Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, Bruce Kennedy was born and raised in the Waterloo region. He founded Stance Healthcare, based in south Kitchener, where they manufacture furniture for hospitals. They employ 125 of my friends and neighbours. They are a homegrown success story, but now they are suffering from tariffs. Since the new round last month, they have already lost $2 million in tariff costs. This cannot go on. I contacted the Liberal Secretary of State for Small Business on Bruce's behalf. What she sent back was a list of announcements that the Prime Minister has made about support for tariff-affected businesses. That is all. It was a list of announcements. It is all talk and no results. Stance Healthcare has not received a penny in actual support. Bruce and his workers face an impossible decision. They cannot keep losing hundreds of thousands a month. They either have to move jobs across the border or lay off 125 hard-working Canadians. The Prime Minister promised to win this trade war. He promised to support struggling businesses. It is five minutes to midnight for Stance. I call upon the Prime Minister to keep his promises.

Mr. Speaker, Canada Health Infoway blew $300 million of taxpayer money on PrescribeIT. They have blown $1 billion over 10 years with nothing tangible to show for it. For six weeks, they have failed to produce the documents the health committee has ordered them to produce. The health minister now says this totally dysfunctional organization will undergo a mandate review. Can she tell us how long the review will take and how much money the review will cost? Why does she not take the obvious decision today and pull their $50 million of yearly funding now?

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to be here so late. I am hoping that if some of the Liberals get sleepy enough, perhaps they will accidentally answer the questions and provide some light on what has gone on at PrescribeIT. We are here for this particular adjournment proceeding question because, on May 28, I pointed out to the health minister that she said in the House that she had spoken to the board of Canada Health Infoway, and subsequently that caused its million‑dollar CEO, Michael Green, to be fired. The only problem is that the chairman of that board said that the Minister of Health had never spoken to the board, so there was a clear discrepancy. We raised as a question of privilege at the committee that somebody was clearly not telling the truth. The minister responded during that question period, saying she meant that she had spoken with her representative on the board, so in a follow-up question, I asked if her representative had spoken to the chairman of the board. She said she was “not going to get into who said what”. Well, why on earth not? This matters. It is important, because it has to do with how the organization is governed. The next thing the minister said during that question period was that “Canada Health Infoway is a separate entity from the government.” Is that true? How can it possibly be true? If the minister appoints the board chair, subsequently appoints a direct representative of herself on the board and then gives instructions to that representative to fire the CEO, how on earth can the organization be said to be independent? I think, honestly, that this is how organizations come to be poorly governed. This is how they come to blow $300 million on a program that did not work but that should have been billed successfully for $5 million. The minister is making a Schrödinger’s cat out of responsibility. If she does something good, such as fire the million‑dollar CEO, that is because she is in charge, but if the organization does something bad, then suddenly it is at arm's length and she has no control over it. This cannot go on. Is she responsible for what goes on at Canada Health Infoway, or is she not? Is she responsible for how it spends taxpayers' money, or is she not? Does she have the power to fire the CEO, or does she not? I will tell the House who has the power to fire all of us: the taxpayer. Why will the minister not say who said what in the chamber, so the taxpayers can make a decision about who needs to be fired? Why will she not come to committee to answer these questions instead of sending attachés who, frankly, do not answer these questions when we ask? However, I am hopeful tonight, so here we go.

Mr. Speaker, I asked several very specific questions. I asked whether Canada Health Infoway is independent or not. I asked whether the Minister of Health has oversight on its funding or not. I asked whether the Minister of Health has the power to fire the CEO of Canada Health Infoway or not. I have asked whether the minister would come to health committee to explain these things in more detail. The member did not answer even one of those questions. It is 11 p.m. It costs money to keep the chamber open. Tens of thousands of people voted for me so I could ask these questions. Tens of thousands of people voted for the member so she could answer these questions. Why will she not just answer them and respect the House, respect the Speaker and respect the mace?

Mr. Speaker, here is a question the Minister of Health has never answered. She knows that PrescribeIT was a $300-million waste of taxpayer money. She knows the organization in charge of that program was so badly run she had to get the CEO fired just last month. Given that she knows all this, what I cannot understand is why she would give that same organization, one that cannot point to one tangible thing it has accomplished in 10 years, another $50 million of taxpayer money this year? It does not make sense.

Mr. Speaker, we are here tonight because, on May 6, I asked the Liberal Minister of Health how much more money she was planning on giving Canada Health Infoway, given that it had blown $300 million on PrescribeIT for no tangible benefit to the taxpayer. She answered that the CEO of Canada Health Infoway's “behaviour was [totally] unacceptable”, and that is why she asked the board of directors to fire him. Then she said that she was going to give Canada Health Infoway another $50 million this year. I will say, I am grateful that she gave a clear-cut, numerical answer rather than dodging the question. That is commendable. However, that clear-cut, numerical answer was totally unacceptable. Why would she give such a backward organization another $50 million this year? That is my question. I have a bit more time, so I want to say that I took the unprecedented step tonight of emailing this question to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health and the Minister of Health's staff. I would never break the rules in this place and comment on the presence or absence of another member; however, I do want to share that I have a terrible feeling that I will be disappointed and that neither of them will answer my question tonight. When this organization came to health committee, I asked its chair, after $4 billion had been pumped into this organization, after 20 years, could he name one tangible program, something it managed, directed, built or designed, that is currently benefiting taxpayers? He could not. He only said that it rolled out a lot of federal funding, answering in vague platitudes. It seems to me that Canada Health Infoway has become a slush fund. The Liberals shovel money at it and then Liberal insiders shovel money around, including to lobbying firms such as Crestview Strategy and, I think, Summer Strategies was the other one. Obviously, it is badly run. The Liberals say it is independent, but then the health minister calls it up and gets the CEO fired. Why would they give such a backward organization another $50 million this year?

Mr. Speaker, to answer the member's first question, I am terribly disappointed. That was no answer at all. I know my constituents very well. I am from the Waterloo region. It is the tech capital of Canada. My constituents, those who work in tech, would love to get a $50-million contract to do nothing. This organization, after 20 years and $4 billion, has done nothing tangible. I am asking the government why it is giving this organization another $50 million, and the member could not point to anything it is going to do. It is going to look at some things. He went to his doctor's office and the doctor was using technology. I am a doctor, and doctors use technology without Canada Health Infoway blowing $50 million on lobbying firms to tell us to use it. The government needs to stop it. My constituents beg the government to stop it. Do not give this $50 million away. Give it back to taxpayers, build hospitals or hire nurses with it, but stop doing this, please.

Mr. Speaker, in response to my question regarding PrescribeIT on May 6, the Minister of Health said that she spoke to the board of directors of Canada Health Infoway, causing them to fire their million-dollar CEO, Michael Green. However, just the day before, the chair of that board, Dr. Peter Vaughan, said that the health minister had never personally raised concerns with him or the board about the $300 million wasted on PrescribeIT. Both these statements cannot be true. Will the health minister tell us which statement was false?

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure today to welcome 58 students and staff from Jacob Hespeler Secondary School in my hometown of Hespeler, who are visiting Parliament Hill today to observe our democracy in action. These students are taking part in an important learning experience, gaining first-hand insight into Canada's parliamentary system, civic engagement and public service. I would like to recognize the dedication of the teachers and chaperones, Dave Lambert, Ashley Pederson, Mishelle Bird and Cole Boland, for helping to guide and inspire the next generation. I welcome all 58 members of the Jacob Hespeler Secondary School visiting today to Ottawa. I hope their visit encourages them to stay engaged and involved in shaping the future of our communities and our country. To the Liberal members across the aisle, Conservatives will be asking hard questions today that pertain to the real-life future prospects of these young people. I beg them to try actually answering today and put on a proper show.

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals gave $300 million to Canada Health Infoway to build PrescribeIT, which the minister now acknowledges was a total failure. However, here is the problem. The board of Canada Health Infoway only fired its million‑dollar CEO after Conservatives raised these failures at the health committee. How much more money does the health minister plan to give this very badly run organization this year? I would like just the number of dollars, please.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my speech by thanking OpenMedia, the Canadian Constitution Foundation and privacy lawyer David Fraser for their excellent work on Bill C-22. The analysis I am about to offer closely mirrors their own, and if the Liberal government members would simply listen seriously to these civil liberties groups, they would not have to hear from me on this bill, but they have not, so here we are. At around age 13, I was horrified to read the following excerpt from chapter 1 of George Orwell's 1984: The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made...would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision...he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in...was guesswork. That gave me a chill down the spine 27 years ago. Could people really live with the government listening to their every utterance, watching their every move? How could the human spirit ever flourish in the utter absence of basic privacy? Even at a much younger age, I knew it was basically wrong for my sister to go through the things in my room or for me to read her diary, not because any authority figure ever told me it was wrong, but because I knew it in my soul. One cannot develop one's thoughts, one's feelings, one's self under prying eyes. That was just respect to my friends and family. What if a power as great as the government or the police violated our privacy? I knew that my mother and her family had escaped a Communist regime in the 1960s, but back then, telescreens were science fiction. Could my family have managed to plan their escape if a telescreen had been in their home? I knew vaguely that there had been revolutions in East Germany and throughout the U.S.S.R., but even in 1989, when those revolutions started, the telescreen idea remained in the realm of science fiction. Fast-forward to today, I am more horrified today. We now have the technological capability to make telescreens. I have a phone in my pocket and an Apple Watch on my wrist. I am most horrified because, with the legislation before us, the Liberal government is attempting to make possible the 1984 telescreen out of every cell phone, AirPod, Apple Watch, smart TV and automobile, anything that is connected to the Internet. To quote the excerpt from 1984 again, “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” I know the members opposite will consider my views outlandish, but they are not. Let me please take them through their own law to show them how they are doing the exact thing they swore they would never do. Proposed subsection 5(2) says: The Governor in Council [which means the government] may make regulations respecting the obligations of core providers, including regulations respecting (a) the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed In plain English, this means a back door. Right now, it is my understanding that my watch listens to everything I say. If I say, “Hey, Siri”, it sends whatever speech follows to the cloud for processing. If I do not say, “Hey, Siri”, nothing goes to the cloud. Proposed paragraph 5(2)(a) allows the minister to require that Apple build in the ability for authorities to listen to my Apple Watch whether I say, “Hey, Siri” or not. The same would go for my phone and my AirPods. Yes, they would need a warrant to actually listen in, but this bill takes the huge first step of building the surveillance architecture in the first place. Once it is built, it will be ripe for abuse either by the government or by hackers. Once it is built, it will not be unbuilt. We are at the stage where the government builds all the telescreens and puts them in our home, but promises to only use them if we have been bad. What is worse is this bill, as pertains to electronic service providers under proposed section 7, such as Apple, Signal, Telegram or Tinder, may be forced to keep that back door secret. Proposed section 15 says: An electronic service provider and any person acting on its behalf must not disclose any of the following information (c) the fact that the electronic service provider is subject to the order; In plain English, this section sets out the fact that the government has ordered construction of a back door to be kept secret. Once this bill passes, our cell phone manufacturer, our messaging service, our dating app may receive a secret order to build a back door into the service for the government to check in on us, and we might never be alerted. Our excerpt from the 1984 says, “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in...was guesswork.” Why? Why, if everything here was above board, would the bill include the ability for the public safety minister to build secret back doors? I do not happen to be one of them, but some Canadians might say it is okay to read their Tinder messages, that they do not care, but to at least tell them if the government is going to do that. This bill specifically allows a minister to do it secretly. Why? Just on these points alone, the construction of a backdoor surveillance architecture and that they intend to keep some parts of this architecture secret, the Liberals should hang their heads in shame. Liberals are supposed to fight against this sort of excessive government reach. They are not supposed to be its source, and it only gets worse. As set forth in proposed paragraph 5(2)(d), in addition to demanding that secret back doors be constructed, the government's ministers can order all electronic service providers to collect and store all metadata for a year. Metadata means many things, but the most important thing to me is location. This bill goes even further than the telescreens in 1984. It would turn every Internet-connected device into not just a listening device, but a tracking device as well, and it would cause that location data to be admissible in a court of law. Let me just give a couple of examples for why I find this concerning. We just had a pandemic, in which some governments went way too far restricting human rights in unscientific ways. Do people remember the red zones and the green zones or the six-person bubbles? It may surprise the House to learn that I never broke a single COVID rule, even though I was a strong critic of their unscientific basis, but I know that a lot of people did. I know that some people sitting on the government side of the House did. It is a matter of public record that Justin Trudeau broke COVID rules and broke the Reopening Ontario Act by attending a Black Lives Matter protest here in Ottawa. If Bill C-22 passes, when there is another pandemic with some silly rules, any police officer could say they suspect that the member for Winnipeg North broke pandemic rules, get a warrant and see his location for every moment of the last 365 days. If he ever stepped into a red zone or ever broke quarantine, it would be game over. This capability would not be merely for COVID laws. It would be for every law. Chrystia Freeland was once found guilty of going 30 kilometres an hour over the limit on the highway to see her dad. Once she was convicted of that, a police officer could check to see her speed for every moment of the 365 days preceding. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. As the head of Joseph Stalin's secret service said, “Show me the man and I'll show you the crime.” If everyone here is surveilled 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every one of us will be liable to be found guilty of something. If the government of the day passes this bill in its present form, I fear that the Liberals may live to see the day when its provisions are used against them. I swear it will not be me doing it, but who knows who will be prime minister in 2046. I fear her last name may be Trudeau-Perry. The Liberals will rue the day they torched all our collective privacy rights. I urge them to correct course. We can catch bad guys without violating the privacy rights of every single Canadian.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is very interesting that the member disagreed with everything I said but failed to point to one specific piece of my analysis that was wrong. Every piece of my analysis was correct. As to this talking point, I keep hearing that all the Five Eyes are doing it. I am proud to be Canadian. I am proud to have been born in the freest country in the land, and God help me, I am going to keep it that way. Just because the member's friends are all jumping off a cliff, it does not mean that the member should too.

Mr. Speaker, the best way to keep a year's worth of surveillance location data secure is to not build a back door or to not save it in the first place. There is some bizarre verbiage in this bill about systemic vulnerabilities, but the point of part 2 of this legislation, as it currently stands, is to build the systemic vulnerabilities that it later says it is not building. It is frankly doublespeak at this point, and it needs to be significantly reworked.

Mr. Speaker, I am relying on the video that privacy lawyer David Fraser put together on the topic. I urge every member of the House, particularly those on the government benches, to see it. It is not outlandish. He is a very credible voice. He teaches at Dalhousie University. He speaks about the Salt Typhoon incident in which the Americans, one of those Five Eyes partners that my colleague from Winnipeg North is so eager to emulate, built these sorts of back doors into their messaging services. The first thing that happened was that the Chinese Communist Party hacked into them and got everybody's private conversations. It is a real threat. If the NSA is subject to this sort of data exploitation by the Chinese Communist Party, I suspect that our country, having just initiated this new security partnership with the Chinese Communist Party, would be even more at risk.

Mr. Speaker, I have come over to the government's side temporarily to offer my question today, because I think it is a common-sense, bipartisan question. I think that anybody on the Liberal side or the Conservative side of the House should be able to ask this sort of question and get a reasonable response. I certainly did not want to be here tonight. I asked what I thought was a very reasonable question to my friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health. She did not really answer it, and that is why I am here tonight. I am going to try asking it again, and I am going to beg her to answer it this time. For folks following at home, I will explain that the Liberal government in the last Parliament spent $250 million on a program called PrescribeIT, with the laudable goal of making it easier for physicians, such as me, to send prescriptions to the pharmacy. I am from the Waterloo region and went to the University of Waterloo. A lot of my friends are tech entrepreneurs and founders. Many of them are senior software developers at this stage of our life. I have asked them how much money this sort of thing should cost. They have said maybe $1 million, and $5 million maximum. There is no way it should have cost $250 million. The Liberals were spraying money from a firehose. It is incredible to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on something that should have cost 250 times less, but what is worse is that the program did not work. The Liberals know that it did not work, which is why they have cancelled it. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money on something that did not work, they are cancelling it. The taxpayer is getting nothing. I know that my friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, was not here in the last Parliament. She did not sign the contract. The Prime Minister also was not here. There is no blame in it for either of them, but as a country, as a Parliament, we need to get to the bottom of this. It is Parliament's sacred duty to protect the taxpayer's dollar, and 250 million is a lot of dollars, so we would like to see the contract. We put forward a motion at the health committee to see the contract. The Government of Canada entered into that contract on behalf of the taxpayers and blew 250 million of their dollars. I think our bosses, the taxpayers, should get to see what the heck happened. My colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, spent two hours of our time filibustering the motion so as to not produce the document. The Prime Minister gave a speech today to reporters in which he said he does not like filibustering, and he criticized some Conservative members for speaking about “cats and dogs”. Does the Prime Minister know that the parliamentary secretary has been filibustering the document production order? Is he happy with that? Why is she doing it? Why will she not stop? Why will she not let the taxpayers see the contract so we can all stop this sort of waste and mismanagement from going forward in the future under the new government, as it likes to call itself? I am sitting close to the parliamentary secretary and can see that she has prepared remarks. I am begging her to put them away and just answer this very simple question for taxpayers: Why will she not just let us, as Canadians, taxpayers and residents in an open society, see the contract, please?

Mr. Speaker, out of respect for the health minister, I informed her office that I would be asking this question. I hope she respects the House enough to stand and answer it. The Liberals blew $250 million on PrescribeIT. That is the same amount they spent on the sponsorship scandal. Taxpayers got nothing for this money. The Liberals are outright cancelling the program, acknowledging that it was a total failure. Now Liberals are filibustering the health committee to prevent the disclosure of the contracts. Why do they not just let Canadians see the contracts so we can all try to prevent such boondoggles in the future?

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have a bad habit of announcing big programs for big money that do not actually work. In Kitchener South, Mohammad Keshvani invested $1.6 million of his own savings and loans to build Angus Valley Montessori, a beautiful child care centre that can serve 100 children. Parents are calling every day and more than 450 families are on the wait-list, yet those spaces are almost all sitting empty. Why is this? It is because the subsidy system is broken. The federal government takes money from taxpayers in Kitchener, brings it up to Ottawa, sends some of that to the province, the province sends some of that to the municipality and, at the end of that chain, 450 tax-paying families are not seeing a dime of what they put into the system. The Liberals want to take credit for a universal child care system, but they never take responsibility when 14,000 families in Waterloo region cannot find proper child care. I call on the Liberals to fix their broken child care system so that Mr. Keshvani and his wife can live their dream of providing high-quality child care to my friends and neighbours in Kitchener. Conservatives will restore child care—

Mr. Speaker, I wish we were here today to talk about health care. Instead, we have to talk about health care fraud. The fraud is undeniable. It is unfair, and the Liberals could stop it by voting for our motion today. For the Canadians watching at home, let me please explain. Currently, if someone declares themselves a refugee to Canada, they get Cadillac health benefits that tax-paying, law-abiding seniors do not get. They get vision care, pharmacare, dental care, physiotherapy, home care, etc. If, after years of waiting for their refugee claim to be denied, it is denied, they continue to get these Cadillac benefits while they spend years making appeals. If their appeals are denied, they continue to get these Cadillac benefits waiting for their deportation to be scheduled. If they fail to show up for their deportation, and currently the government has lost 32,000 people who have criminally failed to show up for their deportations, they continue to get these benefits, even while they are on the run from the law. Yes, they get these bonus benefits that tax-paying seniors do not get and, yes, they get them pretty much indefinitely, but it is also the case that they get better basic hospital care than Canadians. At the health committee, we heard testimony from doctors who came and said that they and their colleagues are charging five times the rate to the federal government that they would charge to the provincial government for the same service. In Alberta, if a senior citizen needs a hip replacement, the surgeon charges $1,000 to do it. That is a great deal, and I thank the orthopaedic surgeons. Someone could not walk and now they can. However, if someone else comes in with a Blue Cross refugee card backstopped by the federal government, the surgeon can charge $5,000 for the same procedure for that failed refugee. If members do not believe me, I invite all of them who are on their phones to google “Billing for out-of-country patients, Alberta Medical Association”. They can see that recommendation in black and white. Let me ask members a question. If a surgeon had a $1,000 case on their wait-list and a $5,000 case on their wait-list, might they not be tempted to do one before the other? I love orthopaedic surgeons. They are good guys, but they are not saints. The Liberals have constructed a literal two-tier health care system, while they fearmonger about us doing something like that. In Ontario, the medical association currently recommends charging three times the rate to the federal government as they would for a Canadian, tax-paying senior. I had to use my own physician login to get that information on its website. That one cannot be googled. Obviously, a system designed this way is ripe for abuse, and it is being abused. For instance, just this past December, Global News reported that 14 men claimed refugee status only after the B.C. extortion task force opened an investigation into them. That is not how actual refugees behave. That is how criminal extortionists behave once they are caught. This is beyond unreasonable. This is beyond unfair. Literal criminals are falsely claiming asylum to get Cadillac health benefits for years. It would be the easiest thing in the world for the Liberals to vote with our common-sense motion to stop this today. I love Canada and I love that Canada is a place that welcomes refugees, desperate individuals who are legitimately fleeing extraordinary hardship like war, famine, genocide or religious persecution. In fact, I would not be in Canada if Canada did not welcome refugees, because I am the son of a refugee. My grandfather brought my mother here in 1967, fleeing persecution and hunger in Communist Yugoslavia. I am not the only MP on this side of the House with that sort of family history. We just heard from the Leader of the Opposition that his wife similarly fled a communist regime as a young girl, and therefore his children, like me, are first-generation Canadians. We want to protect Canada's ability to help such people by saying no to the fraudsters and the criminals who are taking advantage of them. Liberal mismanagement on this file has now prompted the Liberals to worsen health care for legitimate refugees. I am dismayed and disheartened that their solution to this issue is to introduce a copay for all refugees. That means that a six-year-old Ukrainian girl who steps on a land mine, who needs a prosthetic limb once she makes it to Canada, will have to pay 30% of the cost. She does not have that money to pay for that limb. That is insane. That is not a solution to any problem and certainly not the problem at hand. Conservatives will pay for that little girl's prosthetic limb 11 times out of 10. We will also send home the criminals who are abusing the system meant to help her. Canadians expect compassion and discretion from their government. The Liberals today are providing neither. The overall problem, the underlying problem, is the insane backlog and processing delays that Liberal mismanagement has introduced to the system. When Stephen Harper left office, there were 400,000 outstanding immigration files. I think Stephen Harper would agree with me that it was unacceptable. After 10 years of Liberal mismanagement, there are now 2.1 million outstanding immigration files, five times as many. This has passed being unacceptable. This has departed into the realm of the absurd. I know this can be fixed, and I know how to fix it. I called my grandfather last night to make sure I had my facts straight. My whole life, I grew up hearing about my family's escape from Communism. He confirmed the story my late grandmother always told. After they crossed the border, they went to the nearest police station in the nearest city, Trieste in Italy. The police detained my grandfather for three days, separately from my grandmother who stayed with the children. They were treated with compassion and dignity. They were interrogated for three straight days to make sure they were not Communist spies, with questions like, “Were you in the military? Where did you serve? What years? Did you join the Communist Party? Are you a Communist? Where were you born? What is your daughter's middle name?” etc. After three days, their stories were cross-referenced. They checked out completely and they were accepted to a refugee camp. Then, like college applicants, they waited to be accepted to a different country. They received offers from Australia, the United States and Canada. Thank God they chose Canada. They got on a boat, their papers were stamped at the port in Montreal, and that was it. That was the whole process: It was three days of interrogation by a NATO ally, and five months later, they were new Canadians. They were still using telegrams in 1967. How is it that with all the new technological tools available such as facial recognition and AI document processing, the process now takes eight times longer and obviously does not have the integrity it used to have? This is the problem underlying the health care fraud that our motion seeks to address today. We cannot fix the underlying problem. The bad news is that to fix the underlying problem would require an immigration minister who knows what they are doing. When I asked the current immigration minister at committee to explain the process as it currently exists, she could not even do that. I had to read her own website to her, for her to understand that failed refugee applicants still get these supplementary benefits. If she were my medical student, she would have failed her clinical rotation, but she has a position of authority much higher than a mere medical student. She is in the Prime Minister's cabinet. We can only remark that this calls the Prime Minister's judgment into question. I fear it will take a Conservative government with a new immigration minister to fix the fundamental underlying problem. In the meantime, the Liberals could join with us to acknowledge and repair this glaring billion-dollar criminal fraud that is putting our health care system at risk. They could vote for our common-sense motion to stop giving Cadillac benefits to fake refugees, and I urge them to do so.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is the case that, fundamentally, failure has been rewarded in the Liberal government, year after year, for 10 years straight. That is why the passport office broke. That is why the post office has broken, and that is why the immigration system is broken. Eventually, those who govern need to exercise some judgment. They need to be able to say, “This isn't working well. We're going to change it,” instead of doubling down again and again and shovelling money at failed processes. That is why we are seeing the broken immigration system we currently have.

Mr. Speaker, it is important to put these numbers into perspective. Eventually, million, billion and trillion all becomes a haze. The cost of this program has gone up 10 times over the years that it has existed. It used to be $86 million. Now it is $1 billion, and that is about to exceed the entire federal health transfer to the province of Saskatchewan. It is bananas. It is out of control. It is a runaway train. I wish we did not even have to have this conversation. A competent immigration minister would have fixed the problem years ago.

Mr. Speaker, I would just ask my colleague opposite not to shout. I do not think that sort of aggression is warranted here. The Parliamentary Budget Officer made his report. He said this is the projection. It could change if Bill C-12 does not see court challenges. It likely is going to receive court challenges. Many groups have already said they are going to challenge Bill C-12 in court. The PBO said his office has the resources to redo the analysis with this question of Bill C-12 taken into account. We asked him to do that at committee in a motion that the Liberals are currently obstructing. Rather than getting to the bottom of it, in good faith, as we will look into this with the PBO, who wants to, the Liberals are obstructing their own agenda. It is bizarre.

Mr. Speaker, 21 years ago, residents of Kitchener, Ontario, were shocked to hear of a mass murder in our community. Self-described Satanist Michael Sirois rang the doorbell of 87-year-old Verna, whom he once knew from church. He stabbed her and 47-year-old Randy 27 times, including through both eyes. Danny Penner is the brother of Randy. He shared with me the incredible trauma these murders continue to cause in his family to this day. Out of respect for his brother's memory, he has resolved time and again to speak at Michael Sirois's parole hearings. Last week, Danny had flights booked to attend the scheduled hearing, only for it to be cancelled at the last minute out of respect for the psychotic mass murderer's mental health. The justice system is not delivering justice. Parole should not even be a question for this crime. Why will the Liberals not reform the parole system to respect the bereaved family's trauma rather than the so-called mental health of a psychotic killer?

Mr. Speaker, that minister knows very well that he has lost 32,000 people who have been ordered deported. As a physician, as the son of a refugee to Canada, this issue is very close to my heart. I wish we were speaking about health care today, but instead we must speak about health care fraud. We are talking about people who claim refugee status only after they are investigated or arrested for crimes like terrorism or extortion. We need to talk about such people because they are receiving better health benefits than ordinary tax-paying Canadians. When seniors in Kitchener cannot find family doctors and cannot afford their medicines, how on earth does the Liberal government—

Madam Speaker, it is such a pleasure to rise in support of this very excellent bill, presented by my very excellent colleague from Simcoe North. The bill is important. It speaks to principles that are fundamental to a just government, to fairness and to transparency. I am sorry to say that these principles have been sorely lacking in the actions of the Liberal government over the last 10 years. For those just tuning in at home, every year for the last 10 years the Canada Revenue Agency has forgiven or written off more than a billion dollars in taxes or loans owed. In the last fiscal year of 2023‑24, it was $18 billion. As my colleague just mentioned, this is on the order of our entire defence spending, which is about $35 billion a year. For those watching at home, I am thinking of my friend Dave, who is a plumber, and my friend Ryan, who is a contractor. Yesterday, we had a skating event put on by my office in Kitchener, where I met Dragon, a short-haul truck driver, and Lilly, a grade one schoolteacher. Did they receive any forgiveness on their taxes? Did they receive any writeoffs on their loans to the CRA? The answer is that they did not. The vast majority of these writeoffs went to large corporate fat cats who have big lobbyist budgets and spend a lot of time in the offices of the government across the way. The CRA is systematically forgiving the taxes that massive corporations owe to the public. The Globe and Mail reported that last year only 11 corporations accounted for nearly a quarter of the writeoffs. This arrangement raises the question: Who is the government working for? Is it working for the people or for its friends on Bay Street? I can think of two cases in recent memory where the same question arose and where the same principles of transparency and fairness were broken all across the land. One was the COVID pandemic and the mom-and-pop stores. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was teaching medicine at Queen's University in Kingston. There was a hardware store downtown that stood for 70 years. It was run by the Vandervoorts and was called the Vandervoort General Store. Unfortunately, it closed after 70 years of continuously serving the community while Canadian Tire, Home Depot and Walmart all stood open. Similarly, small-time mom-and-pop gyms were closed down while major branches managed to stay open. How did that happen? Through my work in politics, I have come to know some of these lobbyists. They had gigantic contracts lobbying governments, both federal and provincial, to stay open in a way the Vandervoort hardware store simply could not do. Another major example is the SNC-Lavalin scandal. If I were to bribe the dictator of Libya and provide strippers to his sons, I think I would go to jail. However, if I were the proprietors of SNC-Lavalin, I would have the former prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, in the Attorney General's office, violating the principle of prosecutorial independence, which by the way is the same principle the President of the United States broke, resulting in his first impeachment. SNC-Lavalin was able to get its lobbyists, who had the ear of the prime minister, to get sweetheart deals for forgiveness, similar to what the CRA is dishing out to massive corporations, while mom and pop get nothing. However, I do not have any interest in bribing the dictator of Libya anytime soon.

Madam Speaker, I am glad that got a laugh. What the bill would do is restore some of the fairness and some of the transparency. If it passes, which I dearly hope it will, and the CRA forgives more than a million dollars in loans or taxes, it would at least have to say who it gave it to and why. I think the vast majority of Canadians would never see a million dollars, let alone have a tax bill of over a million dollars. It is very simple. It does not say that it cannot continue to exercise this forgiveness; rather, it says that the public is owed a debt, that the government, in its boundless wisdom, has decided to write off that debt, and that we need to know whose it was and why. At the very least, it would give us the opportunity to look at the lobbying registry to see how much that corporation paid to lobby the Liberal government and to ask if those two numbers were related. For those watching at home, I have to say I was so struck, shortly after my election, the first time I opened my parliamentary email. There were literally hundreds of invitations to meet with lobbyists, and there were hundreds of invitations to attend receptions in downtown Ottawa. I instructed my staff, if the meeting did not say Kitchener South—Hespeler somewhere in it, if it was not from a constituent of mine, I did not want to take it. Let me say that from what I have observed during my time here, many of those meetings and receptions are attended by the members opposite. It is my view that these corporations do not spend all that money on lobbying for no reason. They know how to get a return on investment, and I think they are getting that return on investment, as evidenced by the $18 billion that the government forgave large corporations in the last fiscal year. We want transparency. We want the registry. We want to start asking these questions. It was, by the way, my understanding that the common practice, for years and years, was that parliamentarians could at least ask Order Paper questions and put to the government, “Who did you forgive and why?” However, just in recent years, the CRA has stopped providing that basic transparency. We used to have it by convention, and somehow it has gone away over the last 10 years. Now we need to actually write it into the law that this transparency must exist henceforth. I think it is a shame. I wish that we could use the honour system and could continue with our tradition of open government. It is particularly a shame, given that 10 years ago Justin Trudeau came to power promising to have the most transparent government in Canadian history. In this and so many other ways, we have been betrayed. That is about as much as I have to say about it. I know that the members opposite like to say that they are in a new government and are doing new things. This would be a tremendous opportunity for them to turn away from the legacy of the Trudeau government and the legacy of restricting transparency and begin to restore that transparency, even in this small way. Again, this is not going to send anyone to jail. This is not going to stop the practice of gigantic writeoffs for corporate fat cats with a stable of lobbyists, but it is at least going to give the public the answers they deserve. I urge everyone in the House to vote for this bill. For the members opposite, when they vote for this bill, I urge them to consider apologizing for their actions during COVID and apologizing for their actions during the SNC-Lavalin scandal. I hope that Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott will be invited back to their caucus soon.

Mr. Speaker, I found most of that member's speech totally unnecessary. I will explain it very succinctly. Conservatives are here to oppose bad laws. Bill C-9 has become a bad law because of this bad amendment that the Liberals have agreed to, clandestinely with the Bloc, as reported by the National Post. When the former chair of the justice committee said that he thinks some religious texts are hateful and should be banned, we found that appalling. We thought he was on his way out. He has since been elevated to cabinet, and apparently it is now the position of the government and the Prime Minister that some religious texts are hateful and need to be banned in Canada. I have a very simple question for this member: Who was the Prime Minister when the religious exemption was put into section 319?

Mr. Chair, it is such an honour to rise on behalf of the people of Kitchener South—Hespeler, thousands of whom work at the largest car plant in Canada, the Toyota factory in Hespeler. We, on this side of the House, have explained time and again how this electric vehicle mandate directly hurts workers right now and how it ends up being a cash transfer to Tesla, which does not make cars in Canada. It is a cash transfer from Canadian auto workers to an American auto firm. Every time we bring it up, the Liberals on the other side say they are looking at it and working on it. The member is more experienced in politics than I am. Can she explain why the Liberals cannot just end it today?

Mr. Chair, in 2023, I was a simple Canadian citizen, a physician from Kitchener, Ontario, and I was really concerned that the government signed a $15-billion contract on my behalf, and on behalf of all Canadians, with Stellantis, without showing us that contract. I know that my colleague from Vaughan—Woodbridge is a successful businessman in the steel industry. We now see, as it was disclosed at the industry committee, that the industry minister did not even read the contract, much less show it to the Canadian public. Reflecting on his extensive business experience, could the member explain what on earth could justify that?

Mr. Chair, the debate tonight should not be necessary. The Prime Minister of Canada called an election saying that he needed a mandate to take action to stand up against Trump and to build Canada strong. It has now been nine months, and he has not taken those actions. Many people took the Prime Minister at his word, but we all saw him nodding meekly in the Oval Office while President Trump threatened to take every last one of our auto sector jobs. Today, the President is making good on that threat, and the Prime Minister is failing to live up to his promise. When we ask the Liberals what they are going to do about it, they say, “Who cares?” and that they cannot control Trump anyway. No kidding, we knew that. We were not the ones who called an election saying that we were going to solve the problem by gesticulating with our elbows somehow. When I was knocking on doors, people would ask me what to do about Trump, and I would be honest with them. I would say then that we cannot control him. We can only do in this country what we can do in this country, which is a lot, but the Liberals are not doing those things. I sat here during the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry's speech to kick off this debate. It was a bizarre, ChatGPT history of the auto sector in Canada. Conservatives did not call this debate to talk about the auto sector's history; we came here to talk about its future and how we can secure that future with concrete actions tonight. Do the Liberals even believe in the future of the auto industry in this country? If they do, why were they eulogizing it? I have six concrete actions that Conservatives are proposing that the Liberals could take tonight. Number one is to have countertariffs. It was the core of the Liberals' election platform, and it makes sense. Here is the math: Ford Motor Company is an American car company. After 10 years of failed Liberal industrial policy, it barely makes any cars here anymore, but it does make 150,000 F-150s in the United States and ships them up here, where zero tariffs are paid. Conversely, the Toyota plant in my riding makes 500,000 vehicles, of which it ships 400,000 to the United States, and it is getting killed on tariffs of, on average, 15% of the purchase price. Why does the government not keep its promise, put tariffs on the F-150s and use the money it gleans to offset the tariffs Toyota is paying to protect our auto sector? Number two is to get rid of the ridiculous EV mandate. For those following along at home, Toyota makes awesome, low-emission hybrid vehicles in this country and it gets no credit for it. Under the Liberals' mandate, Toyota has to buy EV credits from Tesla, which makes no autos in this country. It is a cash transfer from the Canadian auto worker to Tesla. It makes no sense and should end tonight. The Liberals could end it tonight. I had representatives from Toyota in my office last week explaining that, even if it is paused, they still cannot invest in their people and in their plants if they do not know if they are going to be punished by the radical, woke, nonsense caucus of the Liberal party. Number three is to get clarity on the strategic response fund. It was in the Liberals' platform. They announced it in the spring and re-announced it in the fall. No auto manufacturer knows where that money is going or what the Liberals are doing with it. Auto manufacturers cannot make investments until they find out. Number four is to get rid of the HST on Canadian-made vehicles. It is simple. That ties in to number five, which is to just ask Canadians to buy Canadian. Why is it left to the Premier of Ontario to be Captain Canada pouring out a bottle of Crown Royal because one bottling plant was moved down south? The Prime Minister has never asked Canadians to step up and buy Canadian. Why will he not be Captain Canada? The math is simple. In this country, we buy 1.8 million vehicles a year, and we only make 1.3 million vehicles a year. If we would all commit, with the leadership of a Prime Minister living up to his promise, to buy the vehicles that we make, it would help those families that are worried about their jobs and about buying presents for their kids this Christmas. Number six is to get rid of the industrial carbon tax. It makes no sense. Let me explain something very simple: Global warming is a global problem. When we put in taxes that drive manufacturing down south, where gas-powered vehicles are made that could have been made in Canada, it does not reduce carbon emissions globally. It is a nonsense policy, and the Liberals should get rid of it today. I look forward to the Liberals explaining to the House, and to all Canadians, why they will not take these concrete actions, which, by and large, they promised in their platform. Why will they not take them tonight?

Mr. Chair, I respect the honourable gentleman very much. I am very concerned that he did not listen to a word of my speech. We are in a trade war. I am asking the government to fight the trade war, to take actions on the trade war. We do not win a war by lying down and going to sleep. We do not win a trade war by going to the Oval Office and promising the President $1 trillion of Canadian investment for nothing, and then nodding meekly and saying nothing when he promises to rob us of every single Canadian auto job. That is not winning a trade war. That is not what the Liberals ran on. That is not what they promised. I am asking them to take action.

Mr. Chair, Canadians do not want handouts when they lose their jobs; they want their jobs back. The Liberal solution to every single problem is to take tax money and then throw it at the wall. We want our jobs back. We want to work. We do not want EI. It is the opposite of what the Liberals ran on. It is the opposite of what the Prime Minister promised. After 10 years, it is still not going to work.

Mr. Chair, I am a simple physician from Kitchener, Ontario. I grew up in Hespeler. I represent the people of Kitchener and Hespeler, and I care about the jobs in Kitchener South—Hespeler and the Toyota plant there. All of my effort is on that plant. There are many members on this side who have met with all of those groups. Those lobby groups know not to bite the hand that feeds them. They are still working on the Liberals, begging them to take appropriate action, so, no, they are not going to come out and condemn the Liberals while they are in that situation. It is up to us to be bad cop.

Mr. Chair, that is a big question for one minute. The major problem is 10 years of failed Liberal policies that have put us in such a weak position where somebody might want to have a trade war with us. We have more resources per capita than any other country. We have the space. We have the people. We have to let them get to work and get bureaucracy out of the way. The Prime Minister and his budget have been building that bureaucracy.

Mr. Speaker, that member did not answer the question, so I am going to ask it again. The Prime Minister caved on countertariffs, on digital services taxes and on legal disputes about softwood lumber. We thought he was getting nothing for Canadians, but it turns out he was getting lots for his company, Brookfield. Days after he was in the White House, the Americans signed an $80-billion nuclear reactor deal with Brookfield. Why is it that everywhere the Prime Minister goes, Brookfield gets a sweet deal and Canadians get no deal? Why?

Madam Speaker, this is a real doozy of a budget. It is such a doozy that perhaps this will be my last speech in this Parliament, so let us make it count. I want to start with some confessions. I believe we need to spend less and invest more. I believe we need to build Canada strong. I believe we need to make generational investments in Canada's future. Unfortunately, this budget does none of those things. Each of those slogans is taken straight from the Prime Minister's mouth or the Liberal Party platform. We are six months in. The budget is six months late. Even with that homework extension, the budget fails to produce on each one of the Liberals' own platform promises, and the House must give their work a failing grade. Let us walk through them. The central promise was to spend less and invest more. In an April 19 Instagram video, the Prime Minister explained what he meant by that. He likened it to purchasing a house: The purchase price is a capital investment, and heat and electrical are operating expenses. Let us take the first half of his promise on his own terms. Is he spending less on operating expenses? No. By the Liberals' own extremely loose definition of investment, the operating expenses are going up under budget 2025. I would ask those following at home to please turn with me to Table A1.5 on page 233 of the budget.

The day-to-day operating balance was minus $4.1 billion under the Liberals' definition for 2024, and it will be $33 billion under their definition for 2025. Is this what spending less on operating expenses looks like to the Prime Minister, increasing the operating deficit by 700%? Have the Liberals gone mad? Do their promises mean nothing? How are we supposed to have a democracy when someone can run an election on balancing the operating budget and then increase the operating deficit by 700% in their first year? This is a terrible trick on voters. If I was not already signed up for blue team and a well-dressed Goldman Sachs banker ran for prime minister with red team promising to spend less and invest more, I might have believed him. I might have voted for him. That is how much I agree that we should spend less and invest more. Millions of thoughtful and prudent Canadians did believe him and did vote for him. Today the rug has been pulled out from under them. The budget is a sham; the Liberals are spending more. Before they start shouting about tariffs across the way, those at home can please turn to page 66 of the budget document, Table 1, in which the government estimates that $7 billion of the deficit is due to tariffs, or what they call “Economic and fiscal developments since FES 2024”. Therefore, the operating deficit increases by $33 billion, but only $7 billion of that is in any way a consequence of tariffs. The rest is self-inflicted. Let us talk about the second half of the Liberals' promise, which is to invest more. The issues are twofold: how much investment there is and whether the investments are good or bad. I thank God for the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Table 1 of the PBO report on the budget shows an increase in capital investment based on the PBO definition of $7 billion for 2025. The deficit has doubled from $40 billion to $80 billion, which is a $40-billion increase, and only a fraction of this, or $7 billion, is new investment under this definition. Obviously, this is not generational or transformative, just in terms of the size of the investments, but are they good or are they bad investments? I am a physician, and I do my own investing for my retirement. How to define an investment as good or bad is very easy. A good investment provides a good rate of return, and a bad investment provides a negative rate of return. To use the Prime Minister's Instagram example, if someone buys a $1-million house, that is indeed an investment. If that house loses 20% of its value, that person is $200,000 poorer, and that is a very bad investment. Every single year the Liberals have been in power, they have told us that they are taking our money through taxes to invest it for us, because we do not know how to invest as well as they do. They did it in 2015. Their platform promised “historic new investments in infrastructure”. In 2019, their platform promised, “We will run modest deficits for three years so that we can invest in growth for the middle class”. Their 2021 platform promised to “Immediately invest $6 billion...to support the elimination of health system waitlists.” What sorts of returns did we get on this investment? Did any of that happen? I do not see the historic infrastructure they built from 2015. I do not see that the middle class has experienced growth. In fact, I see that it has been decimated by the Liberals' inflationary deficits. Lastly, as a practising physician, I can promise we are far from eliminating health system wait-lists as they promised; wait-lists are worse now than they have ever been. Furthermore, the national debt has gone from $600 billion to $1.2 trillion over the last 10 years. None of this quite seems as though the Liberals' investments are paying off. It rather seems as though Canadians know how to invest, but the government keeps taking their money and then investing it on white elephant programs that provide no rate of return. What is the top-line conclusion of this? It is that we are now spending $60 billion on debt financing. This is more than we spend on health care transfers or on national security. It does not seem to me that in the aggregate or in any specific case, when the Liberals say they are going to take people's money to invest it on their behalf, they do any sort of a great job at it ever. It never seems as though their investments provide anything like an acceptable rate of return. In fact, Bernie Madoff gave his clients a better rate of return. However, let us take a specific case and drill deeper: housing investment. I find myself asking how many members in the House have ever, with their own hands, built a house from start to finish.

Madam Speaker, there are not many, and this does not surprise me. In general, politicians do not know how to build anything, because they do not build things. Builders build things, and home builders build houses. In Canada, home builders have always built homes. The reason they are not building homes now is that they are not allowed to. My friend Cal is a small-time renovator who lives in Kitchener. He bought a dilapidated house in London, Ontario, and wants to renovate it into a triplex so that three families can move in. He has waited months and months for the city to approve it. I have an Albanian friend, Ben, who is a mid-sized housing developer in Kitchener. He bought a plot of land and wants to build 36 townhomes. The city fought him and said he can only build 16. He had to get lawyers and fight in the Ontario Land Tribunal for two years to finally be allowed to build homes during a housing crisis. My friend Mike owns a gym in Kitchener. He moved locations, and to get his operations running up at capacity, he needed to put in a new washroom for a change room. It took months and months to get that permit for a toilet. In each case, it is terribly demoralizing and financially injurious to have bureaucrats tell people what they can and cannot do with their own property when they are trying to build houses and provide services for our communities. In every case, and this is the issue from coast to coast to coast, bureaucrats stand in the way and say it takes nine months to approve a toilet. Rather than standing up against this violation of property rights and letting builders build, the federal government is going to spend $15 billion for a new federal bureaucracy to add on to the municipal bureaucracies. This will not work; it is a bad investment. Even if people thought the Liberals had perhaps turned over a new leaf after 10 years of bad investment, I am sorry to disabuse them of this notion. Pouring money into bureaucracy will not fix the housing crisis; it is the cause of the housing crisis. We need to build Canada strong, but the budget builds Canadian bureaucracy strong. I want to make a last point about the Liberals' last promise: generational investment. The budget is not providing generational investment; it is providing generational debt. They are increasing spending by a lot and investment by a little. The sum total is $2,000 of new debt for every man, woman and child in our nation just this year. I have a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. How could I kiss them goodbye this morning and tell them that I am going to Ottawa to vote for a budget that puts them in thousands of dollars of debt before they even hit kindergarten? I honestly ask whether the Liberal MPs have small children. Have they told them that they are raiding their college fund, foreclosing on their future, to place bets on government bureaucracies that never pay off? I cannot imagine they have. In fact, I suspect that they were rather taken in by the Prime Minister's promises as well. I suspect that they did want to build Canada strong, spend less money and invest more and that many of them are feeling terribly disappointed now. To them, I extend my warmest personal invitation to come sit next to me on this side of the House. I ask them to please stand up now if they would like to take the offer.

Madam Speaker, as for the second point, it is easy to tell mistruths with statistics. Canada's federal debt is low compared to pure countries as a percentage of GDP, but in terms of Canada's total public debt, because the federal government off-loads so many services to the provinces, such as education, housing in some important respects and health care, the provinces have taken on terrible debts. The federal government has to backstop that debt, which is what puts us at risk of having a difficult time financing our debt. It is important to choose the correct statistics when we are talking about a specific problem. As for my leader's record as a housing minister, this is a very tired attack. I cannot believe the member did not hear the answer in the speech I gave. Builders build homes; housing ministers do not build homes. That is why we have had housing minister after housing minister from the Liberal side promise to solve the housing crisis.

Madam Speaker, I think we have decades-old standards for how budgets are disclosed to the Canadian public. To suddenly change those standards is shifty or sneaky. Then, it causes me a crisis of faith to find out that, even based on the Liberals' own terms, they are not increasing investment by as much as they are increasing spending. I was looking at Brookfield Asset Management's stock price increase. Shortly after the Prime Minister became the chairman there, he did some reorganization, moving the money around into different pots, and its stock price shot up compared to the S&P 500. Two years later, it is coming back down, because playing these sorts of shell games between operating expenses and capital may look very good and may attract some investor dollars, but in the end, those investors are going for a wash.

Mr. Speaker, it is adjusted for the inflation that they caused. The Liberals' new budget is generationally expensive. It is historically expensive. Every dollar the Prime Minister spends will come out of Canadians' pockets. The more Liberals spend, the more things will cost. Through either taxes or inflation in the future, the costs will come. Eighty billion dollars is $2,000 for each man, woman and child in our country. That is $2,000 for my three-year-old daughter and $2,000 for my one-year-old son. Why should they have to pay this generational debt the Prime Minister is saddling us with? Why is the Prime Minister breaking his promise to spend less?

Madam Speaker, I have admired the hon. member's oratory skills for many years, so it is a real delight to get to ask him this question now. One part of his speech that I admired most was his defence of provincial jurisdiction. I think it is important that the people who would be most affected by a policy be the ones who design it, so then I was surprised when he said that he thinks the national carbon tax was critical for fighting climate change. Does he not find that a bit contradictory with what is otherwise his defence of provincial jurisdiction? Would he maybe provide some comments on the fact that in the United States, carbon emissions per capita have gone down by a greater percentage over the last 10 years that the Liberals have been talking about the carbon tax?

Madam Speaker, I visited the Kitchener food bank. Its CEO told me that visits to the centre have quintupled in the last 10 years. What happened 10 years ago to start all of this? The Liberals came into power, promising to grow the middle class, but after 10 years of their massive spending on nonsense like gender-neutral rice in Vietnam, the middle class in Canada can no longer afford to eat. Some 39% of Canadians experienced food insecurity in the last 12 months. I do not think the multi-millionaire Goldman Sachs banker Prime Minister has any idea what Canadians are going through right now. Every time we bring up this crisis, the Liberals say we should be thankful for their school cafeteria program. If that program was working, why has food bank use by children doubled over the last few years in our country? Why would Canadians trust the Liberals, who cannot run a post office or a passport office, to do something as important as feed our children? We cannot and will not. Conservatives will fight for a budget that makes life affordable again so that parents can feed their own kids.