Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I have two petitions to table today. The first petition is from constituents of mine who want the Government of Canada to conduct a full, open, independent public inquiry into Beijing's foreign interference in our elections.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the member talked about family issues that may arise for members who sit in the House. I was listening attentively to that portion. However, the member must realize that in a hybrid Parliament, should this continue on, and I hoping that every single backbencher in all parties is aware of this, that eventually we will have no constituency weeks. We have constituency weeks so that we ca…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I am going to share my time with the member for Chatham-Kent—Leamington. Members have heard me say before that I participated in the Standing Orders debates in the past. I think back to 2020, when Parliament resumed in a hybrid format. I think the Conservative caucus was one of the first to resume having full meetings. We were one of the first ones, if not the first, on Zoom. We had…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, the member is now heckling me from across—
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I invite the member to look at the questions I submit, because I am always looking for data, content and information. That reminds me. With the member's interruption, I do have a Yiddish proverb. I hope that everything I have spoken about tonight are things I have seen. “Let you not say things that you have not seen” is a Yiddish proverb. I hope I have done that. I have stayed consi…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for his question, but that is not the issue we are examining in the House right now. The question before us is whether we should have a hybrid Parliament that operates in the way set out by the government in Motion No. 26. During the pandemic, two of my three children, the two oldest, were attending school online. I was also the caucus chair. As s…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, the member for Berthier—Maskinongé is right. The amendments to the rules proposed in government Motion No. 26 will do away with the need for members to get along with one another. It is easy for cabinet members to meet and talk to one another. They often meet during the week. These meetings are usually held in person, since they sometimes have to talk about confidential matters. How…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I just want to clarify, because I do not think the member quite understood what I was getting at. What I am saying is that, in the future, what will happen is that constituency weeks will simply disappear. This may be two, three, four, five or six years from now. There will be an expectation that we do sessional weeks half of the year or more, and members will pick which weeks they …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, my final petition comes from Venezuelans both in my riding and all across Canada who are calling the attention of the House to the disaster that is the Maduro Communist regime in Venezuela. I have very little affection for the regime, but I have a lot of affection for the people of Venezuela. Petitioners are drawing the attention of the House to some important numbers. As per the Unit…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I have four petitions to table today on behalf of my constituents. The first one is on foreign interference. Specifically, petitioners are drawing attention of the House and the government to the fact that, so far, there has not been a public inquiry called. The petitioners are very concerned about the special rapporteur's conflict of interest with the Prime Minister and those who hav…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, my second petition is from Hong Kongers and those with heritage from Hong Kong. The petitioners are drawing the attention of the House to the following: On February 6, 2023, Canada announced that it would extend and expand the Hong Kong pathway open work permit program for eligible Hong Kongers by extending the open work permit scheme for an additional two years and making additional …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the third petition is from petitioners from the riding of Calgary Shepard, my constituents. They are drawing the attention of the House to the fact that there are over 53,000 internationally trained nurses, doctors and physicians in Canada. They say that we should copy what we do for skilled trades in the Red Seal program and create a blue seal program that would make the processes si…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, Conservatives MPs on the immigration committee called four times for action to help international students who were victims of a fake college admission letter scam, and four times the Liberal and NDP MPs on the committee voted against it. Malicious consultants profited by tens of thousands of dollars from each and every student, promising them a new life in Canada and then sticking th…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I believe, if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for the following motion. I move: That, Whereas Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza is facing political persecution in the Russian Federation including a show trial with high treason charges following his public condemnation of the unjustified and illegal war by Russia against Ukraine; Whe…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I want to ask my colleague a question. He is from the opposite side of Calgary on the diagonal, and his riding is very similar to my own. Like me, he knocks on a lot of doors during election time. I have never heard a constituent of mine tell me that they wanted to see a bill passed that created a commission or a national council, where people would be paid to talk about an issue as o…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, at the committee there were amendments moved by the Conservative members of Parliament to try to improve the bill and make it better. In my riding, there are many shift workers and people who work off-hours who will not be covered by the agreement that would be entrenched into legislation through this bill. I wonder if the member could explain why the Liberal members on that committee…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to the very beginning of when the member started speaking, whenever that was. The member for Winnipeg North, I believe, made a novel argument that I have not heard in the House before when he spoke about the previous bill debated. We were providing critiques of the bill, and he said that we were prolonging debate unnecessarily. Since we agreed with the substance of t…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, let us go over some of those detriments inside this bill and try not to go into too many on ports, but there are quite a few issues with the ports that will be affected. There are additional ministerial powers that will limit local decision-making. That is not a good idea. Additional regulatory requirements will add cost to stakeholders, which, again, will be passed on, like I said, t…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be able to join the debate at such a late hour and to contribute my thoughts on Bill C-33 for my constituents back home. Again, I always want to thank them for sending me here to represent them, and I know they expect us to provide good work and feedback to the government. As I said earlier in the debate, if it were up to the member for Winnipeg North, none of us would ev…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the member brought up a good point. Again, I think we should prefer local decision-making that is informed by a national body to have wider information such as a national security list. It gets intelligence from our foreign allies, our international allies, who might provide or tip us off about events or activities that are being planned. That could then help local decision-makers adj…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, let us be clear. There used to be a legion hall in my riding, not too far from my constituency office. Unfortunately, it closed down many years ago. For the longest time, although I have the second-largest riding by population size in Canada and the largest riding in Calgary, it did not even have a high school in it. It just so happens that I represent a very large area of many suburb…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urgently raise the case of the persecution of journalist Niloofar Hamedi. Hamedi is the 22-year-old Iranian journalist who broke the story of the now famous Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, her beating and murder at the hands of the morality police in Tehran. For her professionalism and journalistic ethics, she has been charged with “colluding with hostile powers”, a …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, procedurally it was necessary in order to have this debate tonight, which is one of the things in Westminster parliaments. We sometimes have to put forward these types of motions in order to have a debate like this. That is my understanding of why it is on the Order Paper.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, no there is not, but it has given us an opportunity to talk about the principle of the bill and to share thoughts that constituents have shared with us. I think it is an accepted principle that we do what we must on behalf of our constituents, and in this case, it has given us an opportunity to talk about the content of the bill at any level of detail a member chooses.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, that is a good question, because we have seen the cost of living explode in this country, and the cost of groceries is way higher now. I have not yet had residents in my riding come to me with direct stories about their grocery costs, but the Cardus Institute has done a lot of work looking at the different agreements, the quality of the agreements and the likely outcomes of them. I …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, to go back, the person who deserves great credit for negotiating the deal was the minister at the time in Alberta, Rebecca Schulz, who was re-elected in this past election. She deserves an incredible amount of credit for holding out until Alberta got a better deal. The problem with what the member just laid out as the deal for affordable care operators, who basically run a dual syst…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be joining the debate. I am glad I caught your eye and was able to rise before my colleague from a different part of Quebec who wanted to speak as well. Just to continue on something the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said, I hope I will not be accused of using notes. I have not used notes in many years in this place. I am sure that if we ever moved to benches, that…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the member in my caucus if she could perhaps expand on how we got to the point where Bill C-21 is now being debated today. It started with the OIC, the initial version of Bill C-21, which provided complete misinformation by the minister and made wild accusations against firearms owners. I would like to hear her talk about the journey it took to get to this point, i…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, alas, I do not have any constituents who wrote to me in French so that I could read what they think of this bill. I do want to remind him that the member for Rivière-du-Nord said, when Bill C-21 came out, that they could not have done better. It is therefore completely ridiculous to hear some members now brag about having worked hard when they agreed with the Liberals' bill.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, to respond to that ridiculous question, the only lobbyists I care about are my constituents who are lobbying me to vote against Bill C-21. So let us continue. George wrote, “I am tired of being lied to about licensed gun owners being the cause of firearm-related violence.... I am losing my firearms based on this new law and its amendments. I will never vote for them or their party i…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I am glad to be joining this debate at this late hour. I have been sitting through many hours of debate on this particular subject of Bill C-21. I will begin by thanking constituents again for returning me to Parliament. It has been a few years now since the election, but I am thankful every single day that I can represent them in this House. Part of my thanks for them will be that …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, perhaps many members do not know this, but that particular member is a long-serving member of the RCMP, specifically from the Special I division. If anybody here is speaking from a place of authority, it actually would be this particular member who just spoke. I wonder if he could expand on his personal experiences as a police officer and give his opinion on whether Bill C-21 would …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, with apologies for prolonging this debate, again, members have been given wide latitude in the House to refer to past votes that have been taken in the House. Member after member has been in the House and has done so year after year. It has never been an issue until right now, when that particular member has a disagreement with the contents of a speech that another member is trying to…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, you have made a ruling, and members have been given wide latitude by Chair occupants in the past to go back into their speech that they have prewritten, where they have made annotations for themselves. The member is referring, obviously, to a court case. He has a point that he is trying to make. If that other member would just let him finish his point, I am sure he will carry on to th…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I am a little worried in the way the member just described my constituents who are emailing me on this issue. They deserve to be heard, not to be name-called. They are concerned not because of what we are saying on this side of the House; they are concerned because the contents of the legislation are bad news for them. I do not need to go around in my constituency raising up fears. …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I completely disagree with the member's characterization. I read the motion, both in French and then in English, and it sounds exactly the same to me. This motion basically rejects the Century Initiative, which is big business executives with these pie-in-the-sky dreams, these utopias that were talking about 75 years from now. I want to talk about the immigrant experience today, right…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question, which I think is very reasonable. Quebec has an agreement with Canada regarding the establishment of criteria for immigrants who want to settle in Quebec. My family settled in Quebec. In the 1980s, my father worked at the shipyard in Sorel, which no longer exists. It is not the government that welcomes immigrants. It is the communities in the citie…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, let us talk numbers. I remember it was a previous Liberal government that left behind a backlog of six to eight million applications for the Conservative government. They did not shut down the program. They returned money to everybody and restarted the program from zero because they botched it so badly. There was no choice but to do that, and they are doing that again. The people who …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, one of the hardest parts of being in politics is having to speak right after the leader of the Conservative Party. He just delivered a powerful speech that was full of compassion for newcomers who choose to settle in Canada. As many members know, I was myself a newcomer several years ago. I immigrated to Canada from Communist Poland. That country is no longer communist. That era is be…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the Bloc leader a question about his motion. He spoke a bit about the workers we need. I would like him to think on the following question. In Quebec and across Canada, we need skilled trades workers. The government's most recent numbers show that in 2019, we had to wait 12 months to bring in a skilled trade worker to work in Canada and Quebec. In March 2023, the wait ti…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, as I have done before, I am tabling another petition on behalf the minority ethnic Hazara community from my riding specifically. They are again drawing the attention of the House to the ongoing genocide of the Hazaras by the Taliban regime, something that has been ongoing for many decades now. The petitioners are calling on the government to recognize the genocide of the Hazaras by th…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I am also presenting a petition on behalf of my constituents, as I have done many times in the House, on the continuing, ongoing genocide by the Taliban regime of ethnic Hazaras, a minority Shia community in Afghanistan. Again, the petitioners are calling on the Government of Canada to recognize the ongoing genocide and the persecution of Hazaras, as well as to include Shia Hazaras in…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions to present today. The first petition comes from a group of Canadians who want the Canadian government to recognize the politicization of the judiciary of Hong Kong and its impacts on the legitimacy and validity of criminal convictions. These Canadians want the Canadian government to affirm its commitment to render all national security law charges and conviction…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, with everything happening now happening in Sudan, my third and last petition is drawing the attention of the House to the ongoing violent conflict in the Tigray region in Ethiopia and the egregious human rights violations, particularly with the humanitarian crisis. They are calling for the following five things: to immediately call for an end to violence and for restraint from all sid…
Read full speech →Statements By Members
Mr. Speaker, the Alberta advantage is back. Alberta’s economy has roared back to life, employment numbers are on the rise and more Canadians are choosing to move their families to Alberta than any other province in Confederation. Albertans are confident again and they are in the driver’s seat for their future, but it was not always like this. Between 2015 and 2019, Alberta’s provincial government …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the government is now moving to guillotine debate on its own budget bill, and there is really no reason to do it. The Standing Committee on Finance is already considering the budget bill at committee and has been for many days. The only reason to do this is to completely shut down debate on a bill that many members, both in the Conservative Party and I am sure other political parties,…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, as I have done before, I am tabling a petition on behalf of constituents of mine who are calling on the Government of Canada to again recognize the ongoing genocide of the Hazara Shia minority in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime. They are also calling upon the Government of Canada to ensure that Hazara Shia minority groups are included in the 40,000 Afghan refugees to be resettled …
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Madam Speaker, last weekend, I joined Rabbi Reuben Poupko for the Sabbath at Beth Israel Beth Aaron synagogue in Côte St. Luc in Montreal. I was saddened to learn there of the loss of a great local leader, Debbie Sonberg Ajzenkopf, who passed away recently. What a rabbi is to the Torah, so was Debbie to everything in that synagogue. She knew who liked to sit where, who was ill, who was doing bette…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be joining this debate. Like the member said previously, today is the National Day of Mourning for those who were injured or killed in the workplace. That reminds me, before I get into the subject matter of the bill, that there used to be a Sobeys in my riding in Douglasdale on the Douglasglen side. I do not know if many constituents know this, but there is a plaque …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, once again, I am presenting a petition on behalf of Canadians of Hazara heritage. This is a minority group originally from Afghanistan. The petitioners are asking the government to recognize the ongoing genocide and persecution of the Hazaras by the Taliban. As well, they are calling upon the Government of Canada to prioritize Hazara refugees as part of the 40,000 Afghans being brough…
Read full speech →