House of Commons Hansard #3 of the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was trade.
This summary is computer-generated. Usually it’s accurate, but every now and then it’ll contain inaccuracies or total fabrications.
Welfare of Indigenous Children in Canada Lori Idlout requests an emergency debate on the health and well-being of Indigenous children, citing government failures, changes to Jordan's Principle and Inuit Child First Initiative, application backlogs, and poverty. 400 words.
Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply Members debate the Speech from the Throne, with Conservatives criticizing its lack of detail and urgency on economic issues like the cost of living and housing, demanding a budget and action on crime like repealing catch-and-release bail laws. Liberals defend their plan to build a stronger, healthier Canada, emphasizing a one Canadian economy and managing trade relations. The Bloc highlights Quebec's distinctiveness and jurisdiction. 23500 words, 3 hours.
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
Mr. Speaker, Canada's unemployment rate has surged to 6.9%, the highest in eight years outside of the pandemic. Alarmingly, youth unemployment is more than double that. Now The OECD is warning that Trump's trade war will cost Canada even more jobs this year.
Canadians are worried about their futures. What immediate steps will the government take to bring the jobless rate down and protect Canadian workers who will be hurt by Donald Trump's tariffs?
Patty Hajdu LiberalMinister of Jobs and Families and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise and represent Thunder Bay—Superior North for a fourth term in the House of Commons.
This government is very focused on protecting workers and on making sure that youth and, indeed, workers of all ages have the skills and abilities to thrive as our economy transitions. I will work closely with my partners and members across the House to make sure that all Canadians have an opportunity to thrive as we see economic change.
Presence in GalleryOral Questions
The Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia
I wish to draw the attention of members to the presence in the gallery of the Hon. Rob Lantz, Premier of Prince Edward Island.
Canadian Human Rights CommissionRoutine Proceedings
The Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia
I have the honour to lay upon the table, pursuant to subsection 61(4) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the 2024 report of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(e), this report is deemed to have been permanently referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
Chief Electoral OfficerRoutine Proceedings
The Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia
I have the honour to lay upon the table the list of members of this Parliament, certified by the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, who sent it to the Clerk of the House.
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Mr. Speaker, congratulations on your election as Speaker.
I rise to table a petition that is very important and timely. It is from the residents of Union Bay on Vancouver Island, who are deeply frustrated. They cite that there is significant risk to workers and the environment associated with ship-breaking due to the presence of a wide variety of hazardous materials and end-of-life marine vessels.
The petitioners also highlight that unlike other jurisdictions, Canada lacks standards on ship-breaking and unregulated ship-breaking activities, which are putting our oceans, coastal communities and workers at risk on Vancouver Island and around Canada. The lack of domestic oversight of ship-breaking and the disposal of end-of-life marine vessels frustrates Canada's ability to ensure compliance with its international obligations under the Basel Convention. The petitioners highlight that this could be a job creator.
The petitioners want to see the Government of Canada develop enforceable federal standards to reduce the negative impact of environmental and social impacts of ship-breaking that meet or exceed those set out in the EU ship recycling regulation; provide assistance through loans or grants to long-term, reputable ship-breaking companies to facilitate the implementation of new federal standards in their operations; and develop a strategy for recycling end-of-life, federally owned marine vessels.
This is the fourth year I have tabled this petition with no action.
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Mr. Speaker, if you will indulge me, as this is my first time rising in this place, I want to congratulate you on your election and thank the people of my community for their trust.
I am limiting myself to one petition today, which is on behalf of Canada's strong Cypriot community. The community has brought this petition to the attention of the House noting that the Turkish military invasion of Cyprus in 1974 was illegal and brutal, resulting in the ongoing occupation of 37% of the island and 57% of its coastline. This occupation has led to significant human rights violations, including a loss of life, the displacement of thousands of Cypriots and the ongoing presence of Turkish military forces at illegal settlements.
This community, throughout the world and in Canada, marked the 50th anniversary of this tragic invasion last year and is calling for justice, freedom and human rights for the Cypriot people. There are various other aspects mentioned, including UN Security Council resolutions calling for an end to the occupation of Cyprus.
The petitioners call on the House to uphold all UN Security Council resolutions on Cyprus and condemn Turkey's ongoing illegal occupation of northern Cyprus; to advocate for the complete and immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops; to ensure no Canadian arms, military equipment or technology is sold to Turkey or used against Cyprus or other oppressed groups; to continue rejecting the recognition of the illegal occupation; and to advocate for a free, united Cyprus based on relevant UN Security Council resolutions and the European Union's statements.
Brad Vis Conservative Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC
Mr. Speaker, I thank the good people of Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford for re-electing me to the House.
Today, I present a petition on behalf of constituents in my riding who are concerned about the transition from military to civilian life. The petitioners are calling upon the Government of Canada to drastically reduce red tape for our veterans and to improve the process of going from military life to civilian life.
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Mr. Speaker, as it is my first time taking the floor in the House in this session of Parliament, I want to begin by thanking the voters of Saanich—Gulf Islands for the trust they have placed in me to continue to serve them. It is the honour of my life to do so. I am extremely grateful to the 350 volunteers who helped so diligently, some of them working seven days a week and around the clock. I will never be able to thank them enough.
On behalf of many constituents, I am rising to present a petition, and not for the first time, from petitioners who point out that there is a strong desire across the country for electoral reform. They point out that an Angus Reid poll conducted recently, this last September, found that 85% of respondents want to see a citizens' assembly choose a form of electoral reform to replace the perverse first-past-the-post system.
To summarize, they are petitioning for the government of the day to put in place a mechanism to find a consensus among Canadian citizens who want to see fair voting that reflects the will of the voting public to make sure that the Parliament voters get is the Parliament voters voted for. They are calling for a citizens' assembly on electoral reform to be completed within 12 months and for recommended changes to be put in place before the next election.
Electoral ReformPetitionsRoutine Proceedings
The Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia
I will not call the rubrics “Questions on the Order Paper” and “Notices of Motions for the Production of Papers”, because no questions or motions are printed in today's Order Paper.
Welfare of Indigenous Children in CanadaRequest for Emergency DebateRoutine Proceedings
The Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia
I wish to inform the House that I have received a request for an emergency debate. I invite the hon. member for Nunavut to rise and make a brief intervention.
Welfare of Indigenous Children in CanadaRequest for Emergency DebateRoutine Proceedings
NDP
Lori Idlout NDP Nunavut, NU
Uqaqtittiji, I first thank my constituents from Nunavut for placing their trust in me so that I can rejoin members in my second term in Parliament.
I thank the member for Winnipeg Centre for submitting a joint letter requesting this emergency debate as well.
I rise today to seek leave for an emergency debate regarding the health and well-being of indigenous children in Canada. The Canadian government has failed first nations, Métis and Inuit children and youth by imposing sweeping new changes to Jordan's principle and Inuit child first initiative applications.
Jordan's principle is a legal obligation directed by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to address gaps in health care for indigenous children. The principle is named after Jordan River Anderson, who died in hospital at the age of five because the federal and provincial governments avoided responsibility for his care. His legacy must be properly honoured.
How indigenous children and youth are treated has become a national crisis. The federal government unilaterally made changes without considering the impacts on first nations and Inuit children, youth and families. Changes to the requirements to access Jordan's principle and the Inuit child first initiative result in keeping first nations and Inuit children in poverty and less healthy than non-indigenous children. The months-long backlog of cases is 140,000 applications under Jordan's principle, with no clear plan on how to address this matter.
Nunavummiut worked hard to get the ICFI extended, but, during the federal election campaign, the Liberals cancelled the hamlet food voucher program for Inuit children and families. This was a very successful program that served over 15,000 Inuit children. No reason was given for cancelling it. This political decision led Inuit children and families back into situations of poverty.
Nunavut has the highest rate of child poverty in Canada, at 42%; the national rate is 18.1%. Nunavut also has the highest rate of food insecurity of any province or territory. Although the population of Nunavut is small, food insecurity in the territories is of concern to all Canadians, given the scale and severity of the problem.
The NDP and I are seeking an emergency debate so that parliamentarians can discuss the sweeping changes made to Jordan's principle and the Inuit child first initiative and address the failure of the current government to implement the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's order on Jordan's principle.
I call on you, Uqaqtittiji, to ensure that the country takes seriously the systemic racism and discrimination toward indigenous children and families that is happening and to do your part to demand accountability for indigenous children.
Speaker's RulingRequest for Emergency DebateRoutine Proceedings
The Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia
I thank the hon. member for her intervention on an extremely serious and vital issue. However, I am not satisfied that the request meets the requirements of the Standing Orders at this time.
The House resumed from May 27 consideration of the motion for an address to His Majesty the King in reply to his speech at the opening of the session.
Resumption of Debate on Address in ReplySpeech from the Throne
Regina—Qu'Appelle Saskatchewan
Conservative
Andrew Scheer ConservativeLeader of the Opposition
Mr. Speaker, now that Their Majesties have left the national capital region, we can really pick apart the throne speech the government wrote yesterday.
Yesterday Canadians heard a throne speech that was not bad on slogans and rhetoric but terrible on any kind of detail and a plan. A lot of times, government members will defend that by saying that the details come out in the legislation. While there may be some truth to that, in a throne speech, we usually at least get a clear indication of what that legislation would do. In other words, we get an indication of the way the government is going to accomplish the goals it has set out for itself. We received precisely none of that yesterday.
We were told that the government wants to build more homes, yet all the government did was talk about increasing the number of bureaucrats who run programs in Ottawa. There was nothing about incentivizing municipalities to speed up development processes and lower development charges. The government copied and pasted many aspects of the Conservative platform; one specific aspect was eliminating the GST on new home construction. Some might call it plagiarism, which is something the Prime Minister has some familiarity with.
The Liberals must have dropped something when they were cutting and pasting that from the Conservative platform, because they accidentally restricted it. I say “accidentally” sarcastically. They made this policy much narrower in its application. Our plan would have reduced the GST on new homes, period, but the Liberals have restricted that to only some new home purchases. They did not talk at all about the way they were going to reduce that red tape and lower those taxes.
We have a Prime Minister who wrote a book called Value(s), in which he defined himself as a human being. In that book, not only did he profess his love for the carbon tax, but he also bragged about the experience he has imposing higher costs, not just on Canadians but on the people of the world.
That is where the Prime Minister comes from: a global investment scheme in which fancy bankers and powerful elites put together a grift. The Prime Minister actually explained how he benefited from this. He gave an interview when he was on a panel and described how this grift unfolds. First, he and people like him have access to important decision-makers and policy-makers around the world. He actually said this. He uses that access to lobby for regulatory changes.
In other words, the Prime Minister gets to have a glass of wine or a canapé with a government official in a country. In those conversations or meetings, he convinces them to make regulatory changes, and then he invests in the companies that benefit from those changes.
In the example the Prime Minister used, he spoke about lobbying the government of the United Kingdom to bring in a new requirement for jet fuel. There was no market for the new requirement. If there was a natural market for it, then aviation companies would make those changes to jet fuel. The Prime Minister specifically required that a certain percentage of that aviation fuel had to be sourced from nonconventional energy. If there was a market for that, if that nonconventional product was more efficient or cheaper, then the companies would do it themselves. They would not need a regulatory agency to tell them to do it. There was no market for it. Why is that? It would increase costs. Those costs would get passed on to consumers, and fewer people would be able to afford to fly.
Therefore, the Prime Minister convinces the policy-maker to bring in a rule that cannot be ignored. In the absence of a market demanding it or necessitating it, the awesome power of the government comes in and forces aviation companies to blend in a certain percentage of nonconventional energy to use in their fuel. Those extra costs get passed on to passengers, and fewer people are able to afford those tickets.
The Prime Minister convinces the policy-maker that every plane flying in and out of a U.K. airport must have a certain percentage of fuel. Then he looks around and sees a company producing a nonconventional energy product. It was not making any money before the regulatory change; now it has a huge market for what it produces, that nonconventional energy product. All of a sudden, with a massive market, that company will be able to sell what it makes to all kinds of airlines flying in and out of the United Kingdom. What does the Prime Minister do? He invests in that company.
Not only does the Prime Minister lobby for the regulatory change, but he then also invests in the company and makes millions. Members do not have to take my word for it. The Prime Minister himself admitted this before he ran to be the leader of the Liberal Party.
Mr. Speaker, imagine doing that with any other aspect of government. Imagine having a buddy who owns an asphalt company, and for one reason or another, it was not making much money. Maybe the company was selling an additive for the asphalt, but there was not really a market for it; cities and rural municipalities did not think they needed to buy it, and the company did not produce anything of value for motorists or taxpayers in that area.
Mr. Speaker, imagine using special access to get time with ministers or government officials and, not because there was a market for it, convincing them to pass a rule that the company's product had to be included in all the asphalt being laid down in an area and then going out and investing in that company. If someone were an elected official and they did that, they would likely be up on criminal charges. They would likely be investigated for corruption. That is exactly what the Prime Minister did in his private sector career: He used his access with government officials to lobby for changes to allow him to make investments and make millions. That is who the Prime Minister is.
In the throne speech, there was no mention of how to get big projects built. We can remember it was the Liberal government that cancelled big energy projects like northern gateway and energy east. Northern gateway would have opened up Asian markets; it is the shortest route between where the oil and gas is found in the ground and where there is a deep water port to be able to ship it to countries like India, China and Japan, with booming populations and an ever-increasing middle class. Right now, many of those countries are buying their energy from countries that do not share our values. These are countries with dictators and regimes that abuse the rights of women and religious minorities and that engage in fomenting wars and terrorist activities not just throughout the region but throughout the world. Canadians are no longer able to fill those markets, because the Liberals cancelled those pipelines. There was nothing in the throne speech about repealing those terrible pieces of legislation or supporting those projects.
The Prime Minister says that he is the man with the plan. Slogans are not as efficient as plans, yet there is no plan. Then he goes around and tells Canadians that there will not even be a budget for six months. We can look at all the economic calamities that Canadians have had to suffer through: an inflation crisis, a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, massive debt and deficits racked up by Liberal governments. The Liberal government is spending more on servicing the debt than it is on health care. In other words, it is paying more in interest payments to bankers and bondholders.
After all of this, with the Prime Minister himself saying that speed was of the essence and that, as a country, we have to start addressing this as quickly as possible, he is telling Canadians they are going to have to wait for six months before we get this plan. I do not know of a single boardroom around the country that would keep a CEO in his position if, in the middle of a crisis, the CEO came in and said, “I know we are in a crisis. Do not worry; I have a plan. I will come back to you in six months.” I do not think any board of directors would keep a CEO who asked for a six-month grace period to start to address a problem.
The Prime Minister says he wants to build, but he refuses to repeal the very laws that stop us from building. He will not commit to repealing Bill C-69, the anti-pipeline bill. He refuses to repeal Bill C-48, the shipping ban that blocks western Canadian oil from reaching global markets. He is keeping in the energy and production caps and the industrial carbon tax. Here we have a situation in which our steelworkers, aluminum workers and manufacturers in Canada have to worry about their companies competing against American manufacturers when there is no carbon tax on the U.S. side of the border. My colleague from Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore made a great point yesterday when she pointed out that saying we are going to fight with the Americans while keeping an industrial carbon tax on Canadian workers is like tying one elbow behind our back. It is not going to put Canada in a position of strength if the government keeps the industrial carbon tax.
The Prime Minister flippantly said, “When was the last time you bought a whole bunch of steel?” Does he not realize that there is steel in a lot of things that Canadians buy on a pretty regular basis?
Last time I opened my fridge, the fridge had steel; the car I drive has steel; lots of household components have steel; and lots of framing materials for new homes require steel. There are many things that Canadians have to buy on a regular basis that contain steel. That steel could be made in Canada, and we could export some of that steel to the U.S. and around the world if Canadian manufacturers had an advantage and did not have to pay that carbon tax. The irrational devotion to the carbon tax that the Prime Minister has in keeping the industrial side of it is a direct repudiation of anything he has said on helping Canada fight back from a position of strength. He is going to saddle us with higher taxes and higher regulatory regimes.
There is no mention of repealing the soft-on-crime laws, Bill C-75 and Bill C-5, which unleashed a wave of crime across the country. Those two bills drastically lowered penalties for dangerous and repeat offenders, which caused the crime wave. Crime is not like the weather; it is not like one day there might be a bit of humidity and the next day there might be a few extra car thefts. Crime is a direct result of justice policies. When the Liberal Party came in and started repealing mandatory minimum sentences and forcing judges to grant bail instead of jail for some of the country's most notorious and dangerous offenders, we saw a direct correlation in the rise in crime.
The same thing happened with the drug crisis. We had a government that decided to take taxpayers' money. We can think of the taxpayer working so hard, picking up extra shifts, working long hours, missing out on time with their children and their families, because they were hustling and striving to eke out a better quality of life, knowing that when those tax dollars came straight off their paycheque, a portion of those tax dollars was going to buy dangerous opioids to give out to people to use in communities and those drugs ended up in the hands of drug dealers. Imagine the insult to injury for those Canadians who are barely getting by, to find out that their tax dollars went to subsidize drug distribution in our communities.
These are simply the same old talking points dressed up in new packaging. The Liberals are trying to pull off a massive trick on Canadians. They are pretending that, if they just change their rhetoric a little bit and change the leader and the name, but keep the same ministers and keep the same policies, somehow Canadians will believe that things are actually different. However, changing superficial things is easy. The Liberals can swap out the talking points, and they can suddenly mimic some of the language they hear from other political parties, as they did when they lifted Conservative ideas. It is easy to wear black shoes and normal socks and pretend everything is going to be different. However, the things that actually affect Canadians' lives are not the superficial things. They are not words on pieces of paper. They are not the grand prose that comes from a monarch on a visit to the Senate to read a throne speech. Canadians' lives are changed by the laws, the tax rates and the regulations that governments set. So far, we have absolutely zero indication that there will be anything meaningfully changed under this Prime Minister.
There was absolutely nothing in the throne speech to talk about unleashing our businesses and our resources, but that is what Conservatives will do. The best way to fight back against a threat to our country is to fight back from a position of strength.
It is easy to use pretty words and make big speeches, but the reality is that Canadians' quality of life is changed only by the government's policies, not by speeches in either chamber. It is the bills and the decisions made by ministers that will truly change Canadians' quality of life. For now, there is no sign that the government is going to offer Canadians real change.
Our plan, which the Conservatives put forward to the Canadian people during the last election, will be what we fight for in this Parliament. We will build on the success our leader Pierre Poilievre had in achieving 42% of the vote, with millions of new Canadians voting for the Conservative Party.
I know my Conservative colleagues will agree with me on this. I guarantee that every single one of us, when we were knocking on doors in the last election, met people who told us that they had never voted Conservative before, any many of them said that they had never even voted before. They saw in our leader Pierre Poilievre's vision for this country something that they had not seen for a generation from the Liberals: hope that the promise of Canada could be restored, where hard work pays off, where we can earn a powerful paycheque that affords not just the basic necessities of life, but some of the nice extras as well, and the belief that every generation that comes after will be better off than the previous because our country continues to grow and improve upon itself.
That hope has been lost over the past 10 years because of Liberal government policies. While we have more work to do, as the Conservative Party, to win the next election, I can assure members that our leader Pierre Poilievre will continue to espouse that vision of hope and that promise to Canadians that life will get better.
In the meantime, we will hold the government to rigorous account. It is our job to go through, line by line, every dollar spent, every tax dollar taken out of the pockets of Canadians and every infringement on their liberty. With regard to any decision that comes from the government, we will do our job, not for ourselves, not because we are the blue team and they are the red team, but for Canadians who have to go to work every day and shoulder that government spending, pay off that government debt and put up with the terrible outcomes of disastrous policies that have hurt our country for so long.
More and more Canadians want a government that puts Canadian workers, Canadian energy and Canadian families first. That is what the Conservative opposition will be fighting for every single day, for as long as this Parliament lasts.
I will close with this thought. It was very disappointing, not just for parliamentarians but for Canadians themselves. There are a lot of economic headwinds that are not just on the horizon but are absolutely blowing through communities all across the country. TD Bank is predicting a recession just around the corner, with thousands of jobs lost. We heard from our housing shadow minister today about a phenomenon that only the Liberal Party of Canada could possibly create, where prices are so high that new buyers cannot afford to buy houses, but they are now lower than the inflated prices that the existing owners bought them at. We have a situation where sellers cannot afford to sell, because if they drop their prices any more, they will not be able to cover the mortgage that they owe, but prices are still far too high for buyers. Buyers cannot buy, and sellers cannot sell. Only a Liberal government could achieve such monumental failure.
We have a situation where the debt required to finance what the government has campaigned on will put enormous pressure on bond markets. We do not know where that will lead, but it has never, ever led to a good place when governments start borrowing so much money that lenders start to doubt whether the government will ever be able to fully pay it off and start demanding a higher premium for that.
We think of the man with the plan, the guy we hire in a crisis, the guy who claims that he can walk into a boardroom and solve these issues, but who still has not gotten results from his visit to the United States. Other countries have gotten deals. The Prime Minister has not gotten one.
There is still no plan to get new energy projects built. Worst of all, there is no budget to show Canadians just how bad the situation is and what they might be facing in the future. That lack of a budget is probably the most concerning thing that we have had heard from the government over the last few weeks. This is the number one job. The reason why the House of Commons exists is to approve taxation and spending. That is the origin story of our parliamentary system.
It is not just a matter of disrespect; it is a matter of hiding from Canadians the true consequences of government policies. The fact that the government will not commit to tabling a budget before it goes on vacation for the summer is telling. What it is telling me is that the Liberals are really afraid to share the bad news. They are afraid of coming clean with Canadians because the numbers are so bad.
The best thing we can do with tough medicine is to take it early, and then all of us can get together to try to fix the problem. We urge the government to table the budget.
In that light, I move:
That the motion be amended by adding the following: “and we urge Your Majesty's advisors to include a firm commitment to present to Parliament an economic update or budget this spring before the House adjourns for the summer that incorporates measures aimed at unleashing Canada's economic potential including full accountability of Canada's finances.”
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the leader of the official opposition. That was a little shorter than what we are used to hearing from the Leader of the Opposition, and I appreciate that.
I do have a question that is related to how important it is coming out of the election, where we saw a very clear mandate, as Canadians throughout the country want to see parties working together, in the best interests of Canadians, to deal with the Donald Trump tariffs, trade and so forth.
We will all recall Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, for years, going around the country saying that Canada is, in fact, broken. Would the member opposite not agree that the consensus in Canada today is that we all need to work together in order to pass the necessary legislation, to show unity and to be together in representing the interests of Canadians?
Andrew Scheer Conservative Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK
Mr. Speaker, of course, there is always a desire to have people work together, but there is working together for the sake of working together, and there is working together to achieve an end to the disastrous policies that caused the suffering in the first place. If the government is sincere, and if its actions and legislation match its rhetoric, then it can expect that we will work together to pass the ideas and the policies that it lifted from our platform, admitting that it was the government's policies that caused the problem.
The member talked about standing up to Donald Trump, and this is the part that I have a big problem with, because what the government did was say “elbows up” at the beginning of the campaign, as it was going to keep the industrial carbon tax or keep locking energy projects, and the government was going to go down and deal with Donald Trump from a position of strength. Then, secretly during the campaign, it was “elbows down”, as the government quietly lowered those retaliatory tariffs down to 0%. Then, it was “elbows back up” at the end of the campaign, in the final days, but the government did not tell Canadians what it had done. It was “elbows back down” when the Prime Minister met with Donald Trump.
The elbows were up; the elbows were down; it was like the government was doing the chicken dance over there.
Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton, QC
Mr. Speaker, today, the third day since our return to Parliament, I am rising for the first time this session. I want to sincerely thank the voters of Saint‑Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton for giving me a third mandate. The riding's name has changed, but it still has the same borders and the same extraordinary constituents. I love them from the bottom of my heart. I will live up to the mandate they have given me once again.
This is my question for my colleague. I just want to ask him whether he thinks that Donald Trump started shaking when he read the Speech from the Throne. Someone must have summed it up for him. I am curious to know what my colleague thinks. Imagine being the White House strategist who has to sum up this Speech from the Throne and write up some notes about recommendations and suggestions. We might have expected a particularly assertive document after such a fearmongering campaign, after everything we were told during the election campaign. We were told that we needed the Liberals to save Canadian sovereignty.
I am curious. Just for fun, could my colleague tell us how he thinks the speech might have been summed up in a few lines for President Trump and how the President might have reacted?
Andrew Scheer Conservative Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK
Mr. Speaker, I think the President watched the throne speech and was probably glad that the government said it was not going to change much.
The Canadian economy will continue to be weak, thanks to the government's disastrous policies. Taxes will go up. The red tape threatening our businesses will stay in place, because there is nothing in the throne speech that addresses these issues.
I do not think there is anything in the Speech from the Throne that would have signalled to the U.S. administration that the Canadian government was going to do the things that would make our country stronger, the things that would put pressure on the U.S. administration. The thing that will put the most amount of pressure on the U.S. administration to drop tariffs is American investors asking the president to make it easier to invest in Canada. When those investors are looking, never mind at tariffs but at Canadian policies, they will wonder what the point of investing in Canada is if they are paying higher taxes and cannot get their projects built. They will not be going to Washington to lobby for easier access to the Canadian market, because the policies of the government have sent the signal to them that they will not get that return on investment here in Canada.
What will actually make Canada deal with the U.S. from a position of strength is when we lower taxes, speed up our approvals process and get big projects built again so American investors go to Washington and demand an end, from their own president, to the tariffs that are blocking them from the Canadian market. That is the recipe for success.
Mike Lake Conservative Leduc—Wetaskiwin, AB
Mr. Speaker, maybe lost in all the noise emanating from down south during the election campaign was a real movement for change, a change back to a common-sense fiscal conservatism that we had in this country from 2006 to 2015, with two million more Canadians voting in our direction and voting for that type of change.
In 2015, we had the strongest middle class in the world and a balanced budget. One of the constants during that time, from 2006 to 2015, was a regular budget every single year in the spring. I remember that the Leader of the Opposition and I were both re-elected in 2011, he for the fourth time. The election day was May 2, 2011, and on June 6, Jim Flaherty put forward a budget. We voted on that budget on June 13.
As we moved out of not only a global economic recession but an absolute, global economic meltdown during that time, how important was that regular spring budget to keeping us on track as a country?
Andrew Scheer Conservative Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK
Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. In 2011, the government did not miss a beat. It had the budget ready to go after the election. The budget drives departments. A federal budget sets the plan, sets the stage, for every single government department. It sends the signal to businesses, to job creators and to investors as to what they can expect the rules of the game to be for the next 12 months or so. It also sends a signal to the bond markets about how the government is going to manage its finances.
It is as if someone were to go into a bank and ask for a loan but could not show pay stubs or expense accounting. A bank would charge a higher interest rate if they were not sure where the person would get the money to pay off the loan. The same is true for governments. Governments have to go out and ask people who have money whether they can borrow that money. When the people who buy government debt and, in effect, lend money to the Government of Canada do not see a fiscal plan, they are going to charge a premium for lending that money to the government.
I believe that, without that plan, we are going to see higher interest rates, and that means more tax dollars going to pay bankers and bondholders than going into tax relief or improving services for Canadians.
Linda Lapointe Liberal Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
Mr. Speaker, congratulations on your election.
I would like to ask our hon. colleague a question. With everything that is happening down south in the United States, with the tariffs and the trade war, I would like to know how he plans to work with all of our colleagues in the House and how we should work together to safeguard our country's interests together, while always keeping the national interest in mind.
Andrew Scheer Conservative Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK
Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my new colleague for her question. I can reply with a message of goodwill. If the government genuinely wants to bring real change for Canadians, we will work with it, and we can find common ground.
However, we have already seen that there are few signs of change. These are the same ministers that were in place under Justin Trudeau. These are the same policies and the same carbon tax on steel and aluminum producers.
We will look at the bills that are introduced. If the government really wants to change the former Trudeau government's policies, we can find solutions and give bills our support. However, if this government does the same thing as all the other Liberal governments, such as increasing taxes and red tape and violating Canadians' freedoms, it will be hard to—
Resumption of Debate on Address in ReplySpeech from the Throne