Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, harvest is here, and the cost of diesel is crushing farmers, truckers and groceries. A U.S. restriction on diesel would hammer Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia. Will Liberals eliminate all taxes on diesel until at least next Canada Day and, second, approve emergency pre-permitting and tax relief for fuel refining and transportation infrastructure? Will they accept the Conservative diesel price relief action plan today?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister spent months redefining his relationship with the United States. He said that President Trump was “transformational”, and then he was the source of global rupture. He said that integration was subordination. Then came fortress North America and a pledge in New York for Canada to make America great again. After declaring an economic war, the Prime Minister now proposes a potash bloc. Forgive us, but can we just get some objective consistency from the Prime Minister, or is the pain of our people and the stagnation of our economy just politics?

Mr. Speaker, throughout question period, we have heard it: the costs of managed decline and out-of-touch Liberals. Prices are rising and tariffs are crushing industries, driving investment away and threatening our livelihoods. Whether it is Washington, Brussels or Beijing, we must build here at home through our projects, our resources and our people. We must save Canadians money. Confronted by war, we should turn to ambition and unleash our economy. Will the Liberals dispense with middle-power thinking and massive spending, and instead fight for our families and our economic action plan and fight for our country?

Mr. Speaker, 1867 brought a sacred covenant, with free people governing themselves, rising above region and religion and building a sovereign nation on ordered liberty, under laws we wrote ourselves. That promise was betrayed by decades of central control. The Laurentian consensus treated provinces as problems to manage. Resource wealth was redistributed, development was blocked and jurisdictions were ignored. It was an ideological project from Trudeau the father, which was continued by the son. Canadians reject it. We hunger for restoration. Canada is the third-oldest democracy on the planet. It is the heir to the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Any self-respecting nation fights for its existence. Ours is a federation of equal partners and a vital contribution to the most successful civilization in history. It is being dismantled and it must be restored. The choice is clear. Either we decline as a grievance-ridden middle power under central control or reclaim the strength and ambition of a rising major power. We will keep the promise of 1867, the promise of our founding and the promise for generations to come.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to honour the life of Bobbie Sparrow, who passed away in February at the age of 90. Bobbie earned respect through a lifetime of service and of unwavering fidelity to her principles. From her years as a surgical nurse at Holy Cross Hospital to her leadership in the energy sector, she embodied the resilience of her generation. She gave herself fully to Calgary and its charities, institutions and civic life. As the member for Calgary Southwest, she brought that same duty to Ottawa, fighting fiercely against the national energy program, inflation and relentless tax hikes. She served with grace, competence and fierce determination. She was a fighter right until the very end. I thank her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for sharing her with our community and our country. May her example inspire us to defend the Confederation she fought for, our resources, our promise for an ordered liberty, and a nation defined by strength and ambition. I will miss my friend. May she rest in peace.

Mr. Speaker, members should not believe the Liberals when they say that we have the fastest-growing economy in the G7. We are the only one in a recession. The Liberals should try telling that to the mom skipping meals so her children will not. They should tell that to the grandma at the food bank who is just trying to put Sunday dinner on the table. They should tell that to the student whose future has been stolen. There are 112,000 jobs gone, a trillion dollars of investment gone and $670 billion in generational jobs gone. It is not wars. It is not tariffs. It is the Prime Minister's record. Which Liberal will get up to defend that?

Mr. Speaker, as the House marks Arab heritage month, I rise not for the ritual gestures that too often accompany such observances but to speak plainly about a civilization whose story stretches across three millennia and whose people have become part of our own. These calendar designations can slide into performance, but they can also compel us to examine substance, the actual inheritance of language, memory and achievement and the choices that have shaped Arab societies in our time. I intend to do the latter. In his indispensable book Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, scholar Tim Mackintosh-Smith demonstrates that Arab identity has never been reducible to a single ethnicity, sect or moment of origin. It is above all a linguistic continuum, the Arabic language acting as a thread that has held together a vast and varied human tapestry from the first recorded mentions of Arabs, in Assyrian records of 853 BCE, through the tribal poetry and trading kingdoms of the peninsula, the urban sophistication of the Levant, the Berber and Arab worlds of the Maghrib and the nomadic traditions of the Bedouin. Pre-Islamic Arabs were already a presence on the margins of greater empires, their poets celebrating honour, resilience and the stark beauties of desert life. The latter expansion of Arabic carried with it not only faith but administration, scholarship and a capacity for synthesis that absorbed and advanced the learning of others. This is the deep inheritance we acknowledge today. It is not a monolith but a living inheritance of peoples who have been both creators and custodians of civilization. That inheritance met the modern world in difficult circumstances. After the Second World War, many Arab societies sought dignity, development and independence. One dominant answer was the pan-Arab socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It drew on Soviet models of central direction and anti-western posture, promising to sweep away colonial legacies and unite the Arabs under a single political and economic project. In practice, it produced authoritarian structures, economic rigidities and repeated foreign policy failures. The United Arab Republic with Syria collapsed quickly. The 1967 war exposed deeper weaknesses. Several societies that followed this path paid in lost decades of growth, suppressed enterprise and the entrenchment of regimes more interested in control than in the human capital of their citizens. The ideology functioned, whatever the intentions of its adherents, as a barrier to the very western institutions, markets and habits of mind that had accelerated development elsewhere. A second answer rose in reaction. Islamist movements, beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood, presented themselves as moral alternatives to corrupt dictatorships and failed secular experiments. They spoke to real grievances and offered a language of renewal that resonated with many, yet the empirical record where such policies gained real influence is clear: deepened social polarization; restrictions on dissent and on minority communities, including long-established Christian-era populations across the Levant, Egypt and Iraq; economic policies that often failed to generate broad prosperity; and in their most extreme expressions, the incubation of violence that has scarred societies from the Maghrib to the Mashriq and beyond. The costs in emigration of talent, institutional decay and cycles of instability are measurable and ongoing. There is a striking exception to these patterns, though, and it deserves our attention. In the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan built a federation from tribal foundations with a realism and self-confidence rare in the post-colonial era. He prioritized education, infrastructure and competent administration over ideological display. His heirs have extended that project with measurable success: deliberate diversification away from hydrocarbons into technology, finance, tourism, logistics and advanced industry; sustained investment in human capital; and a foreign policy of pragmatic partnerships. The Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, which is a single complex containing a mosque, a church and a synagogue, embodies this approach in built form. It is a deliberate statement of coexistence among the Abrahamic traditions, not their subordination. It is the product of a confident Arab leadership, not imported dogma. It is therefore unsurprising that the clerical military regime in Tehran, whose revolutionary ideology has relied on exporting instability and targeting pragmatic Arab success stories, has directed proxy attacks and threats against the UAE in recent years. Success is an indictment of alternatives. Across the Arab world, the poles of cultural and aspirational gravity have shifted. The old centres, Cairo under its successive experiments, Damascus in its long decline and Baghdad amid its traumas, no longer set the tone they once did. Increasingly, younger Arabs, entrepreneurs and reformers look to Abu Dhabi and Dubai for working models of modernity, prosperity and competent governance. Rhetoric has yielded to results. This story is not abstract for Canada. Nearly 800,000 Canadians identify as Arab, a population that has more than tripled in two decades through immigration and natural increase. They come from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Maghrib, the Gulf states, and elsewhere, the full geographic and human diversity of the Arab world. Many arrived as economic immigrants chosen for their skills. Others rebuilt lives after conflict or persecution. They have contributed in every domain that matters to a modern society, such as enterprise and professional excellence, medicine and engineering, scholarship and the arts, and public service and community building. They have done so while sustaining family structures and work habits that strengthen rather than erode our national social fabric. In Canada, they have found what many Arab societies have struggled to secure: the protection of individual rights, the rule of law and the possibility of advancement based on merit rather than connection or ideology. Christian and Muslim Arabs alike participate in our institutions on equal terms. That participation is not an accident of geography, but a product of a political order that treats citizens as individuals first. Where Arab citizens enjoy full equality and democratic participation elsewhere, we see another demonstration that liberal institutions remain the most reliable framework for minority flourishing and Arab talent alike, such as with Arab Israelis, both Christian and Muslim, who serve in the Knesset, the courts and the professions. I would say to our Arab Canadian brothers and sisters that their presence here is not a footnote to someone else's story. From the mighty Nabateans in the times of Rome and the great works of philosophers like Avicenna and Averroës to the modern resilience of a people who have endured and created across centuries, they bring the depth of an ancient linguistic and cultural inheritance and the determination of those who chose this country. Canada is stronger for it. We honour that heritage best not by reducing it to grievance or slogan, but by recognizing its complexity, achievements and continuing capacity to add to a free and self-governing society. The lessons of the past 80 years are not obscure. Grand ideologies, whether imported socialism dressed as pan-Arab unity or political Islamism promising moral regeneration, have repeatedly subordinated practical governance and individual agency to abstractions with measurable costs in human welfare and stability. Pragmatic leadership that builds institutions, welcomes talent and measures success by results has produced different outcomes. The shift in Arab attention toward those who deliver is rational and observable. The best tribute the House can offer is to defend the conditions that allow such contributions to continue, such as the rule of law, free enterprise, open inquiry, secure borders and a confident national identity that does not require citizens to shed their inheritances, but requires them to uphold the common principles that make Canada work. In doing so, we honour Arab heritage in the only way that ultimately matters, by ensuring that the sons and daughters of that heritage can flourish here as free people in a free country. That is the Canada worth building and the heritage worth respecting.

Mr. Speaker, I am a rookie in the chamber, a new member of Parliament having served barely, not even, three years. However, I can acknowledge that public service comes at a price, a cost to our friends, our family and all our loved ones. The hon. member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie certainly has committed himself to this service. We could say that he has very deep convictions. Perhaps we would not agree on anything. Probably we would not agree on anything, but his deep convictions might have been taken a bit too literally by him over the years. In fact, as colleagues may know, the hon. member was arrested in Lakeview in my riding, scaling former premier Ralph Klein's home, and was taken into custody. In a sense, he may have served more time in Calgary than I have. Let me just say that it is a complex issue, because we know that his policies have caused hardships for over a decade. His policies have caused so much hardship for so many families across this country that the price that has been paid by millions of Canadians for his determination has been a very heartbreaking one for all Canadians to bear witness to, but rest assured that his legacy lives on with the current Liberal Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has kept the tanker ban in place. The Prime Minister has kept the “no more pipelines” ban. The Prime Minister has kept the net-zero doctrine. He has kept the EV mandate. The Prime Minister has made sure that his legacy of plastic lids on coffee has been maintained, and in Calgary we cannot use compostable bags. He has kept the industrial carbon tax. One must ask, as I conclude, if the member draws some satisfaction from the Liberal Prime Minister's carrying on his legacy.

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister says that Canadians are keeping up with record costs. MNP reports that gas and grocery prices are straining three out of four Canadians. Two out of three Canadians are working harder but not getting ahead. One out of three Canadians cannot cover their bills and their debt payments. Yesterday, the Prime Minister voted against our motion to cut all taxes on gas and diesel until the end of the year. Nobody is keeping up, except the rich whom the Prime Minister keeps making richer. Why punish the poor even more, when the Liberals can scrap the tax on gas today?

Mr. Speaker, that is some economy those Liberals built. According to MNP, 40% of Canadians are $200 away from insolvency. StatsCan says that the wealthiest now control two-thirds of our net worth. RBC states a trillion dollars, gone. Imagine a third of our jobs, our economy, gone up in smoke. The Liberals want Canadians demoralized, divided and disenfranchised because the Prime Minister knows if they stop believing in this country, he gets to remake it. Which Liberals will stand up to defend that?

Mr. Speaker, the Financial Times reports that LNG flows from the gulf could be disrupted within days with a glut of demand, a European fuel shortage, Beijing's control over rare earth minerals and Russia's leverage over energy. The world is now scrambling for everything Canada has. Alberta's 158 billion barrels of oil and enough natural gas to power the world for 200 years is landlocked. KXL, energy east and northern gateway with $55 billion in growth are gone; $11 billion a year from LNG alone is gone; while $670 billion in projects and generational jobs is gone. Imagine a country this vast in resources, yet half of its people live paycheque to paycheque. We should not be strengthening Beijing's new world order. We should be replacing it instead with one underpinned by Canadian resources. We do not need bureaucracy; we need projects. We do not need platitudes; we need decisions. We do not need middling thinking; we need the strength and ambition of a major power right now.

Mr. Speaker, under the Liberals, foreign conflicts have spilled onto our streets. Their politics and soft-on-crime agenda have made Canadians unsafe. Three GTA synagogues were shot at, and 700 IRGC agents are roaming our streets. We have heard only condemnations and thoughts and prayers. An Iranian dissident has now gone missing, with police probing a possible Tehran-linked homicide. Liberal ministers failed to secure borders and failed to deport hundreds of IRGC agents. Decide today. Deport these agents of terror today.

Mr. Speaker, there is no action, no details and no surprise. Shame on the Liberals. The Prime Minister is all over the map, with four positions in four days. He supported the decisions of our allies in confronting the Iranian regime at first, as legitimate and lawful. Then he regretted the strikes. Then he would not rule out Canadian military action. Even his own caucus does not know what his position is. All this is with a regime that has killed 150 Canadians on a passenger plane and continues to intimidate Canadians. Our people want to know what the Prime Minister is doing to secure us here at home. When will the Liberals finally deport IRGC officials?

Mr. Chair, it has been a war of our medieval rivals over the civilization we have built, a war borne of post-war and Cold War anti-colonial uprisings and of Communism's fall in the Soviet Union reanimated from Beijing today, and a war of nearly a half century cast in modern technologies, the globalized economy we have built and the moral equivalencies we have fallen to. I rise having just returned from Abu Dhabi, where the closing chapter of this regime began to unfold before my very eyes. As I watched Emirati interceptors engage Iranian ballistic missiles overhead, missiles and drones enabled by Beijing's technology, I was taken back 20 years ago to when I was in Iraq watching Iranian Katyusha rockets falling over Baghdad. Today, in response to more than 1,000 missiles and drones, the Emiratis defend their country with extraordinary precision. Their systems worked. Their people were protected. Why does this regime attack Abu Dhabi and Dubai with such aggression? It is because these shining cities represent everything the Iranian regime fears. While the Middle East has moved forward toward prosperity and opportunity, Tehran remains trapped in its same dark obsessions. For 20 years, I have warned about this regime. In Iraq, I have worked with Iranian dissidents. For that, Tehran branded me a terrorist. Later, as an adviser to former prime minister Harper and former minister John Baird, I helped close the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, strengthen nuclear inspections and provide political space to millions of Iranians to speak freely. After 47 years of the Islamic Republic and 37 years under Ali Khamenei, the record is damning. This is the regime that stormed the American embassy and took diplomats hostage, while brave Canadians helped some escape. It is obsessed with destroying Israel, has pioneered roadside bombs, built an empire of proxy militias, sustained Bashar al-Assad's butchery over his own people and brutalized its own citizens over the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. In recent weeks, the regime has massacred tens of thousands of Iranians, all while racing toward nuclear weapons. Who helped fuel this final sprint? The Kremlin and the Middle Kingdom saw their partner in the clerical military dictatorship. Russia and China want a new age of empires. They have been afforded the west's best intentions. The G7 expanded to include Russia, creating the G8, and NATO established confidence measures and the NATO-Russia Council. China was granted most favoured trading status, a seat at the World Trade Organization and prominence in multilateral organizations. None of this was earned. Neither Russia nor China divested their military ambitions, dispensed with their revanchism or displaced arbitrary authoritarian rule with democracy and open markets. As their decisions to decouple from the international system compounded, as they pursued dreams of dual circulation to export boldly while curtailing access to domestic markets and as the state capitalist belt and road initiative challenged democratic capitalism, democracies grew more complacent and prone to elite capture and corruption. The west's nihilistic obsession with postmodernism swelled, imbued with performative stances on issues ranging from human dignity to energy security and an incapacity to define and confront the threat of a rising illiberal age. Russia turned to the Iranian regime for drone technologies and to China for discounted energy as an instigator for the chaos in the west militarily and through exploiting moral equivalencies. Two lifetime rulers, undeterred by well-intentioned protestations and unbowed by democratic resolve, stood in their shared vision of their own dominance over their neighbours and the world. From their vantage, at every turn over the last decade, the democratic world adhered to a pattern of half measures to conciliate, failing to make the hard decisions that would defend us against their authoritarian ambitions. In Venezuela, we see an unchallenged authoritarian consolidation. In Crimea and Donbass, we see a policy of strategic management. Between Syrian former president Bashar al-Assad and ISIS, we see containment. In Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we see performative theatre. In Kabul, we see retreat. In Tehran, we see entreaties. The democratic world's aversion to confronting authoritarians for what they are, instead of longing for a return to an elusive normal they wish they had, can be summed up in one word: appeasement. In two years, China has become the principal external supplier of Iran's ballistic missiles and now buys nearly 90% of its oil. However, this moment is bigger than one regime's collapse. It is about the Iranian people, the millions who have suffered and the thousands who have died for freedom. It is about fulfilling the ancient promise of Cyrus the Great. To the Iranian community in Canada and around the world, this is their moment. The ancient light of their civilization now pierces through the darkness of the last 47 years. The Prime Minister began with strong measures but now wavers between strength and de-escalation. De-escalation with the regime that launches missiles at its neighbours and massacres its own people is not policy; it is appeasement. The Iranian people deserve their freedom. The region deserves peace. Canada must have the moral clarity and act on our interests to stand on the right side of history.

Mr. Chair, the hon. member is on point. He knows what he has been talking about in defence of the Iranian people for a very long time. He is a true champion of our communities across Canada, which are hearing conflicted messages. There have been four positions over four days, including one from the Prime Minister, who once said that the rules-based international order was over, yet only days ago, he said that we have to uphold international law and the rules-based international order. I am not confident the Prime Minister is clear in his own mind. It is not clear what his government stands for, and it is clear his caucus is completely divided. For our Iranian communities here at home, it is devastating at a time when they need clear leadership.

Mr. Chair, I join my hon. colleague in standing with the women of Iran and women around the world. I appreciate the fact that she took some time to honour what this is all about. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement is part of a longer Iranian story of women's suffrage. For 47 years, women in Iran have been subjugated by the clerical military dictatorship to a radical ideology that has denied them education, opportunity, a franchise and a democracy. It has denied them the freedoms they are born into. When we saw the uprisings on January 8 and 9 begin, we saw young Iranians from across the country stand up for their own freedom, and it was the women who paid the severest price. The kind of tools of oppression the regime uses is brutal beyond what I can say in this chamber and something we must hold to account.

Mr. Chair, I thank the hon. member for her question and the offering of her wisdom. What we have seen in the wars over the last 20 years are mistakes and errors that might have been corrected had we had today's wisdom, but we did not. Today, what we have is the story of the Iranian people themselves. They are among the most pro-western civilizational strengths the region has to offer, despite the occupation of the regime for 47 years over its own people. The Iranian people go back millennia to Cyrus the Great and the cylinder, which is now before the United Nations, describing one of the first instances of human freedom, human dignity and religious freedom. It is that aspiration that is now piercing through the veil of this 47-year-old tyranny, and the people of Iran are at a point where they have had enough of their government. They have paid the price with rivers of blood across the streets of Tehran and across the country.

Madam Chair, I want to take a minute to congratulate my colleague for his incredible speech and for his clarity of moral conviction and our national interests. He has been a powerful voice in Parliament for the people of Quebec, and they must be confused about what the Prime Minister and the foreign minister have said over the past week: four positions over four days, and still no clarity in tonight's take-note debate. I would ask my friend and hon. colleague this: What do Quebeckers think of the confused, equivocating and unprincipled Liberals?

Madam Chair, I remain a huge fan of your work and your stewardship in this chamber. I am pleased to speak before you today. I would like to take a minute to congratulate my colleague, the member for Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill. He has been a powerful voice for the great people of his communities. We are so honoured to have him in this Parliament to champion their cause and be such a clarion voice for their interests, their values and their dignity. I would like to ask the hon. member for his assessment of what his constituents are advising him, with respect to the confusion they have heard from Liberal leaders giving four different messages over four days in the period of a week. Even during tonight's take-note debate, we do not have a clear sense of what the government's actual position is. That must cause a great deal of grief and pain. I am curious what the hon. member thinks.

Mr. Speaker, who are we? Are we a nation that is defined by a collection of grievances? Are we a nation where one set of rules applies to one citizen and another to someone undermining that very sense of citizenship? Nations are defined and defended by knowing who they are, their history, their traditions and the laws that shape their societies and their culture. When a government undertakes a political project to revise a national history and its identity with Marxist philosophies, grievance culture and borders open to those who are here to actively undermine the people through extortion or through terrorism, that is a state-sponsored attack on the very concept of Canada itself. In this speech, I want to lay out three main points: first, fairness in health care; second, equality before the law; and third, the defence of our national identity and sovereignty. Let us start with a system that is already at its breaking point: health care. Six million Canadians cannot find a family doctor. That is not a number on a page. That is a senior down the street. It is a single mom waiting for hours in an overcrowded emergency department. They are our family members, our friends and our neighbours. Thirty weeks is how long the average Canadian must wait to see a specialist. That is seven months of waiting, seven months of pain and seven months where life hangs in the balance, yet the Liberal government chooses to prioritize people who do not even belong here. Rejected asylum claimants are getting health care benefits that Canadians themselves cannot even access, deluxe benefits like vision care, physiotherapy and supplementary services, and that is where the real outrage begins. The Liberals opened the border, and then they abandoned screening, rubber-stamped soaring asylum claims and let the backlog spiral completely out of control. Now Canada's health care, housing and job markets are at their breaking points. Their backlog of asylum claims has exploded by over 2,900% since they took office in 2015. The Liberal interim federal health program cost $211 million four years ago. Today, it costs $896 million. By 2030, it is projected to cost $1.5 billion annually for people who have already been rejected as asylum claimants, people who have never paid taxes and people who have no legal right to be here. At the health committee, Conservatives discovered that providers are charging up to five times the provincial rate for services for these individuals. Meanwhile, our own people wait months for a specialist. Seniors wait for procedures that could literally change their lives. Families wait in emergency rooms because they cannot find a primary care physician who could keep them out of those emergency rooms, which would be a great relief to our health system and our hospitals. What do the Liberals do? They write blank checks for people who are not even contributing members of our society. Generosity without fairness is not generosity; it is betrayal. Before the new year, I had a neighbour write to me deeply concerned about the federal budget and public health care. She told me she was worried that the federal government had said very little about improving our health care system. She asked me, in no uncertain terms, how we would help to ensure that Canadians got the care they needed. Her concerns are not unique. Her story is one of millions. That is why we are presenting a motion that would restore fairness. Rejected asylum claimants would receive emergency life-saving care only. Canadians come first, full stop. The soaring costs and abuse of the Liberal IFH program are no accident. They are the predictable result of a Liberal government that has broken our immigration system. Hospitals are full. Emergency rooms are overflowing. However, the Liberals do not raise alarm bells. They open the floodgates to more people, more arrivals, more strain and more chaos. Tax season is coming, and this is a fair question for anyone who is working their butt off and cannot get ahead: Where is all this money going? They cannot buy a home. They cannot get health care in a reasonable time. They can hardly afford to put food on the table, and Liberals keep telling them everything is fine. No, it is not. A government's job is not to micromanage our lives or pick our pockets to fund its failed experiments. A government's job is not to put foreign nationals, criminals and terrorists ahead of its own people. It is to put Canadians and Canada first. Conservatives will ensure health care is available to Canadians first. We will review federal benefits provided to asylum claimants to identify savings for taxpayers. We will stop overwhelming our communities with numbers the system simply cannot handle. We are a generous nation and Calgary is a generous city, but generosity requires discipline. Compassion requires fairness. If we cannot care for our own people first, we are not governing. We are failing our citizens. Then there is the law. Under the Liberal government, foreign nationals here on asylum can commit crimes and, in some cases, avoid meaningful consequences because the system prioritizes process over justice. If we have two people charged with the same crime, one is a Canadian and the other one is not, and the consequences are not equal, that is unacceptable. Let us be clear about how this problem manifests in real life. When someone files an asylum application, it can trigger automatic stays of removal, meaning they get to stay here until their case is reviewed. Across Canada, there are reported cases of individuals charged with violent offences, trafficking and gang-related crimes who, by filing asylum or refugee claims, remain in the country longer, sometimes for months or even years. In British Columbia, law enforcement uncovered organized extortion rings where multiple suspects used refugee claim filings to halt their removal. They tied up enforcement resources and frustrated victims for months. Their legal status keeps shifting and enforcement is stalled. When it comes to assault, theft, fraud and extortion, Canadians face immediate consequences, while foreign nationals can delay, postpone or even avoid sentencing for years using asylum claims. This is a loophole that rewards lawbreakers and punishes Canadians. When someone is charged with a crime, they should face the full weight of the justice system with no loopholes and no preferential treatment because of where they filed paperwork. Our motion calls on the government to immediately expel foreign nationals who commit serious crimes, with no soft landings, no loopholes and no special carve-outs. We are calling for stronger enforcement. When violent offenders, gang members or organized crime suspects are caught, they must be removed. Communities cannot flourish when criminals exploit loopholes in the law. Families cannot feel secure when the system is rigged against them. Canadians deserve a justice system that works for them first. If someone break the law in Canada, whether they are a Canadian or a foreign national, they should face the consequences. That is equality before the law. Our people expect nothing less. Let us look at the numbers and the costs. We are spending $896 million in health benefits today and $1.5 billion by 2030 for people who are not taxpayers and have no legal standing to be here. Where is it going? The Liberals have failed to answer. The Conservatives will demand every dollar tracked, every service justified and no more blank cheques. Every taxpayer dollar spent must go to service Canadians first. We are not talking ideology here. We are talking about the Canadian promise: an affordable home, an affordable life, health care when someone needs it and safe streets. We are moving this motion to restore fairness, restore order and restore trust. Rejected asylum claimants get emergency care only. Foreign criminals face full consequences. Fairness is not sacrificing our neighbours so that someone from outside the country can get better care than them. What do the Liberals want me to do? Should I go back to my riding and tell a grandmother that she has to wait seven months for care while someone who is not even from here, who could be illegal, a criminal or a terrorist, gets better care before her? What am I supposed to tell an immigrant who comes to this country to build something new, who through the sweat on their brow and the pain in their back has contributed to building up this country? What am I supposed to tell that immigrant when those who follow are exploiting the broken Liberal system? Am I supposed to tell them that playing by the rules did not matter? Let me conclude with this: Who are we? The danger of creating one set of rules for one and another set of rules for the next is that it attacks the very idea of our national sovereignty, the very idea of our national identity and the very idea of the nation we seek to build together. If I could carve something onto the desk of every border official, every bureaucrat, every judge, every legislator and every academic, it would read that Canada is the third-oldest democracy on planet earth. We are heirs of the British Magna Carta and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. We are an inheritance forged by first nations and newcomers, the scars they endured together through wars, depressions and hard times, and the promise they built together. We are a constitutional monarchy where the laws are written by the people and their democracy, not the ruler by diktat. We are a promise, and ours is a promise to keep. For the millions in this country who do not respect that this is the core of our national identity, the core of our national sovereignty and the core of who we are and what we are here to defend, then comes the uneasy task of demanding that the government members remove those who they, themselves, brought in.

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is a hard-working person for the great people he represents. He does great work in the House every single day. No, it is not. In fact, the inequality of services being provided to people who have paid into the system for a lifetime, our seniors, is not matched by the deluxe care that fake refugee claimants are being provided in the country. It is absolutely an unjust system that is taking advantage of those who have paid into it and preferencing those who are here to exploit it or, worse, to commit acts of extortion or terrorism or other federal crimes.

Mr. Speaker, as an hon. member of the government, he could get rid of the appeal process today if he chose to. I do not understand why he did not. Conservatives have had to sit here and watch the Liberal government divide Canadians over a decade of terrible immigration policy and terrible justice policy, terrible policies that have resulted in chaos across the streets of Canada. Conservatives have stepped up today with a motion to fix a difficult problem that Liberals created because Liberals refuse to take the steps that they must. What they should do is take our advice in earnest and implement it in full. Our motion would help Canada perform better despite the egregious pains that the Liberal government has caused Canada for well over a decade.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition signed by Canadians. The petitioners note that the budget implementation act would grant cabinet ministers sweeping powers to secretly exempt companies or individuals from federal laws, powers that were never disclosed or contemplated in the budget itself. Accordingly, the petitioners call on the government to remove these provisions and restore Canada's long-standing financial standards, transparency and fiscal integrity.

Mr. Speaker, with hope and unity, and rhetoric over results, Conservatives are returning to Ottawa ready to fight for Canadians. This weekend's convention sent a clear message with nearly 90% from across our country supporting our leader, which is a landslide mandate for unity, hope and results. We can contrast that with 10 years of Liberal failure. Housing is out of reach. Food is unaffordable. Crime is rampant, and immigration is broken. The Prime Minister changed the rhetoric, but not the reality. He grows government, divides Canadians and blocks projects. Conservatives empower people. We would cut taxes, cut red tape, lower costs, unlock our potential and our ingenuity, and get our resources to market. This is the momentum we are seeing from Calgary, united around work, family and country. To those carrying the country on their backs and feeling unseen, underappreciated and overworked, Conservatives see them. Conservatives will fight for them, and we will restore the promise of Canada for them.

Mr. Speaker, “Spend less, [earn] more”, they said. “Build Canada strong”, they said; “generational investment”, they said. Objectively, the Liberals would spend more on operating expenses, not less. Objectively, they would build more bureaucracies, not actual projects. Objectively, they would build generational debt that would deny an entire generation of Canadians, all of our young people, the future they were promised. Imagine never paying one's credit card bill. Imagine opening up a statement and seeing charges piled up, with no plan to ever pay them down. Imagine being told that the decisions we take, the sacrifices we make and the future we hope for no longer matter because somebody else is running up our tab. That is exactly what the budget does. It would create a nearly $80-billion deficit with no credible plan to balance. Every Canadian family is on the hook. Every dollar borrowed today will have to be repaid tomorrow with interest. When the government members say our younger generation must sacrifice more, they are not speaking in abstract terms. They are speaking about real Canadians who now face real consequences. They are speaking about my neighbours, the students starting their career, the couple hoping to buy their first home and the young family saving a few dollars each month to make ends meet. It is a government asking people to make sacrifices today, all while it continues to spend as though there is no tomorrow. Let us be clear: This is not a minor miscalculation. It is a deliberate decision to spend beyond the means of Canadian families and pass the bill on to the next generation. Every additional dollar borrowed today adds to inflation. Every additional dollar borrowed today adds to the costs of housing, groceries, heating and sending a child to school. Every dollar borrowed today will be paid back in greater amounts tomorrow by the very people the government claims to protect. The message of the budget is clear: Canadians are being asked to sacrifice so that the government can spend more on itself. Canadians are asked to tighten their belts so that the Liberals can waste their future. This is the harsh reality of a budget that puts numbers before people, ideology before families and spending before responsibility. Two million Canadians now rely on food banks every month. The Calgary Food Bank is seeing record increases in the number of individuals who are relying on it. In 2019, the food bank was distributing food hampers to 250 families every day. Now, it is up to 800 households every single day. We can let that sink in. In one of the richest countries in the world, in 2025, working Canadians with full-time jobs are lining up at food banks because they can no longer afford to feed their kids on what they earn. It is not a recession; it is a national disgrace. One in five Canadians is skipping meals to make their food last longer. Canadians are choosing the pay-later option on Amazon or Afterpay for essentials. This is a single mom in Bridlewood, unsure if she can keep her home. It is a senior in Shawnessy whose pension is being eaten away by inflation. It is the newcomer or young couple in Millrise whose dream of home ownership is slipping further out of reach. What does the government say to these Canadians? When asked about President Trump's tariffs, the Prime Minister shrugged and said, “Who cares?” This is not leadership; it is indifference. The Liberals are only saddling people who are currently struggling and future generations with insurmountable debt. Bob Cochlan, down the street from me back home, wrote this morning with a way to think about what a billion actually is. He said, “If I give you $1 billion and you stand on a street corner handing out $1 per second, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you would still not have handed out $1 billion after 31 years.... The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the 'politicians' spending YOUR tax money.” Bob is 100% right. The government promised a deficit of $62 billion. The reality would be $78.3 billion. That is $16 billion more than promised. Spending is out of control. The Liberals would be adding $990 billion in new commitments, costing the average Canadian family $5,400 more a year. How many families have $5,400 kicking around to spend on the Prime Minister's best friends and pet projects? The interest on our debt would be more than the amount transferred for health care to all the provinces combined. Here is another way to think about it. The next time people buy something, they can look at the GST on their receipt. The GST on every single payment they make all year, and the GST of every Canadian for the whole year, would still not cover the Prime Minister's deficit. Every GST dollar now goes directly to Bay Street bankers and foreign bondholders rather than hospital beds, nurses' overtime or family doctors. Families are paying for spending, not services. The government calls these numbers manageable or necessary. What they are is simply a tax on hard work, with nothing being provided in return. Canadians are being asked to bear the cost of spending they did not vote for and cannot afford. Private sector business investment is collapsing. High taxes, red tape and corporate welfare have driven $500 billion, half a trillion dollars, south of the border. In Washington, before President Trump, the Prime Minister shamelessly announced this as a Canadian investment. It is capital flight from an over-regulated market that he presides over. Businesses are leaving because the country is no longer stable, predictable or competitive. It is not just businesses hurting. It is the listener at home who is paying the price for the government's failure to manage the economy. Opportunities are shrinking. Jobs are disappearing. People are leaving the country because the environment for business is hostile and expensive. Along with our dollar, our talent drains south. It is one thing to have a deficit. It is another to destroy the very foundation of a productive and growth economy that creates jobs and opportunity. Every Canadian who works, saves, invests or dreams of starting a family is paying a price. Conservatives have offered a clear, practical path forward. We have said that we will work with anyone from any party to make life affordable and to restore Canada's promise. We would end the industrial carbon tax in all its forms. We would cut wasteful spending to lower inflation, debt and taxes. We would restore investment and make Canada competitive again. We would put money back into Canadians' paycheques and pensions. Above all, we would use what is in the ground beneath us to unleash our natural resources through national corridors and major infrastructure that would change the game for every single Canadian. This is how to make life affordable again, not with expensive slogans, such as “generational investment”, but with an affordable budget and a bold plan that rewards work and restores opportunity. I just want to take a step back and place the budget in the context of the last decade. This was supposed to be a historic budget. The country needed a historic budget with big, bold decisions that would unlock our potential, decisions that would break the mindset of middling and declining thinking and replace it with the ambition of a major and rising power, a nation pitched to meet the test of this age. Canadians are managing the emotional weight of having lost the only period in recent memory when they felt financially secure and felt a sense of security. This was a decade ago, after Stephen Harper rebuilt the economy, built corridors for trade to every part of the planet and restored a self-confident country at peace with itself. The pandemic gave people a temporary, albeit false, sense of stability. The return now to a more expensive and unpredictable world has only intensified a mindset that was already growing well before COVID. With the Liberals, costs will not retreat to those levels. Work will not return to that simplicity. The sense of control Canadians once felt is fleeting. Unless something fundamental changes, the forces driving their insecurity will remain. The budget was supposed to give Canadians back control over their lives. Liberals spent the entire campaign harvesting Conservative ideas as their own and are now failing to deliver on any of them, despite having the support of Conservatives. The budget was a wasted opportunity. At a moment when the country needed seriousness, ambition and leadership, Canadians were handed more spending, more debt, more excuses and more government. Conservatives will deliver the fundamental change that restores control for Canadians. We will reward hard work and create the conditions for higher wages, stronger paycheques, affordable homes and renewed confidence. The promise of Canada is not gone. It lives in the single mother keeping her family afloat. It lives in the seniors who built the country. It lives in the newcomers and young people who still believe in what Canada could be. They deserve a future they can count on, a country that works harder for them and a government that respects the sacrifices they make every single day. Conservatives will deliver that.

Mr. Speaker, not only is controlling spending, and doing it responsibly, critical for every taxpayer; growing the economy is a critical part of our own sovereignty, our self-reliance and our independence, irrespective of whatever government is in Washington. Canadians need a government ready to make transformational decisions, from pipelines to ports and energy corridors. They need investment facilities to invest in that are tax-free, in order to build this country. Canadians need the big ideas that the Conservatives ran on and the Liberals tried to replicate, so irrespective of the Liberals' using Washington as a drama and a smokescreen to hide and shield their ideology and indecision, Conservatives would deliver a government that would actually unlock the potential of this country.

Mr. Speaker, I understand that my friend, my hon. colleague, and I have our disagreements about how we can make our country prosperous by unleashing our natural resources. I want to unleash natural resources to help Quebeckers and to help the province of Quebec succeed in this country and this world. Their ports, their energy, their infrastructure and their industriousness are incredible and should play a bigger part in our country's self-reliance and sovereignty. However, I also agree with our colleague about the smokescreen in Washington. It is interesting that the Prime Minister put up a strong front during the campaign about how he was going to challenge Donald Trump and achieve a trade deal, but within minutes he took a different position altogether. In fact he has conceded to the President and to the United States on tariffs, on investment in America and on everything the President really wants, but he is not driving toward concluding a deal. In fact he is weakening the Canadian position by not definitively delivering the resources this country needs to be independent of American leverage. Canada wants a good partnership with the United States ultimately, and we will always focus on negotiating a good deal, but we can do so only from a position of strength.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for the incredible work he does on behalf of the great people he represents. The United States and Europe are obsessed with building critical economic and energy infrastructure, not just the stuff to extract from the ground but also stuff to provide value to it and then export it abroad. Canada cannot get its act together on the basic number of projects it must approve, while the United States and the European Union are moving ahead at lightning speed with pipelines, ports, rail, road and everything else that is needed. That is the kind of determination our government needs to bring. That is the kind of determination the government has never delivered.

Madam Speaker, from my days as an adviser for the Harper government to today, I have had the privilege of working alongside the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman on several files, observing first-hand his steadfast commitment to human rights, accountability and the rule of law. Throughout his career, he has consistently demonstrated a deep understanding of international affairs, a tireless work ethic and a principled approach to defending Canadian values. I have seen it up front as we walked the cobblestone streets of Kyiv amid jubilant protesters, and then later amid burned buildings and the same stones ripped from the ground in self-defence. He does not act for political convenience; he acts with clarity, conviction and a sense of responsibility to Canadians and those whose freedoms are imperilled. To stand with him on this legislation not only recognizes the urgency of the issue before us, but also honours the dedication and leadership he brings before this House. He has championed measures to protect Canadians and to confront the very real threat posed by authoritarian regimes that seek to project their influence into our own communities. This bill would enable the Canadian government to confront, in addition to human rights abusers, dictator corruption and transnational repression. Across our country, people who have fled persecution and violence rightly expect to be safe. They expect their homes to be sanctuaries, free from the nightmare of the dictator they now deny, yet reports show that authoritarian regimes are following their citizens into Canada to intimidate, to coerce and to silence them. This is real; it is ongoing. Current laws have not kept up with the tactics of these regimes. Bill C-219 provides clarity, accountability and enforcement mechanisms. It would prevent Canada from being used as a safe haven by individuals responsible for corruption and human rights abuses. Let me cover three parts of this issue in my remarks: the context, why this legislation is critical and our duty as parliamentarians. Sergei Magnitsky was tortured to death for exposing Kremlin corruption and, from his grave, gave the free world its most potent weapon against the new authoritarians: targeted sanctions that strike the torturers, the kleptocrats and their enablers where it hurts most, their bank accounts and their visas. Today, the long arm of Beijing, Tehran, Moscow and their proxies reach into Canada itself. There are death threats, bounties, covert police stations and intimidation of dissidents, all on our soil. This is not mere crime; this is transnational repression, the export of tyranny into the heart of the free world. Thanks to the persistence over a decade by the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, we already had established human rights violations as Magnitsky powers almost a decade ago. We must now sharpen them into a dedicated tool to confront transnational repression with swift, automatic and merciless consequences for any regime that dares hunt its critics on Canadian streets. In the Cold War, we drew a line and said “not one inch further”. Today, we must say the same. Canada will never be a hunting ground for dictators. We will find them, we will freeze their assets and we will make them pay. Magnitsky's story is not simply a tale of courage; it is a reminder that one person armed with the truth can expose an entire system of lies. His murder was meant to frighten others into silence, but instead it triggered an international movement that forced democracies to confront a hard question about themselves: Do we still believe in moral consequence, or are we willing to let power excuse anything? That is what makes today's debate more than a matter of policy. It is a statement about who Canadians choose to be in an age when authoritarian regimes think the world has grown too tired, too distracted or too divided to stand up to them. Our answer must be calm, clear and confident. Canada will not retreat from its role as a defender of those who risk everything to speak truth in countries where truth is treated as a crime. We cannot talk about this without talking about the world we now live in, a world in which authoritarians are emboldened by new technologies. What once required secret agents crossing borders now only requires a phone, a television, a consulate or a proxy group operating quietly in our communities. Transnational repression is not abstract theory. It is happening in cities across the country, and it targets the people who trusted Canada to give them what their homelands denied them: safety, a voice and freedom. If authoritarian states can reach into our cities to intimidate their critics, then we no longer control the space we claim as our own. That is why the response cannot be symbolic or slow; it must be predictable enough that dictators understand the cost before they act and swift enough that victims understand they are not alone. Renaming the Special Economic Measures Act to the Sergei Magnitsky global sanctions act is part of that clarity. There is power in naming something after a man who died telling the truth. It signals that the purpose of the law is not hidden behind technical language or bureaucratic jargon; it is a law built around a moral line that should never have been blurred. The name teaches every Canadian what the law stands for and tells every authoritarian what it means when Canada acts. The Cold War had a clarity that many in our era have forgotten. It drew a line between the world of fear and the world of freedom. Today the battle lines are not marked on maps, but they are just as real. They run through the phones of dissidents who receive threats at midnight. They run through the inboxes of activists who are told their families back home will suffer. They run through the hearts of communities of people who came to Canada believing they had escaped the regime, only to find that the regime had followed them here. If we do not draw a line now, we teach these regimes that Canada can be bent, that our values can be shaped by intimidation, and that our borders are something they can violate. This is why we strengthen Magnitsky powers. This is why we direct them at transnational repression. This is why we sharpen the law into something that cannot be evaded with excuses or hidden behind diplomatic language. Magnitsky's legacy is not only about his death; it is about the world that responded to it. Democracies came together because they recognized that a system that allows corruption, torture and murder to flourish unchallenged is a system that eventually threatens us all. The legislation before the House carries that same spirit; it connects the struggle of one man in a Moscow prison to the safety of a Canadian family in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary or Montreal. When we act, we are not only honouring Magnitsky's courage but also reminding the world that Canada is not passive in the face of cruelty. We are reminding people who fled oppression that this country takes their safety seriously, and we are reminding people who inflict oppression that they will face consequences even if they believe their borders protect them. This is the heart of the legislation: a line drawn clearly, without drama and without hesitation, a country's stating that its sovereignty is not for negotiation and its people are not for intimidation. Transnational repression is a direct threat to the safety and dignity of people living here in Canada. It is carried out by regimes in Beijing, the Kremlin, Tehran and beyond. Our intelligence community documents that these governments have conducted operations across Canada, including intimidation; surveillance; harassment of activists, students and journalists; and persecution of diaspora communities. Whether people are Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Muslim or Jew, and whether they come from Hong Kong, the Donbass, Tibet or East Turkestan, or are among the Iranians who stand against their regime, all who come here to live in freedom now must contend with the designs of the dictators they fled. Immediate family members of the very people we have sanctioned have lived in luxury in Canada while their relatives engage in corruption, theft or violent repression abroad. The tragedy of flight PS752 is a stark example. Families of the victims have waited years for compensation, despite frozen regime assets that could have been used to provide justice. Russian assets could and should be directed to supporting Ukraine in its defence. Frozen funds should contribute to justice and accountability for people whose war for existence is waged this very day. When foreign governments intimidate or threaten individuals on Canadian soil, it is not only a violation of the rights of the people affected but also a test of the strength of our laws and our institutions. Bill C-219 would ensure that Canada responds firmly, transparently and consistently. To people who have sought refuge in Canada, to those who live in fear of foreign regimes, and to Canadians who expect their government to defend their sovereignty, the bill would deliver clarity, protection and accountability. It is now the responsibility of the House to act. Support for Bill C-219 is support for the rule of law, for victims of oppression and for Canada as a safe and principled country. May the bill not be a partisan one but pass as a parliamentary one instead.

Mr. Speaker, Canadians want an affordable budget and an affordable life, not a prime minister who profits in secret while people line up at food banks in record numbers, since $6.5 billion is how much experts say the Prime Minister's former company, Brookfield, sheltered in offshore tax havens over the last five years. The Prime Minister helped set up three multi-billion dollar investment funds in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, funds he stands to benefit directly from through bonus pay. Canadians deserve to know that the Prime Minister is making decisions in the public interest, not his own financial interest. Liberals can keep protecting their boss. Conservatives will stand with taxpayers. We will expose the abuse. We will defend hard-working Canadians. We will hold the Prime Minister accountable for putting his profit ahead of their lives.

Madam Speaker, as a long-time fan of yours, I know you are a deeply thinking person, and I always appreciate the opportunity to hear your thoughts on a range of issues. With that compliment, I am hoping for all of the graces afforded to parliamentarians in this great chamber. I am thankful for the opportunity to rise today. I will be splitting my time with my dear friend, the hon. member of Parliament for Calgary Crowfoot. The debate today is a central one to the integrity of the nature of democracy in our country. We need to ask ourselves three principal questions. The first is why this motion is being debated today. The second is what concerns the Liberals have when it comes to opening up transparency on the Prime Minister's conflicts of interest. The third is whether the Prime Minister thinks that somehow he might be above the rule of law in this land, always knows best, can always make the right decision and does not need to subject himself to the standards of transparency that the great people of Calgary Heritage and all Canadians deserve him to be held to. Let me start with a little reflection on why Canadians deserve answers with respect to the integrity and transparency of their government. Canadians deserve to understand exactly what the Prime Minister's conflicts of interest are. They deserve to know that the loopholes in the Conflict of Interest Act are not being used to make politicians richer. That is why we are calling for the Clerk of the Privy Council and the chief of staff to the Prime Minister to appear before committee. It would be an opportunity for them, not to be part of some kind of witch hunt about the Prime Minister's individual conduct, but for parliamentarians and all Canadians to understand clearly what the perils might be in the screen they have set up. Both the Clerk of the Privy Council and the Prime Minister's chief of staff are unique. As government and public officials, they are administrators of the Prime Minister's conflict of interest screen. With the opportunity to appear before committee, people deserve to know how the screen is being applied, when it is being applied and what loopholes need to be closed to protect the public interest. This is a central issue to how our government conducts itself on behalf of the taxpayer every single day. The fact that it is even a question now was born specifically out of the Prime Minister's commercial conduct in the past. When the Prime Minister set up his so-called blind trust, he knew exactly what went into it, so consider the likelihood that those assets have changed from the start of the trust to what it is now, seven months into his prime ministership and only a few months after he surrendered them to a blind trust. Members will remember that he has been reluctant, since being sworn in as Prime Minister after a general election campaign, to show transparency. There has been a reluctance from the very beginning. That does not build confidence and trust with the people of Canada at a time when people are very anxious about government abuse and waste in spending. Specific to this, the Prime Minister is a very impressive business person, and I say that comfortably in this chamber. He coled efforts to raise billions of dollars in capital. He is entitled to future carried interest payments based on the performance of the fund he set up. At his previous firm, he set up a massive fund and raised billions of dollars in which he has a personal stake, but the Canadian public has no idea what is actually in that fund. Members will understand the conflict issues that the opposition is raising in good faith with the government. The screen set up by the Ethics Commissioner does not require disclosure when the Prime Minister recuses himself when dealing with these types of issues. That is an intolerable loophole. It is an opportunity for a massive abuse of taxpayer money and massive abuse of the public trust. We are talking about a country that the Prime Minister himself has defined as one in a huge crisis. Major decisions need to be made with blinding speed, but with that must come brilliant transparency to ensure that the Prime Minister and his government are not setting themselves up to be on the take later. This is not a different kind of government, a government worthy of trust. We are now into over 10 years of it, and historically the Liberal Party has not exactly been known as the model for public trust and public confidence with public finances. This speak to a pattern of Liberal corruption. Canadians have seen this Liberal movie many times before. They saw it with former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who violated four provisions of the Conflict of Interest Act by accepting a vacation on a private island, of all things. They saw it in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, where the former prime minister abused his power and forayed into the integrity of public prosecutions to protect his friends and a company that has been revealed to be mired in scandal and corruption around the world, building prisons for dictators in Middle Eastern jurisdictions. We saw a prime minister who abused the idea of charitable work for our young people through the WE Charity scandal. That was supposed to be good in this country, but he engorged and enriched himself and his family through it. We saw a prime minister who stood by the arrive scam app, an app that was designed to try to keep Canadians safe, and who spent tens of millions in development on phony companies and phony front organizations. That is the just the tip of the iceberg. This is a record of abuse that stretches into the tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Massive spending was required in the context of an international crisis, but so much of that money is completely unaccounted for. It is not exactly a record of trust. Now we have a Prime Minister who could cash in on nearly 100 conflicts of interest, according to statistics expert Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch, who appeared before committee. Ninety-nine per cent of the decisions the Prime Minister makes are not subject to conflict laws. The Prime Minister told Canadians that they needed to sacrifice while he financially benefits from offshore tax havens. This is not the kind of confidence that Canadians expect of their government. It is not the kind of trust that we would expect to see built over the months the Prime Minister has had, despite the support of Conservatives, to move major projects forward. These ethical failures of the Prime Minister and his government are already an opportunity to investigate a bit more how he views ethics and integrity. Internationally, there has been the beginning of a disaster. We have seen the government and the Prime Minister dispense with something as simple as the rule of law and basic human dignity when it comes to standing with the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel, instead siding with terror organizations and rewarding them with statehood. That is one of the highest failures of ethical standards and moral judgment. The Prime Minister is now ensconced in not just one trade war but two with the United States, which were uncalled for and require Canada to stand strong and united, but he is not turning to resolving a deal with the United States. Instead, he is creating strategic partnerships with the world's biggest rivals in Beijing. The People's Republic of China does not deserve a strategic partnership with Canada. It deserves strategic concern on a range of issues that touch on natural resources, data, technology and the economic growth of our country. For all of these issues, the Prime Minister will be making massive infrastructure decisions with respect to the future of our country, and he, himself, may be personally incentivized in them. Finally, there is the unleashing of our resources. The Prime Minister is in Asia this week without a single deal to offer the Asian markets that have lined up for our resources. They want to end their reliance on dirty dictator energy. They want to partner with Canada on our resources, the most cleanly cultivated in the entire world with the most stable market for long-term partnerships. However, he did not arrive in Asia for the purpose of doing this, but in anticipation of a meeting with the leadership of Beijing to try to deepen a deal with bad actors. The decisions made when the Prime Minister looks at the ethics of our country and the screens he sets up, not just to incentivize himself, are for the national interests of our country, the prosperity of our people and, indeed, the security of our western security architecture. That is why this is important. If this is truly a new government, as the exact same Liberals claim, then they should prove it, flip the page on Liberal corruption and be transparent with Canadians. Should they not want to close these loopholes? Should they not want our people to know that decisions are made in the public's best interest, not in the partisan interests of the Prime Minister or for his personal enrichment? With that, I will conclude my comments. I hope this Parliament and this chamber pass the amendment we proposed today.

Mr. Speaker, I would perhaps suggest that the hon. member listen to my remarks because I complimented the Prime Minister on his past. I made certain that I not make this about his character, but rather, the need for his decisions to provide the public with transparency. The Prime Minister has not been embracing the concept of transparency or sunlight when it comes to his personal finances. Since the day he was elected Liberal leader, ran in the election and was sworn in as Prime Minister, only in the aftermath of the election did he provide an opportunity to understand exactly what his personal financial interests are. Public service is a high calling. It is an opportunity for all of us to sacrifice for the benefit of our country by offering transparency so we can build the trust that Canadians need.

Mr. Speaker, the government has had the support of opposition parties on a series of priorities. If the government wanted to provide energy corridors to unlock this country's enormous potential, it could decide to table the bills and do so immediately. If the government was serious about bail reform, as the member indicated, the government could have tabled a bill in the first week back in Parliament and got the job done, saving thousands of Canadians from the crime and chaos that affect them on the streets. If the government was serious about transparency and openness, it could have done this from the very beginning by making decisions that would not cast a cloud over every major decision it is making from this point forward. The government has not shown an honest partnership with opposition parties in trying to make progress for the people and succeed as a democracy. The government has, instead, offered up barriers and bait-and-switch games legislatively. In committees, government members slow down the opportunity to hold people accountable by pursuing transparency and understanding the model of how they do so today.

Mr. Speaker, I am a proud colleague of the hon. member for Calgary Crowfoot. He serves his constituents incredibly well, including two retired people in the northwest of Calgary, and I am grateful for his service and hard work. The list of Liberal transgressions and corruption is taller than I am. I am not particularly tall in stature, but it is longer than my leg, longer than height that I possess of five feet, six inches, and it is longer than the The Iliad. We could talk for a long time about Liberal corruption. Conservatives are perpetually elected to restore trust in government and provide transparency and integrity. That is what we will do when we win the next election.

Mr. Speaker, there are 300,000 asylum claimants in the system, as we know. The Liberals' interim health program is now $1 billion. Toronto has to increase rents. The Liberals broke the system. Many legal experts have suggested that the immigration provisions in the bill are unconstitutional. Some have even said they are undertaking research in preparation for legal challenges. Knowing this, is the government prepared to challenge court rulings against the provisions, or is it just planning on punting the utter mess it has made of the asylum system to the courts?

Mr. Speaker, the prism refracts the light. Two years ago, the world turned on itself, with an epidemic of anti-Semitism against the Jews and their state, the greatest test of our generation and our way of life, a fight for civilization over our medieval rivals. Across millennia, Jews have faced down Haman and Antiochus, and, in the last century, Hitler and Hamas. All through this, Canadian Jews have taken their mezuzahs off their doors out of fear, students have hid and mobs have gathered outside classroom doors, as everything we know, everything we are, is torturously inverted. Where were we. May the memories of Ben, Vivian, Judih, Adi, Alexandre, Netta, Shir and Tiferet be a blessing. May we remember that the source of both pain and joy is love. In this broken prism, I thank God for the Jewish world that is the light.

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House of Commons to speak to Bill C-9, an act to amend the Criminal Code with respect to hate propaganda, hate crime and access to religious or cultural places. I will be splitting my time with my dear friend, the member of Parliament for Bowmanville—Oshawa North. I will speak about Gardiner and Voltaire: one an English journalist and the other a French satirist. A.G. Gardiner, in his essay On the Rule of the Road, put it plainly: One's freedom ends where the other person's nose begins. One's right to swing their fist ends when it collides with another's safety. To live together, we accept this social contract, curbing certain impulses so that everyone may move freely. Gardiner used simple ideas like the limits of playing a trombone at midnight to illustrate the point. True freedom comes with the responsibilities of restraint, rules and tolerance. Without responsibilities, liberties clash and dissolve into anarchy, where no one is free. With these responsibilities, we achieve freedom for all, including minorities. Voltaire, in his writings and satire, came to the same truth from another perspective. For him, freedom of speech was the lifeblood of progress. A society advances when ideas, even unpopular ones, can be expressed and tested. He fought censorship, knowing that suppression is always the tool of tyranny. A phrase often attributed to him, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, was in fact penned later by Evelyn Beatrice Hall. Voltaire defended free expression, while rejecting incitement, libel and sedition, insisting that open dialogue is the only safeguard of liberty. Taken together, Gardiner and Voltaire remind us that freedom lives in the balance in between. Without restraint, it collapses into anarchy, and without expression, into tyranny. It is against this balance that we must measure the state of our country today. Taking into account the understanding that Gardiner and Voltaire provide us with, let us chart out Canada in the last decade and provide three principal critiques of Bill C-9. The hate crime legislation before us right now is legislation that we should have been debating several years ago. We will take no lessons from Liberals when it comes to fighting hate. Let us talk about the last decade. Since 2015, when the Liberals took office, hate crimes have gone up 258%, police-reported hate crimes have increased six years in a row and anti-Semitic hate crimes are up 416%. We have a government in place that has allowed Jewish Canadians, who account for less than 1% of our population, to become the most-targeted minority in our country. Seventy per cent of all hate crimes are targeted at less than 1% of the population. It is a government that, for far too long, has decided to place political expediency over moral clarity, choosing appeasement over principle. A synagogue was fire-bombed twice in one year. Two Jewish schools were shot up. A bomb threat targeted Jewish institutions across Canada. A Jewish man was assaulted in a Montreal park. A Jewish woman was stabbed in the kosher section of an Ottawa Loblaws. The government's announcement, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, of granting a state to the people who practise state terror as statecraft, emboldening mobs and violence upon our Jewish communities, is just the latest example. It has been a decade of waiting for the rule of law over mob rule. Christians across our country have been subjected to over 100 church bombings and attacks. Communities are divided against one another as political projects of Liberals, rather than as a country being raised on the basis of the rule of law for all its people. Truckers took to our streets to protest for their rights and freedoms, as the Prime Minister then betrayed civil liberty and sowed distrust in our financial institutions, calling those very protesters seditious. Trust is broken in this country. Our institutions, whether media, bureaucratic, judicial, financial or academic, have all been subjected to radical conformity, not critical thinking. The rot of one ideology as supreme against all others has shaken the confidence of Canadians, and restoring that trust requires much more than the performance art and virtue signalling that much of Bill C-9 presents. The same Liberal members of Parliament who stood and watched as trust eroded and communities were torn apart stand here today to claim that they have solutions for the very problems they caused. They claim they have majestically changed since their new Prime Minister took office. We cannot forget the damage and division they sowed, the trust they have broken. It is against the backdrop of the rising hate and violence the Liberals have caused that I offer three three principal critiques of Bill C-9. First is the removal of the Attorney General from the process of approving charges for hate crimes. The requirement for AG consent has long served as a safeguard against abuse and as a means for accountability. By removing that oversight, the government would risk giving unelected bureaucrats unchecked discretion over prosecutions, paving the way for radical ideological judges. My friend, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, put it best on September 24: Right now, our biggest problem is that enforcement is not consistent. Bail is virtually automatic, and charges are often dropped. Serious charges are plead down. That is where Parliament's attention should be: on stronger enforcement, on swifter prosecutions and on support for victims. Unamended, this bill risks punishing the unpopular while the truly dangerous slip through. Second is a question of identity. Where the bill currently refers to the protection of identity, it shifts attention away from protecting individual dignity. This carve-out from free speech would give Liberals the opportunity to define what they do not like as hate speech. Identities and human association are complex and subjective, but the concepts of the individual's rights and dignity are objective. Our laws should defend every Canadian against intimidation, harassment and violence, not protect abstract categories that are open to interpretation. Third, another concern with Bill C-9 is its approach to defining “hate” itself. As drafted and as the government indicates, the bill would codify the Supreme Court of Canada's definition of “hatred” as “detestation or vilification”. On its face this seems consistent, but by removing the word “extreme”, the government would lower the legal threshold, enabling police to lay a multitude of charges with less scrutiny and less investigation. In practice, this would risk opening the floodgates to inconsistent prosecution and litigation. This is the kind of overreach we have come to expect in the United Kingdom, but not here in Canada. The Conservatives are the party of free speech, not the party of prosecuting those whose speech we do not agree with. There is a lot at stake in Bill C-9. We must resist the left's troubling argument that words alone constitute violence. Words are words. Violence is violence. Conflating the two licenses the idea that real violence is a legitimate response to speech, a principle that is both dangerous and indefensible. The only correct response to offensive or hateful words is more words and more debate. If there has been a rise in hate in Canada, it is not because we fail to police speech; it is because we fail to police actions: barricading neighbourhoods, assaulting members of religious minorities, burning down churches, shooting up synagogues or vandalizing minority-held businesses. It is because we have a government that sows division, pitting one community against another, and that treats one speech as sacrosanct and the other as seditious. It is because our government does not have the resources to act and because the Liberals have created a justice system that lets offenders walk back onto our streets. The solution to violence is enforcement of the law by police and by courts, accountability for wrongdoers and genuine condemnation by public officials, none of which we have seen. Bill C-9, as written, falls short. As hate crimes have risen across this land, successive public safety and justice ministers have failed to bring focus to the source of these crimes. They have failed to provide both legal and moral leadership to stand against the mob and call for civility in Canada, honouring what Gardiner and Voltaire described. Without them, violent crimes go unchecked. It is time to jail the haters, not for what they say, but for what they do. Bill C-9 fails to strike the balance Canadians expect. Despite having had the support of the Conservatives since the election, the Liberals only table a law that would essentially repurpose an existing law and would contribute very little to dealing with one of the biggest crises our country has to confront. We must confront hatred with the rule of law and the love of liberty. We must protect Canadians from violence, not expose them to arbitrary prosecutions. We must hold the government accountable for legislation that leaves our communities vulnerable. That is our responsibility. That is our commitment. That is the standard Canadians expect.

Madam Speaker, the hon. member should look in the mirror. This is a government that has spent the last decade dividing Hindus and Sikhs against one another. This is a government that has failed to utter a single word of strength against a majority of hate crimes being levelled against less than 1% of our population. More than 70% of all hate crimes across the country are focused on less than 1% of the population. Over the last year, what has the government done? It has accelerated hate and poured gas onto the fire. Synagogues have been bombed, schools have been shot and communities have been threatened. Conservatives will take no lessons from Liberals on what it takes to confront hate when they are the ones who have been promoting it all along.

Madam Speaker, let me offer this. It is true that at the time, I was not in the chamber. I did not represent the great people of Calgary Heritage. At the time, I was a writer, a thought leader, at a place called the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. I happened to be in Ottawa at the time of the convoy protest, and I decided to take a look for myself to see exactly what was involved. I walked from one end to the other. I probably encountered a bit too much beer and weed for my taste, but I will tell members that this was a peaceful protest. These were authentic people fighting for their freedoms and doing so in the best interests of our country and our communities. They were diminished by the farce of what was proposed, the Emergencies Act, against them and against the freedoms of Canadians, freedoms that were shaken in our financial systems with subjective enforcement of the rule of law. These things need to be confronted and should never again be permitted to happen.

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his incredible work on restoring trust among our young people and trust between communities. The Nazi hooked cross was culturally appropriated from the ancient civilization of Hindus and Indians. People of Indian origin and Hindu faith have often seen that symbol, the swastika, as it is properly known, as a symbol of peace, love and prosperity. When the Nazis culturally appropriated it and made it famous as a symbol of hate, they chose to do something terrible in this country. In how we speak about hate crimes and hate symbols, it is so important for us to learn this lesson of history, to classify the hooked cross of the Nazis correctly, to defend our Hindu community and to defend our—

Mr. Speaker, ignoring the massacre of eight Canadians on October 7, siding with their killers and dehumanizing their families, the hostages still held and over 1,200 stolen souls is evil. Granting a state to those who practise state terror as statecraft and pay pensions for murdering Jews is evil. Not requiring the state to even recognize Israel's right to exist is evil. None of their conditions were met. There was no election, no release of all hostages and no demilitarization of Hamas. Lying about these intentions is evil. Doing this on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and emboldening mobs and violence upon our Jewish communities, is evil. The fascism once buried in the last world war has risen again as modern terrorism. This is not diplomacy. It is appeasement. It is betrayal. The Prime Minister has dispensed with human dignity and the rule of law. He has emboldened terror with a state, and it is evil.

Mr. Speaker, the Palestinian Authority runs a program perpetuating generational genocidal hate with penchants for terrorists who murder Jews. The PA, the PLO and Fatah all embed terrorism into their institutions. The PLO founded the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a listed terrorist entity responsible for the attacks on October 7. If recognition of statehood is to have any real meaning, will the Prime Minister designate this as a state sponsor of terrorism?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister promised the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Tell that to every out-of-work young couple living in the worst unemployment and immigration crisis Canada has known. He said that Canadians could judge him by grocery prices. Tell that to Robin in Calgary, who is watching food costs rise faster than when the Prime Minister took office six months ago. The Prime Minister promised to cap and control spending. Tell that to the taxpayers expected to pay for him doubling the deficit. He promised nation-building projects. Tell that to any resource worker or project builder still waiting for a single permit. The Prime Minister promised safe communities. Tell that to the Hamiltonians who survived 80 rounds, to the three-year-old girl and her broken-hearted family in Welland, to the family of Abdul Aleem Farooqi in Vaughan, to the Jewish woman stabbed in the kosher section of an Ottawa Loblaws and to the communities of Calgary, Surrey and Halifax. It is time to stop the broken promises. It is time to stop the bait and switch. It is time for the Prime Minister to do his job.

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's four weeks in Parliament were filled with broken Liberal promises: broken promises on spending, broken promises on the tax cut, broken promises on defence and broken promises on elbows up with the United States. The Prime Minister promised $800 in savings, a savings bonanza. Instead, the average Canadian only gets $90 this year. Did the Prime Minister mislead Canadians during the election, is he misleading them now or is it both?

Mr. Speaker, if their math is like their promises, we are in serious trouble. They promised to put more money in Canadians' pockets. It is not $800 a year; it is seven dollars a month: broken. They promised to rein in government spending. We have $26 billion in consultants and $1,400 in taxes for every Canadian household: broken. The Prime Minister has promised to rein in inflation. Beef is up 34%, baby formula is up 9% and apples are up 18%: broken. Was the Prime Minister misleading us in the campaign, is he misleading us now or is it both?