Routine Proceedings
With regard to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the temporary special measures for extended family in Gaza due to the Israel-Hamas war, since the December 21, 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 breakdown by age range; (d) how man…
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The member is giving an impassioned speech about her riding and there is so much noise in the chamber, it is impossible to hear her from the front of the floor of the House.
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With regard to the acceptance of government assisted refugees from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) refugee camps in Uganda: (a) what is the total number of refugees accepted from Uganda since January 1, 2017, broken down by year; (b) what is the breakdown of (a) by ethnicity; (c) what is the breakdown of (a) by country of origin; and (d) what is the breakdown of (a) through (…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the rarest day of the year is upon us once more. February 29 appears once every four years, and it is quite a fitting day to mark this occasion. My family is affected by two rare diseases. Three of my living kids have a rare chronic kidney condition called Alport syndrome. My youngest daughter passed away from Patau syndrome in 2018. Since I rarely do haikus in the chamber, here is on…
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Madam Speaker, I am glad to be joining debate on Bill C-62. Off the top, I will mention that I will be voting for it. Like the shadow minister for justice on the Conservative side said, this is about protecting the vulnerable. Though the federal government has dropped the ball in this latest iteration of its legislation, these three years, I hope, will be taken to basically fix the mistakes that w…
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Mr. Speaker, it is something that I also think about. The member mentioned courts, and sometimes, I feel that these court decisions should apply for six months to the judge who makes them before they apply to the rest of the public. I sometimes wonder, when they think these things through, that it goes back to too much legal information that clouds their judgment at times. This is where I worry th…
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Mr. Speaker, the member raises a great point. There are a lot of vulnerable, disabled Canadians who have expressed themselves through not only their associations but also as individuals by communicating to their elected representatives that they do not want to see this expansion because they are worried. It comes from their experience when they go into a clinical setting or into a hospital setting…
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Mr. Speaker, I obviously agree with the member. The dog that ate the government's homework has been fattened up over the last nine years, because it had a lot of homework to eat that the government has not done or pretends not to have done. However, we had an opportunity to close the door completely with the bill from the member for Abbotsford, Bill C-314. I think it was a grave mistake of the Hou…
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Madam Speaker, I am tabling a petition from my constituents, asking for another non-confidence vote to be held. This is a petition I had out at my new year's levee earlier in January, and this is the earliest opportunity I have had to get it certified by Journals. It is very simple: My constituents are asking for a vote of non-confidence to be held within 45 days, and, should the government lose t…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, the Senate amendments to Bill C-234 have drastically changed the contents of the original bill that this House passed with support from multiple parties. It would basically have reduced the tax bill for farmers by about a billion dollars, savings that would have been passed on to my constituents whose greatest relationship with farmers is when they go to the grocery store to buy Canad…
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Madam Speaker, I am glad that the minister was able to contribute to this debate. It is hard to take him seriously, though, because that immigration plan was tabled November 1. By that time, in his own ministry, there were now over one million international students in Canada. He knew that. He came two to three months later to announce a cutting down of 35% and capping all over the country on a sy…
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on a Bloc opposition day motion. To summarize it briefly, it would recall a vote in the House that tied immigration targets in Canada to various areas of capacity in social services, French and English-language training, transportation infrastructure, health care, jobs availability and education. This was voted on at the end of last year, typically wh…
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Madam Speaker, a Yiddish proverb I love is that if a wise man and a fool are debating, and rabbis love this proverb as well, what we have are two fools debating between each other. Sometimes I feel this is what I am watching. I have listened to the Herle Burly Podcast, and the new Minister of Immigration has appeared on it twice now. He talks a really tough game when he is on the podcast. Then he …
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Madam Speaker, what I am prepared to say is that we will have a common-sense immigration system. We will not need a referendum, since we will have a federal government that is able to work with all the provinces fairly. Furthermore, our government will make sure that the provinces are able to tackle the challenges. It will not call them names, compare them to heat pumps or insult them. It will wor…
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Madam Speaker, it is sad that those members have not read the immigration plans pre-2015. It was a Conservative government that created the super visa program for parents and grandparents. It was a Conservative government that made the PGP, the parents and grandparents permanent immigration system, work better. What the Liberal government has done is create a lottery system whereby people have spe…
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The member is saying it is not true. I invite him to check the immigration committee's records, because all the numbers have been tabled successively over the last year, which proves the case that all the backlogs are worse than they were in 2015 for almost every single program the government controls today.
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Madam Speaker, the member has a lot of experience, especially on the immigration committee. I usually do not agree with her, but I do respect the fact that she brings a deep level of knowledge to a lot of the immigration issues that she approaches. We are usually on opposite sides of voting. She has basically supported this government for the last three or four years without objection, every singl…
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Madam Speaker, I did say that she bears responsibility with voting on every single confidence motion and every single confidence measure in the House, and so she does bear responsibility for decisions made by this government. She is supporting the spending, she is supporting the employment, she is supporting the number it is hiring and how it is handling the files. That is what I am saying. The me…
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Madam Speaker, concerning the first part of my colleague's question, it depends. I know that this is not the answer he was hoping for. However, it depends. We will see how the debate unfolds. As for the second part of his question, as the member knows, we Conservatives voted in favour of the Bloc Québécois's motion on the Century Initiative. At the time, we voted with the Bloc Québécois and the ot…
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Madam Speaker, the member is wrong. When the Paul Martin government was defeated in 2006 and a new Conservative government took over, it took a few years to realize that, in fact, there was a six million to eight million application backlog created by previous Liberal governments. At that time, the decision was made to reset the system to zero, because there was no way to fix it. Liberal governmen…
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Madam Speaker, the member for Sarnia—Lambton is correct. I asked the government to tell me how many construction workers were brought in through all immigration streams under the different NOC codes. The minister claimed that he was not the minister responsible for NOC codes. It is about 4,500 per year since 2016. We have a shortage of 100,000 residential construction workers just in Ontario. They…
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Madam Speaker, I would like to ask a question as a follow-up to the question from my NDP colleague. In fact, the misleading information about how immigrants are partly responsible for Canada's housing problem came from the Liberal Minister of Housing. He said it, not me. For the past two months, we have witnessed two ministers publicly pass the buck by saying that the other is to blame. There is c…
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Madam Speaker, several times today, Liberal members mentioned consultation. Several times, they gave the impression that there had been consultations about the cap on the number of foreign students before decisions were taken and the Minister of Immigration made his announcements. From what I gather from the different provinces, universities and colleges, there were no consultations. The federal g…
Read full speech →Statements By Members
Mr. Speaker, athlete, author, thinker, businessman, husband and grandfather are a few of the ways to describe Bill Gairdner, who passed away at age 83 last month. He won a silver at the decathlon in the 1963 Pan American Games. He competed in 1964 at the Tokyo Olympics, in 1966 at the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica and in 1970 at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games. He married his beloved wife, Jean, …
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for the very detailed history lesson that he gave about the oath of allegiance. I would have liked to hear even more about that. I would say that section 128 of our Constitution needs a twin, rather than a son, a godfather or a sister. It needs a twin section. I like the way he approached this subject. Could my colleague give us some examples of what…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the current Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages: (a) has the minister advocated or taken other action to convince the Prime Minister to remove or pause the carbon tax from natural gas or other sources of home heating; (b) if the answer to (a) is affirmative, what are the details, including for each action, the (i) date, (ii) description of the action…
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With regard to the processing times for applications submitted to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, as of October 30, 2023: (a) what are the processing times for the temporary programs, broken down by month in 2023 for (i) study permits, (ii) work permits, (iii) temporary residents; and (b) what are the processing times for permanent residency programs, broken down by month in 2023 for…
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With regard to the First-Time Home Buyer Incentive (FTHBI) announced by the government in 2019, from September 1, 2019, to date: (a) how many applicants have applied for mortgages through the FTHBI program, broken down by province and municipality; (b) of those applicants, how many have been approved and accepted mortgages through the FTHBI program, broken down by province and municipality; (c) of…
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With regard to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada's Express Entry program: how many construction or trades workers have been admitted through the program, broken down by stream, year, and each of the major and minor groups within category 7 of the National Occupational Classification codes (trades, transport and equipment operators and related occupations), since 2016?
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his speech about the free trade agreement and the bill, which will implement it in Canada. I travelled with him several times to Washington, and I must say that he is a champion of workers’ interests in the labour and battery sectors. Every time we met with the Americans, he would talk about that, trying to convince them. I think there is somethi…
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Madam Speaker, I have two petitions to present today on behalf of my constituents. The first one draws attention to the fact that only 41% of doctors with international credentials work as doctors in Canada, and 30% of nurses with international credentials work as nurses in Canada. That is about 53,000 foreign or internationally trained professionals, and many of them have great difficulty. We jus…
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Madam Speaker, my second petition draws the attention of the House to the following: The value of the energy sector is about 10% of Canada's GDP. It pays over $26 billion in taxes at all levels of government, and it paid about $48 billion in royalties and taxes in 2022. Constituents are calling for Bill C-50, the “unjust transition act”, to be abandoned. They say that a central planning agenda is …
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Madam Speaker, on the same point of order, on what the parliamentary secretary just said, a member is allowed to reflect on their own votes. I do not believe the Standing Orders in the House of Commons directly affect how committees vote. I do not believe it has ever been part of the rules directly. Votes cannot be referred to in the House that are taken here. Part of the ruling that is made shoul…
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Madam Speaker, very quickly, I have five petitions to table on behalf of my constituents. The first one calls for a blue seal program, modelled after the Red Seal program, for medical professionals.
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Madam Speaker, the second petition calls for the government to ensure that hate crimes are prosecuted in Canada when they target certain religious groups.
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Madam Speaker, the third petition asks for an inquiry to be called into the foreign interference in our elections by the People's Republic of China.
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Madam Speaker, the fourth petition from my constituents calls for Bill C-50 to be abandoned, as the unjust transition act targets them specifically.
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Madam Speaker, my fifth petition calls for the Government of Canada, and the Speaker specifically, to give royal recommendation to Bill C-318 so that adoptive and intended parents are able to better support their families.
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Madam Speaker, I request a recorded division.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary completely avoided answering the question from the member for Lakeland, demonstrating that the bill would not actually impact the workers most affected by the unjust transition act. I know she wants to avoid saying that. The member from the Bloc directly asked the parliamentary secretary why it is that the legislation is not called by what it would actual…
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a great honour to rise on behalf of the constituents of Calgary Shepard. This is the 14th report of the Public Accounts committee, a committee I got to chair briefly. I know that there are other members here who have had the honour of chairing that committee as well. It is one of the most interesting committees to be on because it is one that deals very closely with the A…
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Mr. Speaker, I am delighted that answers to questions have been tabled in the House. The government has now created one carve-out for heating oil. It did it for electoral reasons. One of the Liberal cabinet ministers said exactly that, that if westerners, prairie Canadians like myself, expected to get a carve-out for natural gas, which is the primary fuel used to heat our homes in the winter, then…
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Mr. Speaker, I hear a member heckling again. It is the same voice I hear all the time, from the member for Timmins—James Bay. He spends more time heckling and talking about Toronto subways than he does about the people from Timmins—James Bay. I want to wish him good luck in a future life when he perhaps will try to go and get a pundit job with maybe the CBC; sorry, not the CBC because we are going…
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Mr. Speaker, I have respect for the member for Winnipeg North. He does the best he can for his Liberal side, rising consistently in the House and trying to do the best that he can with the miserable talking points that the Liberals receive. Let us go back to the record. There is RADARSAT satellite imagery of where Russian troops went across the border. The Stephen Harper government gave access to …
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Mr. Speaker, let us talk about Bill C-11, which was passed in the Senate. I think there is a big difference when we are talking about a bill that seeks to determine what people have the right to access online, the freedom of speech that they should have and what the government can control on YouTube, Facebook and the Internet in general. With regard to the cost of food, we know that more than two …
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Mr. Speaker, there is not enough time to respond to that ridiculous statement. I just want to wish the member a happy defeat in the next election when the people of Timmins—James Bay send him packing, and I hope that he enjoys his retirement.
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Madam Speaker, artificial intelligence obviously depends on models and information that it scoops up off the Internet. There are two sources of information to build the AI model: low-wage workers working sometimes in deplorable conditions and also AI scanning through places like Google or DuckDuckGo or other browser engines. It hoovers up data and images. When AI picks up AI images and information…
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Madam Speaker, I request a recorded division.
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Mr. Speaker, I ask for a recorded division.
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Madam Speaker, that felt like a long 20 minutes. I do want to make a commentary about the member admonishing the Conservatives for simply bringing forward concerns with legislation, expressed both by our constituents and stakeholders. The member for Battle River—Crowfoot mentioned that the legislation would not address the 60,000-plus complaints. I would draw the attention of all members of the Ho…
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