report, and it is not as rosy a picture as the Liberals would have us believe. The headline claims 88,000 jobs were created, yet Stats Canada hired 33,000 people to conduct the census in May, and 17,000 of the remaining jobs were in construction, which sounds great until you realize this is Canada, where we build more in the spring and summer and less in the winter. When compared year over year, there has been no job growth in construction. We cannot say the same for retail. In May, 35,000 Canadians lost jobs in the retail sector. In fact, since May 2025, over 61,000 retail jobs have been lost. Despite what the Liberals would have us believe, Donald Trump cannot put a tariff on the mall. The other big sector with job gains was in culture and recreation, because camps, resorts and other seasonal tourist businesses began hiring for the summer season. I know Liberals think they can control the weather with taxes, but they cannot claim credit when the sun shines. For 11 long years, the Liberals have been promising their deficit spending would turbocharge growth and investment. It has not. Recently, the Prime Minister said that they are investing tremendous amounts of money in the country like we have never seen before. Oh, my apologies, that was a quote from President Trump. Here is the Prime Minister's quote: “We’ve secured new investment in the country of a size not seen, arguably, before.” Well, set aside the hyperbole and the Prime Minister's narcissism, Canadians can see the truth for themselves. Liberals love low growth. Only Conservatives are fighting for a strong economy.

Mr. Speaker, the latest Liberal talking point is to claim Canada is the second-fastest-growing economy in the G7. This is like your teenager claiming they were the least drunk person at the keg party. What the Liberals do not like to mention is that the fastest-growing economy in the G7 is the United States. That means the U.K., Germany, France and Italy are all growing slower than us. Despite the slow growth in Europe, the Prime Minister has spent two-thirds of his overseas travel in Europe. He even enjoyed a family vacation in Tuscany while telling Canadians to vacation more at home. It is easy for the Prime Minister to fly to a nice privately owned European airport and give the same speech announcing the same new partnership strategy for a future alliance, for a new strategic future with the EU. Talk is cheap, and fancy speeches in foreign capitals do not put food on the table for Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned the Cowichan decision. My question is this: How will that decision potentially impact other areas in Canada, and what are the economic consequences of that? Will life become more affordable for Canadians as a consequence?

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the big-hearted constituents in the caring riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke to speak to Bill C‑9, the Liberal bill to ban symbols of hate. The bill is back here because the other place has amended the legislation to include a new symbol to the Liberal hit list. The Senate used to be called the chamber of sober second thought. Unfortunately, under the democratic reforms by Justin Trudeau, that chamber has come to resemble a critical studies faculty lounge. It is less sober second thought and more quick hot takes. While the Senate had sufficient sobriety to reject one amendment on so‑called denialism, the decision to include the symbol of a noose highlights a broader problem with the Liberal approach to combatting hate. As I said during the debate at second reading, the rise in hate is real under the Liberals. The measures in this bill to protect places of worship and cultural centres and add penalties for obstructing or intimidating people from entering those places are a step forward. The removal of the safeguards around religious expression is vile. The criminalization of specific symbols would be less alarming if the Liberals were not the ones pursuing it. They have a long track record of engaging in bad‑faith attacks and outright fabrications when they see a chance to smear their political opponents. I would encourage the Canadians watching this debate at home to listen to the powerful speeches given by the member for Terrebonne and the member for Hull—Aylmer. Both spoke of the legacy of lynching in the United States and how the noose became a symbol of terror and violence. They both cited specific, well‑documented historical facts about the history of the noose in the American context, yet when it came time to speak about Canada, the specificity stopped and they moved to speak in generalities. I am in no way suggesting the members were engaged in a repeat of the outlandish claims made by the Liberal member for Vancouver Centre when she claimed crosses were burning on the lawns of Prince George residents. There have been at least three documented cases of nooses being left at workplaces since the summer of 2020 and the death of George Floyd. Prior to the summer of 2020, there had been only one documented case. All four incidents generated considerable media attention and widespread condemnation. In one of the three cases, a person was arrested and charged. Hanging a noose on someone's workplace locker is unambiguously a death threat, regardless of ethnicity. If the intent was to foment hate, then the act is already a criminal offence. If this bill becomes law, the police and the Crown prosecutors will still need to prove that the display was intended to promote hate to lay a charge under this act, yet to hear the Liberals speak, one could easily be misinformed into believing that the simple act of displaying a noose is now a hate crime. Given the Liberals' own recent history of bad‑faith claims of noose sightings, this should concern Canadians. During Justin Trudeau's 2021 superspreader election campaign, the Liberal war room found a pliable journalist to publish the Liberals' pathetic lie that I had depicted the prime minister being lynched. University professors wrote op-eds condemning the so‑called depiction of political violence, except it was a fake noose news story. There was no noose. It was a picture of Trudeau pulling on a thin red lanyard while mugging for the camera. Having had the recent experience of the Liberal Party of Canada lying about a noose and then having it reported by the Liberal‑funded media, I can speak from my own experience about how troubling it is for the Trudeau Senate to add something as vague as the word “noose” to the list of prohibited terror symbols. This example of the Liberals seeking to ban the symbol of the noose so soon after engaging in a bad-faith attack on a political opponent by claiming a lanyard was actually a noose does not stand in isolation. During the “freedom convoy” and the protests, we saw the Liberals deploy this exact same technique. Some protesters had likened the public health restrictions to Nazi‑era policies. Some had even desecrated the Canadian flag with the Nazi hooked cross as a way of illustrating their point that the Liberals were acting like Nazis. When one of those protesters walked behind a Conservative MP doing an interview with the CBC, the Liberals pounced. They accused us of supporting Nazis. Trudeau literally accused a Jewish MP of standing with people who wave swastikas. The Liberals were more than happy to deploy misinformation and disinformation around the use of a hate symbol to score cheap political points. The CBC worked hand in glove with the government to push this fake narrative. No one needs to agree with protesters' views comparing the Liberals to the Nazis, but if we want to keep our democracy, we have to protect the right to express those views. Instead, the Liberal‑funded media, in close coordination with the Liberal government, sought to discredit the protesters as hate‑mongers before a single truck had arrived in the city. Before my Liberal colleagues reach for their favourite talking point, I just want to remind them that the Liberal staffer emails to the media are all available online on the evidence page of the Public Order Emergency Commission website. These two recent examples, the fake noose and the protesters who were labelled as Nazis for calling the Liberals authoritarian, are precisely why we cannot trust the government with this much power over expression. Even last night during debate, the member for Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas engaged in a bad-faith attack on my colleague for highlighting the different history between Canada and the U.S. That member provides an example of a type of affliction common to Liberals, what we might call the progressive man's burden. They see it as their moral duty to defend those they view as weak while educating the uncivilized among us. If this bill was a one‑off viewed in isolation, a reasonable case could be made to support it. However, when placed in the broader context of decades of Liberal political strategy that sought to paint all Conservative opposition as motivated by hate and the Liberals' continued desire to construct an entirely new bureaucracy to monitor Canadians' digital expression, this bill looks like a dangerous expansion of authority. Layer that atop the Liberals' decision to support the separatist motion to eliminate the religious defence, and the expansion of state powers starts to look threatening to many Canadians. I agree with my Liberal colleagues when they say hate has grown under the Liberal government. Before the Liberals were elected, there had not been a documented case of a noose in a workplace in decades. Now the Liberals claim it is so common the symbol must be banned. Between 2021 and 2023, there were 238 recorded arson attacks on churches. There are regular hate marches through Jewish neighbourhoods. Liberals even claim their own communities are hotbeds of hatred, where white supremacist rallies are held on a regular basis. Ever since the Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker introduced the Canadian Bill of Rights and restored voting rights to indigenous Canadians, which the Liberals had removed, this country had been on a steady march toward greater inclusion. That all changed in 2015. The decision by the Liberal government to abandon Canada's multicultural approach in favour of an imported American ideology of racial essentialism is at the root of the problem. When combined with out-of-control immigration and soft-on-bail policies, we see the inevitable result. We see the Iranian Revolutionary Guard agents hiring contract killers to shoot up synagogues. We see hate marches in our streets. We see places of worship burned to the ground. Stubbornly, the Liberals still refuse to admit their mistakes on this file. They have admitted they were wrong about carbon taxes. They have admitted they were wrong about the need for tougher bail. They have admitted they were wrong about the need for adult supervision of our immigration system. What will it take for them to realize their approach to combatting hate has only created more hate? The positive elements in this bill that would protect people attending religious places are completely undone by the decision to remove the religious speech defence. We have recent examples of Liberals spreading disinformation about fake nooses and Nazi supporters. They have cut off debate on this censorship bill. Now they want to create a new bureaucracy to monitor harmful content, yet they tell Canadians to trust the cabinet to determine what is and is not harmful. If Canadians did not even trust the Liberals with a majority, we definitely do not trust them with the power to decide what is and is not hate.

Yes, Madam Speaker, under the Liberals, and this hatred that they are promoting, I can believe that this incident happened, and it is unacceptable. However, given how the Liberals expand laws and try to encompass innocent people into law–breaking, they cannot be trusted with adding these symbols to the bill.

Madam Speaker, I can say that since the bill has been introduced, I have received more mail with reference to the bill and that particular amendment and the removal of religious freedom than for any other bill. In fact, it almost comes to the level of the firearms registry back in the late 1990s, Bill C-68. There was such upheaval that it changed the course of the election in my riding, where lawful firearms owners felt that the legislation the Liberals were bringing in was unjust. They feel the same way about this.

Mr. Speaker, I have not seen such public upheaval over legislation since the gun registry was introduced in the late 1990s. The fact of the matter is that we have had anti-hate legislation on the books since the 1970s, and under former justice minister Vic Toews it was more clearly defined; that has been in place. The real problem is that the government does not want to enforce this and law enforcement is not enforcing what already exists. When we see protests, right outside this building, with people screaming at the top of their lungs that they want to see our Jewish population annihilated, there is a refusal to act on that, even on the grounds of the House of Commons. Is this bill not really about trying to make it look like the Liberals are doing something about combatting hate instead of really doing it and having it enforced?

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' pay raise for the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces is a farce. The Liberals are slashing the housing benefit by up to 72%, while upping the rent by 5%. CAF members in the national capital region will see their housing differential cut by up to $4,200 a year. In Kingston, they will see their housing differential cut by up to $7,200 a year. When will the defence minister reverse these harmful changes?

Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned that this includes any organization or any company that transmits electronic data on behalf of a client. Would this include physicians, the medical field, where they either fax or email prescriptions to the drugstore? They are transmitting electronically on behalf of a client. Would that be subject to part 1 of Bill C-22?

Madam Speaker, the annual report from housing advocate Marie-Josée Houle, who is also a cabinet adviser, says that “the current pace of building deeply affordable homes is so slow that it [will] take over 1,000 years” to get to where we need to be. Housing is a provincial and municipal jurisdiction. All these agencies are working as fronts for private interests. What we need is for the government to cut taxes and just get out of the way so that we can get the homes built.

Mr. Speaker, Bill from the valley is a home renovation contractor. He called me to tell me that, by the end of May, he is usually fully booked for the entire season. It is June, and he has just two projects booked. People are more worried about putting food on the table than about fixing a leaky roof or a broken porch. He thinks he may have to take on an extra line of work. Will the Prime Minister tell Bill that Canada is in a recession, or is he going to tell Bill that he is just technically running out of work to do?