Madam Speaker, it is always a true pleasure and honour to rise in the House of Commons and speak on behalf of the incredible people of Peterborough—Kawartha.
It is another day, another scandal. It really feels like everything is on fire. It really is heavy right now for a lot of people in Canada. When they watch this House, it is so frustrating for people at home. I assure them it is also frustrating to sit in here and listen to the repeat, the Groundhog Day that it is in here, every day with the same thing over and over again.
Canadians really want one thing. They want an election. It is the only way out of this disaster. This is a disaster. This would be the most consequential election in my lifetime and in many people's lifetimes because, without a doubt, people's lives depend on it. That is not dramatic. That is not being a rage farmer. That is the fact of what is happening on the streets of Canada.
I do not know how the Liberals and New Democrats go home after a week here and go to a grocery store or go out in their community and not hear this from every member in their community. There is no trust. There is nothing in place anymore and all hope feels lost and that is a terrible feeling.
The finance minister calls it a vibe; it is a bad vibe. It is a bad vibe, according to the finance minister, that over two million people are accessing a food bank in a month. It is a bad vibe that one in five kids are experiencing poverty. It is a bad vibe that the number of kids in homeless shelters has tripled in Toronto in the last eight years. It is a bad vibe when we walk down ByWard Market on a Tuesday at seven o'clock and a man has overdosed, dead on the street, and paramedics roll up to revive him, which they tell me they have already done multiple times that week. It is a bad vibe. That is who is in charge of our country right now, so we can bet people are mad. We can bet people are hurt and hopeless. We have a Prime Minister who is vibing to Taylor Swift, exchanging friendship bracelets while the city of Montreal burns. It is a bad vibe. This all comes down to a level of corruption that has to be addressed in this House.
The green slush fund is a fund created by the Liberals that the Auditor General has done an audit on and we are still waiting, pushing and pressuring the Liberals to hand over the unredacted documents from the green slush fund. A whistle-blower came to committee and said they could not take this anymore; could not lay their head on the pillow knowing what is going on in the government and keep showing up to work, because they wanted a moral compass. Therefore, the whistle-blower came and testified at committee and said that this is corruption at its core; this is a billion-dollar fund.
The Auditor General proceeded to do an audit. There were 90 decisions in which the fund had violated its own conflict of interest policies. One out of six projects funded by SDTC, which was $59 million, were not eligible and in some cases did not even support the development of a new green technology.
It is scam and corruption. Over a dozen government departments and agencies either provided redacted documents or simply refused to comply with the order and withheld some or all of their records.
Right now in the House as I am speaking, there is talk everywhere. Nobody is even listening anymore because corruption is normal under the Prime Minister. This is nothing to the Liberals. They are talking and it does not matter because the Conservatives keep speaking and saying the same thing. We will keep saying the same thing because we will fight for Canadians. We are the only ones in this House calling out this corruption. It is absurd and insane, and everyone at home knows this.
This is the most consequential time in the history of politics. One in five kids are hungry and there are 1,400 homeless encampments. The YWCA shelter in Halifax says women cannot leave the shelters because there is no housing. What happens when women cannot leave a shelter or get into a shelter? Intimate partner violence on the street goes up. Women are dying. A woman was murdered in broad daylight just weeks ago in Ottawa while she was with her two children. The man got out of the car, slit her throat and she bled out. Do I have the Liberals' and NDP's attention now? I hope I do, because this is so consequential.
We may be sitting in here in our green comfy chairs, but people at home are starving. These are not made-up statistics. This is real life. If we talk to people and maybe visit some of the homeless encampments, we will know what is happening. Food banks are running out of food. The people who used to volunteer at a food bank are now using a food bank. The 2024 hunger report from Food Banks Canada show the shocking statistics of over two million users in one month, 30% of whom are children, but those numbers are low.
I thought about Fleming College that runs a food bank. It would not be registered with Food Banks Canada. I thought about Street Level Advocacy, where Scott Couper gives hot meals to people every single day. He is not registered with Food Banks Canada. Ladies make sandwiches and drive downtown to deliver them. They are not taken into account for that. Those numbers are not even real. They are higher than that.
There is not one area in this country that is functioning. Not one area is doing okay or thriving. It is so sickening to sit on this side of the House and hear the Prime Minister, with the leader of the NDP holding him in power, say it is not the Liberals' fault. No, they are a victim. The Minister of Justice had the audacity to stand in this House yesterday, when he was called out on his atrocious justice laws in this country, and say they delivered bail reform. Yes, they delivered bail reform all right. How about they check the incidence of femicides in this country, of women being murdered in broad daylight, or the 16-year-old girl in northern Ontario who had her arm slashed off by her abusive boyfriend, who, guess what everyone, was out on bail? However, the justice minister delivered bail reform. When we destroy trust, we destroy society. The Prime Minister has no respect, he has no trust and there is chaos on the streets.
People need hope. People need to know that there will be laws put in place to prevent this level of corruption that we have never seen in history. It has become normal. It is so common, it is normal. We have a former minister of employment who misinformed the House of his indigenous heritage, and who took money from the government, much like this green slush fund. He is gone. He is no longer the minister. It is just, let us move on to the next thing.
How many ministers are gone from that side of the House? There is the former minister of public safety who said it was not his fault that Paul Bernardo got transferred to medium security in the dead of night and the families of victims were not notified. He said it was not his fault. It is never their fault. They say that they did not get the email, or they did not read the documents. They drop like flies.
I feel so bad for the MPs over there who actually care about their constituents, because I know there are some. I see their body language in here when the Prime Minister stands up, and they are sick, just like the rest of us, because he gaslights Canadians.
That is the hope I want to tell people at home they need to have, because it is here. The change is coming. Two, three years ago, even when I first got elected, people were still afraid to speak the truth, because they would get cancelled. They were called a racist or a misogynist. If they did not have vaccine status, they were called a leper, divided and shamed and put down. They would be cancelled.
No more. People started to say, “I am not any of those things. I am a good person who wants to just let people live their life without hurting others.” That is all people want in this country, and now they are standing up and they are fighting back against the insane government, the wacko government that has legalized drugs and become a drug dealer.
All people have to do is go outside, two blocks from here, and just walk down the street. People who used to come to Ottawa would know ByWard Market was like the most amazing place. Tell me a tiny town in this country that feels safe anymore. There are not too many. We have headlines of stabbings and shootings on a regular basis in a community like Peterborough, where a man who murdered an indigenous woman might get four years.
People are so stressed. I want to read you some stats, because I think the stats tell the human consequences of bad policy and bad leadership. It is really important to know these numbers, because on the other end of these numbers are real people, real humans and real families.
Children have the highest rate of food insecurity among all age groups in Canada, 24% in 2022. That is 1.8 million children. One third of kids in Canada do not enjoy a safe and healthy childhood. In what country, like Canada, do we not take care of our kids where they feel safe? Two-thirds of Canadians report experiencing abuse before the age of 15. Nearly one in five kids live in poverty. Suicide is a leading cause of death for children aged 10 to 14 in Canada.
Over the past decade, Canada has fallen sharply from 10th to 30th place amongst OECD countries for the well-being of children. Twenty per cent of children and youth in Canada, approximately 1.2 million young people, are affected by a mental health disorder. If they have the courage to ask for help, there is none on the other side of that. Also in this country, under the Prime Minister, health care has been decimated. There are doctors ready to practice in this country, but they cannot.
We are spending more on servicing the debt in this country than we are on transfers to health care. The economy is the foundation of this whole problem, and that is why we are in this discussion right now. The government forgot, or maybe it knew the whole time, that it does not have any money. It has taxpayer money. It has Canadians' money.
The Liberals take that money; they do not have any accountability, and they waste it. They give it to their friends and their family, or they try to buy votes with a $250 cheque that only some people get. No, they cannot give it to the people with disabilities or the people who really need it.
This is a quote from the Prime Minister:
One of the fundamental challenges around affordability is they would love to say, ‘Well, you know what? We just need more money. Can you send us...an extra thousand dollars a month?’ As soon as you do that, inflation goes up by exactly that amount.
Those are the Prime Minister's words, yet we have an inflationary crisis. We have an affordability crisis. I wonder why. Does he believe that budgets balance themselves, that he can buy Canadians' votes and that he can just spend, spend, spend and print more money as though he is playing a game of Monopoly?
The Prime Minister will just increase the carbon tax to try to make up for that revenue and that money he is spending, hoping it will be fine. What does the carbon tax do? It puts a tax on every single thing Canadians use and drives up the cost of living even more.
I want to come back to the finance minister's saying that Canadians are just not in the right vibe. They are just not in the right vibe when they go to the food bank or when one in five kids is living in poverty. It is just not a good vibe. There is nothing serious about the government. I actually implore people not to give up hope.
I watched Gladiator with my parents and my kids on Friday night. It felt so relevant; people rioted out on the streets, and they had these emperors who were destructive and narcissistic and did not care about the people. There was a man fighting for the people, and there were people fighting with that man fighting for the people. People should not give up hope. We are holding this line.
Pressure builds diamonds, and I know it feels like Groundhog Day. I am living it too. However, there is a Canadian gladiator here to bring it home, to make life affordable and to restore the hope of the Canadian dream. I promise it is coming. We will get an election, hold the Liberal-NDP government to account and restore the hope of Canada.