Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. During question period today, the Secretary of State for Labour referenced Canada's having the best economy in the G7, but every economic institute says exactly the opposite, including the Bank of Canada, so I would ask—
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Mr. Speaker, it is great to see my colleagues in the House of Commons, and I am happy to address the bill that is before the House, Bill C-19, the Canada groceries and essentials benefit act. It used to be called the goods and services tax credit, but in a nice marketing move, we are going to change the name, because before this bill, Canadians have been having trouble paying for their essentials.…
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Mr. Speaker, I must apologize, as I did not fully understand the question from my Bloc Québécois colleague. I think he asked what we intend to do about the increase in household debt, which is significant. For the moment, I think it is important to give more money to people who need it to feed themselves. However, we also need to fix the federal government's funding system, which is causing inflat…
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Mr. Speaker, that is an important question. Working in the House, getting things done for Canadians, is important. The bill would ease food costs for a portion of Canadians. Of course we are going to get behind that, because we see the policies that have driven up those costs. We need to make sure we address that. People's ability to eat is a very important part of what we have to address. We agre…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague is right. The government is targeting 12 million Canadians here with more rebates going out the door. The issue, of course, is that the government's role is to take taxes in through a whole bunch of forms, including hidden taxes, and then redistribute them to people they think deserve that money. The question is, can we not just have a better economy if we do not pull tho…
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Mr. Speaker, announcements are easy. One can organize a press conference and tell the hungry crowd of reporters all the great things one is going to do. Getting things done requires work. Were the Liberal government to be judged by its announcements, the country would be riding a 10-year wave of success. Sadly, this is not so. For announcements to translate to results, economic activity and payche…
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Mr. Speaker, last week the environment minister said that Canada must be “an energy superpower...low carbon, low risk and low cost”, but the government has deliberately chosen to ignore a proven opportunity: waste heat to power. Every day, heat from industries, such as metals, chemicals and cement, escapes unused. Industry makes up over half of Canada's energy use. Much of it lost as residual heat…
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on behalf of the citizens of Calgary Centre and speak about the new bill that is before us. The actual title of the bill is an act respecting certain measures relating to the security of Canada's borders and the integrity of the Canadian immigration system and respecting other related security measures, but I say we should call Bill C-12 the short Liberal ti…
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Madam Speaker, that is a very good question. I thank my colleague for arriving with the data. It is important because making announcements is something we have talked about. As I said in my speech, it is all talk and no action. It is the same with the Canadian Armed Forces and the notion of improving the Canadian Armed Forces and getting back to a base. The Liberals talk about increasing the numbe…
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Madam Speaker, that is a good question. Our job is to work with all other parties to improve the bills that are presented to us. That is our job. The member is talking about another bill. It is important to take a look at it and take it under consideration.
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Madam Speaker, that is an important question. As the member across the way will understand fully, we are co-operating very clearly on getting Bill C-12 to committee. Without the offensive parts of Bill C-2 in it, we are moving this bill forward. However, a number of issues only have half measures, and we need to make sure they fully address the problems faced by Canadians, not just those visited u…
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Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague to the House of Commons. This is the first time I have had a chance to hear him in debate. I heard his speech, and then I heard every one of his responses, which were actually from his speech. This is called Q and A, questions and answers, where we actually engage to show how well we know the bill and what we want to do with it. This bill is a replacement for a …
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Mr. Speaker, one thing my colleague mentioned in his speech was the social media posts that advertised how people could get into Canada through the asylum process. Does the member think the government has designed a system that is so easy to manipulate that there are advertisements on social media? Who might be profiting from that system?
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I have spoken about the importance of budgets in the democratic process and in the Canadian context as well. I did not hear any response to that at all from the government side. The issue, of course, is that these are time-tested democratic instruments that we have. We are the institution, the House of Commons, that authorize this, but Canadians have to have their eyes on what their g…
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Mr. Speaker, it is October 1, 2025. The government's fiscal year is April 1 to March 31 every year. We are now seven months behind in having a budget presented to this House of Commons on how the government is going to choose what it is spending money on this year. Budgets are important documents. I was in a synagogue in Calgary some time ago, and the rabbi and I had a discussion about the importa…
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Mr. Speaker, after 10 years of Liberal mismanagement, food bank usage in Canada is up 142%. In Calgary, demand for emergency hampers rose another 17% this past year. The Prime Minister said that Canadians would judge him by the cost at the grocery store. Well, they are. They are lining up at food banks. This is not about inflation; it is about a government that has lost control of affordability, e…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, our Constitution is the highest law in Canada. Every other law must conform to it. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a cornerstone of our Constitution, and the notwithstanding clause is central to it. It is a deliberate and essential part of the 1982 compromise that made the charter possible. It reflects the will of Canadians to allow elected legislatures, not courts alone, to mak…
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Mr. Speaker, I am not familiar with the report my colleague is referring to, but I know that the greenhouse gases coming from Canadian natural gas are much cleaner than the coal that is currently being burned in China and the rest of Asia. It is very important to export Canada's natural gas around the world.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address one of the issues that have been dogging this country for years, a cap on emissions in our oil and gas industry. A cap on emissions is of course a cap on production. To pretend otherwise is to be talking out of two sides of one's mouth; that is something the government is becoming better and better at, but eventually it has to land on some real solutions. The g…
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Mr. Speaker, we deal with greenhouse gases better here in Canada than they do in many other countries around the world. The situation is better here than in other countries, but we also need to produce energy for the whole world. Coal-fired energy in Asia is not as clean as what we produce here in Canada. Liquefied natural gas from Canada is very important to the world when it comes to reducing gr…
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Mr. Speaker, it is interesting because clean energy is defined differently by different people. For the member on the other side of the House, I think it might mean solar and wind energy. However, I am not sure that they are as clean as the energy we have now. Natural gas, LNG, is a source of clean energy for the world. It is currently the cleanest form of electricity generation in the world. It i…
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Mr. Speaker, I alluded to that a bit in my speech, but we have an industry that the government has held back for nine years. It has done its best to punish the Canadian economy by punishing the oil and gas industry. After nine years, it has found out that it has not worked. The rest of Canada is slavishly now deeper and deeper in debt, and we have to address that as quickly as possible. The Libera…
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate what is in the bill and how it would actually move things forward as far as safety goes, particularly on the border. I hear from my colleagues on the other side that they listened to police officers over the summer. My question is this: What took you so long? All of these things make so much sense. Were you not listening for the past 10 years, or four years in particular?…
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Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to be here tonight and to ask the questions that I did not feel were adequately answered back in June. I was talking about the increase in the amount Canadians were spending on food out of their weekly budgets. It was about $800 a year more being spent on food at that point in time. However, we can take a look at what has happened with the cost of food since then.…
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Mr. Speaker, the point that I think is still being missed by the government side of the aisle is that we cannot spend our way out of a deficit and a mounting debt problem. More and more money is flowing off the table. The member refers to the idea that we are giving more to programs so it should not be as bad, but the fact is, food prices continue to inflate. This is a basic human need. We have to…
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With regard to the Canada Revenue Agency and corporate income tax return data from 2015 onwards, broken down by year: (a) how many corporate income tax returns were filed on paper and, of those companies, how many companies had a gross revenue threshold (i) exceeding one million, (ii) under one million; (b) how many corporate income tax returns were filed electronically and, of those companies, ho…
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With regard to the Housing Accelerator Fund: (a) how much of the allocated $228,466,276 has been released to the City of Calgary to date; (b) what was the date and amount of (i) the first advance, (ii) each subsequent payment; (c) has this advance been fully disbursed; (d) what milestones have been achieved; and (e) how much of this funding has been allocated to create direct incentives for develo…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague's speech was interesting because, again, I do not think it addressed the bill at all. The big question we have here is this. Every expert has looked at the number of people this might open Canadian citizenship to as more or less a free pass. If the member cannot arrive at some number here about how many people we are inviting in for Canadian citizenship, then the bill is …
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Mr. Speaker, I have an office in Calgary that is well known for its casework in immigration, and that casework in immigration is becoming more and more backlogged. The speculation on that is that the government is, pardon my phrase, ragging the puck so it does not have to deal with these issues. It can just drag things out, and hopefully people will eventually get the hint and move on. There are v…
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Mr. Speaker, that member continually brings up what happened 15 years ago, and then he spouts it off as if it is actually fact. He talks about reality. I am not sure that member recognizes reality. He talks about “cancel and delete”, yet we talk about the number of Canadians who were brought in during the Stephen Harper years. It increased substantially, and that member does not really seem to wan…
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague who just gave a barnburner of a speech and a clinic to everybody in this House about what is wrong with this legislation. I will try to follow that. Before I do that, I want to thank everybody who is participating in this Parliament today, but I also want to thank everybody who got us here, specifically the volunteers in Calgary Centre who did a really good job in…
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Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague to the House of Commons. As I told him in my speech, I have already been in committee looking at this bill. I would like to see it go to committee once it has the proper amendments put into it so it is presented as something we can debate at committee and we can discuss the pros and cons of it. If I could make a suggestion that would get it to committee very qui…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague asked me that question because I am often focused on this country's economy. The number that the PBO came up with is about $20.4 million per year in additional administration costs to get this program across, if it is approved in this way. That escalates going forward, of course, and that means more cost to Canadians. We can think about that as it continues down, with chi…
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Mr. Speaker, I apologize to my colleague because I was going to respond in French. However, he used the word “stubborn”, so I think I am going to have to respond in English. Our job here is as His Majesty's loyal opposition. Members know that. There are gross holes in this legislation and the member knows that. He knows what happened at Roxham Road, and he knows how the Quebec government had to tw…
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Mr. Speaker, it was an Ontario Superior Court judge who ruled that the existing law was unconstitutional. I think that we should also consider the opinions of other judges who have ruled on constitutional issues since then. We should not rely on a single judge from a single court, namely the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Perhaps we should also consider the opinions of other judges who are mor…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, in this short parliamentary session, we are rushing through legislation to temporarily, partially, perhaps, override the very laws that have defined the Liberal government's decade-long war on development. Let us name them: Bill C-69, the “no new pipelines” act; Bill C-48, the tanker ban; the oil and gas production cap; and the industrial carbon tax. These laws have made Canada one of…
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech, but I have heard this speech several times today. It seems to be an excuse mechanism on why we do not need to deal with this as forcefully as we should. This was $65 million of taxpayers' money that disappeared to a group, which was previously at the bar of the House of Commons. I remember, at that point in time, the Liberal Party across the way wa…
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Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order. I can assure my colleague that the Conservative Party had no position on that debacle at that point in time. He should retract that comment and make sure that he is actually giving a speech that actually speaks to Canadians and not just to his own followers for a clip.
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, the average Canadian family is going to spend $800 more on food this year because of Liberal inflationary spending. The Calgary Food Bank organizers say that 65% of working Calgarians are now experiencing severe food insecurity. What affects this, of course, is bad government budgeting. Deficits lead to inflation, and the government plans to spend 8% more this coming year. The Liberal…
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are delaying tabling a budget as it is expected to show a supersize deficit that will increase inflation even further; the higher the deficit, the higher the inflation. The price Canadians pay for food is dependent upon the government's budget. However, we should not worry; the government's budgets affect only Canadians who eat. Will the government stop driving up costs a…
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Mr. Speaker, the answer is $25.6 billion. It has nearly doubled in 10 years. Of the $49 billion, what does it represent for each of the 16.9 million households in Canada?
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Mr. Speaker, the answer is $49 billion. How much did the government forecast to spend on interest in the year's estimates last year?
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Mr. Speaker, it is $2,900 per Canadian household. How much did these Canadian households spend on interest on Canadian government debt 10 years ago?
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Mr. Speaker, the answer, of course, is $2 billion more than it forecast in the estimates last year. How fast has that interest expense grown over the past 10 years?
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Mr. Speaker, is it the minister's plan to masquerade Canada's debt problem with the reclassification of debt announced by the Prime Minister?
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Mr. Speaker, how much did the government forecast to spend on interest in last year's estimates?
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Mr. Speaker, what is the Government of Canada going to spend on interest payments this fiscal year?
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Mr. Speaker, the answer, of course, is $1,800 per household, so it has gone up significantly. The Parliamentary Budget Officer foresees the interest on Canadian government debt growing by around 10% per year for the foreseeable future. Does the minister see the economy growing by 10% per year?
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Mr. Speaker, does the minister see the government's taxation revenue growing by 10% per year?
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Mr. Speaker, to help the minister again, the answer is $46.5 billion. How much did the government miss that estimate by last year?
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