Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, CORCAN is the inmate skills development wing of Corrections Canada. Last year, it employed 608 individuals, at a cost of $66 million, to educate only 1,056 inmates. That is an annual per-student cost of $62,000, about half the cost of tuition at Harvard University. What kind of education did the inmates get? They were taught rudimentary tasks like shovelling manure, picking apples and sewing pillowcases, none of which will help them to find jobs upon release. Why does the government allow CORCAN to achieve so little at so great a cost to taxpayers?

Mr. Speaker, during question period, the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands was repeatedly carrying on a very high-volume monologue, the purpose of which, I believe, was to interrupt the ability of members who were posing questions to concentrate and to ask their questions properly. That, of course, would be a violation of Standing Order 16(2), which states, “When a member is speaking, no member shall pass between that member and the chair, nor interrupt him or her, except to raise a point of order.” During my own remarks, which were dealing with an aspect of Canadian correctional services, the member was speaking so loudly that it was very difficult for me to concentrate. One of the goals of producing an effective debate in the House is to have us be capable of speaking in a normal speaking voice, as I am doing now, as opposed to yelling at each other. Had I been yelling, I think I could have successfully drowned out the member's yelling, but it is very difficult to carry on a civilized debate when this kind of, frankly, uncivilized behaviour is going on. I have no idea if that constitutes something for which the member should apologize. One cannot retract a loud voice, but whatever the situation is, I seek your guidance on this, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that all colleagues have reviewed the seating plan that has been proposed for our return to Centre Block. Faced with a growing number of MPs in a fixed space, the government's solution is, number one, to expand by about 30% the size of the desks assigned to cabinet so the Prime Minister will feel like he is back home on his favourite luxury jet, and number two, having thereby caused an artificial space shortage for everyone else, to shove 300 MPs into four rows of bleachers, so tightly packed that MPs will no longer have a usable workspace and will have to tread on each other's toes to get to their seat. A better idea would be to use the Quebec legislature's new seating plan as our model. We could have five rows, with each row containing 36 members, connected by four aisles. This would result in wider seats, retention of desks instead of bleachers, and enough room for members to circulate behind each other's seat rather than over each other's feet. All we need for this to happen is to acknowledge the ancient principle that all MPs are treated and seated equally. Let us do that.

Mr. Speaker, first I am presenting 15 petitions, signed by a total of 3,357 Canadians, against the Alto high-speed rail project. I am being flooded with literally thousands of signatures on petitions on this subject. I have already tabled petitions on this topic from an additional 3,300 Canadians. The petitioners are concerned that their land will be expropriated and their lives destroyed by this project that is going to pass through their communities. They are also painfully aware that once their land has been taken from them by the government, they and their children will then be sent the tax bill for their share of a project so expensive that it will cost $9,000 for every family of four nationwide. Second, I am presenting the certificate for e-petition 7203, which I sponsored. It calls for the High-Speed Rail Network Act provisions of Bill C-15 to be stopped, the provisions that allow for an expedited expropriation process that will remove the right of appeal and guarantee that landowners get far less for their land than they ought to be getting; for the cessation of further advancement of the high-speed rail project; and for redirection by the federal government of investment toward improving higher-speed passenger rail service within existing rail corridors, which, as they note, can be done within the life of the current Parliament instead of in the year 2038. E-petition 7203 gathered 17,531 signatures, and, in total, the petitions I am tabling today contain the signatures of over 20,000 Canadians who are opposed to the Alto rail project.

Mr. Speaker, the second petition relates to the Alto high-speed rail project. I am being flooded by literally thousands of signatures on petitions on this subject. The petitioners list a series of concerns about the Alto project and have three specific requests for the House of Commons: first, to get the government to immediately cancel the entire Alto high-speed rail project; second, in the event that the Ottawa-Montreal part of the project goes forward, to restrict the ability of Alto to engage in expropriations in the area west of Ottawa, which is not covered in that area, until such time as we can be certain that this part is actually going to be built; third, in the event that expropriations do occur, to restore to property owners the rights they had prior to the changing of those rules, the diminution of their rights in the Alto high-speed rail act.

Mr. Speaker, today I would like to address very briefly two topics and then dwell at greater length on a third. Like many of my colleagues here, I am generally supportive of this legislation. I do think it is good that it will go to committee where it will, one hopes, be open for genuine good-faith amendments to improve it. Since we agree on the substance of the bill, it should be easy for us to find improvements that make sense to all of us. I am very hopeful that will happen. There are three areas that deserve being noted because they are particularly valuable. One is the banning of anonymous contributions through cryptocurrency, which I think removes a loophole on the idea we have had established in Canadian electoral legislation for some time, that we ought to be able to identify all contributors and that all contributions are public contributions. It is also a way of getting around potentially maximum contribution levels for individuals. Dealing with that is useful. The removal of some forms of foreign interference is also beneficial. Then, of course, there is the issue of ballot integrity, which is dealing with the problems introduced by the activities of the longest ballot committee. I want to spend a bit of time talking about that. I had the chance to see this up close in the last federal election, about this time last year, when I spent a considerable amount of time campaigning in the riding of Carleton, where the leader of my party was running. It is the riding that joins my own riding. It was clear that there was a need to get in there and do what we could to help the leader. Ultimately, the efforts that other individuals and I made were insufficient, although we did cause him to experience the highest Conservative vote he had ever had in his entire career, but that was insufficient to win the riding. At the same time that was going on, there was an effort by the longest ballot committee to put many people onto the ballot, ostensibly, in the service of their goal of trying to draw attention to the abandonment, way back in 2017 ,of Justin Trudeau's stated goal of changing the electoral system. We will recall that in 2015, then candidate Trudeau said this would be the last election under first past the post. There was then a series of hearings of a parliamentary committee for this purpose. I served on that committee, and so did my colleague who is nodding. She still looks somewhat exhausted from the experience. We came up with a proposal that, ultimately, he decided was not very satisfactory, so Trudeau stepped away from it. The longest ballot committee felt this would be a way of drawing attention to their concerns with his abandonment and his approach. I think that may be how it started, but as time went on, it went from being a form of political protest to being a kind of performance art. There is nothing wrong, I suppose, with engaging in performance art if it creates no harm, but I think in this case it did create harm. I will, first of all, show how over a period of time, over six different elections, this transformation occurred. In the year 2021, in the riding of St. Boniface—St. Vital, the longest ballot committee put forward 15 candidates. Of those 15 candidates, the maximum number of votes garnered for one candidate was 58 votes. The minimum number received by a longest ballot committee candidate was seven votes. In 2022, there was a by-election in Mississauga—Lakeshore. This time, there were 33 candidates from the longest ballot committee, more than double. The maximum number of votes received by any of them was 48. The third by-election took place in Winnipeg South Centre. It resulted in 42 candidates that time, so it is going up, as we will notice. There was a maximum number of 36 votes for any of those candidates and there was a candidate who received only one vote. The fourth time this happened, when the longest ballot committee weighed in, was in a by-election in 2024 in Toronto—St. Paul's. This time, there were 77 longest ballot committee candidates. For the first time, we saw a candidate who received zero votes, strongly suggesting that the candidate was not a resident of the riding and was not even able to vote for himself or herself. The fifth time this came up was in a by-election in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun in September 2024, with 77 longest ballot candidates again. By the way, I got all this information from Wikipedia. In each of these, as I looked it up, it said that it was a new record-breaking result. It seems that whoever wrote those articles was starting to cover it as a kind of sporting event. There were 77 candidates for the committee. The maximum number of votes achieved was 34, so we notice a gradual downward trend here. Two candidates got zero votes. The next one was in Carleton last year, with 85 candidates, a significant number of whom received zero votes. Finally, last August, in Battle River—Crowfoot, we saw something in the neighbourhood of 200 candidates for the longest ballot committee. The point is that 77 of those candidates got zero votes, and a significant number got one vote each. That was the performance chart. Now, what are the consequences of doing this? In Battle River—Crowfoot, there were two independent candidates, both of whom complained that they had a hard time being taken seriously and drawing independent attention to local issues, which is often what independent candidates are trying to do, because they were being conflated with the people on the longest ballot committee. In fact, the second-place candidate in that by-election was an independent candidate, Bonnie Critchley, and she largely got attention for the issues she was concerned about by criticizing the longest ballot committee and asking, “How can we express our concerns when these guys are hogging all the bandwidth and distracting?” As I said, she came in second. In all fairness, she got only 9.8% of the vote, but that was more than twice what the Liberal candidate got. She was a serious candidate. These other people were not serious candidates. I think that's a legitimate harm they are doing. Perhaps it is not a harm that is a cause to ban them. However, I will point out as well that my step-mother lives in the riding of Carleton. She is quite elderly now and cannot get out to vote, so I looked into getting a ballot for her to participate from home. In these circumstances, it is very difficult to get a mail-in ballot that would be usable by someone in her situation. Likewise, someone who is visually impaired is normally enabled to vote and to participate fully, with a confidential, secret ballot, when there is a normal-length ballot, in the following manner: People are given a ballot and then a template with a series of holes. They can feel which hole is in which spot, while the names of the candidates are read out to them in order, typically in alphabetical order. They identify that they will vote for candidate number three, who is the candidate of their party. They go behind the screen, count down to the third spot and mark their X. It gets put into the ballot box with everybody else's ballot. The result is that they have a secret ballot. Once this is done, that is taken away from them. Taking away the right of a citizen to participate fully and properly in an election is, in my view, a contravention of section 3 of the charter, which guarantees every Canadian the right to vote in a federal election. I am sure that was not the intention, but that is the practical result. The practical proposal being adopted in this legislation is one that eliminates the ability to engage in this kind of frivolous balloting. It is not that independent candidates cannot get on the ballot, real independent candidates like Bonnie Critchley. It is a way of ensuring that candidates who have taken what started off as a legitimate protest and turned it into a form of performance art cannot engage in that performance art at the expense of the constitutional rights of Canadians who have disabilities, who are prohibited by their actions from participating in a full, proper and rights-respecting manner.

Mr. Speaker, to be honest, I think the measures that have been proposed would actually serve the same purpose, basically eliminating non-serious independent candidates. I do want to say, though, that we have to be a bit careful about what we put in there. I will just throw this out as a thought. In 2011, the New Democrats won a significant number of seats in Quebec, where the candidates were not resident in the riding and had not visited the riding. It appears that the people who voted for them we actually aware of that fact. This was their way of expressing support for Jack Layton and his vision. After some of them got elected, they went to heroic efforts, in some cases, to move to the area. We all remember Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who went to her riding. She did not speak French very well. She learned to speak it better. She moved. She raised her son there. The result was that she was re-elected. I do not ever want to preclude the possibility of that happening again.

Mr. Speaker, to me this is not really a problem. I once signed a nomination paper for a candidate who was running against me. It was the Green Party candidate in my riding. I did vote for myself though. I heard that, in 2011, NDP candidates in Quebec stopped people in the street to sign their nomination papers. That tells me that people are prepared to sign these papers to express their support for the process, not the candidate.

Mr. Speaker, the Alto project will be the biggest expropriation event in Canadian history. Alto also costs more than Canada can afford. At $90 billion, it is larger than last year's record federal deficit. If Alto experiences the 50% to 100% cost overruns that are typical for Canadian rail projects, it could easily be paused or even abandoned. This makes pre-emptive expropriations and land freezes doubly irresponsible, but pre-emptive expropriations are a hallmark of Liberal infrastructure policy. At Mirabel airport, at Pickering airport and at LeBreton Flats, land was expropriated first, and the project cancelled later, after costs skyrocketed. Citizens are not powerless. If enough Canadians sign petition e-7203 against Alto, we can show the Liberals that Canada does not want the Alto project, not the expropriations and not the wasted billions. It is time for the government to go back to the drawing board.

Mr. Speaker, I am presenting a petition. It is the first petition of what I believe will be many on the subject of the Alto high-speed rail project. There is currently an online petition with, at this point, over 10,000 signatures, and I know other print petitions are circulating. The petitioners draw the House's attention to the fact that the cost of this project will be as much as $90 billion, which is $9,000 for every single family of four in Canada. They note the aggressive use of expropriation orders to prohibit work on private property and other measures, such as the right of first refusal, that will destroy or reduce the value of property for many people who are on the line who will see their properties affected. They also note that the high-speed rail will create an impenetrable barrier between two sides of the same community. Therefore, the petitioners call upon the government to do three things. First, they ask the government to immediately cancel the Alto high-speed rail project. Second, in the event that the project is pursued, they ask that the Ottawa-Montreal portion be finished before any expropriations occur west of Ottawa. Finally, they ask that the full protections of the Expropriation Act should be returned to property owners along the route instead of being stripped away, as has been done under the budget implementation bill.

Mr. Speaker, today I am going to be talking about two themes: the first is property rights and the second is the economics of the Alto project. My comments on both are in the context of the part of the budget implementation act that deals with the proposed high-speed rail network and the Alto train, which would run 1,000 kilometres from Quebec City to Toronto at a cost estimate of $60 billion to $90 billion. I am going to start with property rights because the proposed corridor of 1,000 kilometres would run through my constituency. There are two proposed routes that would go through my constituency: a northern route and a southern route. Whichever one is chosen, people who live on that route would be negatively affected, and I thought I would talk a bit about how they would be affected. Let me start by telling members my own position on property rights. This is an issue that is near and dear to me. It is an issue on which I proposed a constitutional amendment, an amendment to the Charter of Rights, to include property rights. The formula which I suggested, because one speaks in general language in bills of rights and charters of rights, is to say that, when property is taken or its use infringed upon for a government purpose, the owners ought to have a right to full, just and timely compensation. All three of those principles are violated by the expropriation and land use restriction regime proposed under the budget implementation act for Alto. Alto has published a plan of rough estimates for where the corridors would be. These rough estimates show corridors roughly 10 kilometres wide. It varies along the route. I assume Alto is in the process of doing some geological work to determine where it wants to go. The process that has been outlined for us says that, at the end of this year either the northern or the southern route will be chosen, and additionally, the corridor for the potential rail line will be narrowed to about a kilometre wide. I am not sure if that is actually what will happen, but that is what it has planned to happen. Within that one kilometre-wide corridor, a thousand kilometres long, and therefore a thousand square kilometres, Alto would have the power to expropriate. This expropriation would occur with a Crown corporation, which includes private investors, and it would do this using expropriation powers normally only exercised by government. That is an extraordinary shift. Additionally, a series of protections for property owners would be stripped away. The first thing that would happen is that Alto would look and then say it might run along a certain part within that kilometre-wide corridor. It might not, but it is not sure, so it is going to put a property development freeze on all properties that it might go through. Will that be every property within the kilometre-wide corridor? We do not know yet, but a freeze on property, that is to say that someone cannot develop or improve their property, has a real financial impact. Under the Expropriation Act, this kind of freeze is permitted, and it can be for up to 120 days. Under the new legislation, it would be for up to two years. During those two years, someone would not be able to do anything to their property. If they tried to, they could be fined through what are called administrative monetary penalties, and they can be ruinous penalties. It is a bit difficult, from the legislation, to determine exactly what those penalties would be. It appears to me that they could be as high as $20,000 per offence, and individual offences that continue over a period of time could result in multiple fines. That, I think, is enough to ensure that anyone would, indeed, not develop their property. After Alto has built its rail and decided which properties it actually wants, someone's property might be released, at which point they have the right to seek compensation for the loss in value. However, that is a long, slow process, and this would affect thousands of properties, maybe tens of thousands of properties. I actually do not know how many there will be in the as yet undefined corridor. All these properties would be involved, with people trying to seek compensation, and each one would have to be a negotiated settlement. I think it is safe to say that, for many people, the payback would be less than it was worth or they would simply give up and never actually seek the money that was taken from them. That is for the people who would have a property freeze placed on them. Will there be any compensation for people whose property value is diminished because the Alto line runs through, cutting the community in half? No, there will be no compensation for those folks. It will significantly affect property values, landlocked properties, properties that can no longer be accessed with ease, properties where formerly people could get to them by simply crossing and driving down the road, where now the road is bisected. Presumably hundreds of roads will be bisected. Alto will have a strong incentive to try and make it as minimal as possible, the number of roads on which overpasses are built. There is a reason for that: Overpasses cost money. I have heard estimates that a single overpass is as high as $50 million, but I have found some evidence that it may be as low as $20 million. Whatever the case is, multiply that by a few hundred, and we can see that Alto, which is trying to be a profit-making company, is going to finance this money through floating a bond. It is going to have a very strong incentive to be as ruthless as possible and have as few overpasses as possible. I was wondering: How many overpasses might there be? It is hard to estimate exactly, but I did take some highway construction for property near places where I live or have lived. I used to live on Phelan Road in what is now part of the extended city of Ottawa. Highway 416 was built south of the city. That road was cut off, and so where people could have crossed and talked to their neighbour within a five-minute walk, they now have to drive seven kilometres in one direction, cross over the highway and go seven kilometres back, 14 kilometres in total. Similarly, east of Ottawa, there is a spot where I go camping. My mother-in-law owns a campground there. To get across Highway 417, people have to drive seven kilometres in one direction, cross over and drive six kilometres back. I have several other examples I could give, but I think the point is made. This is going to divide communities, slow down emergency response times and so on. Now, in the three remaining minutes I have, I want to talk about the costs of Alto. I do not think we grasp just how badly costed-out this really is. A cost range was given. These were stabs in the dark, frankly. Let us say it is $90 billion. There are 40 million people in Canada, 10 million families of four, and $90 billion divided by 10 million is $9,000 for every single Canadian family of four across the country. It does not matter if they live in Nunavut and will never even see this rail, because every Canadian family is paying $9,000. Every Canadian family across the country is paying for something that is going to service people only in that narrow corridor. The people whose properties will be sliced up are paying $9,000 too. Is that number to be taken seriously? That, in itself, is mind-blowingly high. It is higher than our entire national deficit this year. As it turns out, there is a fascinating paper written by Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg, who is the professor and founding chair of program management at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. He writes this, in a recent paper about megaprojects in general: Performance data for megaprojects speak their own language. Nine out of ten such projects have cost overruns; overruns of up to 50% in real terms are common, over 50% are not uncommon. Then he provides a list. I will just read some of the rail projects: The Shinkansen Joetsu high-speed rail line in Japan is somewhat comparable, at a 100% cost overrun; the Boston–New York–Washington Railway, U.S.A., a 130% cost overrun, the Copenhagen Metro, Denmark, a 150% overrun; the Montreal Metro Laval extension, Canada, a 160% overrun; the Minneapolis Hiawatha light rail line, U.S.A., a 190% overrun; and the Troy and Greenfield Railroad, U.S.A., 900%. That, perhaps, is an outlier, but it makes the point. He says shortfalls of 50% are also not uncommon: Combine the large cost overruns and benefit shortfalls with the fact that business cases, cost–benefit analyses, and social and environmental impact assessments are typically at the core of planning and decision making for megaprojects and we see that such analyses can generally not be trusted. For example, for rail projects, an average cost overrun of 44.7% combines with an average demand shortfall of 51.4%. I will stop there and go to questions.

Mr. Speaker, I lack the expertise to give an intelligent response to that question, which is clearly designed just to divert me from the issue of this mind-blowingly expensive project that would destroy lives, ruin property rights and ruin communities that I represent. It would destroy people's lives. That is what is at stake here. The costs of this would be just insane for every single Canadian, including the member. He gets a nice big salary for his $9,000. However, for people who are never going to be around this, how would this be beneficial to them? Why on earth should people in British Columbia, Alberta and Newfoundland pay for this, so that people who live in downtown Toronto or Montreal can get back and forth and shave 90 minutes off their travel time? If I lived beside the train station and I could get that benefit tomorrow, not 10 years out, and it is $9,000 for my family, I would not go for it. It is a terrible cost proposition for someone in that situation, and it is an insane cost proposition for someone who happens to live somewhere else. Worst of all is being a property owner and seeing one's property destroyed and one's life destroyed and then being told, “Now here is the tax bill for this thing we have done to screw you over.”

Mr. Speaker, in the end, the cost is going to be zero, because there is no way that this insane project is actually going to make its way through. We do not have the money to spend $90 billion, which is the estimate. We do not have the money for that. We will spend $3 billion or $4 billion, do a series of expropriations and destroy lives, and then, like the Pickering airport, it will be shut down, unfinished, with no benefit except to the consultants. That is what is going to happen. However, in the event it actually went through, there is a fascinating estimate. Alto projects 24 million riders per year, which turns out to be significantly higher than the number of people travelling between Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto right now by rail, air and road combined, so somehow, people who are not travelling at all would start travelling because of this amazing transportation hub. We have a pretty good idea that, in practice, if the costs are not very low and the speed is not high, people do not tend to shift to rail unless the travel time is under two hours. Therefore, it is not likely to generate the expected ridership. That means that revenues would be very low and the subsidies would be in the multiple billions of dollars every year. Again, we cannot afford this. I suspect that if anything does get built, it will be the Ottawa to Montreal part, at which point the low ridership would show that the whole thing was a catastrophe and we would stop halfway through, much like we did with the Mirabel airport. It was going to be a giant airport, but once we saw the insane costs and the low usage, the whole thing was shut down.

Mr. Speaker, I am torn between my sympathy for the idea of shorter speeches with longer questions following them and the fact that I have a 10-minute set-piece speech that I am going to be delivering later on this afternoon. I do think there is a model for this, and I wanted to ask my colleague about it. Adjournment Proceedings questions, or late show questions, are four minutes of question and four minutes of answer. They are equal length and both of them are longer. It does give time to allow people to put a substantive, as opposed to purely rhetorical question, into what they ask. I am wondering whether that serves as a model or potentially, as it is not a perfect system, a warning about things we should think about as we look at this question.

Madam Speaker, I was unaware of the code of conduct issues that had arisen with regard to the member. I will just observe that it is an excellent introduction to what I am about to deal with here, which is our own code of conduct. The Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons is an appendix to the Standing Orders, and today's debate is therefore the appropriate forum in which to discuss the code and also to discuss the problematic way in which it has been administered. In my remarks today, I will demonstrate that, in at least one case, the administration of the code by the former ethics commissioner, Mr. Mario Dion, was itself a very consequential violation of the code. I hope that the current commissioner will take heed. I have already been vocal in my criticism of Mr. Dion. In February 2021, I wrote an essay, which I published on my website, criticizing Commissioner Dion's report finding the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore guilty of an entirely invented breach of the code. Last October, I had the opportunity to speak out against the former commissioner's outrageous 2019 finding that the member for Ottawa West—Nepean had violated the code by transgressing a preposterously stringent interpretation of the term “using her position as a member of Parliament”. On September 29, 2020, it was my turn; the commissioner went after me. I received a letter on that day in which the commissioner informed me, “Pursuant to subsection 27(4) of the...Code, I am writing to notify you of my concerns that you may have contravened the Code by attempting to use your position as a Member of Parliament to influence a decision so as to further the private interests of a member of your family”. Commissioner Dion further stated, “Upon receipt of your response...I will determine whether an inquiry into your conduct is warranted”. I will fast-forward to another piece of correspondence from Commissioner Dion, dated November 25 of the same year, in which he wrote: I am writing further to the letter from your [legal] counsel...responding to my concerns...that you may have contravened section 11 of the...Code.... ...I have determined that I do not have reason to believe you have contravened section 11 of the Code and I will not initiate an inquiry into the matter. That ended things. I had a clean bill of ethical health. However, members will note that Commissioner Dion makes reference to a letter from my legal counsel. Here is that letter, and as members can see, it is over 100 pages long. I apologize for showing it in the House, but I want to make the point that it is over 100 pages. It includes tax returns, audited statements and other documents. Importantly, my legal bill to respond to Mr. Dion's preliminary review was $43,423.53, every penny of which was paid out of after-tax income. At the 50% tax bracket in which all MPs sit, the cost to me was over $80,000. I have the good fortune to have a significant amount of inherited wealth. However, for the majority of members in this place, the sudden imposition of a legal bill of this magnitude could be ruinous. Had Commissioner Dion decided, as he could well have done, that he would go further and launch an actual inquiry, my legal bills might well have been several multiples higher. When the costs of responding to an accusation become ruinous, prosecutions, including preliminary reviews and inquiries, can be weaponized. That is to say, the process of prosecution itself can be used as a weapon. Mere accusations, including groundless accusations, become death blows to all but the wealthiest. Our court system has therefore adopted a number of rules to prevent weaponization. One such rule is that the losing party in a court action must pay a share of the court costs of the winning party. Another rule is that the person who is accused has the right to face his or her accuser. By contrast with the courts, our conflict of interest code contains no version of the first of the two rules I just mentioned, but it does contain an interesting proxy for the right to face one's accuser. Pursuant to subsection 27(1) of the code, the commissioner may pursue a preliminary review only if authorized to do so by a signed, written request from a member of Parliament, who effectively takes on the role of publicly identified accuser, and if at the conclusion of an inquiry, the commissioner is of the opinion that the request for an inquiry was frivolous or vexatious, subsection 27(6) of the code provides that “the commissioner shall so state in dismissing the request in a report...and may recommend that further action be considered against the member who made the request.” However, in my case, the commissioner ignored the limit imposed on him by subsection 27(1). In his letter of September 29, the commissioner informed me that he had been notified by an anonymous tip. He said, “On June 26...I received a letter from a member of the public alleging that you communicated numerous times with councillors and municipal employees of Tay Valley Township in respect of your spouse's operation of a forest school and community garden at [Blueberry Creek Forest School and Nature Centre] on Highway 7.” It was on the basis of this letter, from a party whose identity the commissioner subsequently kept secret, that he informed me that he would launch an inquiry unless, within the next 30 days, I satisfied him as to my innocence. It was the act of satisfying him as to my innocence, by exhaustively demonstrating the fact that Blueberry Creek is a bona fide not-for-profit and that my wife derives no financial benefit from the operation of the forest school, that cost me 43,000 after-tax dollars in legal bills. That is a bit like proving someone's innocence of witchcraft by drowning them during a witch dunking: They are innocent but also dead. The accusation was costless for my anonymous accuser to make. Refuting the anonymous accusation was devastatingly expensive. Even though the request for the inquiry was indeed vexatious, I have no ability to seek the redress promised by subsection 27(6) because the commissioner has made sure that I cannot find out who made the anonymous denunciation. However, I was able to draw the commissioner's attention to the fact that, whomever it may have been who contacted him, the ultimate source of this information had to be an interested party on the other side of an ongoing legal dispute between Blueberry Creek Forest School and Tay Valley Township. I sent a letter to the commissioner pointing out that one piece of evidence that had been given to him by the anonymous informant “has never been made public”. I am quoting from my letter, which continues, “Only the eight members of the Council to whom this was emailed, plus the township's clerk, Amanda Mabo, and the township's Chief Administrative Officer, Larry Donaldson, would ever have seen the...email.” An Ethics Commissioner who allows anonymous denunciations to which the cost of responding are ruinous has set the grounds for the serial use of vexatious assertions of ethical breaches in order to settle scores or to force elected officials to resign as the only means of escaping expensive inquiries. Now, lest the assertion that I have just made be taken as hysterical, let me point out that this is exactly what has happened to Ontario's system of municipal integrity commissioners. Ironically, this was attested to just a moment ago in the last remark by the previous speaker, the member for Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, who said he faced numerous such accusations for reasons that were entirely personal. The Ontario system permits anonymous denunciations, arbitrary penalties and provides only the weakest safeguards against the integrity commissioners, as ethics commissioners are called provincially, who are usually external counsel retained on contract by the township or municipality, having their own conflicts of interest. For example, they might be simultaneously a town solicitor and its integrity commissioner, a clear conflict of interest. In 2024, Ontario's integrity commissioner system was variously described as the “wild west” and as being a “cash cow” for the commissioners themselves, most egregiously for Tony Fleming, a lawyer at the Kingston law firm of Cunningham Swan, who served simultaneously as town councillor and integrity commissioner for 35 municipalities, despite repeated accusations that this represents a conflict of interest on his part. In 2022, it was reported that the legal bills paid to the integrity commissioner in the town of Elliott Lake over the four-year term of the town council amounted to $858,000, or about $80 per town resident. To give another example, at one point in the summer of 2025, the integrity commissioner for the Township of Rideau Lakes, just south of my riding, was involved in 11 simultaneous investigations. The town council in Rideau Lakes has only nine members. A year earlier, the Ontario ombudsman reported that most of the complaints it had received regarding municipal accountability officers were specifically about integrity commissioners. A similar form of weaponization of our own ethics code is a very real danger should the safeguards that have been built into the code continue to be ignored by the official who is charged with their enforcement. Commissioner Dion facilitated weaponization. It is my hope that the current commissioner will hear what I am saying today and will firmly reject the dangerous precedent set by his predecessor, and in the event that he takes the position that his predecessor's actions in accepting anonymous denunciations were not a breach of the code, that the House will modify the code to impose this limit in clearer terms in the future.

Madam Speaker, I am not going to respond to that one either, except to say that there is a connection here. There are a number of these kinds of processes that have been weaponized. One was weaponized against the leader of the Green Party, which was the internal processes in her party, by an individual who had come in as a temporary employee and proceeded to attack her leadership and basically tried to destroy it. It attracted enough attention that its refutation made its way onto the editorial pages of the National Post, where Christie Blatchford attacked the individual who had behaved in this disgraceful manner in attacking the member in her role as Green Party leader. That individual's name is Rob Rainer, and he is now the reeve or mayor of Tay Valley Township. I have wondered whether it was he who anonymously denounced me to the Ethics Commissioner, but I have no way of knowing that. Perhaps Mr. Rainer will have the chance to say so, one way or the other, when he gets the opportunity.

Madam Speaker, the simplest thing would be for PROC, the next time the commissioner is before that committee, to ask whether he agrees or disagrees with the approach of accepting anonymous denunciations, denunciations other than those spelled out in subsection 27(1) of the code. If he says that he disagrees with the precedent and would not accept such an act, I think that settles the matter. If he says that he thinks that Mr. Dion acted correctly, then I think that a firmer wording is needed to make it absolutely transparent that nothing other than a denunciation or an accusation submitted by a member of Parliament or a motion of the House is acceptable.

Mr. Speaker, In this week before Christmas, one might wonder why Write a poem at all, and not just use AI. AI knows meter and rhyme and all their uses Can make Clement Moore's verse sound like Dr. Seuss's. AI seems to do everything better than you can, Flies drones and drives safer than a real human. Its advantage in word search is very well sealed. It found me 29 words that rhyme with “Brookfield”. But there are things too bizarre for AI to know, Like what draws Katy Perry to Justin Trudeau. You can ask, but AI can't give you directions Why Jagmeet Singh lasted through three elections. And AI can't explain to me or to you Why the Grits won't vote to support their own MOU. Some places there are, where AI just can't fudge it. It's going to take humans to balance the budget. Which is why this poem was still written by me (But the partisan bits are from ChatGPT).

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has adopted a perversely restrictive interpretation of the bulk labelling regulations under the Fertilizers Act. If enforced, the interpretation would impose $120 million in compliance costs on retailers, which will be passed on to farmers to achieve, quite literally, nothing. If the Liberals are truly committed to reducing red tape, they could instantly override the CFIA by making marginal clarifications to these regulations. Will they do so, or will they allow the CFIA to drive small retailers out of business and drive up costs for Canadian farmers?

Mr. Speaker, I am tabling two petitions today. Both relate to freedom of religion. The first petition relates to Falun Gong practitioners. It is an issue I have been pursuing for a quarter of a century. The very first thing I said in the House of Commons 25 years ago was on the subject of the Communist persecution of Falun Gong, which still goes on after a campaign of more than a quarter of a century. The petitioners point out that Falun Gong practitioners in China have suffered a number of very serious human rights abuses, ranging from detention to torture and forced organ harvesting, which of course involves the death of the person whose organ has been harvested. There is also transnational persecution that extends to Canada. There are attempts to influence the Canadian government to turn it against this peaceful religion. The petitioners ask that we take steps to make sure this does not happen.

Mr. Speaker, the second petition relates to a report from the finance committee some time ago that asked for religious charities to be stripped of their CRA tax-exempt status. The petitioners point out that nearly half of all work done in the charitable sector is done by religious-based charities, and they note that it is inappropriate for the government to be assigning a values test and saying that unfashionable values, those held by religious groups, should exclude them from doing the great work they do for our communities.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to address two general subject areas, if time permits. For the first of these, I will make some observations about how this budget and the general direction the government has taken over the 10 years it has been in power have caused us to drift away from the goal of Canada being a financially egalitarian society, in which all people have a fair shot at doing well and those who are less well off are taken care of through our welfare state. As the second part, I will talk specifically about issues relating to the cost of housing, especially as it affects younger people, which obviously is one of the key areas in which issues of affordability and equity are problematic. The stated goal of Canada's welfare state has always been to redistribute wealth from wealthier Canadians to Canadians who have less. From its very start in the 1920s and 1930s, the goal of wealth redistribution from rich to poor has been supported by a broad national consensus, and all parties. Over the years, Canadians have sometimes complained that taxes were too high or that too much of the redistributed wealth was being used up in bureaucratic churn, but no major political actor has ever suggested a return to the old days when tax rates were very low and the poor received no public assistance whatsoever. However, recent public policy shifts of the last 10 years, and particularly this budget, have caused the welfare state to drift away from this widely supported redistribution from rich to poor and toward something entirely different. Increasingly, the policy choices of the Canadian government and to some degree of governments at all levels, but particularly of this government, have had the practical impact of transferring wealth not to the poorest, but rather to parts of the population that are already well off. I could give a very long list of both federal and provincial policy, and municipal policy as well, quite frankly. However, let me just give one example that is held up by the Liberal government as being a touchstone of how much they want to help those in need. This is their publicly funded child care program, introduced last year, which promises to offer significantly more affordable child care to everyone, in principle, but in practice, the program is available, for the most part, only to people who live in larger population centres that are closer to where the regulated day care spaces are located. This creates the following problem: State-subsidized child care spaces are available to urbanites, who are on average wealthier, but not to rural Canadians, who are on average less wealthy. Similarly, subsidized child care is unavailable for children of shift workers, who are almost always less wealthy, so on the whole, this is a transfer that misses those who need it the most and provides it to those who need it the least. That is not to say that it is not an important policy goal. It is to say that this is a very poor mechanism by which to help those who are parents and who are not wealthy. Likewise, the programs to give incentives to individuals to purchase zero-emission vehicles are great for those who are in a position to purchase a vehicle at all and who are in a position, because they are urbanites, to be close to where they can recharge their vehicle with ease before the battery runs out. It is of no use at all to someone in a rural area. It is of no use at all to someone who is less well off, but it transfers taxes that were collected from everybody to a certain segment of the population that, in practice, does not need it, rather than to those who need it the most. Let me turn to the issue of housing. Everybody knows the cost of housing has soared over the past few years, but it seems to me that something should be said to the generally well-off people in this room, those of us who are wealthier, those of us who are older, someone who is a boomer or a generation Xer like me. If that person bought a house a decade ago, two decades ago or three decades ago, the price of housing can be looked at dispassionately. In fact, it is a question that, on the whole, has made us better off. Prices are high and that is tough for some other people, but for us homeowners, things are actually pretty good. The house that each one of us bought, which seemed expensive at the time, is now worth twice as much or more, and that is when I take into account inflation. If I look at the nominal price, the growth is even greater. For many people of my generation, the resale value of that mortgage-paid house is the foundation of what promises to be a very comfortable retirement. However, if someone does not own a house, as is the case for most young people, things look and feel entirely different. When I was 25, in 1990, it was possible for me to rent a small, fully detached three-bedroom house in a pleasant neighbourhood in Ottawa for $850 a month, which is $1,840 in 2025 dollars. Recently, out of curiosity, I took a look online to see how much it would cost to do this now. A comparable home in a comparable location would be about 50% more to rent than it was then. As a result, for 49% of Canadians under the age of 25, just paying the cost of rent consumes half their income, according to a survey conducted earlier this year. We could just shrug at that and say that maybe it is a bit much for a 25-year-old to expect to live in a three-bedroom house, although nobody thought that in 1990, when I was 25. However, the fact is that most people that age are now living in shared rooms or in apartments far smaller than what I once enjoyed, and the survey shows that the average rent for people in this age range is about $1,400 and that they are living in very small spaces. It is not just the very young who have this problem. Thirty-four per cent of renters of all ages are paying more than half their income in rent. It is also a problem not just in the big cities; a substantial percentage of residents in Lanark County, in the riding I represent, also pay more for rent than for all other expenditures combined. Given these facts, it seems hard to deny that in order for most young people to become financially secure, they have to escape the high cost of renting, which means buying a home. However, to state the obvious, it is nearly impossible for them to save up for a down payment for a house, the price of which has skyrocketed, when the high cost of rent is soaking up so much of their income. This inevitably leads inevitably to some depressing news. StatsCan reports that after 10 years of Liberal government, the percentage of people under the age of 30 who own their own home has fallen by a third. The statistics are for 2011 and 2021; nothing more recent is available, but they make the point that by now, home ownership numbers among the young are falling and appear to be falling with increasing speed. This produces an even more alarming statistic: While the average income in Canada for people in the bottom half of wage earners has gone up by 250% since 1982, mostly due to inflation, the cost of housing of all sorts has gone up more than three times as much. Housing prices are rising much faster than wages. That means that there is now a divide. It is generational in nature, and it is divided between urban and rural. It is divided in a way where we see the dream of social equity and the dream of prosperity disappearing for a substantial part of the population. That is why we had the results we did in the last election. Poll-by-poll results are available, so we can look at them. We can see very clearly that, in my own riding, the people who are the least well off were voting for the Conservative Party and against the government. That appears to be a pattern that was true across the country. The people who are the most well off, who enjoy home ownership, who enjoy high-paying wages and who enjoy the benefits of a system that transfers, essentially, to the wealthy, voted Liberal. I think we have to step back and think about what we can do as a country to make sure the divide ends. The Liberals should have a partisan interest in this. They should, for their own sake, be worrying about and trying to stop the enormous and growing social divide. This is a crisis that is transforming the nature of our society. I think, if it is not dealt with, the Canada our children will have when they are my age will be far worse, quite frankly, than the one we inherited from our parents. That is a great shame. The budget could have dealt with the issue. Instead, more spending has been piled on and more debt is being accumulated, which will be paid for by the next generation. When the Liberals use the term “generational budget”, I can only think they are talking about a concept known as generational debt, which is what they are imposing on our children, who will pay more taxes into a system that transfers money away from them and structures policy to make sure they cannot move ahead. It is a great shame. All I can do is hope that, on this basis, the House will reject the budget implementation act when it comes to a vote.

Mr. Speaker, that is of course a question about provincial policy, but I did invite it by saying that federal and provincial policies have been in combination. I suppose the answer there is that the goal the provincial government had in mind was to encourage more construction for rental purposes. The Ford government's belief was that there is no investment case to be made for building a new rental unit if landlords expect that controls would have the effect of capping their income from that unit. I think that was the purpose of doing that; whether it has been successful, I do not know for sure. However, there is a basic problem here with rent control, which is this: It is available for those who have been renting for a long time, who typically are older people who in some cases, not in all cases, have more money, and it is not available at all for younger people, which means that they are facing paying full price for rent in a province that has rent control for some and not for others.

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question, but I do not have any expertise on that subject. The issue of seasonal work affects some of my constituents, but it is a real problem for a large part of the population of the Magdalen Islands, which may be one of the most beautiful regions in our country. It is a region where the fishing industry plays a vital role. I do not believe I am the best person to answer my colleague's question.

Mr. Speaker, it could stop spending more than it is bringing in. At some point, we have to return to a budget balance. There is no way one can continue spending with deficits of this size forever. It is fiscally unsustainable. As we do, it is going to lead to more and more debt on which we have to pay interest. It is going to crowd out lending in the private sector, which will drive up interest rates for those who are paying mortgages or have other forms of indebtedness. Everybody who does have debt suffers in a high interest rate environment. Every individual who is a creditor or who owns shares in a company or has a pension fund that owns bonds is wealthier, and they do better in a higher interest rate environment. In the Parliamentary Budget Officer's paper on the relative amount of spending power for different quintiles in the population, he points out that the result of higher interest rates has been that the wealthier in Canada are getting wealthier and the poorest are getting poorer.

Mr. Speaker, the House unanimously adopted two motions, one affirming that a genocide is under way in China and the other calling on the government to “expedite the entry [into Canada] of 10,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in need of protection, over two years starting in 2024”. That two-year period ends in a month, and as of yesterday, only 143 Uyghurs have been admitted to Canada by a government that now calls the People's Republic of China a strategic partner. How soon can we expect the remaining 9,857 Uyghurs to receive the protection we all agree they need?

Madam Speaker, I am, like all members of the House who are not of indigenous background, the child of immigrants. We are all either immigrants ourselves, the children of immigrants or the grandchildren of immigrants. This is where I fit in. My grandparents came to Canada, and my grandmother came from a place called Bialystok in Poland. She was a Jew. Bialystok had, at the time she left with her parents in 1914, 10,000 people, and the majority, about 70%, were Jewish. When my mother returned to Bialystok in the 1970s, of course, a few things had happened, including the Holocaust and then several decades of Communist rule. There were no longer enough Jews in that town to form a minyan, which is a 10-man group of people to conduct prayers at the beginning of Sabbath. It is our good fortune that our family was not there because 95% of the Jews were killed. My mother obviously would not have survived that. I am someone who is half Jewish, and it is questionable, depending on which part of Europe one was in, whether I would be have been considered someone slated for extermination or not. This thought crosses my mind when I consider what could have happened. My grandfather was born in a place called Odobesti, Romania. While 90% of Romanian Jews were killed, Odobesti was far enough into the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps that it was overlooked. When my mother went there in the 1970s, she met with some people from the Jewish community who were able to describe the situation. I say all of this by way of saying that Canada is the land of hope. It was then for people who were leaving prosecution. In the case of my great-grandfather, who led his family out of Bialystok, he was not trying to escape the Nazis, who did not exist yet. He was trying to escape conscription to the czar's army at the beginning of World War I. My great-grandfather bought a passport from a neighbour, which was obviously an illegal transaction. His family name was Tauber, but the name of the neighbour from whom he purchased the passport was Chaiton. For the rest of their lives, they were known as the Chaiton family. I say this by way of saying that, even those who come here under conditions that might not meet with what we consider full respect for all laws of all jurisdictions are, nonetheless, often good citizens, and they are welcome here. If I go to my father's side of the family, who came from Ireland and Scotland, their tale is a little different. They were staying within the British Empire when they migrated, but they had to leave their families and know they would never see them again. The immigrants who come here today, fresh from, typically now, Asia or Africa, and sometimes Latin America, also, over and over, demonstrate a deep respect and love for this country. They understand in a way that those of us who are born here can forget, unless we are reflecting on the history of our own ancestors. They understand what an extraordinary gift Canadian citizenship is and what an extraordinary thing it is to become a part of this welcoming community. This is the theme of the concerns we in the opposition are expressing with this legislation. We do not think it is inappropriate to respond to a court ruling, although I do want to return to that theme in a second because the government acted precipitantly in this manner, but we do think it is reasonable to apply a nuanced view to accept that the government‘s first draft might not be absolute perfection and that it is worth considering the ideas others, and other parties, are putting forward in the House of Commons. Let me just talk for a moment about the way in which the government has handled this legislation. It responded to a ruling of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, which was handed down on December 19, 2023. As one of my colleagues noted a little earlier in this debate, a deadline was attached for compliance to that ruling by the judge, and a variety of exigencies, including the recent election, nine months ago now, had the effect of pushing back that date. This was a ruling of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, not of the Supreme Court of Canada. I think we should understand that there is a distinction between rulings of lower courts and of the Supreme Court of Canada. When the Supreme Court rules, it, of course, has nine members. Sometimes they sit en banc, which means all of them together. Sometimes there is an odd-numbered panel of seven. This allows for something very important to happen. Multiple opinions can be expressed, including dissenting opinions. For the question that is before the court, the simple question of whether party A is right or if party B is right, and which of these two interpretations of the law is right on that specific, narrow question, the majority rule prevails, but there are opinions, both of the majority and of any dissenting minority. There can be more than one dissenting opinion that is filed. We can have seriatim dissents. In fact, we can have seriatim opinions in favour of the narrow point in question, with different reasoning. The reasoning is what is actually valuable. The reasoning is what pushes forward a more nuanced, intelligent and thorough comprehension of the common law or, in the case of constitutional interpretation, the development of our understanding of that statute. It is a really important concept. That is why we have the Supreme Court. It is why our higher courts have more members than our lower courts, because higher courts are the ones where judicial reasoning is of particular importance, as it lays that ongoing and ever-building framework of improvement in our understanding of how our laws work and how our Constitution ought to be applied. It is not with any sense of disrespect that I point out that the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, in its ruling, was the ruling of a single judge, one judge, with neither dissenting opinions from other judges, nor concurring opinions, for that matter. It would have been appropriate, I believe, for the government to have made an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to get the reasoning of a larger number of justices. We would not have seen the introduction of new facts. We do not in an appeal case, typically. We would have seen a review of what might be errors in judgment or errors in the understanding of the precedents. That is where the value lies. I think that it was regrettable that the government made the decision to not let this go to the Supreme Court. Having said that, the government did not take the matter the Supreme Court. It took it to Parliament. It introduced Bill C-3. The bill essentially removes the first-generation limit, introduced by former prime minister Harper's government back in 2009, a model which, with variations, exists for many counties around the world. I talked at length about my mother's side of the family. My father's side of the family comes from Ireland. Ireland applies a limit. My great-grandfather came from Ireland. His son and his grandson, my dad, would be eligible for Irish passports. I am not, which I frankly regret a little, but it is the way it is. Even if my father had gotten his Irish passport, which he thought about doing, I would not have qualified. That is a reasonable limit. My affection for Ireland is significant. My actual connection to the country is very limited. It is a reasonable limit to place. There are other countries that do something different. Some countries never get rid of citizenship rights but they are typically countries that do not have that combination of people leaving and people coming from elsewhere, at least to the same degree. Malta, for example, extends it. There are very few people who have immigrated to Malta, although there are many Maltese immigrants. It is a significantly different situation. The common-sense way in which the opposition parties have proposed to deal with some of this is by proposing a series of amendments. They proposed a change to the residency requirement. The parent applying for Canadian citizenship, who is the descendant of those who have left Canada, should be able to demonstrate a consecutive physical presence in Canada for the same time frame as a naturalized citizen. I think that this is a very reasonable rule for extending, effectively, a form of inherited citizenship to their children and grandchildren. Other amendments include a citizenship test requirement, similar to what one would face if one was a new immigrant to Canada, and a security screening, to make sure that one has not broken the laws, not the kind of law I mentioned with my great-grandfather but the kind of law that we see with individuals who have committed violent criminal acts in other countries. I think, as well, that our suggested amendments regarding transparency for the ministry would be very helpful, for a minister to report to Parliament on the number of citizenships granted under the terms of the bill every year. That would be a very helpful thing to see. Likewise, a reporting requirement on revealing security screening exemptions would also be something that should be considered by the government.

Madam Speaker, my colleague asked why the government was not transparent. I do not know the answer to that. It has a remarkable reluctance regarding transparency on many issues. The most obvious one has nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with a certain emigrant who left this country, went abroad for a number of years, became governor of the Bank of England, wound up running Brookfield investments, moved its headquarters out of Canada, caused it to divert about $6.5 billion in tax revenues out of Canada and is someone who has shrouded his own assets in complete darkness, so we have no idea what he is invested in. I am obviously speaking of the Prime Minister. He makes the claim that he will be recused from anything that is a conflict. We cannot recuse the Prime Minister. He is implicated in every decision, and we have no idea where the conflicts are, although there are clearly many.

Madam Speaker, that is a very good question. When it comes to the rules for people immigrating to Canada, there is a requirement that they be able to speak one of our two official languages, for example. This is mandatory for people seeking citizenship who were born in a foreign country and who do not have a parent or grandparent who was born in Canada. I think this is a reasonable requirement for people who are in the same situation but who do have a parent or grandparent who was born in Canada. The rules are there to ensure that both official languages are spoken by the majority of Canadians across the country.

Madam Speaker, if we were to learn China uses convict labour, drawn disproportionately from indigenous minorities, to produce products to be sold commercially by the prison system, we would condemn this, and we would ban that product. What are we supposed to think of a report from the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network that milk produced at the Joyceville prison farm by inmates paid less than a dollar an hour is being sold by CORCAN for profit? Canada's correctional investigator says that, in his view, this represents “a human rights violation.” I agree with him, and I wonder why the government is doing this.

Mr. Speaker, the petition I am presenting today concerns recommendations 429 and 430 of the Standing Committee on Finance. These meetings happened a long time ago as pre-budget hearings, but because of the delay in the budget until the week after next, they are highly relevant. These recommendations were supported by the Liberal members of the finance committee but not, I note, by Conservative members of the committee. The recommendations would single out a specific subgroup within the charitable sector, penalizing organizations that are based on moral stances different from those of the governing party in the country and effectively taking away their charitable status. A fact pointed out by the petitioners is that faith-based charities represent the majority of charitable spending and community activity in Canada. These include such things as community services and ministries, food banks, soup kitchens, refugee resettlement, climate and social justice initiatives, day cares, schools, hospitals, pregnancy care, long-term homes and palliative care centres. Replacing these would require many billions of dollars and would be enormously socially disruptive. It is based, frankly, on anti-religious bigotry. They oppose these measures and so do I.

Mr. Speaker, I did not know that the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands—Rideau Lakes would be rising on this question of privilege, but it is a very important point he raises. I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that the problem the member is pointing out to the House is a long-standing one. It did not begin with the present commissioner; it goes back certainly to his predecessor, Mario Dion, who violated and acted in contempt of the code on a number of occasions. Before I get to that, I will say that I have personal knowledge of a number of the things that have been referred to by the hon. member with relation to the history of the code. I served for 15 years on the procedure and House affairs committee, which I think is a record. I do not think anyone here has ever served that long on that, or any other, committee. I was on the committee when we adopted the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons, and I was there for various amendments. I chaired a subcommittee dealing with gifts and where that issue fits into the code. I also dealt with and was part of the writing of the report in which we concluded that Commissioner Shapiro was indeed guilty of contempt of Parliament in his actions. There were very serious consequences of the unauthorized investigatory activities he undertook, including devastating consequences for people who were not members of Parliament. Mr. Speaker, you can read the report to learn more about that. When I say that this is part of a pattern that goes back to Commissioner Dion, what I am referring to is the use of unauthorized forms, which includes other forms that the House has never seen. I will give an example. I do not know how many of the forms exist, but one form that Commissioner Dion put out is a non-disclosure agreement. When the Commissioner Dion would conduct an inquiry into a member of Parliament, his office would submit a non-disclosure form, which he told them they were required to sign, because we are all required, under section 27(8) of the code, which states: “Members shall cooperate with the commissioner with respect to any inquiry.” If the commissioner started investigating someone, they would be required to co-operate. Part of this co-operation, in the commissioner's mind, was signing a form, a non-disclosure agreement, about the way in which he conducted an investigation. This ensured that if he engaged in any abuses of his investigatory power, a person had no recourse and would not be able to speak out against what he had done. I think this is an absolutely outrageous abuse. It is part of a pattern of administrative justice in this country, in which all the normal protections that exist under the criminal law or civil law are stripped away when it is an administrative matter. This is a fundamental problem we see not just with this commissioner or the previous one, but also with the integrity commissioners, for example, running Ontario's municipalities, where there is widespread abuse, to the point that the integrity commissioners have, frankly, less integrity than the people they are investigating. The non-disclosure form would then be used to silence the member, who would be unable to say how the investigation had been conducted or whether the commissioner had gone too far. I was never the subject of an inquiry from the commissioner, but I did have the experience of, again, the commissioner's acting in contempt of Parliament, in sending me a letter in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. I cannot remember the exact date I got the letter, but I believe it was in September 2020. The letter effectively said, “I was approached by a member of the public who tells me that you may have used your office for the benefit of a family member. You have a limited amount of time to convince me otherwise. If you don't satisfy me, I will launch an inquiry.” The nature of the evidence he then cited justifying his course of action included a number of documents I had written. One of them was an email I had sent to members of the council of a rural township where my wife was involved in a zoning dispute. I had sent an email to them asking them to conduct themselves in a certain way regarding the zoning. It was addressed to a limited number of individuals. Only those people, our lawyer, my wife and I had seen this letter, so I knew he was taking this from an opposed party in an ongoing legal dispute and decided to weigh in on a private legal dispute on one side based on an anonymous denunciation. To this day, I still do not know who the anonymous denouncer might have been, although, as I pointed out to the commissioner, it was clearly one of a limited number of people: the members of the council, their senior staff or their lawyer. I could list off the names. One of them was formerly a staffer to the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands who had engaged in a similar action against her when he worked for her. I have a suspicion it is that individual, a man named Rob Rainer, but I do not know for sure. Initiating an inquiry on his own initiative or on the basis of an anonymous denunciation is not permitted under the Standing Orders, under the conflict of interest code. Here is how the commissioner may engage in an inquiry. Subsection 27(1) says: A member who has reasonable grounds to believe that another member has not complied with his or her obligations under this code may request that the commissioner conduct an inquiry into the matter. Alternatively, subsection 27(3) says: The House may, by way of resolution, direct the commissioner to conduct an inquiry to determine whether a member has complied with his or her obligations under this code. There is no other mechanism for initiating investigations. Anonymous denunciations are not listed as one of the bases for doing this. I could have pointed that out to the commissioner, but he was in the process of beginning an investigation that, to me, could have resulted in the destruction of my career, so I was not in a position to fight back on technicalities. We went out and collected all of the evidence required, including going through our financial records and numerous legal documents, and in the end, he concluded that my wife had no financial interest in the matter and that I was therefore not guilty of misusing my office. By the way, the way I had misused my office, to be clear, was that I had sent an email from the email address scottreidmp@gmail.com, and he concluded that this represented a misuse of my office because it implied that I was a member of Parliament. That implication and the authority of Parliament somehow represented a misuse. To say the mere mention that a member is an MP represents a misuse of their office is a ludicrous interpretation, which he previously used in the investigation of the member for Ottawa West—Nepean. He found her guilty of acknowledging that she was an MP when she was campaigning for her husband, who was running for Ottawa city council. It was a crazy interpretation of the code to say that people knowing she was a member of Parliament while her husband ran for public office represented an abuse of the code. The fact that her husband was going from a higher-paying job to a lower-paying one as an Ottawa city councillor, thereby making it a negative financial interest, was of no concern to the commissioner, who was simply looking for a way to find her guilty of something to justify himself and his salary. It was an outrageous pattern of behaviour that he repeated again when he went after the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore. Members can read both his report and my views on his report on my website. It was a vindictive attack on the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore just because he did not like the way the member was behaving. This kind of personal, petty vindictiveness creeping into an officer of Parliament so they can take advantage of the fact that there are no procedural protections for members of Parliament and abuse their authority is an outrage and should be dealt with. In the event that one member asks the commissioner to investigate another member, it can happen that the commissioner looks into it and says ultimately that it was frivolous, that the member's name was dragged through the mud for nothing. When I was on the procedure and House affairs committee, we changed the code to say that when an investigation is undertaken, both the commissioner and the member who made the accusation have to stay quiet so they cannot damage a person by launching an investigation right before an election, for example. This was put into the code in subsection 27(6): If the commissioner is of the opinion that a request for an inquiry was frivolous or vexatious or was not made in good faith, the commissioner shall so state in dismissing the request in a report under section 28(6) and may recommend that further action be considered against the member who made the request. That was done, by the way, when Charlie Angus launched a frivolous accusation against another member. This is great if an MP does it, but I did not get that right, because some anonymous person anonymously denounced me to a commissioner who kept protecting their identity after the fact, after finding out the whole thing was frivolous. I apologize for revealing a confidential conversation, but when I spoke to the member for Ottawa West—Nepean, I talked to her about how much it cost me in legal bills to fight this. I said that I am very fortunate; I have extraordinarily fortunate financial circumstances. The $40,000 in legal fees it cost me to fight this was something I could sustain. She said she had to pay a whole bunch too. The commissioner gets a salary for doing this stuff. She and I, and I assume the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, had to pay out of our own pockets for this. If a member is not independently wealthy, the investigation itself can ruin them, even if it is completely vexatious. This is an outrage that exists throughout the administrative justice system in Canada, federal and provincial. It exist right here, and it is time to cut out this cancer.

Mr. Speaker, on Friday last week I asked a question regarding automated external defibrillators, AEDs as they are called. I asked about placing them in RCMP cruisers. I just want to talk for a while about some of the things that are hard to discuss in the 35 seconds allocated for a question in question period, in order to explain some of the benefits that would accrue from RCMP cruisers' having defibrillators. The RCMP, of course, is the largest police force across Canada. It is the de facto provincial police force in every province except Ontario and Quebec, and even in Ontario and Quebec it has a limited presence, in national parks, the national capital region and so on. RCMP cruisers are not equipped with AEDs. By contrast, the City of Ottawa police, the City of Toronto police and the City of Kingston police, in the local area, have defibrillators. The City of Ottawa police have had defibrillators for over 20 years. In the case of the Toronto municipal police, the defibrillators were installed when the former minister of national defence was the chief of police in Toronto. I spoke to him once about it. He said that he was very proud of the fact that he got them put in. He said that they have saved a lot of lives. Indeed they have. I, likewise, am responsible for putting defibrillators in a much smaller police force. The last independent police force in my constituency is in Smiths Falls, and I arranged the fundraising drive that allowed defibrillators to be placed in all its cruisers in 2005. In the cruisers of that small police force, they have been used on a number of occasions and have saved some lives, nowhere near the number of lives saved in Toronto because that has a very large police force. However, whether it is a small police force or a large one, the cops are frequently first responders. When an emergency call goes out, not just for a crime in progress but also for a health emergency, the paramedics are notified, the fire departments are notified and so are the police, and there is a bit of a lottery. Sometimes the police have the closest vehicle. Sometimes they arrive first. If I talk to an experienced police officer, they will usually be able to say that they were the first person on site at some kind of cardiac emergency. If they are from the City of Ottawa police, the Toronto police, the Smiths Falls police or literally any of 100 other municipal police forces across Canada, they will be able to say they had an AED at their disposal and were able to attempt to save a life. It does not necessarily mean they saved it, but it might mean they did. The fact is that a significant number of lives are saved, and based on the save rate for various municipal police forces in Canada, we can take that and multiply it by the number of cruisers the RCMP has. If the RCMP had defibrillators, they would perform, on average, 300 saves every year. The cost to equip every police cruiser in the RCMP would be about $10 million. It would be a one-time cost, although the defibrillators have a finite life of about 10 years, and there is some upkeep, but it is minor. For $10 million, we could save 300 lives a year. There is literally no other measure I can think of that would save that number of lives for that small an expense. This is a government that is willing to spend many billions on other issues, to create a few jobs, for example. Saving 300 lives for $10 million is a bargain. Why does the government not take action on this?

Mr. Speaker, certainly, we should take our time and think this over carefully. Ralph Goodale, when he was in opposition, before he became minister of public safety, when the government changed hands in 2015, put forward a private member's motion in 2013, saying: That in the opinion of the House, the government should address the wide variation in the availability of defibrillators throughout the buildings and facilities owned, operated or regulated by the Government of Canada, and the equally wide variation in the training of appropriate personnel to use defibrillators properly, by adopting and implementing a policy of: (a) installing an appropriate number and calibre of automated external defibrillators in all such buildings and facilities; and (b) training the appropriate personnel to use such defibrillators properly, with priority being assigned to all RCMP offices and vehicles. That was 12 years ago, when the man who went on to become one of several now Liberal ministers in his portfolio said this should be done. How much study does it take? That is a decade, and at 300 lives per year, that is 3,000 lives. We could fill every seat in the House with 10 bodies, because the government has failed to act. That is shameful. I ask the member to defend that record.

Mr. Speaker, if we install automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, in police cars to be used when the police are the first on the scene in a 911 call for a heart attack, we can save a lot of lives. Municipal police across Canada have been saving lives with AEDs for years. RCMP officers are already trained on how to use AEDs. Equipping all RCMP vehicles nationwide with AEDs would save upwards of 300 lives per year. Therefore, after 10 years in government, why have the Liberals not installed AEDs in all RCMP cruisers?

Mr. Speaker, in the past two weeks, I have twice asked the government why there is still a 35% tariff on Russian fertilizer when it is clear that this is not causing a net decline in Russian exports, nor a fall in the price paid worldwide for Russian product. The purpose of the tariff, when it was imposed in the spring of 2022, was to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. That year, a total of $115 million in tariff revenue was collected on fertilizer and fertilizer precursors, but because the contracts with Russian suppliers had already been signed and the fertilizer had already been loaded onto ships, the cost ended up being borne not by the Russians but by the Canadian farmers who were on the hook for these purchases. This debacle prompted one contemporary analyst to observe in December 2022, “Sanctions should be punitive. But for tariffs on fertilizers, there was no evidence that Russian companies were affected at all.” By the start of 2023, Canadian agricultural organizations were calling for the tariff to be lifted, pointing out that Canada was alone among G7 nations in imposing tariffs on Russian fertilizer. I do not see any evidence that our farmers are any less supportive of Ukraine than the rest of Canadians, but I think they wondered, quite reasonably, why in this country, unlike the rest of the world, farmers were being singled out to pay a vastly disproportionate share of the financial burden for supporting Ukraine. Since 2023, direct Canadian imports of Russian fertilizer and fertilizer precursors like urea have largely dried up, but this has not had the hoped-for effect of driving down the total worldwide demand for Russian urea or monoammonium phosphate. Here is what has happened instead. Canada now imports about 50% of its urea and about 60% to 70% of its monoammonium phosphate from the United States, up significantly from four years ago. In the meantime, the U.S. has increased its own direct imports from Russia, making up the demand shortfall. A position paper prepared earlier this year by the Grain Farmers of Ontario reports as follows on the implications of what I just described: Granular, fertilizer grade urea is an indifferentiable commodity, meaning individual tons are very difficult (if not effectively impossible) to trace. The vast majority of US urea exports to Canada enter the country through inland border crossings, but that doesn’t mean the urea received can't be a blend of imported Russian tons with domestically produced American tons. The report goes on to observe that even when Russian product is not being transited to Canada via the U.S., the need to import from our southern neighbours hurts Canadian farmers and enriches American middlemen without actually reducing the net North American demand for Russian product. It states, “American companies are essentially able to benefit from both sides—importing cheap Russian urea and exporting expensive American urea.” It then says, “the Canadian farmer ends up being the one to foot the bill”. If the foregoing is correct, why on earth are we retaining the tariff on Russian fertilizer and fertilizer precursors? Surely, Canadian farmers do not need to be further impoverished by a completely ineffective policy that does not make any difference at all to Russia or Ukraine.

Mr. Speaker, of course my hon. colleague has no specialized expertise in agriculture and is reading prepared remarks, which ignore everything I just said about how Russian supply still comes via the U.S. and an upcharge occurs. North American demand remains the same and prices remain high. This is a completely futile policy. I want to take a moment, though, to make another point. I am so sick of hearing these self-righteous Liberals talking about what great things they have done for Ukraine and lecturing Conservatives about how we are not supportive of Ukraine. Shortly after the invasion, my family took in a family of six Ukrainians from Dnipro in the eastern part of the country. They were our friends and stayed with us for a year and a half. On the day I raised my question, we had their nephew and niece staying in my house. I had coffee with them that morning. I would not betray my friends. I wonder if the member, or any of his colleagues, took in a Ukrainian family. I sincerely doubt it. They are full of hypocrisy. They do not help Ukrainians any more than anybody else, and they should not engage in hollow rhetoric to that effect.

Mr. Speaker, last week, I asked why there is still a 35% tariff on Russian fertilizer when it is clear that it is causing neither a net decline in Russian exports nor a fall in the price paid worldwide for Russian product. In Canada, no meaningful displacement of Russian imports with domestic production has taken place, so the result is that eastern Canadian farmers pay more for imports from third countries, creating a shortage in their markets, which is then filled by a full-priced product from Russia. No other G7 country imposes this burden on its farmers. Why does the Liberal government continue to do so?

Madam Speaker, in 2022, the Liberals imposed a 35% tariff on Russian fertilizer. By December of that year, Canadian farmers had paid $115 million in tariffs, which the government donated to Ukraine. In the three subsequent years, the tariff has remained in place, and a further $300 million has been paid to the government by farmers, but the funds are no longer being donated to Ukraine. Because replacements are not available, imports of Russian fertilizer have not gone down. If the tariff does not actually hurt Russian exports or help Ukraine, why is the government still extracting hundreds of millions of dollars each year from Canadian farmers?

With regard to Parks Canada land currently under lease to the municipality of Smiths Falls, Ontario: (a) does an archaeological assessment already exist for the leased Parks Canada lands adjacent to the Rideau Canal within the Smiths Falls municipal boundary, and, if so, can the assessment be shared with the municipality, in its capacity as a leaseholder; (b) what triggers the requirement for an archaeological assessment, including for low-impact projects, including, but not limited to, pathway installation and landscaping; (c) who determines the scope of an archaeological assessment; (d) is the municipality, in general or in its capacity as a leaseholder, responsible for conducting and funding this work; (e) what are the review timelines and implications if archaeological resources are identified; (f) what federal policies govern the use, enhancement or activation of Parks Canada lands under lease to municipalities; (g) what types of improvements are permitted on Parks Canada lands under lease to municipalities, including, but not limited to, permanent structures, landscape enhancements and events; and (h) who within Parks Canada holds the final decision-making authority for development proposals on leased lands?

With regard to CORCAN agriculture and agribusiness spending since fiscal year 2015-16: (a) what is the total amount of operational spending related to CORCAN agriculture and agribusiness, broken down by fiscal year; (b) what is the total amount of capital spending related to CORCAN agriculture and agribusiness, broken down by fiscal year; (c) what is the total amount of revenue related to CORCAN agriculture and agribusiness, broken down by fiscal year; (d) what is the total amount of operational spending related to CORCAN penitentiary farms, broken down by fiscal year; (e) what is the total amount of capital spending related to CORCAN penitentiary farms, broken down by fiscal year; (f) what is the total amount of revenue related to CORCAN penitentiary farms, broken down by fiscal year; (g) what is the total amount of operational spending related to CORCAN penitentiary farms, broken down by fiscal year and institution; (h) what is the total amount of capital spending related to CORCAN penitentiary farms, broken down by fiscal year and institution; and (i) what is the total amount of revenue related to CORCAN penitentiary farms, broken down by fiscal year and institution?

With regard to expenditures for reestablishing the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison farms at Collins Bay and Joyceville Institutions: (a) since 2015, broken down by fiscal year, what is the total amount, including taxes, paid to (i) Taylor Hazell Architects, (ii) WSP Canada Engineering, (iii) Tacoma Engineers, (iv) Lashley & Associates, (v) Norwell Dairy Systems, (vi) Eastern Crop Doctor, (vii) Advanced Grain Handling Services, (viii) McCann Farm Automation, (ix) Hart Acre Grains, (x) Willows Agriservices, (xi) A et R Boulet, (xii) Chris Rots Enterprises, (xiii) St. Lawrence Veterinary Services, (xiv) Colliers Project Leaders, (xv) Pen Farm Herd Co-Op, (xvi) Dairy Farmers of Ontario, (xvii) Strong Bros Construction; (b) since 2015, broken down by fiscal year, what is the total amount, including taxes, spent on (i) veterinary services, (ii) project management services, (iii) construction site security services, (iv) pesticide application services, (v) fertilizer application services, (vi) combining and trucking services, (vii) silage services, (viii) procurement services, (ix) engineering and architectural design services, (x) translation services, (xi) legal services; (c) since 2018, what is the total number of beehives purchased, the total amount spent on beehives, and the current number of beehives at each site; (d) of the total number of beehives purchased in (c), how many beehives were purchased from Correctional Service Canada and CORCAN employees, and at what cost; (e) since 2018, what is the total number of beef cattle purchased, the total amount spent on beef cattle, and the current number of beef cattle at each site; (f) since 2018, what is the total number of dairy cattle purchased, the total amount spent on dairy cattle, and the current number of dairy cattle at each site; (g) of the total number of dairy cattle purchased in (f), how many cattle were purchased from members of Correctional Service Canada’s Prison Farm Advisory Panel and the Pen Farm Herd Co-Op, and at what cost; (h) since 2018, broken down by fiscal year, what is the total amount, including taxes, spent on (i) farm staff salaries and benefits, (ii) offender pay for farm work, (iii) farm equipment, (iv) demolitions and renovations at Collins Bay Institution, (v) demolitions and renovations at Joyceville Institution, (vi) new construction at Collins Bay Institution, (vii) new construction at Joyceville Institution excluding the dairy cattle barn; (i) what is the total amount, including taxes, spent on the dairy cattle barn at Joyceville Institution, including construction, modifications, procurement fees, consultancy fees (design, engineering, geotechnical, environmental, topographic, etc.), travel and meals, contingencies, project management, contract administration, and dairy equipment and technology for the cow barn; (j) on what date was final completion of the dairy cattle barn achieved and on what date was the barn handed over to Correctional Service Canada by the contractor; (k) since 2024, broken down by month, what have been the costs of operating the dairy cow barn, including staff salaries, veterinary care, feed and bedding, waste management, transportation, utilities, maintenance, internet fees, licensing, inspections, security and supervision; (l) since 2024, broken down by month, what have been the total revenues from the sale of milk; (m) since 2018, broken down by fiscal year, what have been the total revenues from the CORCAN Agribusiness business line, other than milk, broken down by the sale of (i) beef cattle, (ii) dairy cattle, (iii) crops, (iv) honey, (v) other (please identify); (n) since 2018, what is the total amount spent on offender vocational certifications directly related to the prison farm program; and (o) since 2015, including but not limited to all expenses identified in (a) to (n), what is the total amount spent to date on all aspects of reestablishing the penitentiary agriculture program, including planning, consultations, implementation, construction, operations, consultancy, procurement, inspections, assessments, regulatory fees and legal services?