Parliamentary Speeches
611 speeches by Michelle Rempel Garner — Page 9 of 13
Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, in 2018, the House was seized with a very emotive and serious issue. This was the transfer of Terri-Lynne McClintic, a child killer, from a maximum-security prison to a much less secure facility, a healing lodge. I remember the debate in the House and reading the stories of how the families of the victim were retraumatized through this decision. That was five years ago. Before the s…
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Madam Speaker, the last Liberal speaker questioned whether or not my colleague had talked to any leaders in Atlantic Canada about whether or not they wanted the bill. I wonder if the member could speak to the fact that most premiers in Atlantic Canada asked for the carbon tax to be removed. In fact, some of the Liberal caucus is actually all of a sudden starting to ask for the carbon tax to be rem…
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With regard to the passport design unveiled on May 10, 2023: (a) what are the details of all spending related to the redesign of the new passport, broken down by item and type of expense; (b) who were the artists and companies that were used for the design and images in the new passport, and how much was each paid for their work; (c) what are the details of the consultations related to the redesig…
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Madam Speaker, this bill deals with a very important topic, which is the sustainability of journalism in Canada. There have been many stakeholders from across the country who have expressed deep concerns, and I also note that, at various stages of the debate, there were many witnesses from different regions, different demographics, who participate in media in Canada who were not allowed to testify…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, our planet and our country are literally burning. Objectively, the Liberal environment minister is making it worse. Not only has he allowed Canada's greenhouse gas emissions to climb to a record high, but he has also done so while dogmatically enforcing policies that are not getting the job done and are making the cost of living worse. That is because the Liberals' deficit-fuelled inf…
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Madam Speaker, I rise on the same point of order. I just want to respond to the deputy House leader's assertion that I did not like the response. For your information, and for that of the table staff who are perhaps providing you information, the point is that the government said that it could not respond to the question in the time allotted. Therefore, it has stated that it could not respond. Whe…
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order to draw attention to a procedural matter related to Question No. 1337, which I submitted on March 21. In this Order Paper question, I asked for a detailed breakdown of spending from the mission cultural fund. For the sake of time, I will spare reading the text of the question into the record, but my point of order relates to a passage found on page 523 of …
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Mr. Speaker, first of all, with regard to the for-profit licensed child care spaces, the bill does not recognize the fact that there might be a grandma, a retired person or an aunt who stays at home specifically to care for children and who takes in other children in the neighbourhood. They may not have the means to go through the licensing process, but they are providing quality child care. It is…
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Mr. Speaker, this bill will not meet all child care needs. What we should be looking at when it comes to child care is valuing the labour of child care no matter how it occurs, because if we do not use that as a principle, we are not as a Parliament respecting the diversity of our country, nor are we creating equity in how we value child care. That is the wrong message to send to Canadians. I unde…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the government’s commitment to provide free menstrual products in federally regulated workplaces, since January 1, 2019: (a) how many consultations has the government held on this policy; (b) how many stakeholders has the government consulted with on this policy; (c) what are the details of the consultations, including, for each consultation, the (i) names of organizations consulted…
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Mr. Speaker, of course creating more child care spaces is important, as is creating equity in how child care is valued in all of its forms. I just wish we could have our cake and eat it too with this bill. I will say that perhaps the NDP and Alberta's prospects would have been better if they understood that rural Alberta matters, too, because they sure did not do well there.
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With regard to sexual assault, physical assault or harassment complaints filed by those abiding by the government’s hotel quarantine measures since March 1, 2020: (a) how many sexual assaults, physical assaults or harassment complaints have been filed, broken down by type of complaint; (b) how many of the complaints in (a) resulted in criminal charges; (c) how many sexual assaults, physical assaul…
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Mr. Speaker, let me start by saying something from my heart, something I think we all agree on in this place: Canadians deserve and need access to affordable, quality child care. This is important for so many reasons, particularly for gender equality. While our country has made gains in various measures of gender equality, we know that women still bear the disproportionate labour costs of child ca…
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in debate tonight to talk about amendments that have been proposed to Bill S-5, which is an act to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act of 1999. I have now had a chance to review many of the amendments that are before the House right now. I want to focus my comments on one particular area, and perhaps express some concern over the lack of clarity with…
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's response. I also think he would understand that, when I hear from the government “Do not worry; just trust us”, I am not so sure about that. Also, the reality is that we do have a very important issue facing our country, which is climate change. The Liberal government has failed to meet its targets. It has failed to provide the type of infrastructure, for…
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Madam Speaker, first of all, I would never defend the Liberal government, just to be very clear to my colleague. We agree that there has to be some change there. The reality is that Canada is a large country that is natural-resource-intensive in terms of its economic output. It is cold here. We do not have the substitute goods that we need, in the Canadian context, to lower the price elasticity of…
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Madam Speaker, just to re-emphasize the point I tried to make in my speech, the government has not included any sort of clarity with this provision, either on scope or on enforceability. It is really unfortunate. It is a missed opportunity, particularly now that we are in report stage. The government needs to fix that.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the Mission Cultural Fund (MCF) since November 4, 2015: (a) what are the details of all spending from this fund, broken down by month, including, for each initiative funded, the (i) name of recipient, (ii) amount, (iii) location, (iv) date, (v) purpose, (vi) description of related events; (b) what was the amount spent from the fund, broken down by month; (c) what is the current stat…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, “They will definitely be allowed to enter Canada with this letter” is what a senator's office told people when distributing hundreds of unauthorized travel documents, yet the then minister of defence said he did not know this was happening because he was not reading his emails. These actions put lives in danger and vaporized any illusion of equity in Canada's grossly inadequate evacua…
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Mr. Speaker, that was a bit of a hot mike for my colleague. We have got to be compassionate for Canadians and feel what they feel. We have got to stop spending more and giving them less.
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Mr. Speaker, oh, boy, I agree. They have got to get back to the table. The government also has to stop trying to trial balloon things, saying that this strike is the union's fault, because what that does, and what it is trying to do, is pit public sector workers against private sector workers and against everyone. We have to unite as a country. There are a lot of people who do not want us to be un…
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Mr. Speaker, I have questions about Canada's grocery oligopoly. I do. However, the government has racked up so much debt. That money has caused an inflationary crisis, including food increases. With regard to energy, of course we need to address climate change. While we do that, why are we lining the pockets of autocratic countries? Why are we not investing in our own energy security? It is just t…
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Mr. Speaker, this government has spent a lot on climate. Our greenhouse gas emissions are going up. We do not have substitute goods for high-carbon products and practices. We are not meeting our climate targets. They are not even measuring results of the program. On housing, we do not have affordable housing stock. On health care, people are waiting in emergency rooms. Everybody feels that tune, a…
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a deep honour to rise and speak in this place. There is something uniting Canadians right now, and it is not a good thing. It is this emotion, this sense, this pulse that is kind of humming through Canadians. The beat goes like this: spend more, get less; spend more, get less. It is at the heart of family disagreements. It is at the heart of people feeling hopelessness. I…
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Madam Speaker, the member spoke about cats. When I think about my cat, my cat has this habit of jumping out of nowhere and grabbing me, and it is really annoying. It is kind of like another cat I know in this place, a cat who has taken an all-expenses-paid trip to the Aga Khan island, charged six thousands dollars' worth of hotel rooms, went on a Jamaican vacation with a donor to his family founda…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I would just note that, when the Liberal-NDP coalition was trying to shut me down on this, I was barely a minute into my speech. These members need to let me get to the point I am trying to make, instead of just trying to silence me, as the government is doing with its censorship bills. This is what we are dealing with here, being silenced. Instead of debating the budget, as we are …
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Madam Speaker, the debate that is happening here today, to me, seems to be a repeat of the debate that happened at the immigration committee on a motion that went through the immigration committee. It is also happening on a day when the budget is being debated and I am wondering if my colleague thinks that the reason this is happening is because the Liberal-NDP coalition actually does not want to …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, we are late into debate here in the House of Commons today. For those who may just be catching up on what is happening, I would like to offer a little refresher, if I may. Today what was supposed to be debated in the House during this time period was legislation regarding the federal budget. That is what we were supposed to be debating right now. Of course, the federal budget is som…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I would like to focus my remarks today on the component of this bill that deals with the artificial intelligence and data act. The first time I interacted with ChatGPT was the day after it was released. Upon seeing it easily parse human language, my first thought was, “holy” followed by a word I am not supposed to say in this place. The second thought was, “What will the government …
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Madam Speaker, I am so glad we are having this debate. The large language model technology ChatGPT, as well as the Sydney chatbot, is based on these other technologies. It scrapes and uses massive data sets that may or may not be ethical to use, or as my colleague rightly mentions, they may have issues intellectual property ownership. It is the Wild West. There are no rules around this. I would li…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague raises an excellent point. I wish I had three hours to address the privacy components of Bill C-27. I am certainly very keen to follow, should this make it to committee, what happens there. I am of the opinion that this should not make it to committee. There are so many amendments that need to be made on the privacy components, but more importantly because AIDA was tack…
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Madam Speaker, I had the opportunity to speak in a large debate, actually with Noam Chomsky, if one can believe it, with the Montreal institute for artificial intelligence, on a similar topic. The reality is that, with AI, the toothpaste is out of the tube. We are not putting it back in. It is incumbent upon humanity to answer that question with a positive outcome that we are putting guardrails ar…
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With regard to Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Integrity Regime, since November 4, 2015: (a) what are the details of any memorandums, briefing notes, or other similar type of documents which discussed the status of McKinsey & Company’s acceptability to receive contracts under the Integrity Regime, including, for each, the (i) date, (ii) sender, (iii) recipient, (iv) type of document…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to start with my colleague's first statement. Speaking in this place is a privilege. It is about quality, not quantity, and that is a lesson the member should undertake. The member should also understand that speaking truth to power is something that is our responsibility, rather than being a toady for the PMO.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, we are here today in the middle of a debate where the Liberal government has curtailed debate on a censorship bill. It has actually censored debate on its censorship bill. To put into perspective what is happening here today, people who have reviewed this bill, from all political stripes, all walks of life and all backgrounds in Canada, have said this bill would create in Canada the m…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, what do CTV bureau chief Bill Fortier; the president of Save the Children Canada, Danny Glenwright; film director Adam Smoluk; Alana Warnick, star of Canada's Ultimate Challenge; and I all have in common? Well, we all graduated from Winnipeg's Glenlawn Collegiate Institute 25 years ago, and this May the school will celebrate its 100th anniversary. This western Canadian public school h…
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Mr. Speaker, I would love to take a trip back down memory lane. In 2015, houses were half the cost in Canada, people could actually afford rent, the budget was balanced, we had economic growth and our international peers looked upon us to actually get things done instead of with embarrassment. Those were the golden days. If we could only have them back.
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Mr. Speaker, my maiden name is Michelle Godin. I was one of the many people in Canada who, frankly, I will just say it, were the victims of anglicization. Thus, I understand how important it is to ensure that French-language programming and the right to French-language learning are made available to all Canadians, because they are part of our cultural heritage. However, the 20,000 artists the memb…
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Mr. Speaker, I think Margaret Atwood presents a lot of tales we should take into consideration, like the need to continuously protect women's rights under any circumstance. I also think, though, that Margaret Atwood is one of those voices that would not necessarily speak in favour of a Conservative Party position, but would certainly speak in favour of the fact that free speech is an underpinning …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I have the honour of presenting two petitions today, the first being a petition regarding the cost of living. Many Canadians are concerned about the increased cost of living and the lack of government action thereof. The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to immediately table a plan to address the affordability crisis in Canada. The petition has over 500 signatures.
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Mr. Speaker, I also have the pleasure and honour of tabling a petition concerning provincial sovereignty. The over 3,000 petitioners note that the government's continued appeal of decisions regarding Bill C-69 and the constitutionality thereof is a violation of provincial sovereignly and jurisdiction. The petitioners are calling upon the government to respect the ruling of the Alberta Court of App…
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Madam Speaker, in spite of the minister's assertions, this bill would not in any way help Canadian voices. What it would do is prop up a failing business model of other types of legacy content producers. There is one line in a review of the bill that says, “C-11 will take money away from young entrepreneurs, funnel it back to traditional media and fund content from the established and well-connect…
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Mr. Speaker, the world has changed in recent years. It is a reality that all people in this place need to confront themselves with on behalf of their constituents. What I mean by saying that the world has changed is that there are more state actors or other countries that are becoming increasingly hostile to the interests of our country and our constituents. As this is happening, we need to remind…
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Madam Speaker, that cuts a little close to home for me. My husband is a combat veteran. I know what it is like when he casually tells me that one of his colleagues that he served with has taken their own life. This is not a joke. We should not be offering medically assisted dying as the first intervention of Parliament, which is what the government would be doing, instead of telling Canadians they…
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Madam Speaker, the government has spent us into oblivion. Our government has put us into a situation where we are broke. Talking about all the things that could help Canadians is so much farther away because of the waste, the corruption and the lack of priorities on Canadians. There are so many things we could be talking about and should be talking about to help Canadians, but the first thing we n…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg just said that he would hope that we would have more resources for mental health. He is part of the government. He has a government appointment. He sits around the table. We do not have those supports because the government has not provided them to Canadians. Honestly, he is listening, and he should think about this. This is not a talking point. His govern…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague said something, a quote that I think is haunting, profound and accurate. She quoted someone who said that we spend too much time helping people to die and not enough time helping people to live. For a government member to try to diminish what happened with veterans affairs, I find that disgusting. I was wondering if my colleague would like to take a little more time tal…
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Madam Speaker, we are here tonight, at nearly 10 o'clock in Ottawa, discussing a difficult topic, but one that every Canadian should be concerned about. I would like to outline what we are talking about tonight so I can give my argument in that context. In 2020, a bill was tabled to discuss and put forward proposals to expand medically assisted dying, and then in the other place, the Senate, there…
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Madam Speaker, for my constituents, I will say that we are debating a bill that proposes to establish a legal framework for persons to be declared inadmissible or deported from Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act due to their person, country of origin or organization being subject to sanctions. I want to pick up on my colleague's theme of the enforcement of sanctions. I think w…
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Madam Speaker, I am glad that my colleague asked this question. There was another item in the Globe and Mail article today that suggests Senator McPhedran, in her affidavit, may have submitted information about what were deemed to be 640 inauthentic letters to the government in September 2021. During that time, my office communicated with IRCC, GAC and other officials over 30 times between August …
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