Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, we are talking about border security. That is all well and good, but things have gotten to this point thanks to 10 years of Liberal neglect. Now, the people protecting the border, the customs officers, are telling us, through their union, that we could need up to 3,000 more officers at the border. Meanwhile, the government has promised 1,000. This was not even mentioned in the throne …
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals and the Conservatives all voted to make Quebeckers pay $814 million in bogus Canada carbon rebate cheques. The Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed it, saying that the funds will obviously be drawn from the consolidated revenue fund. Worse still, Quebeckers are going to keep paying. The Parliamentary Budget Officer also said that there was no doubt that there would be i…
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Mr. Speaker, sometimes we are asked what the Bloc Québécois is good for. At the very least, it is good for having members of Parliament who do not steal $814 million from Quebeckers to write cheques for Canadians. Right now, there are 44 Liberal members from Quebec. All 44 of them voted to steal from Quebeckers, as did the 11 Conservatives from Quebec. They all rejected the National Assembly's una…
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Mr. Speaker, in response to the question from my Bloc Québécois colleague, the member for Winnipeg North told us to correct him if he was wrong. Here is the situation. The federal government paid incentives to get people to buy electric cars. Seventy per cent of the funds in Canada come from Quebec. Quebec dealerships, small and medium-sized businesses, were the ones that had to provide that money…
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Mr. Speaker, this is a period for questions and comments. There will be no questions. I will make a comment. I rarely do that. I listened to my colleague's speech. It has become clear to me. The Liberals no longer have a moral compass, any ideas, values or principles. They have nothing left. They are prepared to do anything to keep their seat, their big salary and their pension. We saw that today:…
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Madam Speaker, my regards to the member for Terrebonne and congratulations on her election. Last Thursday, we were studying the estimates with the Minister of Finance. He was asked if he intended to restore the electric vehicle subsidy. He told us that he was not interested and that he would find other ways to help dealers. Barely an hour ago, I asked the parliamentary secretary, the member for Wi…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his scholarly presentation. I would also like to take this opportunity to greet his family members, who are here on the Hill today. At the end of his speech, my colleague said something very important. He said that it is important to study the estimates, because it is the role of Parliament and, by extension, that of the opposition, to serve as a check on th…
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Madam Speaker, I want to say hello to my colleague and wish him a good evening. It could be a long night. I understand from my colleague that he had a good career in the energy sector and in the business world and that he has now been elected as a Conservative member of Parliament. This is his first term. Since taking office, since we have been sitting, he voted with the Liberals last week to stea…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is once again talking to us about the opposition motion. I am looking at the orders of the day. We have reached the debate on the main estimates. It is hard to tell whether my colleague knows where we are on the agenda. I will ask a very simple questions. Can my colleague tell us what the main estimates and the supplementary estimates are?
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Madam Speaker, I would like to wish you a good evening. It may be a long night for you as well. Since this may be my last speech before the House adjourns in the next few days, I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone in my riding a very happy Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day and national holiday. We are going to celebrate in style. We are going to celebrate our national holiday, our French-s…
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Madam Chair, my colleague does not seem to have understood my speech, even though we have excellent interpreters with us. Actually, it seems he did not listen to my speech. Here is what I asked: Where in the Liberal election platform does it say that a sentence on the front page replaces the will of the legislator and the work done in committee? I did not get an answer to that. Our colleague rises…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague from Fort McMurray—Cold Lake is someone I really enjoyed working with. We are far from agreeing on everything, but she is always very easy to work with. I must remind her that in Quebec, we are obviously celebrating our national holiday, which, coincidentally, falls on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. We wish a happy Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day to all francophones in Canada. The Li…
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Madam Speaker, you can put a new label on a jar of expired peanut butter, but it is still the same old stuff in the jar. Members need to stop telling me that this is a new government. We have not talked about oil per se. I talked about environmental regulations because it seems to me that, for the Conservatives and the Liberals today, environmental regulations are only good when they do not do the…
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Madam Speaker, what the Conservatives are doing is incomprehensible. They are telling us that the Liberals are stealing their ideas, so we are proposing that they study the bill in committee. The Conservative position in the debate is that the Liberals are not going far enough. They have an opportunity to improve Bill C‑5 and have even more of their ideas stolen, but they are passing it up. I thin…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague is a member from Quebec. She must know that, when the Parliamentary Budget Officer appeared before the Standing Committee on National Finance, he confirmed that during the election campaign, there were so-called carbon tax rebates in eight provinces on a tax that had not been collected. That is further proof that Quebeckers were robbed of $814 million. I know that we neve…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague is a right-wing Conservative. He talks about freedom ad nauseam. What always surprises me about these right-wing Conservatives is that they become communists when it comes to taking public money and sending it to the oil and gas industry, with subsidies for small modular nuclear reactors that make oil with nuclear power, or with subsidies for research and development for …
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Madam Speaker, my colleague knows that I appreciate him. He also knows that I come from his riding, where there is a Garon Street in honour of my grandfather. I know that developing our resources is important to the people of Saguenay. However, when we look at the Conservative agenda, it is clear that they want no environmental assessments. What we get from their speeches is that as soon as an env…
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Madam Speaker, I salute all my colleagues in the House. I find it rather interesting that we are spending a lot of time discussing the substance of the matter and the bill itself, when we are looking at a closure motion. After a little over three weeks in the House, we are already dealing with a gag order. First, the bill itself is a problem. It is because two bills were merged into one. What the …
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Madam Speaker, first of all, before us are two bills that have been merged. Had the government given it any serious thought, it would have split the bill in two. Second, the member for Winnipeg North tells us that the bill reflects the fear that Canadians were feeling during the election campaign. I agree with him that the Liberals campaigned on fear. That was their main selling point. This bill a…
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Madam Speaker, the economists at the International Energy Agency have not said that. The economists at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have not said that. All economists are saying something: We have to take our time. Where was the gag order in the Conservatives' platform and the Liberals' platform? Where in both of those parties' platforms was the idea of muzzling Parli…
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Madam Speaker, the Liberals were so afraid of losing their seats over the past few months, before the new Prime Minister came along, that they fell prey to a cult of personality. Now no one dares challenge this Prime Minister, who appeared like a saviour and says he is going to cut taxes, but will not say how he is going to pay for it, and this is after presenting a completely flawed economic and …
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Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned in her speech that, during the election campaign, the Prime Minister said one thing about oil and gas projects in English for Alberta and another in French for Quebec. I just want to confirm that she was indeed talking about how, in western Canada, the Prime Minister said in English that he would use his prerogative to authorize projects that he describes as b…
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Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge my friend, the parliamentary secretary who said this morning in committee that the Liberals feel that they are right to impose a gag order, cut short debate, fail to send the bill to committee and short-circuit all the work of Parliament because they indicated on the first page of their platform that they intended to introduce a bill on free trade within Canada. For the …
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Mr. Speaker, I want to repeat my question because it is important. According to the Liberals, the fact that this was part of their election platform is enough to keep Parliament from doing its job. That alone is enough to short-circuit democracy. I trust my colleague and his ability to answer the question accurately. What other items on the Liberal election platform does he believe are so urgent a…
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Mr. Speaker, I am not surprised that the minister is so fond of his own bill because it would give excessive power to him personally. The minister will be able to designate projects as being in the national interest, hold non-binding consultations and have the federal government adopt environmental standards. Nothing would prevent the federal government from adopting the lowest environmental stand…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague put it very well: Essentially, the bill requires the entire country to blindly trust a minister who will not be bound in any way by environmental assessments. I recall the fairly recent Bay du Nord project, which received unfavourable environmental assessments. In the end, even the environment minister at the time, who is now the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture,…
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Mr. Speaker, six days before the election, the Prime Minister sent out cheques, paid for by Quebeckers, to almost everyone in Canada except Quebeckers. The Quebec National Assembly was unanimous: The Liberals need to reimburse us now. Quebeckers are also suffering due to the cost of living. They should not have to hand over $450 to families in Alberta or $300 to Ontarians in the form of fake carbo…
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Mr. Speaker, the minister, whom I hold in high regard, knows full well that Canadians were not paying the carbon tax when they got their cheques. The Prime Minister himself confirmed that he had eliminated the carbon tax on April 1 but that he had nevertheless issued the quarterly cheque for the period from April to June at the end of the month. If tax revenues were not used to cover those cheques…
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Mr. Speaker, I wish to raise a question of privilege. Yesterday, during consideration of the main estimates in committee of the whole, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue deliberately misled the House when he answered one of my questions. I asked him several times whether he acknowledged that the Canada carbon rebate cheques that were issued by the federal government in the middle of the …
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Madam Chair, I got an answer. I will mark my calendar. Can the minister confirm which level of government in the U.K. is responsible for education?
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Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, the member has been given time but the motion concerns a specific topic. My colleague is completely off topic. I would like to know if she is going to shift direction and talk about the motion we are debating today.
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Mr. Speaker, in addition to greeting you, I would like to take this opportunity to say that I will be sharing my time with the member for Rivière-du-Nord. I listened to the previous member give a speech that was completely off topic for all 10 minutes. I was wondering how to start. I went to the dictionary and looked up the word “cheat”. That is a strong word. It is important to define it. It is d…
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Mr. Speaker, the issue is not that Quebec did not participate. It is that the Liberals created a war room, thought about how they could buy votes, and decided to write cheques to eight provinces. I find it interesting how the member for Winnipeg North phrased his question. He spent the day in the House telling everyone that people had budgeted for this rebate and that they should be treated with r…
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague, whom I hold in high regard, said something important in his opening remarks. He said that he does not always agree with the Bloc Québécois. We do not have to agree on everything. However, we must agree that there are facts, things that can be verified as true. Then we can disagree on which policy is the right one. For the purposes of this debate, the Liberals believe tha…
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Mr. Speaker, Quebeckers are making an effort when it comes to the environment and the transition, but the rest of Canada has decided to stop trying. I think that is obvious. Now, in this debate, people have made the mistake of thinking that the April 1 cheque that was sent to eight provinces was in some way related to the carbon tax in those eight provinces, even though it no longer existed, or th…
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Mr. Speaker, I am surprised by the comments of my colleague from Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk. We should ask him how many Bloc Québécois seats he thinks it takes to make cheating morally acceptable. I sense some moral ambiguity in my colleague's questions now. I have a question for my colleague from Rivière-du-Nord. We know that the Liberals do not want to pay. Usually, we would expect the rea…
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his eloquent speech. It was very good. During the last Parliament, the Bloc Québécois held opposition days on issues we consider important, such as Bill 21, secularism, the oath to the King and the monarchy. Each and every time, the Conservatives stood up and asked us why we were not talking about the real issues. They spoke about the cost of living, how much …
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Mr. Speaker, with your permission, I request a recorded division.
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Madam Chair, I salute my colleagues in the official opposition. I also want to salute the minister. We did not have a chance to talk, and we were not supposed to. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate him on his election. In early January, the incentive program for zero-emission vehicles was suspended. We were told that there was a lack of funding. People in Quebec who bought an el…
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Madam Chair, does the minister remember the commitment that he made to dealers to provide the necessary funds to reimburse these amounts?
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Madam Chair, has the minister provided the funds to reimburse these people?
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Madam Chair, 70% of electric vehicles in Canada are sold in Quebec. Does the minister acknowledge this statistic?
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Madam Chair, can the minister tell us how much of the unreimbursed funds are owed to Quebeckers?
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Madam Chair, he was unable to secure the funding that he promised. Does the minister believe that he owes money to these dealers?
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Madam Chair, with regard to carbon pricing, eight provinces had a federal tax. Does the minister acknowledge that cheques to individuals and families were sent out before the tax was collected?
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Madam Chair, the member for Mirabel has enough experience to know that the minister is playing for time. Can the minister tell us whether the cheques were sent out before the tax was collected?
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Madam Chair, the minister does not have enough respect for the member for Mirabel to answer the question. Perhaps he does not know his file. Were the cheques sent out before the tax was collected?
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Madam Chair, I am a very humble man. I insist. Could the minister add anything to my knowledge?
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Madam Chair, with all due respect, I think that is what the minister is presuming. Were these carbon tax rebate cheques that were sent out in the middle of an election to buy votes in eight provinces delivered without the tax that funded them being collected?
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Madam Chair, it took a lot of energy to get the opposite of the truth. I thank the minister. He is very good at that. When the minister does the accounting reform, he is going to separate the capital and operating accounts. What part of the budget is he going to exclude from the calculation of the operating deficit?
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