Government Orders
moved: That, given that the House recognize that (i) Canadians of Chinese descent have made immeasurable contributions to Canada, (ii) the people of China are part of an ancient civilization that has contributed much to humanity, (iii) the distinction between the people of China and the Chinese state, as embodied by the Communist Party of China and the government of the People's Republic of China,…
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Mr. Speaker, the government's lawyers are stuck in Afghanistan. There are 28 of them. They worked for the Canadian embassy, and they are being hunted by the Taliban because they worked for Canada. The foreign affairs department passed along their names to the immigration department so they could escape to freedom and to Canada, but the immigration department has yet to process their applications. …
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Mr. Speaker, Canada's mortality rate is not the best in class. Japan, Finland, Australia and many other OECD countries have much lower death rates from COVID. Canada is one of the few remaining countries with domestic air travel restrictions in place. Canadians have endured the isolation of the pandemic and separation from loved ones. We live in a vast country where air travel is often the only wa…
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Madam Speaker, in March 2020, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions reduced the domestic stability barrier to 1%, thus freeing up an additional $300 billion in capital. The government at the time said that it expected the banks to lend it out, and the banks did loan it out. Mortgage credit has exploded over the last two years of the pandemic, from $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion …
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Niagara West. I would like to quote a fiscal Conservative, who stated: Canadians want to know that the principles guiding government are ones that they share. Here are our principles. First, governments created the deficit burden. And so governments must resolve it—by focusing first in their own backyards—by getting spending down, not …
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague's question highlights an important debt of gratitude and an important debt we all owe, as Canadians, to the veterans who have served this country, both in current and past conflicts. I know that my wife has many members of her family who have contributed to Canada's armed forces and served in uniform in both of the great wars of the 20th century. I would not be her…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question. I think we need to invest more in equipment for the Canadian Armed Forces. It is clear that we have a problem because, after sending only $100 million worth of equipment to Ukraine, the government said it could not give any more, because we have no more equipment to give. It is therefore clear that spending on the Canadian Forces must be i…
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Madam Speaker, there are no contradictions at all. In fact, when the current government took office on November 5, 2015, it inherited a budget surplus. The previous government had balanced the budget by the time the current government took office. In fact, it then spent an inordinate amount of money until the fiscal year end of March 31, 2016, that actually pushed the country back into deficit. It…
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Mr. Speaker, the government says Line 5 is important to the government. It supplies almost half of Ontario and Quebec's energy needs. If it is so important, why is the government not opposing the application made in the U.S. federal court to shut down this pipeline?
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Mr. Speaker, Line 5 is being threatened yet again with another shutdown through an application filed in U.S. federal court. This would cut off gasoline, diesel, propane and jet fuel supplies to Ontario and Quebec. Has the Prime Minister picked up the phone and talked to President Biden to get this matter resolved, or will he have to invoke the 1977 treaty just to talk to the White House about this…
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Mr. Speaker, the Emergencies Act is only supposed to be used when there is no other law in Canada able to deal with the situation. It is not clear that threshold was met. When emergency powers are used in a democracy, the question that must be answered is this: “Did the government act lawfully in the invocation of those powers?” To answer that question, Justice Rouleau needs cabinet documents. For…
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians need answers about the government's invocation of the Emergencies Act. The key question is whether the invocation of these extraordinary powers met the legal requirements of the act, a question Justice Rouleau and the public inquiry need to answer. In order to do that, Justice Rouleau needs access to documents covered by cabinet confidence. Will the Prime Minister, and will …
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Mr. Speaker, Russia is committing war crimes. Reports from Bucha of civilians shot with hands tied behind their backs and of others dumped in makeshift pits have shocked the world. In response, allies have expelled some 400 Russian diplomats, and President Zelenskyy has pleaded with the Prime Minister for Harpoon systems so that Ukraine can defend itself in the future against these types of massac…
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Mr. Speaker, there are reports that some 300 civilian men were massacred last week in Mali by Malian and Russian forces. Only a few short years ago, for a brief moment in time, the government sent hundreds of Canadian troops to Mali and over a hundred million dollars in aid, and then it lost interest. Does the government have any plans to stop future atrocities in Mali seeing that it was once the …
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Louis-Saint-Laurent. President Putin and the Russian Federation are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Reports from Bucha last weekend of dead Ukrainian civilians with their hands bound behind their backs and others buried in makeshift pits have shocked the world, and these war crimes in Bucha are not all …
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Madam Speaker, I think the world before February 2014 was a very different one. We had the peace dividend as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and many NATO members significantly reduced their defence budgets in the view that Russia no longer presented a threat to the safety and security of Europe. That changed after the Sochi winter Olympics, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prime Minister Har…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her question. She is right. The Canadian Armed Forces has problem with recruitment and needs to recruit more people. That said, according to the NATO report, we also need to increase our military equipment budgets to make sure our military has the tools it needs to do its work here and in Europe.
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Madam Speaker, I believe if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for me to speak to this motion, seeing that I moved the motion but did not speak to it when it was initially moved in the House.
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Mr. Speaker, I listened to my hon. colleague's speech with great interest. If I heard her correctly, I think she said that the government is committed to meeting the NATO commitment of spending at least 20% of defence expenditures on equipment, and that would not include NATO modernization or the acquisition of F-35 jets. Could the member tell the House where she thinks the additional equipment sp…
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague raises a very good point. When one reads the Secretary General's annual report of 2021 from NATO, one sees that Canada has underspent in equipment for the Canadian Armed Forces. I think part of what Canada needs to do is ensure that our men and women in uniform have the latest and most encrypted and secure military communications available to them, because as Russi…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, quite simply, I think we need to get better. The Government of Canada needs to do better when it comes to operational excellence. The Government of Canada has immense policy capability, but my observation over the past several years is that its ability to execute operationally has been lacklustre. When we look at the government's implementation of various policies over the years, it…
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Madam Speaker, there are myriad ways in which we need to assist Ukraine and our European allies. The motion in front of us today is one example of what we are calling on the government to do, and is on visa-free travel. The other issue the hon. member has raised is energy. We, as a country, need to understand that our natural gas and oil are not simply important to our economy, but are essential t…
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Madam Speaker, I think the reason the government is hesitant to implement visa-free travel probably has to do with the fact that it does not believe it can expeditiously negotiate bilateral or multilateral information-exchanging agreements and implement those agreements quickly enough to ensure that we can weed out any bad actors who might use the cover of a humanitarian crisis to try to sneak int…
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Madam Speaker, I want to tell my colleague how touched I was by his grandchildren's mural that was put together. Quite simply, I think we need to do both. We need to shorten the time and increase the availability of biometric scans for Ukrainians wanting to come to Canada. Subsequent to that, we also need to shorten the processing time for applications by IRCC to ensure that people get a yes or no…
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Madam Speaker, I would like to speak to the debate on the report from the citizenship and immigration committee. Essentially, the report does three things. It condemns the unwarranted and unprovoked attack on Ukraine by President Putin and the Russian Federation. It calls on the government to support Ukrainians and people residing in Ukraine who are impacted by this conflict to ensure that there i…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague across the aisle for his remarks. Natural gas is clearly about defence and security. That is why there has been a raging debate in Europe about Nord Stream 2. It is why Germany just cancelled Nord Stream 2 in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It is why Donald Tusk, then prime minister of Poland in 2014, in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, asked …
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moved: That the House: (a) condemn President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation for their unprovoked, illegal attack and invasion of Ukraine; (b) stand with Ukraine, the people of Ukraine and Canadians in the Ukrainian community; and (c) call on the Government of Canada to undertake measures to ensure new natural gas pipelines can be approved and built to Atlantic tidewater, recognizing ene…
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Madam Speaker, I could not disagree with my hon. colleague more. We have for weeks, months and years called for the government to issue an order of general application to direct the CRTC to a new broadcasting policy, under section 7 of the Broadcasting Act, to take state-controlled broadcasters that spread disinformation and propaganda off of Canadian airwaves, such as Russia Today: RT. We have be…
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Madam Speaker, we believe it is essential that Canada work with allied countries. Our position is that the NATO alliance has worked in a very collaborative fashion in presenting a very strong position against the menace of the Russian Federation in Eastern Europe, and we support the actions taken by the Government of Canada to date. We encourage the government to work in a quadrilateral fashion wi…
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague's question. The European Union is also obsessed with pipelines. I have a document here from 2015 that says that pipeline policy is a concern not only for the economy, but also for Europe's security and its expenditures. I encourage my colleague to read this document.
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Mr. Speaker, it is clear that authoritarian states such as Russia and China are spreading disinformation. In the last election, China spread disinformation leading to the defeat of MPs in this very House. Right now, Russia is spreading disinformation through proxies such as Russia Today, RT. Will the government take seriously this threat, take immediate action under section 7 of the Broadcasting A…
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Mr. Speaker, the government has recalled Ambassador LeClaire from Moscow, which is one of the things we called for last week. The U.S. has expelled 12 Russian diplomats this week for espionage. If the government will not expel the Russian ambassador and his disinformation, will it at the very least follow the lead of other allies of Canada and expel Russian diplomats engaged in subversive activiti…
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Mr. Speaker, the government is not participating in joint military exercises between the United States and Scandinavian countries that have been taking place over the last year in the Arctic. Russia supplies 40% of Europe's natural gas and uses this to threaten European democracies by threatening to cut off gas. Canada is the fifth-largest natural gas producer in the world. Will the government now…
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Mr. Chair, our energy is vital not just to our economic interests and not just to our security interests, but to our environmental interests. The single thing that the world could do in the next decade to meet our Paris targets and to reduce global emissions is to replace coal-fired electricity generation with natural gas-fired electricity generation. It is the single biggest step we can take to r…
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Mr. Chair, I think China is watching us and our allies very closely right now to see what we do in response to Russian aggression in eastern Europe. The actions taken by western democracies today are going to dictate the actions of the People's Republic of China for years to come in the Indo-Pacific region. That is why we have to get serious about our foreign policy. We have to get serious about o…
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Mr. Chair, the most important role that Canada can play is to bring members of the NATO alliance more closely together. The single biggest threat that has created gaps between the positions of the various members of the alliance is energy. Russia has used energy as a weapon, as a hard power tool, to cow and intimidate central European democracies, particularly democracies like Italy and Germany, i…
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Mr. Chair, I will share my time with the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles. The attack on Ukraine by the Russian Federation, ordered by President Vladimir Putin, is the first European war since the Second World War and a serious violation of international law and our collective humanity. This attack threatens not only Ukraine, but also Canada, because our security has always been inextri…
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Mr. Speaker, Canada, like Ukraine, shares a border with Russia, our Arctic. We can no longer afford to take our sovereignty and security for granted. Russia considers the Arctic to be its most important theatre, its most important region, and has spent considerable resources over the last decade building up capabilities there. Will the government now act urgently to protect Canadian sovereignty an…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, three days ago, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association filed an application for judicial review in Federal Court to quash the emergency proclamation, the emergency measures regulations and the emergency economic measures order. If the court quashes these three emergency measures, does the member believe that the government will accept the court's remedy or will the government appeal…
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Mr. Speaker, has the government received a legal opinion from either the Attorney General or the Department of Justice as to whether the emergency powers granted under the Emergencies Act, particularly the power to freeze financial accounts, are consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? If so, will the government release the legal opinion to the House before this evening's vote?
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Mr. Speaker, I asked a serious question earlier, which the Attorney General did not answer. I asked whether or not the Attorney General or the Department of Justice had rendered a legal opinion regarding the public order emergency powers and the charter. Surely his answer to my question was not the sum total of that legal opinion, if it exists. Therefore, I will ask the question again. Is there a …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, the government has proclaimed a public order emergency under the Emergencies Act. The question before us today in the House is whether the proclamation is consistent with the law. For a public order emergency to be proclaimed to deal with the blockades here in Ottawa and across the country, three criteria must be satisfied. First, there must be an urgent, critical and temporary situat…
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Madam Speaker, three of the safeguards that have been put into the act are the three criteria that the government must meet in order to trigger a public order emergency. The first is a threat or the actual use of violence to achieve a political, religious or ideological objective. The second is a threat to the health, safety and lives of Canadians that is beyond the capacity of a province to deal …
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Madam Speaker, the issue here is not a lack of laws to effectively deal with the situation either here in Ottawa or previously at the four border crossings; it is a lack of law enforcement. As the former commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police said yesterday, the power to make arrests, seize and tow vehicles, cordon off the city, put up checkpoints and get thousands of additional officers in…
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Mr. Speaker, a century ago, Viscount Haldane created the emergency doctrine of the peace, order and good government clause of the Constitution. At the time, he indicated that in peacetime, when that clause was used to create legislation, the onus was on the government to justify the use of that extraordinary power. Justice Laskin, in the Anti-Inflation Act reference case, seemed to suggest the sam…
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Madam Speaker, the issue here is a failure to uphold the rule of law that has been years in the making. Two years ago the blockades on the CN main line and in western Canada at the pipeline were allowed to continue for weeks. People who tear down statues in front of provincial Legislatures and in other public squares in this country suffer no consequences. I think we have a failure here to uphold …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I present a petition signed by constituents in my riding of Wellington—Halton Hills. The petitioners call on the parties in Parliament to work together to commit to reducing Canada's greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% from 2005 levels by 2030, to establish a concrete plan to end fossil fuel subsidies, to stop all new fossil fuel expansions, to restart the just transition consult…
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Mr. Speaker, Russia supplies almost half of Europe's gas. President Putin has threatened to cut off those gas supplies if Europe comes to Ukraine's defence. People will freeze. Industry will shutter. Europe's economy will grind to a halt. President Biden has been rallying natural gas producing countries around the world to secure additional supplies in the event that happens. Can the government ex…
Read full speech →Emergency Debate
Mr. Speaker, quite simply, I believe that the blockades are illegal. I believe that the blockades here in Ottawa and at the international border crossing in Coutts, Alberta, are illegal. I believe that it is up to law enforcement to uphold the law and ensure that these blockades are taken down at a time and choosing of law enforcement. Governments and cabinets in this country do not direct law enf…
Read full speech →Emergency Debate
Mr. Speaker, I believe that we should encourage all Canadians to get vaccinated. Vaccines are a miracle of modern medicine. They are safe and effective, and they are a critical tool for emerging out of this pandemic. We should encourage Canadians to get vaccinated through nudges and encouragement, not by demonizing them and singling them out. I think that is the leadership we need from the current…
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