Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, Terry Fox inspired a nation with his fight against cancer. Fifty years later, his dream of raising money for the fight against cancer still lives on. Yesterday, the Minister of Health announced that the government is providing $80 million to the Terry Fox Research Institute for the institute's work in precision oncology research. Can the parliamentary secretary tell this House how this investment is accelerating research and bringing more personalized cancer care to patients across the country?

Mr. Speaker, I rise today, with the member of Parliament from Port Moody—Coquitlam, to present an e-petition on behalf of over 2,400 Canadians seeking to designate February as Canadian Chinese heritage month. I stand, with national support from coast to coast, with many organizations and cities across the country joining our movement. The contributions of Chinese Canadians over the past 230 years deserve recognition. Our government's message this year has been about building Canada strong. Chinese Canadians have been doing so since before Confederation.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition on behalf of constituents to designate February as Canadian Chinese heritage month. The petitioners note that there are over 1.8 million Chinese Canadians, representing one of the largest and most established communities within the country. For generations, Chinese Canadians have played an essential role in shaping Canada's social fabric. Their contributions date back to the 1800s, with their vital role in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. However, the petitioners remind us that this history includes deep hardship. Chinese Canadians have endured systemic exclusion and discrimination, including the Chinese head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Despite these injustices, Chinese Canadians have preserved and shared a rich heritage that continues to strengthen Canada's multicultural mosaic. The petitioners highlight that February is an important period for Chinese communities because of the cultural significance of the Lunar New Year, making it a meaningful and appropriate time for recognition. Given that Chinese heritage month initiatives have taken place throughout numerous municipalities across Canada, Markham included, and have reached provincial legislatures, with Ontario among the first, it is time to take the most reasonable next step at the national level. Such a holiday would provide an opportunity for education, reflection and celebration while truly capturing the unique identity of the Chinese Canadian community.

Mr. Speaker, while I now sit on a different side of the House, my priorities remain the same: standing up for my constituents and making sure their concerns are acted on. Last fall, I held a crime prevention town hall in Markham—Unionville. What I heard clearly and repeatedly were concerns about auto thefts and home invasions and the impact these crimes have on families' sense of safety. Can the minister outline how Canada's new government is strengthening public safety and ensuring—

Mr. Speaker, as we get into the details of the budget implementation act, it is important to take a step back to assess the philosophy that has informed the budget itself. The big picture of the budget rests on a single question: Is the government a player or a referee in the arena we know as Canada? Of course, this arena is not hosting a game of hockey or soccer. This is a game of factions. This is a game of competing private interests. The government, as a referee, would take no sides. The referee gets out of the way. He draws the lines of the arena, and lays down the rules that allow the best players and teams to win. This is the North Star of the Conservative world view. Unfortunately, the red Liberal government sees itself as a player. It is picking winners and losers through that age-old enemy of human progress, central planning interventionism. As the Liberals see themselves as a player, they have always stacked the game in their favour. They are team asset inflation. They are team rentier economy. They are team feudalism. The Liberals do not believe in a productive economy that works for hard-working Canadians. One of the chief ways team feudalism has empowered its rentier economy with unending asset inflation is through immigration. The immigration file has been noticeably absent from the debate on the budget and its implementation, so I will ask members to please allow me to give it some floor time. Affordability for Canadians is a core Conservative focus. As a member of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, I have learned over the past several months how the immigration file is deeply affecting housing, health care and employment for everyday Canadians. The Liberals admit, on page 95 of the budget, that, “the pace of arrivals began to exceed Canada’s capacity to absorb and support newcomers”. On the same page, the Liberals further admit, “In 2018, 3.3 per cent of Canada’s population were temporary residents. By 2024, that number had more than doubled to 7.5 per cent, an unprecedented rate of growth that put pressure on housing supply [and] the healthcare system”. These expressions in percentages do not do the raw numbers justice. Let me take one of the most devastating years on record, that is 2023, and repeat the figures. We issued over 681,000 study permits to international students, 761,000 work permits through the international mobility program and over 183,000 work permits through the temporary foreign worker program. I grant there is some overlap between these categories, as a single person can be counted under two categories. Nonetheless, we are in a situation where our economy has been flooded with at least an extra million foreigners in any given year. The rapid growth of temporary residents overall in 2022 and 2023 contributed to Canada having the highest annual population growth rate since 1957. These figures are madness when we realize that only 30 years ago, we used to admit around 30,000 international students per year. Team feudalism across the aisle knows what game it is playing. Just as it engages in deficit spending to map more units of currency to a stagnant suite of goods and services, team feudalism has flooded an increasing number of people into Canada against a roughly steady state housing and jobs situation. What does team feudalism produce in both situations? It produces its time-honoured goal of asset inflation under a rentier model. The Liberals have used both the temporary foreign worker program and the international mobility program as a business model to keep wages artificially low, to keep paper profits high and to price Canadians out of the job market. The interventionist red Liberals pick their winners, and they have chosen to give a discretionary government subsidy to unproductive rentier businesses that can only function on the modern equivalent of slave labour. I wish this were the end of my immigration critique, but there is another unfortunate layer. I do not know whether this is a tragedy or a comedy. We know, for instance, that nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle here. This finding is confusing unless we realize that we have not been matching our international student intake to our labour market needs. The main field of choice for international students has been business studies and, at the college level, nearly 50% of all international students are enrolled in business programs. In the 2022-23 academic year, there were over 90,000 international students enrolled in college business programs and close to 60,000 international students in university business programs. This is not the labour force we need to build Canada strong. A promise was made to many of these students that this would put them on the immigration track in Canada, when the simple fact was that there were not enough permanent resident slots to accommodate the huge volume of students we let into the country. What conclusion are we now led to? Team feudalism used international students not as a value added to our skills mix, but as a form of quantitative easing to inflate the assets of its rentier economy. It just needed more bodies in the country to boost up rent and housing prices, while suppressing the wages of hard-working Canadians. The Liberals do not represent team Canada. They do not represent the average hard-working Canadian. They represent the most ancient of feudalisms with a fake paper economy bolstered by something that very nearly approximates a slave system. While over two million Canadians visit food banks each month and 700,000 of those are kids, the Liberals work every day to inflate asset prices, whether through deficit spending or by letting any warm body pass into the country to keep those rents sky-high. Team feudalism has the audacity to run a $78-billion deficit with over $90 billion in new spending, which equates to over $5,000 per Canadian household, yet still says they wish to build Canada strong. The question is, strong for whom? The Liberals have not been playing as a referee in the great game of factions. They have chosen to play for team asset inflation and they have made us all poorer for this decision. Young Canadians cannot get the jobs they need, the housing they deserve or the health care services they are entitled to. With money printers working overdrive, what future does Canada have under the Liberal feudal regime? I do not see a future here, and it worries me.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind the Liberal government that it had 10 years to fix any such problem. It had 10 years to address it. Look where we are today. As I said in my speech, the numbers I provided show that it has actually gotten worse. Let us not go back through history to see who did what when. We are talking about how the current Liberal government is unable to resolve this problem to make Canada strong and make Canada better.

Mr. Speaker, with this budget, we are not helping Canadians who have contributed to the Canadian economy and to building Canada strong throughout their lifetimes in Canada. We are not taking care of them when they need it now. It is shameful that a lot of seniors have to line up at food banks and so forth. We need to do more for seniors who helped bring this country to this point. We need to enable them to live gracefully.

Mr. Speaker, there is one message that the Conservatives have for the Liberals when it comes to their overall approach in bills like Bill C-4: Get out of the way. On the surface, the Liberals are selling Bill C-4 as a way of giving a tax break to 22 million Canadians, among other components. That is the headline. That is the label on the packaging. What is the fine print on the packaging? The Conservatives took a look. The fine print is about embedding this proposed tax break in the bigger picture of Liberal deficit spending. We have just passed a new budget that runs a $78-billion deficit. The government is adding $90 billion in new spending. That is $5,000—

Mr. Speaker, there is one message the Conservatives have for the Liberals when it comes to their overall approach in bills like Bill C-4: Get out of the way. On the surface, the Liberals are selling Bill C-4 as a way to give a tax break to 22 million Canadians, among other components. That is the headline. That is the label on the package. What is in the fine print on this packaging? The Conservatives took a look. The fine print is about embedding this proposed tax break in the bigger picture of Liberal deficit spending. We just passed a new budget running a $78-billion deficit. The government is adding $90 billion in new spending. That is $5,000 per Canadian household. Meanwhile, the tax break on offer for Canadians in Bill C-4 checks out to $90 per month. Anything on offer in the bill is already wiped out by interest on the Liberals' deficit spending. The central-planning Liberals are committed to interventionist tactics. We, as Conservatives, are simply asking them to get out of the way of hard-working Canadians so they can build our country strong. We are in a shameful situation in this country, where over two million Canadians are visiting food banks every month. At the end of every month, paycheques are not going far enough. Why is that? The Liberals want to deflect and blame this solely on the trade deficit. However, there is a simple economic fact: When we create more units of currency and map them to an economy that is not meaningfully producing more units of goods and services, we get inflation. As a case in point, in the last five years, grocery prices have risen more than 20%. We cannot print our way out of economic stagnation. We are already in this situation because of all the deficit spending engaged in during the Trudeau years. Why are we doing more of the same? How insulting it is to hard-working Canadians for the Liberals to create a macro situation where paycheques are not enough for food and rent, then pat themselves on the back for doling out welfare in various guises. It is no different from throwing rocks at household windows and offering window replacement services, or pushing us into a pool and offering us a floater, yet this is the world view of the interventionist, nanny-state central planners. The interest payments on our debt already exceed what is transferred to provinces for health care, yet the modus operandi of the nanny state is rather to add to this debt instead of simply letting the natural drive of hard-working Canadians carry our economy forward. Instead of getting out of the way, the Liberals choose to continually stand in the way of a naturally productive, real economy. How can we meaningfully affect prices at the grocery store when the industrial carbon tax makes it harder to grow food, when the fuel standard makes it harder to ship food and when the packaging tax makes it harder to sell food? The Liberals operate in a system of intervention and then propose branded, one-shot measures to create the image of doing good by Canadians. If they stopped their environmentalist overreach, Canadians could do good by themselves. I want to affirm, right now, that all parties in the House seem to me to be committed to making lives more affordable for Canadians. What separates us is not only our methods but also what we can call accumulated technical debt from previous approaches. No matter how many one-off, targeted measures the Liberals put on offer, they are weighed down by the second-order effects of having engaged in far too much deficit spending. The cumulative path of dependence on 10 years of out-of-control spending is a national situation where monthly income cannot meet monthly bills. Therefore, what we must address here is the root of the mindset behind all the deficit spending. Allow me a moment to address how the Liberals could get out of the way and, in so doing, alter the course of Canada's affordability crisis. We can do this only by empowering hard-working Canadians to take the lead. The first shift is one of mindset. Do the Liberals believe in the capacity of their fellow citizens? Do they believe in the entrepreneurs and businesses that move the needle economically in this country? If they do not, I completely understand why they are so attached to interventionist measures. It all makes sense. Otherwise, if the Liberals actually believe in the people, they should get out of the way and create opportunities for everyday Canadians to step up through grassroots initiatives. The second shift consists of removing all the hidden taxes that pile onto the price of groceries. The Conservatives will keep on repeating this until the Liberals hear us: Remove the industrial carbon tax, remove the fuel standard and remove the packaging tax. When I say, “Get out of the way”, there is a very literal way to do this. Why are the Liberals hindering every single step of the grocery supply chain? Food is such a fundamental part of total monthly spending, and this is the one, single area where a concerted effort to get out of the way would yield genuine results. The Liberals do not need a history lesson from me, but one of the core drivers of the French Revolution was the elevated price of grain. There is no area where the Liberals should be more incentivized to get out of the way than the total supply chain that affects grocery prices. When it comes to food, the issue extends beyond partisanship. This is life or death. Finally, the third shift is amplifying the power of a common Canadian paycheque. Canadians are already putting in the hours, day in and day out. Why can Canadians not afford basic necessities through the income they are already earning? It is an insult to every hard-working household to receive handouts after putting in an honest day's work. I believe the Liberals need to do some soul-searching around how they have created this macro trap where the average monthly salary is not enough to afford the average monthly bills. The bottom line here is very clear: The $90-per-month benefit in Bill C-4 is wiped out by the $5,000-per-household cost of deficit spending in the new Liberal budget. If the Liberals want to address affordability, their first step should be tackling the basket of items in every Canadian's monthly spend: groceries. They can do this by stopping their nanny-state, central-planning interventions, stopping the industrial carbon tax, stopping the fuel standard and stopping the packaging tax. My Liberal colleagues, please get out of the way of hard-working Canadians and have the conviction that people can make this economy thrive.

Mr. Speaker, if we look at what is happening today, we are seeing reciprocal tariffs between China and Canada. When Canada imposed a 100% tax on electric vehicles, China imposed reverse tariffs on Canada. What we need to look at is how effective the Liberal government has been in negotiating all the tariffs around the world, whether it is with China, the U.S. or Europe. We seem to be getting more tariffs rather than reducing them. I would like to understand how the Liberal government is going to be addressing this and demonstrating to Canadians that it is working for Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, 2.2 million Canadians line up at food banks every single month, and the unemployment rate is 6.9%, yet as chair of Brookfield, the Prime Minister helped the company avoid $6.5 billion in Canadian taxes through offshore tax havens. While the Prime Minister dropped the most expensive budget in Canadian history outside COVID, the Liberal government has shown us its top priority: making Brookfield richer. Canadians need transparency about the total incentive structure acting on our Prime Minister. Canadians need to know that the doubling of Trudeau's deficit is serving our total national interests, not simply those in the Prime Minister's circle. Canadians need to know whether the Prime Minister is incentivized to serve all Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to be here speaking for Markham—Unionville. The Liberals claim they want to “balance firmness with fairness” in Bill C-14 and that they want "a justice system that works for everyone." This is a false equivalence. There is no “everyone” when it comes to our justice system; there is a value hierarchy, and there is only one spot at the top. Whom do we choose to serve? Whom do we build our justice system around? Day in and day out, the Liberals have shown us whom they truly value. They cater to the common criminals, with fairness for the thief, the murderer and the drug dealer, and firmness for the honest citizen and the compliant taxpayer. They do not value the everyday hard-working Canadian upon whose back this nation was built. We are treated like a tax farm to be extracted from and then fed to the bandits like in some sick joke. The world the Liberals have legislated into being through Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 is madness incarnate. Human narratives are post hoc rationalizations. We commit to a position dictated by our incentive structures, and then we invent reasons why we took the given position. A metaphor I have encountered that captures this dynamic equates our gut instinct to an elephant, and our rational mind to an elephant rider: The elephant moves around any which way it wants, and the rider invents the reasons why the movement occurred. The Liberal elephant is committed to sitting with criminals, and the Liberal elephant rider creates narratives to justify soft-on-crime policies. The principle of restraint is embedded in the very core of the Liberal doctrine on justice, so much so that even though the Liberals were forced to make numerous concessions to Conservative advocacy around the errors of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75, they have still left the principle unchanged in Bill C-14. Let me remind the House what Bill C-14 really is: a direct Liberal admission of failure regarding their soft-on crime policies, without altering the underlying pro-criminal commitments that undergird their doctrine of justice. There is a good parallel to this in the world of science. Scientific paradigms are world views that are ways of looking at and interpreting bodies of facts. We can look at the facts of physics through the paradigm of Newton and the paradigm of Einstein, but we can never hold two competing paradigms at the same time, because each is a totalizing way of looking at the world. In what we might call a justice paradigm, the Liberals are committed to catering to criminals. When they speak of restraint, they speak only of their favourite little lawbreakers. There is no room to look at the world from the world view of the everyday Canadian when the Liberals have chosen to take up a pro-criminal paradigm of justice. This has been a prolonged build-up for what is a very simple solution. The Liberals must know in their heart of hearts that they need to go all the way and repeal Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 in full. They keep saying that they are a new Liberal government and are different from the old Liberal government. Well, I ask that my colleagues show us. Bill C-14 succeeds, from a pro-order lens, where it would move in the direction of undoing the damages of C-5 and Bill C-75. The bill fails where it would retain the principle of restraint. There can be no balance in our system of justice between competing world views. The Liberals need to take one path and go all the way. What Bill C-14 represents is a patchwork of compromises. The Liberals have found such a big tent that competing factions sit uncomfortably together under a single roof. The ideological incoherence in Bill C-14 maps the incoherence of the Liberals' factional support structure and the basis of power. To use a metaphor from earlier, the Liberals have more than one elephant, but only a single elephant rider to rationalize policy commitments post hoc to the entire world. What a mess. The Liberals will be perpetually locked into half measures to keep a tenuous coalition together. With my remaining time, I want to outline some potential positive directions for Bill C-14 if the Liberals accept my commentary on the justice paradigms. First of all, the Liberals need to put law-abiding Canadians first by choosing to commit to the maintainers of order. It is already impossible to hold the principle of restraint as a core value. When we put something together at the centre of our value hierarchy, we will necessarily build a new system around it. Second, once the public safety of law-abiding Canadians is set as the true north of our justice paradigm, it becomes impossible to uphold the errors of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. Restoring mandatory minimums, ending the catch-and-release system and removing the house arrest option for serious offenders are the logical consequences of accepting a new set of priorities. Finally, Liberals will have to come to terms with their big tent and prune the factions that are clearly against the well-being of law-abiding Canadians and the productive society they enable. The principle of restraint for criminals is a principle of constraint on our productive economy. In conclusion, I want to remind the Liberal colleagues that the situation with our justice system has deteriorated to such an extent this is no longer a question of partisan politics. If they continue with this patchwork of compromises, what will the spillover effects be? How many more Canadians need to be shot dead in their own homes by repeat offenders for this systemic madness to bleed into genuine societal chaos? We are not talking about riots in the streets, though that is always possible. We are talking about the everyday chaos of a low-trust society, a slow and steady descent into balkanization and tribalization when citizens see they cannot trust their justice system to serve their interests. If the Liberals continue to wine and dine on the luxury belief of restraint for criminals, the least of their concerns will be the fractioning of their own coalition. They are to fear the fracturing of our society and of the tax base that funds their capacity to engage in those ludicrous luxury beliefs.

Mr. Speaker, if the Prime Minister is serious about delivering his promise, he should attack the fundamental root cause of this problem and repeal Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. As I said in my speech, let us not fool around with more compromises. Let us get at the root cause of this problem. We hear this from our Canadian citizens. We hear this from our police force. Let us fix this once and for all, and stop fooling around with all these compromises.

Mr. Speaker, we are hearing from Canadians and from law enforcement that the current bill, and the existence of Bills C-5 and C-75, are not working. In fact, over the weekend, we had a seminar on crime and heard a very emotional testimony from an elderly couple who lost their 25-year-old daughter. That is the reason we need to fix the fundamentals of what is going on. Let us not give bail to all of the repeat offenders.

Mr. Speaker, today, when we are discussing Bill C-14, the Liberal government seems to be rushing us through its consideration and wants to send it to committee. Members have talked about the ineffectiveness of committees. We are rushing through a bill that does not address the fundamental issues in Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. I would like to ask the member to comment further on that. Why is the Liberal government rushing us through Bill C-14, an incomplete bill with shortfalls?

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Niagara South. The Liberals drafted flawed legislation in Bill C-3. It was too loose in the requirements that would confer Canadian citizenship. The Conservatives and the Bloc members therefore worked together to tighten up Bill C-3. Our proposed amendments were guardrails that would prevent second-order abuses. These amendments were voted on and approved at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. However, the NDP members and the Liberals united yesterday to undo the positive changes that we so carefully crafted at committee and that would harmonize the pathways to citizenship across descent and naturalization. As such, Conservatives will not be able to support this legislation. Today I stand baffled at the complete disregard for the committee process that was shown yesterday. As such, I want to hold my Liberal colleagues accountable to the promises they made on June 19 about sending Bill C-3 to committee and receiving amendments. The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship said the following: “I very much look forward to members discussing and debating this and receiving any amendments or constructive advice.” In response to the minister, I would define our amendments as constructive. We built upon what was presented in Bill C-3 and merely added guardrails. The deputy House leader of the government said, “we are happy to bring in amendments that make sense, in committee, and work together with all parties”. In response to the deputy government House leader, I want to emphasize that the amendments were crafted by both Bloc members and Conservatives. If by “all parties”, the member is referring to recognized parties, it seems that everyone was accounted for in these amendments. The member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre stated, “That is exactly what the committee process is for. We know that bills go to committee and get amended. If Conservative members feel this does not allow for a substantial connection, then let us have that conversation at committee. That is exactly what we should do.” The member further stated, “Of course, all bills need improvement. Let us get it to committee. Let us work fast at committee, make the improvements necessary, bring it back for third reading and pass it.” In response to the member, all I can say is that I wholeheartedly agree. We worked through the committee process to have our important conversations and to improve the bill. We crafted the proposed amendments with care, yet the New Democrats and Liberals have shown, through their actions, that they do not respect the committee process. Finally, not to belabour these points, please let me end with a question by the hon. member of Parliament for Waterloo: “Does the member agree that the right way to provide suggestions and amendments to the legislation would be at committee?” In response to the hon. member, my reply is yes, amendments are to be made at committee. I must ask, then, why have we undone all of these carefully crafted committee amendments? At this juncture with Bill C-3, I do not even see why there is a Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Why did I spend several afternoons at the committee working with my Conservative and Bloc colleagues to improve this legislation when all of this work done by recognized opposition parties can be undone by a party that the Canadian voters chose to punish with only seven seats? With the remaining time, I want to briefly give an overview of the common-sense amendments that the Conservatives and the Bloc members passed in committee. With every amendment, let us examine whether, in any way, they would infringe on a group we know as lost Canadians. First, we proposed amending the three-year presence in Canada, to be achieved within a five-year time frame. This is not a high bar. Certainly any lost Canadian would want to spent 36 months in Canada within a 60-month time frame. That is only a high bar for Canadians of convenience who want Canada to remain open to them as an insurance policy if geopolitical affairs go south in their current country of residence. Second, we proposed adding requirements around language proficiencies, citizenship knowledge and security checks. That is not a high bar. Certainly, any lost Canadian should already know how to speak one of our official languages, should already know about the duties of citizenship and should already have a clean criminal record. It is a high bar only for Canadians of convenience who struggle to speak our official languages well and who struggle to understand the values of our nation. These are the people who want to enjoy the privileges of a Canadian passport without the duties of contribution to our society. Third, we proposed adding two reporting requirements for the Minister of Immigration, where the first would be on the number of citizenships granted by the enactment of Bill C-3, and the second would be on the number of security screening exemptions. Again, that is not a high bar. Certainly, every lost Canadian would like a living record of their ranks' regaining citizenship. Certainly lost Canadians would want the Canadian public to be made aware of exemptions made for people in their ranks with criminal records. This is a high bar only for Liberals who do not want a living record of all Canadians of convenience to whom they granted citizenship. If Canada as a whole were a municipal community, the Conservative and Bloc members would be councillors who merely wish to put speed bumps on our residential roads. Functionally, all our proposed amendments were speed bumps that would have made it harder to drive 80 kilometres per hour in a residential zone. Lost Canadians already know how to drive in Canadian residential zones; they would simply endure a few speed bumps and be on their merry way to regaining their driver’s licence, which is a good metaphor for Canadian citizenship. Canadians of convenience want to drive at highway speeds in our residential zones and then head immediately back to where they came from, with our official driver’s licence in hand. The speed bumps do not bother someone who intends to live as a resident here in our Canadian community; they are a bother only for tourists who want to zip in and out of Canada, acquiring our status symbols without contributing to the society that gave those symbols status. Conservatives will not support the current Bill C-3, which the old NDP-Liberal coalition stripped of the amendments so carefully crafted in committee. We Conservatives stand with all proud Canadians and lost Canadians against the mutilated Bill C-3 that the NDP-Liberal coalition cut up to serve Canadians of convenience. When the next geopolitical flashpoint emerges, how much will the NDP-Liberal coalition take from the pockets of hard-working Canadian taxpayers to fund a vacation bailout for Canadians of convenience?

Madam Speaker, let me remind the Liberal government again that when the law was struck down by the Ontario courts, the Liberal government had every opportunity and all the time it needed to repeal that decision, but it never did. It has done nothing about it. Now that the deadline is coming, the government just all a the sudden wakes up and says it needs to do this. It is rushing this through without due consideration for all Canadians.

Madam Speaker, we truly worked together and considered the value of Canadian citizenship and what it means for Canadians. The amendments we put together would have addressed, as the member mentioned, the naturalization process. People should have a clean criminal record, understand Canadian culture and, most importantly, speak English or French. That is not too much to ask, so we do not understand why the Liberal government and the NDP are trying to rip this away from us so the bill would create another class of Canadian citizens who know nothing about Canada and who do not necessarily value Canadian citizenship.

Madam Speaker, truly we are talking about the values of being a Canadian citizen. My grandfather came to Canada when he was 15 years old, but because of the law of the day, my grandmother could not come here. My mother was born in China, and later I was born in Hong Kong. Therefore, by definition, I am a lost Canadian. However, we went through the proper immigration channels, the residency requirements and all the various citizenship tests. That proves to me that it is valuable to go through the process so people can integrate into Canadian society and be positive role models for the country.

Mr. Speaker, the common-sense amendments that the Conservatives and the Bloc so carefully crafted at committee to improve Bill C-3 are being undone by my postnationalist colleagues across the aisle. The Liberals do not believe in Canada because they do not believe in our borders. They believe in a two-tiered immigration system, where citizenship by naturalization within our borders has harder requirements than citizenship by descent outside of our borders does. They believe in distributing the privileges of Canadian citizenship abroad while offloading the costs and duties of citizenship to those who live coast to coast to coast. They believe that Canadians of convenience should be able to wear the team Canada jersey without ever putting in time on our ice. They are people who want to be in the team photo without being a team player. Let me remind the House of how this entire situation first began. The phrase “Canadians of convenience” emerged after 2006, when, during the Lebanon war, the Canadian government evacuated 15,000 Lebanese Canadians at the cost of $94 million to Canadian taxpayers. They were evacuated beginning in July 2006, and by September of the same year, 7,000 of those evacuees had returned to Lebanon. This was the central reason the Harper government took action to initiate the first-generation limit several years later. Let us make this definition very clear: Canadians of convenience, as grounded in our 2006 example, are those who hold Canadian citizenship but live abroad and do not participate in Canadian society. They view Canada as an insurance policy when a crisis emerges, but never pay into our system. They are passport holders who merely parachute back into Canada when they need assistance. They wear team Canada’s jersey, but they have never played with us. Conservatives are in full support of all measures needed to specifically address the lost Canadians situation. However, lost Canadians must understand that they have been used as a Trojan Horse by the postnationalist Liberals. The first-order effect of the original Bill C-3 would directly help lost Canadians. The second-order effect of Bill C-3 in its original form would have indirectly created over 100,000 Canadians of convenience. This is why the Bloc and the Conservatives united to create common-sense amendments that would lessen the impacts of Bill C-3’s second-order effects. Let us discuss the common-sense amendments that were crafted in committee. Might I add, these were crafted by recognized opposition parties through a committee, where committees are central to the parliamentary process. Our legitimate parliamentary work is being opposed by team orange, which has been stripped of official party status. I will only entertain this tangent once, but I do question the legitimacy of an unofficial party challenging the parliamentary work of recognized parties in committees. What are the optics of this? Why bother having parliamentary committees if all voted resolutions are ignored? I digress, so I will get back to the amendments. The goal of our amendments was simply to harmonize the requirements of citizenship by descent with those of citizenship by naturalization within Canada. Is it too much to ask for a harmonized system with universal standards? What we achieved in the amendments would strengthen the substantial connection test, while adding quality control reporting responsibilities for the presiding minister. One, we amended the three-year presence in Canada to be achieved within a five-year timeline. This would allow some flexibility while ensuring some level of intensity. With any more flexibility, we must seriously ask if we are talking about a path to citizenship or mere tourism. Two, we added requirements about language proficiencies, citizenship knowledge and security checks. It is not a high bar to demand proficiency in one of our official languages. It is not a high bar to demand a prospective Canadian citizen should understand the responsibilities and privileges of Canadian citizenship. We expect much more of someone getting their driver’s license. It is not a high bar to demand a security assessment, but it is a high bar for Canadians of convenience who would like to wear team Canada’s jersey without being a team player on our national rink. Finally, the Bloc and the Conservatives added reporting requirements for the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. The first reporting requirement would be the number of citizenships granted by the enactment of Bill C-3. The second reporting requirement would be security screening exemptions. Essentially, the first stream of data would be to understand how Bill C-3 is performing, and the second would be to keep an eye on potential security threats. If we have the best interests of Canadians in mind, these reporting requirements are not just logical but absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, these reporting requirements are too high a bar if the goal is to obfuscate operational metrics while being soft on crime. Taken together, our amendments make the substantial connection test of Bill C-3 functionally substantial in practice and not just in words. Of course, there is nothing more substantial than what citizenship by naturalization requires of those understanding its process. What these amendments achieve is the addition of a certain cost to the process of earning Canadian citizenship, a cost to reflect the value we hold in being Canadian. I would like to wrap up my comments with a topic that has been the central but unspoken theme of Bill C-3, which is the value of Canadian citizenship. Every Canadian citizen is like a voting shareholder in a corporation. The shareholders have elected the Liberals to be the operating officers on the assumption they would be prioritizing the values of what it means to be Canadian shareholders. Instead, they have weaponized a promise to reinstate lost shareholders as a Trojan Horse to dilute every existing share by issuing new tranches of passive shareholders of convenience. All the Bloc and the Conservatives are asking is that this new tranche of shares being issued under Bill C-3 meet the same standards as those governing employees who earned sweat equity by contributing to our corporation. When the Liberals, as the acting officers of our corporation, and the consultants on team orange, who are no longer legitimate members of the board, decide that Bill C-3 tranches of shares should be issued without the parity vesting and work we require of sweat equity earners, I have only one question: Are they fulfilling their fiduciary duty to our existing base of shareholders?

Mr. Speaker, it is true that the value of Canadian citizenship used to be one of pride all over the world. As I said, if we want to wear the jersey, we have to be part of the team. If we continue this process of passing it on from generation to generation, we are going to lose that Canadian value and the connection to Canada. What would the loyalty to Canada be other than being a Canadian passport holder for convenience?

Mr. Speaker, every dollar the Prime Minister spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians through higher prices and food inflation. Monthly visits to food banks have doubled since 2019, with 2.2 million visits per month. Nearly 10% of food bank users are now seniors. This is up 22%. This reliance on food banks has become an ongoing necessity to survive. When will the Liberals realize that their inflationary deficits are driving up the cost of food and driving Canadians to the food bank?

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals say that they want to secure our border, but they have filled Bill C-12 with nothing but half measures that fail to target the core issues. They will be unable to combat transnational organized crime when they value the well-being of repeat offenders over law-abiding citizens. They will be unable to get a handle on our asylum system when they value economic migrants with bogus asylum claims over legitimately vulnerable people. The Liberal half measures in Bill C-12 stem from their continued inability to both set up and enforce disincentives against bad actors. Fundamentally, the Liberals take the maxim of the three wise monkeys to heart: See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. The Liberals do not see the criminals. They do not hear the vulnerable. When they choose not to see the bad actors and not to hear the downtrodden, they by all means speak half measures into being. Let us first address how Bill C-12 would fail to secure our borders, from a crime angle. I have a simple question: Do hard drugs like fentanyl just magically appear in our country? No, of course they do not. Some group has to produce them, and some group has to distribute them. The drug dealers should not be the only central target for the legislation. The problem is that lax Liberal laws have altered our Criminal Code to put criminals first. Law-abiding Canadians live in fear, while repeat offenders serially reoffend against Canadian society, knowing there will be no consequences for their crimes. The Liberals cannot just paper everything over with Bill C-12 while we still live in the madness legislated into being by Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. They are building bridges to nowhere, upheld by pillars of sand. How much longer must the Conservatives bring up the failures of these two bills? Bill C-75 forces judges to apply a principle of restraint that puts repeat offenders back on the streets. Bill C-5 repealed mandatory jail time for serious offences, like extortion with a firearm or trafficking hard drugs like fentanyl. Thus, not only are we letting criminals with many offences roam free; we are also letting the ones who have performed the most serious offences at the highest frequency roam free. This is the pro-criminal world that the Liberals have legislated into being. How do we stop the Liberal madness? The first step is clear: Put law-abiding Canadians above the well-being of repeat offenders. When we put hard-working, law-abiding and tax-paying Canadians first, at the top of our hierarchy, the policy suite to serve them unfolds naturally. We must disincentivize the crime that harms our law-abiding society, by locking up the repeat offenders rather than letting them roam free. It is not hard to understand how disincentives work. When a toddler touches a hot stove and burns their hand, they will learn not to touch the stove again. Through this feedback loop, the child will learn not to repeat the mistake. Human behaviour is like a river flowing down a mountain. We can either dig grooves to enhance the flow down one path, or we can build dams to block the flow down another. The Liberals have been allowing the river of crime to flow unimpeded. We Conservatives plan on setting up some more dams. Having addressed the failure of Bill C-12 to secure our borders on the drug front, let me redirect attention to how Bill C-12 would fail to do so on the asylum front as well. Canada's asylum system was set up to protect truly vulnerable people, like those from Hong Kong or Ukraine. We cannot resettle every economic migrant claiming asylum to get a free hotel stay. However, this is our current state of affairs. We have made the asylum route a lucrative one and have incentivized it. We give hotel rooms to people with bogus asylum claims, while hard-working Canadians struggle with housing, health care and jobs amidst a general cost of living crisis, and while legitimately vulnerable people from Hong Kong and Ukraine have been left in limbo on their path to permanent residence, despite already being in Canada. All that Bill C-12 would accomplish is to shift the burden to the courts, which is another half measure among half measures, as the Liberals choose not to see the bad actors and choose not to hear the vulnerable. Let me bring my Liberal colleagues the voices of the vulnerable. I was shocked to discover that on October 9, the estimated time for processing individuals under the Hong Kong pathways to permanent residence was revised to being upwards of 10 years. My constituency staff have seen the processing times for cases of applications that have been situated in the IRCC pipeline for years jump from 25 months to 48 months after the October 9 threshold. For those who submitted their application this summer, processing times went from 25 months at submission to 10 years after October 9 . In the best of cases, it is a doubling of processing, and in the worst of cases, it is a quintupling of processing. In all cases, there are lives ruined and families put in peril. Hong Kongers are a case study of a people that has integrated into our society. They do not take handouts. They are taxpayers who contribute to the system instead of getting free hotel stays on the backs of hard-working Canadians. The Liberals can secure our borders from their out-of-control asylum system by removing all the benefits. A single action like this would have sweeping effects, and yet the Liberals have chosen the path of half measures. In conclusion, my message today about Bill C-12 can be expressed in two concepts: incentives and disincentives. All we have to do is to stop incentivizing behaviours we no longer wish to see and to start disincentivizing behaviours we want to end. We cannot secure our borders with half measures that dance around the core problem. People are the actors; people do things, so to stop bad actors from doing bad things, we must build systems of incentives and disincentives around the bad actors themselves. This is only impossible to do when we actually love and esteem the bad actors above the hard-working, law-abiding and taxpaying Canadians. As it stands, structurally, Bill C-12 does not see the bad actors and does not hear the legitimately vulnerable. Bill C-12 is a bundle of half measures that would not secure our borders.

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley. I am honoured to be representing the people of Markham—Unionville. If capital can be considered water, then Canada is a leaky bucket. Our foreign direct investment, FDI, is the directional flow of this water. FDI coming in is the total inflow of capital from the world to Canada, and FDI going out is the total outflow of capital to the world from Canada. If we subtract the inflow from the outflow, we get our net FDI, or the level of water in our bucket. The Canadian bucket has been leaking every year from 2015 to 2024 under the Liberal government. Rounding solely to the nearest billion, these are the quick stats for the net outflow each year, all negative: 2015 was $30 billion, 2016 was $44 billion, 2017 was $69 billion, 2018 was $26 billion, 2019 was $36 billion, 2020 was $24 billion, 2021 was $56 billion, 2022 was $50 billion, 2023 was $63 billion and 2024 was $40 billion. From 2015 to 2024, this equates to negative $437 billion. Do we even have a bucket here, or is this a pipeline of our capital being pumped directly to other countries under a decade of Liberal loss? Let us discuss the cause of these leaks. When the outflow FDI from Canada consistently exceeds the inflow, it means that Canadian capital is finding better opportunities abroad than foreign capital is finding in Canada. This means we need more domestic projects with streamlined regulations to retain our leaky capital. Our domestic market is small, with only about 40 million people dispersed across a land mass that is second only to Russia in size. This already means that our firms cannot completely rely on domestic consumption. It already means that the only way we compete internationally is through exports. It already means that the only decision in the mind of our firms is whether they can build in Canada and ship to external markets or whether they set up production internationally to sell internationally. We need incentivizing structures to make it easier to launch massive projects in Canada around energy, infrastructure and manufacturing. These projects would give our economic actors reasons to keep their capital within our borders. However, the Liberals want to make it hard to build in Canada. Our reputation is ruined for investors with multiple failed projects like northern gateway or energy east. The Liberals want carbon pricing. The Liberals want environmental, social and governance, ESG, reporting requirements on everything. The Liberals want impact assessments over and over again, barriers upon barriers. The Liberals do not want us to build. They do not want us to be industrialized. The Liberals want to drive us back to the Stone Age, where we can frolic in fields, beset by poverty. We only need to look at current stats to see the road to poverty that is being paved for us by Liberal intentions. Since the Prime Minister was sworn in, in March, 86,000 Canadians have lost their job, Canada has the second-highest unemployment rate in the G7 and food inflation is double the Bank of Canada's target rate. I came across an interesting definition of the west: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. When we take away our industrialization, we lose what makes us rich and what enables us to be educated. We often find in cities that universities emerge only after the city has undergone an industrial and commercial build-out. There is no true mass democracy without a mass society fostered through the foundation of industrial wealth. When too much capital leaves Canada because of anti-growth Liberal policies, will Canada still be a western nation? The Conservatives want to stop these capital leaks. The overarching vision is very simple: Retain more of our domestic capital and attract more foreign capital. Another way to look at this is when we have more water than our bucket can contain. Imagine that our bucket is no longer leaking, but that it is very small. This small bucket could not contain the $437 billion of outflow that exited our bucket over the last 10 years under the Liberal government. Building a bigger, capital-retaining bucket means having cities where we can deposit our capital for an expected return. As I mentioned before, let us focus on energy, infrastructure and manufacturing. If we cannot create a policy environment where it is easy for major projects to be set up in Canada, these major projects will be set up outside of our borders. Along with these out-going projects will be the jobs that should have existed for Canadians. There is no other way for us to make meaningful moves within the parliamentary cycle. I have one additional point that relates to manufacturing, and I will relate it through an analogy. All things being equal, do we want to be grape sellers or wine sellers? Speaking broadly, Canada is very used to being a seller of grapes throughout our distinguished history. However, if we want to retain more capital within our borders, we need to do more of the venture-added processing work, which would behoove us to have a stronger domestic production build out. From an industrial policy standpoint, this means selling less of our resources raw, investing in more production capacity for the resources that we have in abundance and ensuring that we have end markets for our value-added products, otherwise this export strategy all falls apart. Let us recall that, first, if we do not do this ourselves within our borders, it means that our capital will find itself investing in production facilities within the end market destinations. Second, our roughly 40-million person market across a vast land mass is not enough to serve our total pool of capital. Finally, an export-oriented strategy built upon the foundation of energy, infrastructure and manufacturing projects may be one of the few ways to reserve our flows of capital from a federal policy standpoint under the consideration of a parliamentary cycle. Absent our capacity to retain our capital through policy levers at the federal level, we risk becoming a nation of fields to frolic in, beset by poverty in a post-industrial wasteland that the Rust Belt knows only too well. Perhaps we will then come to rely solely on tourism to our green society, and guess where our tourists will come from? They will come from industrialized societies producing wealthy citizens, uninhibited by carbon pricing, ESG reporting requirements and impact assessments. Every dollar that leaves the country means lower wages and lost jobs for workers. We Conservatives call on the Liberals to stop driving investment and jobs down and the cost of living up.

Mr. Speaker, we all know the deficit will drive up costs for all Canadians because, as the hon. member mentioned, we have to finance those debts. They do not come cheap or at zero cost. What that means is that a lot of the tax dollars we receive will have to go to service those debts. That takes away from the available budgets for programs like hospitals, education and, most importantly, developing our economy. That is very critical when we are expecting this new budget coming up to be even worse than that of the last Liberal government. This would be an alarm bell for all Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals broke our immigration system. We have legitimately vulnerable persons from Hong Kong, Ukraine and Sudan who have been left in limbo on their path to permanent residency, despite already being in Canada. I have personally met with over 500 people in the Hong Kong pathways program across Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. They are all positively contributing to Canada. They are paying taxes, and they are integrating into our society. Canada's asylum system was set up to protect truly vulnerable persons, but it is being abused through the chaotic Liberal immigration system. Conservatives call for the Liberal government to fix the broken immigration system to help the many people who are being left behind.

Mr. Speaker, every dollar the Prime Minister spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians in higher Liberal taxes and inflation. A new report shows that one in three seniors is supporting their adult children and grandchildren. What does this mean? It means that 28% of seniors help their adult children with rent or mortgage payments, up from last year. This should be a concern to everyone. When the Prime Minister doubles the deficit, how much more will grandparents have to pay to house their adult children and grandchildren?

Mr. Speaker, the question is for the immigration minister. Seniors in the greater Toronto area are having to choose between heating and eating, but now we know that over the past decade, the Liberals spent more on providing benefits to a group that includes bogus asylum claimants than on their platform promise to spend on upgrading long-term care facilities. Canadian seniors are suffering, so why did the Liberals allow Canada's once-compassionate asylum system to become an abused system that fails everyone?

With regard to the former residence of the Consul General of Canada in New York, located at 550 Park Avenue and currently listed for sale: (a) on what date was the property listed for sale; (b) what is the listing price of the property; (c) what is the total amount paid in condominium fees since January 1, 2020, broken down by year; (d) how many property showings have taken place since the property was listed, and what are the dates of each showing; (e) what are the names of the real estate firms contracted to represent the Government of Canada in the sale of the property; (f) what is the total amount spent to date in relation to the sale of the property, including legal, administrative, real estate and staging costs; (g) were there any maintenance or renovation expenditures on the property since January 1, 2020, and, if so, what are the details, including the (i) amount, (ii) date, (iii) description of the work, (iv) vendor; (h) have any offers been received on the property to date, and, if so, (i) what is the date of each offer, (ii) what is the amount of each offer, (iii) was the offer accepted or declined; and (i) what were the moving costs incurred by the government to relocate to the new residence?