Mr. Speaker, congratulations on being in the chair. It is great to see you there. I hope, together with the Speaker, you will vigorously defend the rights and authority of parliamentarians in this Parliament as much as he did in the last Parliament.
I will be splitting my time with my esteemed colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles.
As this is my first speech in Parliament since the election, I want to quickly thank my family, particularly my wife Raechel for supporting me always.
I also want to thank my campaign team, my manager Luke Inberg; my board president Susan Evans; and members of my team, Rick Solomon, Tom Cox, Barb Costache, Imelda McLaren, Kristine Alex, Rebecca Van Middelkoop, Roger Hebblethwaite, Scott Hawkings, Julia Roy, Scott Brummet and many others.
Finally, I want to thank the good people of Sturgeon River—Parkland for placing their faith in me a third time. I will not let them down.
Today, we are debating a motion that would govern at least the next seven months of our nation’s Parliament. We have a clear choice. We can move forward with a hybrid system that we have used for the past year and a half or we can move back to the traditional system, with enhanced safeguards to protect public health.
It is important to reflect on what we saw under the hybrid system imposed in the last Parliament. That is the best indication of what we will see going forward should this system be restored.
In the last Parliament, I remember sitting in the House on multiple occasions with over a dozen members from my party and several members from other opposition parties, and yet only one, sometimes two members of the government caucus would show up. Of those one or two physically present members, there was rarely a minister or any member who could speak with authority.
This is not what accountability should look like, seeing one or two of the same MPs taking questions, while the rest of the government caucus and the ministers look on over Zoom or do not show up at all.