Government Orders
Madam Speaker, as a matter of fact, just this past Friday, I was at a round table on poverty with people from the community, which gave me an opportunity to hear from people who are struggling. They shared their stories about how they are having a hard time paying their property taxes and rent; they are having a hard time paying for their groceries. The fact remains that, ever since the government…
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Madam Speaker, as always, I am honoured and proud to stand in this place and speak on behalf of the constituents of Niagara West. I want to start by reading a quote. It states: One of the biggest pressures on people right now is housing. Young Canadians – particularly Millennials and Gen Z – are being priced out of their communities. Families are finding it difficult to get a good place to settle …
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Madam Speaker, one thing my colleague talks about is the hundreds of millions of dollars they are spending, and my challenge with the government is its competence level. At the end of the day, the government has no problem spending money. The challenge is actually getting results. We do not have to go back very far. There was a previous question talking about the fact that the government had spent…
Read full speech →Statements By Members
Mr. Speaker, last weekend, I was out door knocking in my riding of Niagara West, and next door, in the riding of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek was our Conservative candidate Ned Kuruc. The topic that came up most was the cost of living. Folks at the doors said that the basics are getting too expensive and that things are getting worse. Many cannot pay their monthly bills. They are getting further and…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the government's purchase of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning January 1, 2020: (a) which companies did the government purchase PPE from; and (b) for each company in (a), (i) how much equipment was purchased, in total and broken down by type of PPE, (ii) how much was each company paid by the government for the equipment, (iii) where …
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With regard to the government's purchase of COVID-19 vaccines, beginning January 1, 2020: (a) which companies did the government purchase the vaccines from; (b) for each company in (a), (i) how many vaccines were purchased, in total and broken down by type of vaccine, (ii) how much was each company paid by the government for each order placed, (iii) where is each company headquartered, (iv) in wha…
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With regard to the government's COVID-19 vaccine mandates: since August 13, 2021, how many people were denied Employment Insurance benefits for the sole reason of their COVID-19 vaccine status?
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the government's purchase of COVID-19 rapid tests, since January 1, 2020: (a) which specific companies did the government purchase these tests from; (b) how many tests did the government purchase from each company; (c) how much was each company paid by the government for the tests; (d) where is each of the companies in (a) headquartered; and (e) in what city and country did each com…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to present a petition that deals with mental illness and MAID. The petitioners say that mental illness is complex. It can include suicidal thoughts and other symptoms, and people really should be provided treatment and support and not offered MAID.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to Health Canada (HC) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC): (a) what do HC and PHAC know about the origins of COVID-19; and (b) how and when was the knowledge in (a) obtained?
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to requests made by CBC/Radio-Canada to social media companies to take down, edit, ban, or change in any other way social media content, posts, or accounts, since January 1, 2020: what are the details of all such requests, including (i) who made the request, (ii) the date, (iii) the social media platform, (iv) the description of the original content including the name or the handle ass…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the debate we have had regarding this bill, although I do not agree with all my colleagues from the other parties. As we conclude second reading, it is important to keep several things in mind. It was wrong to divide and discriminate against Canadians based on a personal medical decision. It was wrong for the government to demonize Canadians who did not agree with the hea…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, earlier this month, I had the distinct honour of attending the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce 2023 Outstanding Business Achievement Awards. Each year, the event showcases and celebrates high achievement in Lincoln's business community. Since I was elected, back in 2004, this has been one of the most important events on my calendar, and I make it a priority to attend. This year, the cerem…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, this bill is about choice. That is all we have said. It is about the ability to choose for one's self whether they would like to do that and to not exclude people because of that choice. Whoever wants to take it, that is up to them. The point is that they will not be excluded from society, which the Liberal government did for three years, and that is completely unacceptable.
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, this bill is merely about choice. All things need to continue. We realize that health care is still underfunded. We need to do more in that respect. This is about allowing people to make their own medical decisions. This is about people not being excluded from travelling. This is about people not being excluded from going to school. This is about people not being excluded from going…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, this bill is about freedom. It is someone having a choice to take the vaccine or not, and not be excluded from going to their job. The government was heartless to say that someone cannot go to work and collect a paycheque. On the issue of the provinces, whether it was done federally or provincially, it was still wrong. A lot of pressure was exerted by the federal government pressuri…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
moved that Bill C-278, An Act to prevent the imposition by the federal government of vaccination mandates for employment and travel, be read the second time and referred to a committee. Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the House of Commons and represent the people of Niagara West. I appreciate their support for the past 19 years, and I want to make sure they know I never take it fo…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to government contracts with Baylis Medical since January 1, 2020, broken down by department, agency, Crown corporation, or other government entity: (a) what are the details of all such contracts, including, for each, the (i) date of the contract, (ii) value, (iii) description of the goods or services provided, including the quantity and whether the goods were manufactured by Baylis Me…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, as we look at trying to reduce violence and at trying to get illegal guns off the street, we need to go to where these issues are happening. Time and time again, as stated in my remarks, we have seen that over half the people have been out on bail. That is a great place to start. We need to deal with the people who are actually perpetuating most of this crime. That would help to make …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, it is great that it doubled, but I guess the question would be how many we are missing, at the end of the day. That is one aspect we need to do. We need to deal with the border, but we also need to deal with this revolving door of bail and the fact that people are out on bail who should not be. We have seen many people's lives endangered as a result of that.
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Mr. Speaker, it needs to be clear that the shooter did not have a licence, so he was in possession of illegal firearms, full stop. We support safety measures in this country. We support training. We support the fact that there should be a number of steps that need to be taken to be able to obtain and use firearms safely. At the end of the day, if some or all of these measures are not followed, the…
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Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we are concerned about is the continual change of definitions. At the end of the day we talked about how this would be a ban on assault rifles, but what we have now seen creep into this is hunting and sport shooting, etc. The question would be, as we return in the fall and down the road, what guns would get added into those definitions that the Liberals have lef…
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to speak on behalf of my constituents of Niagara West once again. I never take this privilege for granted and I always want to thank them for their trust in me. This time I rise to relay my constituents' concerns on the Liberal government bill, Bill C-21. My office received hundreds of regular mail, phone calls and emails disagreeing with what this bill would d…
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Madam Speaker, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek is right in my neighbourhood. Fundamentally, the difference between Conservatives and Liberals is that Liberals like to take the money from people who actually earn it and work for it and then like to give it back out in the ways they control. Conservatives believe moms and dads, people who work hard for their money, actually know how to spend their money …
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Madam Speaker, it would appear to me, based on the relationship in the House, that the NDP is actually closer to the Liberals than the Conservatives are. It has been propping them up through all these times. The member talks about offshore money that needs to be collected. We agree with these things. As Conservatives, what we tried to do when we were in government was to create an environment wher…
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Madam Speaker, at this point, the reason we have not given a full approval or not had much of a comment is that we do not understand what the actual deals were. If one thinks about the whole process of what we have gone through over the last couple of weeks, it was very hard to get any kind of information on what dollars were spent. Now we are trying to figure out what they are for and what will b…
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Madam Speaker, I was listening earlier to a number of people, and I think one thing we all agree on in the House is that it is an honour and a privilege to serve the people who elected us to be here. I want to thank the people of Niagara West, and I do not think I could ever thank them enough. I would never take that for granted. I was reminded of that as a number of my constituents were in Ottawa…
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Mr. Speaker, we have said over here that there is absolutely no way that big tech is perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. They have major issues, and there are things that they need to do as well. What we are concerned about is what would be suppressed at this point in time, and that is the challenge right now. If individuals are creating content and are not able to put it out there bec…
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Mr. Speaker, I just want to go to what Senator Dave Richards had to say: No decree by the CRTC could, in any way, tell us what Canadian content should or should not be, or who should be allowed to bob their heads up out of the new murkiness we have created. Like Orwell’s proclamation, the very bill suggests a platform that decrees, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than other…
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Mr. Speaker, at the end of the day, we support Quebec culture, absolutely, this party does. We also believe that some of the larger techies need to be paying their fair share. There is no question about that. Our concern is that we do not want government bureaucrats deciding what the Canadian people can have access to and what they cannot.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I do believe that. It has been spoken about here, even by some of the other parties who said that there were some concerns about amendments that were actually rejected. We had a number of great amendments, as has been discussed today throughout the course of the debate, from the Senate, which were clearly rejected. We have the admission from the Green Party member that the comment fro…
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague for Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies. I rise today to speak on behalf of my constituents of Niagara West who have expressed deep concern with the Liberal government's online censorship bill, Bill C-11. My office has received hundreds of phone calls, emails and regular mail regarding the bill. I can confidently say that we have not …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to requests made by the government to social media companies to take down, edit, ban, or change in any other way social media content, posts, or accounts, since January 1, 2020, broken down by department, agency, or other government entity: what are the details of all such requests, including (i) who made the request, (ii) the date, (iii) the social media platform, (iv) the description…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, earlier this month, I attended the ceremony for the Fonthill and District Kinsmen Citizen of the Year award. This is a very special event in my riding of Niagara West. We were all happy to gather safely in person, to celebrate once again, after a three-year break due to the pandemic. I have attended almost every year since I was elected back in 2004. This year's recipients were Brad a…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I am presenting e-petition 4183, which was started by a constituent of mine, John Fulton. It is signed by over 2,161 Canadians. The petitioners are calling upon the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry and the Minister of Health to recommend to the Governor in Council to immediately add COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics to schedule 1 of the Patent Act, thereby pe…
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With regard to government expenditures on membership fees, broken down by department, agency, Crown corporation, or other government entity, since October 1, 2020: (a) how much money has been spent; and (b) what are the details of each expenditure, including the (i) name of the organization or the vendor, (ii) date of the purchase, (iii) amount, (iv) number of memberships purchased?
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With regard to the statement on Twitter by the Minister of Foreign Affairs on November 28, 2022, that “Grand corruption is a threat to democracy and security”: (a) what specific actions, if any, has the (i) current Minister of Foreign Affairs, (ii) government, as a whole, taken since January 1, 2020, in order to combat corruption within the government; and (b) what assessments has the government m…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my constituents once again for giving me the opportunity to be here and represent them. One of the things I heard a lot about this past summer was not so much about the billions of dollars being spent, although people do talk about that, but the level of competence of the government. That is one of the things we should focus on here. The government loves to talk about …
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Madam Speaker, with respect to the point of order that was raised earlier by the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader on the private member's bill, Bill C-228, let it be known that, when the amendment regarding severance was introduced, the chair ruled it out of order. The chair's ruling was then challenged and the majority of the committee voted to overturn the decision of the c…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the last two years have been difficult for Canadians. This is especially true for Canadians who made a personal medical decision that the Prime Minister disapproved of. Because they disagreed with him on this issue, he called them extremists, racists and misogynists. He also questioned whether they should be tolerated. If people did not agree with the Prime Minister on their personal …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I am tabling a petition in support of Bill S-223, a bill that seeks to combat forced organ harvesting and trafficking. This bill has passed in the Senate twice and in the House once in its current form. It is currently stalled before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the petitioners hope that it will be passed soon. The families and victims of forced organ harvesting and …
Read full speech →Statements By Members
Mr. Speaker, today I am proud to share the story of James Topp. James is a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. He has served for 29 years. James is marching on foot from Vancouver to Ottawa to support Canadians hurt by vaccine mandates. The march started at the Terry Fox statue in Vancouver and is ending at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa. That is 4,293 kilometres in approximately 130 …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, wherever we look these days, we see the NDP-Liberal government in chaos. If it is not chaos at our airports, it is chaos at our passport offices. Every week, dozens of constituents call my office looking for help. People have been waiting since January, with little to no response. People are lining up overnight just to get to the office. Some are even being turned away and asked to co…
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Mr. Speaker, that is one of the challenges we have with a lot of the legislation we see in the House: the vagueness. It is so open-ended that definitions are not nailed down. This has happened with many pieces of legislation before, when we did not get definitions to define what something is. It created a lot of ambiguity. At a point later in time, the Liberals could do exactly that. They could sa…
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Mr. Speaker, it has been great working with the hon. member over the years. We spent some time on the trade committee together. I would point to the fact that I have not heard one speech on this side of the House that has not said we should level the playing field. We believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that big corporations should not just get away with whatever they feel like. We have not said th…
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Mr. Speaker, the great example is everything the Liberals have done in the past couple of years. They said they based things on science, but really it was based on political science. There was massive government overreach at every step. They would say one thing and do something different. They would have experts, chambers of commerce and international organizations saying that what they were doing…
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Peterborough—Kawartha. Over the last two years of the NDP-Liberal government, we have seen a very uniquely ballooning government interfering in virtually all aspects of Canadians' lives. It has truly been a pattern of an expanding, intrusive and increasingly controlling and restrictive federal government, with its ill-advised discriminator…
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moved for leave to introduce Bill C-285, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act, the Canada Labour Code and the Employment Insurance Act. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to introduce my bill, a bill that I believe is crucial at this point in time. I would like to thank my esteemed colleague, the member for Peace River—Westlock, for seconding the bill. As a Canadian, I am a firm believer i…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the last two years have been a traumatizing time for many Canadians, and the NDP-Liberal coalition continues to make the situation much worse. It supported draconian rolling lockdowns, which contributed to a mental health disaster. It supported and is still keeping unscientific and now notorious vaccine mandates, which angered and divided Canadians more than any other policy we have e…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Madam Speaker, I think I speak for most Canadians when I say that the last two years have been extremely difficult. At times like this, one would think the leader of our country, the Prime Minister, would be there to unite Canadians. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. He has done the opposite. Do not take my word for it; his own Liberal MPs have said so. The Prime Minister chose to divide …
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