Government Orders
I was not a roadie; I was a carny. I think that is the technical term, to correct the member for Abbotsford—South Langley.
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Mr. Speaker, I delayed standing up because I know other members have petitions as well, and I have more than one to table today. First of all, I would like to begin by tabling another petition similar to that tabled by colleagues in response to this very concerning recommendation from the Liberal-dominated finance committee in the previous Parliament. Notwithstanding his protestations, the member …
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The second petition is in support of the people of Lebanon. Petitioners note that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that started on October 8, 2023, has had terrible consequences for the Lebanese people. They further note that Hezbollah is a terrorist Iranian regime proxy that acts to serve the regime's ideology against the interests of the people of Lebanon. The people of Lebanon want a c…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to propose a petition brought to me by constituents that deals with Senate reform. Petitioners are concerned about unequal representation in the Senate. In particular, they are concerned about the fact that there are some provinces in this country with lower populations that have more representation in the Senate relative to provinces such as mine, which have a much lower numbe…
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I have four more, but I'm happy to end earlier.
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Mr. Speaker, my succinctness is one of my best qualities, as members of office have said.
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Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, I do not know how to say “succinct” in French.
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Mr. Speaker, my ability to be succinct is my best quality.
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Next, I would like to table a petition in support of Bill S-210. The petitioners say that was the number of the bill in the last Parliament, the protecting young persons from exposure to pornography act. It is now Bill S-209 in this Parliament. The petitioners note that sexually explicit material, including demeaning and violent material, can be easily accessed on the Internet by young persons. A …
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition I am tabling deals with the issue of euthanasia or medical assistance in dying. Petitioners are concerned, in particular, about what has come to be known as track 2 euthanasia and how this has led to significant problems for Canadians living with disabilities. In fact, these expansions have been vocally opposed by every single major organization representing Canadian…
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Next, Mr. Speaker, I am tabling a petition, and I am not sure who prepared it, in which petitioners say that Canada made us all a promise: that anyone from anywhere could do anything. They say that after 10 years of the Liberal government, the promise of Canada has been broken. There have been a lot of broken promises: to balance the budget, to reduce taxes, to make more affordable housing, etc. T…
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Mr. Speaker, there is a lot in this petition, but I will wrap up in the time that is available. The petitioners note that we need a rule where one dollar of savings is found for every new dollar of government spending. This is how parents, seniors and small businesses balance their budgets, and they would expect the same common sense from their leaders.
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Madam Speaker, I even went to the Red River Ex a few times and had a lot of fun there. The point is, if someone is running a small business, say a carnival game, they are going to have a lot of people paying individually in cash, and that is going to add up to a lot of cash by the end of the day. With the government putting constraints around the use of cash, we can note the impact it may have on …
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Madam Speaker, I am happy to repeat what I just said. We have concerns about the provisions in the bill around use of cash and the limiting of that. We have concerns about the restrictions on civil liberties. We have actually been asking for changes to sentencing, to parole and to bail. Those changes are not in the bill. The changes we have said are critically needed when it comes to criminal just…
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his question. I think it is important to discuss the issues plaguing the asylum seeker system. We need to recognize that the overall immigration system been broken by the Liberals. Asylum seekers now have to wait a long time for their applications to be assessed. The solution is to implement an efficient system where asylum claims are assessed very q…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is the shadow minister for our party on this issue and is doing excellent work advocating for public safety. There are some weird things, unrelated to the objective, woven into the bill, but also many of the things we have been asking for that are needed are missing. The government should take its cue from what we have put forward, like bail reform legislation and other…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I very much appreciate having the opportunity this evening to speak about the metastasizing unemployment crisis that is facing this country. We have seen over the course of the summer that new reports demonstrate a continuously worsening situation, although I think it is important to say as well that this is the continuation of a three-year trend. It is not as if things were rosy an…
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary presented government subsidy through the Canada summer jobs program as the solution to this youth unemployment crisis, but let us talk about some numbers. Canada has over two million post-secondary students. The jobs numbers from Statistics Canada show that about one in five returning students was unemployed this summer, so we are talking about probably m…
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Madam Speaker, it is good to be back in this place after the summer break. Today, we are discussing immigration. However, the unemployment rate in this country is clearly a serious problem. The Conservatives say that the Liberal government's immigration policies and inefficiency are partly to blame for the unemployment rate. I am curious to know what the Bloc Québécois thinks about the connection …
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Madam Speaker, I wanted to comment on what the member for Winnipeg North said. I am looking at the clock, and it is one o'clock. Parliament has been sitting for two hours, and this is maybe the 20th or 21st day in 2025 that Parliament is sitting. We are trying to have a serious conversation about an important immigration issue, and the parliamentary secretary, who is the only Liberal to have spoke…
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With regard to the call between the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the India External Affairs Minister, in late May 2025: (a) what were the issues and topics discussed during the call and what progress or agreements, if any, were made in relation to each issue or topic; and (b) have there been any follow-up calls or meetings between the minister, her office, or other government officials and the …
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With regard to labour market impact assessments, broken down by each of the last five years: (a) how many applications were there in the (i) high wage stream, (ii) low wage stream; (b) how many high wage stream applications were (i) approved, (ii) rejected, (iii) withdrawn; (c) how many low wage stream applications were (i) approved, (ii) rejected, (iii) withdrawn; (d) what percentage of applicati…
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With regard to job and skills training programs funded through Employment and Social Development Canada: (a) how does the government assess the effectiveness of these programs; (b) for each program funded, what is the completion rate for participants of the program; (c) what proportion of participants, in each program, are (i) Indigenous, (ii) living with a disability, (iii) experiencing long-term…
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With regard to information accessed and used by the government for decisions about immigration and credential recognition, and using the most up to date figures available: (a) how long does it take for each licensing body in Canada to provide an answer to an internationally trained professional on whether or not their credentials will be recognized in Canada; (b) for each licensing body, do they o…
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Mr. Speaker, Canada faces a deepening youth unemployment crisis, and I am rising today to request that the House of Commons hold an emergency debate on this crisis. Parliament has not sat since June, and in that time we have had three new reports from Statistics Canada that underline the dire situation facing Canadian young people. The unemployment rate has gone to 7.1% overall. For youth, it has …
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Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, it is important for you to rule on the rules, because the member opposite suggested that somehow debating this bill is preventing the Liberals from bringing in a budget. Would you, Mr. Speaker, be able to clarify that the amount of time we spend debating this bill has absolutely nothing to do with the timeline available to the government, and, in fact, they could …
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Mr. Speaker, I believe this is a new member, so I welcome her to this place and thank her for her commitment to being a part of this important process. This is a government bill that would allow many more people to become citizens of Canada. I assume that, in putting the bill forward, the government knows how many people it would affect and has an estimate of what additional costs it would impose …
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Mr. Speaker, as this is almost certainly my last time speaking in the House before the summer recess, I want to join others in thanking the many hard-working staff around this place, including security, pages, table staff, local officers, committee clerks, etc. I thank them for facilitating the operations of Parliament. This has been, I think, a short, but significant session. We are starting to g…
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Mr. Speaker, respectfully, the member seems to have read a pre-prepared text that did not have much to do with the speech that I gave or the content that I talked about. I want to just say that I firmly reject the implication that freedom means having the most expansive possible citizenship rules. Freedom does not mean that we necessarily need to expand Canadian citizenship, as in this case, to fa…
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Mr. Speaker, let me be very clear. Our caucus supports the version of the bill that was introduced by Senator Yonah Martin. It deals with measures to be taken in legitimate cases where citizenship should be restored. That said, Bill C‑3 goes further than what Canadians and the courts are calling for. I cannot support the measures in this bill that I spoke of earlier.
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Mr. Speaker, the member underlines an important point about this legislation, which is the unknown. There would be so many people potentially affected by this change, and the government, as we have seen from responses to my questions, appears to have no estimate of the number of people affected, the cost or the associated issues with having families where, generation after generation, people are n…
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Mr. Speaker, I would encourage the minister to come down from his penthouse and answer the question himself, rather than relying on the House leader. He has a $10-million real estate portfolio that includes multiple properties and a beautiful Vancouver penthouse. I am sure it is very nice. It is no wonder, then, that his first act as housing minister was to announce that he does not want housing p…
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Mr. Speaker, I do want to be generous today and offer the housing minister one more opportunity to respond. The issue here is that the minister, who is supposed to be solving the Liberal housing crisis, actually has a personal financial interest in seeing that crisis continue. I think to most Canadians, that would seem to be a little bit of a problem. How can we expect the penthouse minister to ac…
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Mr. Speaker, we are at an interesting moment in Canadian politics, I think, because the Liberal government is trying to run against many things that were core to Justin Trudeau's governing agenda with the Liberal Party over the last 10 years. Part of the governing agenda under Prime Minister Trudeau was to set up an impossibly complex web of regulations and processes that made it very difficult fo…
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Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague back to this place. There are many things I could focus on from her remarks, but I think it is worth drilling down on one piece of clear misinformation. She made the comment that Stephen Harper got nothing built, which is outrageous and verifiably false. Many pipelines were built under Stephen Harper. The northern gateway pipeline to tidewater was approved, and …
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Mr. Chair, does the minister think that people who work for the public service should be able to work as external contractors at the same time as they are employed by the public service?
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Mr. Chair, does the minister think that people who work for the public service should be able to work as external contractors at the same time as they are employed by the public service?
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Mr. Chair, the question, again, is this: Is the government planning a major overhaul of the indigenous procurement program?
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Mr. Speaker, the member continues to claim that he represents a new government, but it is a new government made up of the same people. My question is simple. If this is truly a new government, will it immediately demand reimbursement of the funds that were spent? Will the Liberals support our motion? Will they try to correct the situation? Will they demand a reimbursement? I want a yes or no answe…
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Mr. Speaker, this question underlines the problem with the Liberals in regard to whose side they are really on. We can compare the way they treat elite insiders who have abused the rules and taken money from taxpayers versus what would happen to everyday Canadians who might have a dispute with CRA, for example, about what is owed. The gentleness with which the government approaches elite insider c…
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Mr. Speaker, what is going on here? We have a 10-year-old government that is neck deep in corruption. It is another week and another Auditor General report denouncing the actions of the government, a government that really wants to profess to be new. It is a new government, but not new people. It is the same people, but they have changed. They have found religion. They are going to do things diffe…
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Mr. Speaker, this is a hypothetical, and a ridiculous hypothetical, but ridiculous hypotheticals are required to demonstrate what has actually gone on in government procurement. For example, someone hires me for $100 to paint the fence. I hire someone else for $50 to paint the fence. I collect $50 for doing, you guessed it, nothing. If this happens over and over again to the tune of tens of millio…
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Mr. Speaker, I was surprised to hear such a sharp question from my colleague, because I thought I was very generous in my speech in giving the government this opportunity to vote in favour of our motion. This opposition motion is a gift to the government. We are inviting them to come along with us and vote in favour of getting this money back from GC Strategies. I think this is the kind of offer o…
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Mr. Speaker, I can say that we did a lot of work with whistle-blowers on this file. I am sorry that I do not remember the individual that the member mentioned, but I can say that we worked really hard with the other opposition parties. We worked really hard to try to force the government to answer these questions. It was clear that the government was going to take its time answering them, but the …
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Mr. Chair, it is just a really simple question about the minister's philosophy in terms of how he thinks things should work. Does the minister think a person who is employed by the public service should be able to simultaneously work as an external contractor? It is the third time I have asked the question. Could the minister answer it? Does he think that is appropriate, yes or no?
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Mr. Chair, am I to infer from the answer that the minister thinks there are some instances where it is okay for a public servant to also be an external contractor?
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Mr. Chair, I think it is pretty clear from that answer that the minister thinks there are some cases where it is acceptable to double-dip as a government employee and a contractor. If he does not think that, he can say so, but I think that is pretty troubling. I have another question: Does the minister think that companies that do work for hostile foreign regimes should also be able to simultaneou…
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Mr. Chair, the minister did not listen to the question I asked. He repeated his non-answer from the previous question. I invite him to come up with a new non-answer to the new question. The new question was this: Does the minister think that companies that do work for hostile foreign regimes should be able to simultaneously do work for the Government of Canada?
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Mr. Chair, with all due respect to the minister, this is embarrassing. I would be embarrassed. I am almost embarrassed for him. Is the government planning a major overhaul of the indigenous procurement program?
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Mr. Chair, very respectfully to the President of the Treasury Board, there is nothing virtuous or public service-minded about ignoring serious questions from members of the opposition and repeating lines that have absolutely nothing to do with those questions. This is not a “gotcha”; this is a basic question of government policy. Is—
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