Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, for constituents at home and Canadians wondering whether any rare disease drugs will be covered by anything, as the member mentioned rare diseases, not a single medication will be covered. In fact, the government's own 2019 budget announcement of $1.5 billion for rare diseases has not covered a single medication for any patient in Canada. I would ask the member the same question I ask…
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Mr. Speaker, the member did mention rare diseases, and I cannot pass up the opportunity to clarify a couple of things. It is only mentioned once, in clause 5 of the legislation. To all my constituents back home, and all the rare disease organizations and patients across the country, not a single person will have their rare disease drugs paid for by this legislation, not a single one. It is not in …
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Mr. Speaker, the NDP caucus is heckling me once again. I know the New Democrats get really upset when I raise this. The government is the one that actually cancelled the original rare disease strategy in 2016, and at the time, the head of the organization called it “the kiss of death” for rare disease patients. Does that member agree?
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, I am glad to be joining this debate with respect to Bill C-353, the foreign hostage-takers accountability act. Again, it is always an honour and a privilege to rise in the House and speak not only on behalf of my constituents, but also on behalf of a lot of friends of mine from the Middle East: Kurds, Persians and a lot of Chaldeans and Arab-Iraqis and Turks whom I know and who are …
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Madam Speaker, we request a recorded vote.
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, what I did not hear the member talk about is his statement. I will remind him of it. He said, leading up to the vote, “This cannot happen [again] moving forward. From now on, you cannot have the Speaker engage in partisan activity.” He said that if there were any derogation from that, in the weeks and months to come, his party would join in voting non-confidence in the Speaker. He h…
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Madam Speaker, off the top, just so that this is not a surprise, not to you as the Chair, but to the Speaker, I want him to know that I lost confidence in him long before now. I know I am supposed to split my time, but I usually look around to see if the member is in the chamber; he is behind me now. I was hoping to get the whole 20 minutes, but I will split my time with the member for Stormont—Du…
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Madam Speaker, let me say a few kind things about another member of Parliament, of the House, who is a former Speaker himself, the member for Nipissing—Timiskaming. He was a good Speaker. He applied the rules as best he could and tried to control us as well as any person can control us from the chair. That member made one mistake, and he resigned honourably to protect the Speaker's job and the rol…
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Madam Speaker, the member for Nipissing—Timiskaming honourably stepped down to protect the speakership and the Speaker's office from being further attacked and from further losing the confidence of members of Parliament, and he made one mistake. He was a Speaker whom I voted for, because I had the confidence that he would be neutral in his role. The current Speaker does not have my confidence.
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I want to thank the Bloc Québécois member for his good question. I am currently serving my third term in the House thanks to my constituents in Calgary Shepard, and I have to say that it is a great privilege to serve as an MP. I find that, before every election, the tone and the words that are used in the House become more intense. I think that we need an election. We need to either…
Read full speech →Statements By Members
Mr. Speaker, after nine years of this NDP-Liberal government, more Canadians are hungry and homeless. The latest Salvation Army report reveals alarming statistics: 68% of Canadians now rely on discounted food and 44% have to cut the grocery bills just to make ends meet. A staggering 40% are forced to buy less nutritious food due to cost, while 26% skip meals because they cannot afford groceries. T…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, more Canadians are now going hungry and homeless. The latest annual risk outlook from OSFI highlights that 76% of mortgages will come up for renewal by the end of 2026. Now, the Prime Minister's high mortgage rates are creating misery for Canadian homeowners. Again, the Liberal government's own bank regulators are flashing red stop s…
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Mr. Speaker, that overheated and over-the-top rhetoric is cold comfort to homeowners who are facing hundreds of dollars per month of increased mortgage costs because of the Liberal government's decisions during the pandemic. The Liberals doubled the national debt and increased spending by $600 billion over that time period, which led to higher mortgage interest costs at the same time that the Prim…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the government side why it felt the need to do this, to shut down debate on a gag order, because Motion No. 39 is a gag order being directed at the Standing Committee on Health. I will also remind members, before they give me talking points, that just two days before Motion No. 39 was tabled before the House, the Minister of Health said, “there will be time for the…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, just to confirm, now that the motion has passed regarding Motion No. 39, I lose my unlimited time and I now have a 20-minute slot. Therefore, I will have to share my time with the member for Cumberland—Colchester, even though I would have enjoyed continuing to speak to an issue that I hold very dear to my heart, which is the approval of drugs for rare diseases in Canada and how pati…
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Madam Speaker, I will return to the debate on the gag order for the Standing Committee on Health. I want to remind the Minister of Justice that he makes the same claim that the Minister of Health makes, which is that we need to quickly rush this through the process. This has been a promise that has been lingering for years from their side. There have only been three days of debate, April 16, May 6…
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I would ask for a recorded division.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, if my constituents or members of this House look at my speaking time in this chamber and compare it to that member's speaking time on government bills, they will see that he has delayed more government bills than any Conservative in this House.
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Madam Speaker, I think that the reason why the Bloc Québécois is opposed to Government Business No. 39 and this bill is, of course, that this falls under Quebec's jurisdiction. We should put our trust in all the provinces. They know how best to manage their health care system and health insurance for the patients and families in their own territory. We are talking about programs that existed 24 ye…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I would like to correct the member. I think the most unpopular government today is the NDP government in British Columbia. Premier Eby is now going to be facing the electorate after going along with the Liberal plan to basically approve all hard drugs and just spread them across the streets of Vancouver. I have door-knocked in the member's riding, I have met church groups in his rid…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I listened attentively to the health minister's speech. He talked about, at one point, finding common ground and finding solutions. He recited every single anecdote in this speech that he did in his second reading speech on the bill. This bill, Bill C-64, only got three days of debate in the House, and it was then sent to committee. Now, we have a programming motion, so it is a guil…
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Madam Speaker, I listened attentively to what the health minister was saying, so I am glad to be the first person to rise on my side to maybe provide a rebuttal and also to reset the debate, because the debate is not directly about Bill C-64; it is about a programming motion. When I listened to the minister's speech, I also had the time to compare it to his speech that he gave at second reading. T…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, in yesterday's debate, I mentioned that I was one of the 18 parliamentarians targeted by this pixel reconnaissance attack from APT31. As I disclosed, this was not just any cyber-hacking group in their mom's basement. These were actually intelligence officers working for one of the subnational governments that the Beijing government loves to use in order to target legislators. I was ta…
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Mr. Speaker, I wish I were pleased to join the debate, but I am not. I am one of those 18 parliamentarians who had their email targeted by APT31. To be perfectly honest, I did not know what APT31 was. I think many of my colleagues know that I spend a lot of time in diaspora communities, so I do know quite a bit about random, obscure groups that many of us do not pay attention to, but this is a new…
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Mr. Speaker, there is a line I hear from the government whenever it has made a mistake. “Do not be so partisan” is the response Conservatives get from the government benches. I have made the case that the government followed its own process, but the process is immoral. It is unethical. The Liberals' line is that, because the interference was not successful, we did not need to know about it. That i…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the member for Edmonton Manning is absolutely correct. The message the government basically sends to the diaspora communities, to former political prisoners whom we meet with and to people in civic organizations in Canada is that they do not matter. They will not be protected by the government. It is a free-for-all, with foreign agents and foreign hacking. It is not just their physica…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the member is right. As with many things with the Liberals, they are not leaders on anything. They are followers on where other governments have gone. The U.S. State Department has already listed seven of these intelligence officers connected with APT31. Let me just read some of the targets mentioned. It goes to why we should list them, why we should penalize them and why we should sa…
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Mr. Speaker, the member raises a very good point. It is possible that one of the reasons the government chose not to inform us, those 18 of us who were targeted, is not just because the attacks did not succeed but also because there would have been an expectation from us, and calls by us, for sanctions on the people, organizations and governments that were doing this. This is, again, not something…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, first, I would never tell members not to rise in the House when it is their opportunity to speak on a particular issue. Second, I think every single member who was targeted should get an opportunity to rise in the House and explain exactly how this impacted their work. Third, I note that it is after 11 o'clock. I doubt PROC will be meeting tonight. The debate should continue until eve…
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North talked about your ruling, so I did want to read a bit from it. I did quickly read it over one more time, and you actually did not praise anything the Liberal government has done over the past nine years to try to offset the amount of foreign interference in our country or said that the government has succeeded in somehow protecting parliamentarians, becau…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I am tabling a petition on behalf of Hong Kongers all across Canada. The petitioners draw the attention of the House specifically to the treatment that Hong Kongers have received ever since the national security law in Hong Kong was implemented, instituted in Hong Kong by the Communist authorities, on June 30, 2020. They draw the attention of the House to the fact that it has suppress…
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With regard to Immigration and Refugee Board hearings on refugee claims, in 2023: (a) for written hearings, how many claims were (i) accepted, (ii) rejected, (iii) abandoned, (iv) withdrawn and other, in total and broken down by the country of origin of applicants; and (b) for oral hearings, how many claims were (i) accepted, (ii) rejected, (iii) abandoned, (iv) withdrawn or other, in total and br…
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Mr. Speaker, I am tabling two petitions today on behalf of constituents in my riding. The first petition calls on the federal government, which has already issued sanctions against the Russian Federation, to also name the Russian Federation as a foreign state supporting terrorism and to list it as a state sponsor of terror under specific legislation related to terrorism and the State Immunity Act.
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Mr. Speaker, the second petition is very dear to my heart, because I am a member of the Calgary Co-op. The Government of Canada has made illegal single-use plastics across the country as of December 2023, including the Calgary Co-op's 100% compostable shopping bags. This is despite the fact that the Calgary Co-op states that its bags contain no plastic, including no plastic in the ink, and that th…
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Madam Speaker, I want to make a comment and ask the member a question. The first line of the report calls on the government to designate the group, called Sepâh-e Pâsdârân in Farsi, as a terrorist group. We have been trying to convince the government for six years now to designate it as a terrorist group under the Criminal Code. Some members have asked the question about the people who have been f…
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Madam Speaker, I would like to commend the member on at least recognizing the fact that there are IRGC agents in Vancouver. I do spend quite a bit of time in the Persian community, but also with Kurds and Baloch, who are also all impacted. Many of them originate from Iran and are chased here by IRGC agents who continue to try to persecute them, whether it is with WhatsApp messages or telegram mess…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I know the member cares about this particular issue quite a bit. We had a kind of round table on the Hill, what now feels like many months ago, regarding specifically the issue of conscripts in the IRGC, in Sepah-e Pasdaran. The way it works in Iran is that one enters a room where all the conscripts are and people are basically assigned in thirds to whatever service they are going to.…
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Madam Speaker, I would like to request a recorded division.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I would like to ask for a recorded division.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I would like to ask for a recorded division.
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the Financial Post headline says it all. Scotiabank reports that the Bank of Canada rate cuts could be delayed due to high government spending. Under the Prime Minister, our national debt has more than doubled, more than all other prime ministers combined. The consequences are spiralling inflation and skyrocketing interest rates hitting every single Canadian family. Rents and mortgage…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I rise to present three petitions from my constituents. The first petition is on medical assistance in dying or the assisted suicide system. These constituents are drawing the attention of the House to the fact that, on March 17, MAID was supposed to become available to those with a mental illness. Parliament has since then extended it. They are still calling on the Government of Cana…
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Mr. Speaker, my second petition goes back to the issue of the lost confidence that many Canadians in my riding have about the government here. They are calling on the House for a vote of non-confidence again. They are asking for an election to be held within 45 days after the vote is won. Once again, as the current government is not acting in the best interests of citizens, they are asking the Hou…
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Mr. Speaker, the third and final petition that I am tabling is on behalf of constituents in my riding who are also members of the Calgary Co-op. This is with regard to Environment Canada's decision to continue to ban compostable shopping bags that are 100% non-plastic bags. These constituents are drawing the government's attention to the fact that the Calgary Co-op has successfully kept over 100 m…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the federal government's commitment to resettle 15,000 refugees in Canada following the renegotiation of the Safe Third Country Agreement: (a) what is the breakdown by country of origin; (b) what is the breakdown by country of citizenship; (c) what is the breakdown by demographics of the claimants by (i) age, (ii) sex or gender; and (d) how many claims were (i) accepted, (ii) refuse…
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With regard to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the family-based humanitarian pathway for Sudanese and non-Sudanese nationals due to the ongoing conflict in Sudan, since the December 28, 2023 announcement: (a) how many applications have been (i) received, (ii) accepted, (iii) denied, (iv) pending or under review; (b) what is the breakdown by male and female; (c) what is the breakdo…
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