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Crucial Fact

  • His favourite word is liberal.

Conservative MP for Regina—Qu'Appelle (Saskatchewan)

Won his last election, in 2021, with 62% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Public Services and Procurement February 26th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, while the common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, after eight years, this Liberal Prime Minister, with the support of the Bloc Québécois, is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.

The Bloc Québécois voted eight times to give the Liberal Prime Minister tens of millions of dollars for the “arrive scam” cost overruns and contracts that gave money for nothing.

The leader of the Bloc Québécois knew that the “arrive scam” app should have cost only $80,000, but his party still went ahead and voted in favour of at least $24 million more for the app.

What is the point of the Bloc Québécois?

Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings February 26th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, this is what Liberals do. They attack others for the very things that they are guilty of themselves. If this member wants to talk about respecting this institution, we can talk about how the access to information commissioner has said that it has never been harder to get information from a government than it has under the current Prime Minister.

How about the fact that the government decided not to fund the Auditor General appropriately to do her important work of uncovering Liberal waste and mismanagement? How about all the times the government has shut down debate before many members have even had a chance to speak on behalf of their constituents? The Liberals then come in and blame the opposition for all that.

They are the ones who have the power to be more forthcoming with information. They fight and they redact. They try to keep documents hidden. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming, at committees and here in the House, just to provide factual information and copies of correspondence. They do everything they can to block that, then they try to have some debate about when the House should adjourn, whether it should be 6:30 p.m. or midnight. They say that this is how they are protecting a democratic institution.

That is baloney. The real way we can protect our institutions is to be open and accountable. Independent officers of Parliament have denounced the Liberal Prime Minister for the assault that he has launched against information accountability and transparency.

Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings February 26th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, my colleague makes another great point, again, about how the carbon tax adds to inflation. We heard the Bank of Canada governor come to committee and explain that the carbon tax was responsible for about a third of the extra inflation that Canadians are suffering under.

In Saskatchewan, we saw our premier, Scott Moe, have some compassion for the people of Saskatchewan. He saw the unfairness about how this Liberal government gave a carve-out to one particular region in Canada and ignored the concerns of people in the Prairies, in British Columbia and in Ontario. Our premier decided that he is not going to do the Prime Minister's dirty work. He is not going to collect the carbon tax. As a result, when the Government of Saskatchewan stopped collecting the carbon tax on behalf of the Liberal Prime Minister, guess what happened? Inflation went down in Saskatchewan.

Not only the Bank of Canada admitted that it helps cause inflation in the first place, but also we now know, with empirical evidence, that when one removes the carbon tax, one lowers inflation.

Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings February 26th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, the NDP House leader talks about how the Liberal government is bad. If only there were a political party that could do something about that. If only there were someone in the House who could put an end to bad government.

It is the NDP, but of course, it will not because its leader has not quite come to that point. Who knows what their motivation is for propping up the Liberal government? It used to be that they were interested in finding corruption and unearthing Liberal mismanagement and waste, but they have completely parked all that for their own personal and political gains. They have never been so close to the reins of power, and I think that is their motivation. They actually enjoy the personal trappings of getting to sit down with Liberal ministers. Maybe they are impressed by Liberal cabinet ministers, and they are dazzled by things like that. Maybe it is because the NDP leader has not hit his six years yet, and he wants to get his pension vested before he goes back to the Canadian people.

I am not going to speculate on why the NDP continues to prop up a corrupt and tired Liberal government, a government that has imposed higher costs, more inflation, higher interest rates and a crime wave on Canadians and that has failed to get enough homes built to meet the demands of Canadians. We will continue to put forward the types of common-sense ideas that will help lower costs for Canadians and bring interest rates down as well.

He talked about previous governments extending sittings. Those late-night extensions in June are actually in the Standing Orders. Those are things that all political parties have agreed on over the years and are completely apples to oranges with what the government is doing here today, unilaterally, making major changes to the Standing Orders, over the objections of other opposition parties, because it has a trusted partner to help cover up its costs and its corruption.

Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings February 26th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, my colleague reminded me of something that her House leader said during his speech when he talked about the toxicity in this place. This is from the Liberal Party whose leader violently elbowed a female MP in the chest because he did not get his own way. He threw a temper tantrum. This is the same leader who used the pandemic. Canadians were going through incredible hardship. Loved ones were dying alone because they were not allowed to receive visitors. Businesses were forced to close. People were going bankrupt. While that was going on, what did the Liberal Prime Minister do? He took the time to reward his friends. Let us remember the WE scandal. He chose to use the pandemic as an excuse to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to his friends at an organization that had paid his personal family members massive speaking fees.

How about the former Liberal member of Parliament who got a contract? He had never ran a business in the medical field at all, but when the pandemic rolled around, he got a sole-source contract from the current Liberal government. We are in the middle of the arrive scam hearings where we are hearing about more sordid affairs about how a company got paid $20 million for doing IT even though it did not do any IT work. There are too many examples, in the short amount of time I have in this debate, to go over all the list of the ways the current Liberal government has wasted taxpayer money and has tried to cover up its corruption.

Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings February 26th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, common-sense Conservatives are focused on axing the tax, building the homes, fixing the budget and stopping the crime, while the Liberal Prime Minister proves day in and day out that he is not worth the cost or the corruption.

What we are seeing today is a perfect example of how the government is focused on the wrong things. While the Conservatives are putting forward tangible and practical measures that will lower costs, bring interest rates down, get homes built around the country and put dangerous criminals behind bars, the Liberal government is focused on the Standing Orders of the House of Commons.

Canadians are going to food banks in record numbers. People have moved away from home and have found jobs. They are now finding themselves having to renew their mortgages and are being forced to move back with their parents. Communities once safe and secure, where people would go to bed at night without locking their doors, are now investing in security cameras and other measures because their neighbourhoods have become so dangerous. All of this is going on in Canada, while the Prime Minister continues to break so many aspects of Canadian society. While the Liberals come in with a programming motion, using a valuable day of House time debating how bills are going to be debated and how many hours the House will sit, the Conservatives will continue to raise the important issues that Canadians face. The Liberals want to debate and delay, have a day-or-two-long debate arguing about how the process should be handled in the House of Commons.

We are not going to let them off the hook. Let us go through these points one by one.

The government is saying that it has to do this to get its agenda through. We in the official opposition would happily help advance an agenda that would actually accomplish these priority items. If the Liberals were to bring in a bill to cancel the carbon tax or at least cancel the increase that they have scheduled for April 1, we would support that. If they brought in tangible measures that would actually get homes built, we would support that.

We found out just a couple of weeks ago that the current housing minister launched a brutal and devastating personal attack on the previous immigration minister, who, by the way, are the same people. The former immigration minister is now the current housing minister. The current housing minister attacked the former immigration minister, blaming himself for mismanaging the immigration system in our country, which has caused terrible consequences on the housing side of things. After eight years of the Prime Minister, Canada builds fewer homes than the number of new Canadians added every year.

The minister admitted at committee that all of the Liberals' billions of dollars, their fancy photo-ops and their repackaged announcements did not build specific homes. The vaunted and much-celebrated, in Liberal circles, housing accelerator fund sounds active. It is one of those buzzwords. I wonder how many consultants they had to hire to come up with a name like the housing accelerator fund. That sounds exciting. It sounds like it will really pick up the pace of home building. We asked him a simple question. How many homes had this housing accelerator actually built? He said that it did not actually build any homes. Pardon the official opposition members if we come to this place to defend taxpayer dollars and if we oppose billions of dollars of spending that does not build new homes.

One of my Conservative colleagues, and I believe it was my colleague, the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, asked a very simple question of the government when it came to the carbon tax. He asked whether the government could tell Canadians how many greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by the carbon tax. We would think that if the signature economic policy of the government is the carbon tax that it might measure that, that it might actually count how many greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by its signature policy. However, the answer that came back was that it did not keep track of it. It does not know; it does not measure that.

The Liberals have imposed this carbon tax on Canadians and have hiked it year after year, after promising not to, by the way. Remember that promise going into the 2019 election when former Liberal environment minister, Catherine McKenna, promised that they were never going to raise the carbon tax? The Liberals attacked me for telling Canadians not to believe the Liberals, that once the election was over, when the Prime Minister did not need the votes of Canadians but still needed their money, he would absolutely raise the carbon tax.

Catherine McKenna's other famous comment was that if we repeated a lie louder and over and over again, eventually people would believe us. That certainly bears out how Liberals have communicated about the carbon tax. They promised not to raise it and now they are forcing a hike on everyone year after year.

In the fiscal update in the fall of 2022, the Liberals promised that they would stop pouring inflationary fuel on the fire. The current Liberal finance minister said that in order to fight inflation, they had to get a grip on government spending, and there was that glimmer of hope. After telling Canadians that the Prime Minister did not think about monetary policy, in the few days after the fall economic update in 2022, there was that brief moment of hope when Conservatives thought that maybe he finally got it, that maybe someone finally read that part of macroeconomics textbooks to the Prime Minister and explained to him how, when governments go deep into deficits and force central banks to create brand new money out of thin air to bankroll government spending, that caused inflation. We thought maybe he finally got that and that the Liberals would work toward getting back to balanced budgets.

Of course, that hope was very short-lived. Just a few weeks after that, they went right back to their Liberal ways, borrowing and spending, plunging the country deeper into deficit. Immediately afterward, inflation started going up again. That is why so many Canadians cringe every time interest rates go up, because the Bank of Canada has to raise interest rates to fight the inflation that it caused in the first place by bankrolling the government deficit spending.

The Conservatives want to stop the crime. After eight years of the Prime Minister, Canadians are less safe. In fact, many areas in Canada are experiencing a dramatic spike in violent crime, which we have not seen in decades, hitting all-time highs in many areas and for many different types of crime.

Crime, like inflation, does not just happen. It is not like the weather. It is not like we can read the Farmers' Almanac one year and say that we will probably have an early frost or that inflation might hit 3.5%. Inflation and crime are directly linked to the government's policy decisions.

The previous Conservative government brought in tougher penalties for dangerous and repeat offenders. We are not talking about young people making a mistake for the first time in their lives. We are talking about hardened criminals, people who use dangerous weapons to commit their crimes, people who commit the same crime over and over again or people who cause grave bodily harm or even death in the commission of their crimes. We toughened those penalties. What did the Liberal Prime Minister do early on in his mandate? He started repealing those common-sense Conservative tough-on-crime bills and made bail much easier to get.

It used to be that if people had prior convictions, had proven to society and the courts that they were dangerous offenders and were accused of committing new crimes, it would be harder to get bail. In other words, it would be harder for them to be released before their trials. The Prime Minister's ideological obsession with putting the rights of criminals ahead of the rights of law-abiding Canadians decided to make bail easier to get. He actually mandated judges to err on the side of granting bail, even for dangerous and repeat offenders.

Again, we are not talking about a young offender being picked up for the first time for shoplifting or someone who has lost their temper for the first time and maybe lashed out at someone in a restaurant or a park. We are talking about people who commit the same crime over and over again. The government decided to put them back on the streets as early as possible. It is no surprise that crime started ticking up. Now we are in the midst of a crime wave that we have not seen in over a generation, and it is all directly linked to the government's agenda.

The Conservatives offer practical solutions. We offer many different ways of providing Canadians tax relief when it comes to the carbon tax. Obviously, we would like the government to acknowledge the failure of its signature economic policy. It does nothing to reduce emissions. The government does not even count how many emissions are affected by the carbon tax. It increases the cost of literally everything. Everything that needs to be produced, shipped, refrigerated, heated or sold in a store that has to have lights or any type of refrigerator or freezer has to pay the carbon tax, and that is built into the price that consumers pay.

We are going to hear Liberals saying throughout the day, and we hear it all the time, that Canadians are better off with it, because of the rebate they cooked up. What they do not tell Canadians is that the budget watchdog, the person the government appointed to scour through all the data and to go into a room, read all the reports and measure everything, account for everything and model everything, the non-partisan independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, has concluded that the vast majority of Canadians pay far more in the carbon tax than they hope to get back in any rebate.

The reason for that is that when the Liberals designed it, they deliberately excluded the knock-on effects of the carbon tax. Therefore, the only thing the rebate even contemplates, when it is being calculated, is the actual line item we might see on our bill when we fuel up or when we pay our utility. What we do not see, and what the calculation does not take into account, are all the price increases that go from farm to plate and from forest to Home Depot. All the aspects of the supply chain where costs are added on, the carbon tax applies every single step of the way and increases that price.

We offered a common-sense plan to scrap the tax, and it was rejected. Then we proposed to at the very least stop raising the carbon tax in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. When we are in a hole, we stop digging. Homer Simpson has the idea that when we are in a hole, we can try to dig up, but that does not work, and it certainly does not work to keep digging, to add on those costs.

The government is hiking the carbon tax. It is due to go up again on April 1 by 23%. Media reports say that the rebate is only going to go up 17%. Even with the fact that the rebate does not cover all the costs, as the government hikes the carbon tax, the rebate does not keep up with it. Canadians are falling further and further behind.

We proposed to at the very least stop hiking the tax, and that was rejected. Then we talked about grocery prices going up. There is that heart-breaking scene that so many of us see when we go to the grocery stores in our communities. We see well-dressed men and women, often with children, going through the grocery aisle. They pick up a package of beef and they stare at it for sometimes a full minute or maybe even a minute and a half. Maybe they pick up something else to compare with it. Then they put both of them back because they cannot afford them. Grocery prices have gone up so quickly and so dramatically because of the inflation and the carbon tax.

What is the government's answer? It is to keep hiking it. We proposed to at least take the carbon tax off groceries and farmers, to remove the carbon tax off farm production so that we do not tax the farmer who grows the food and we do not tax the trucker who trucks the food or the retailer who sells the food. That was rejected too. The government does not want the carbon tax to be lifted off our agricultural producers. That is a tangible practical way we could bring costs down. The government rejected that.

We have proposed a common-sense approach to tackle car thefts. Our leader announced a signature policy to deal with this scourge that is now plaguing Canadians from coast to coast. Stolen cars are becoming one of Canada's fastest-growing exports after the Liberal government weakened penalties and made it easier to get bail. It also diverted much-needed resources from frontline border service agents, who have the responsibility to inspect and track things leaving the country, and it spent those resources on the arrive scam.

An app that should have cost $80,000 ballooned to over $60 million because of phony invoices, work that was never done and all kinds of corruption that we are uncovering. The government paid billions to consultants instead of investing in the frontline resources that would actually bring that crime down.

We offered to fast-track that bill too. We could have easily had those types of things passed. Instead, the government is doubling down on its failed agenda and using the coalition it has with the NDP to ram through more of the same agenda, the very same policies, the very same ideology that caused the cost of living crisis, the inflation, the massive interest rate hikes, the crime wave plaguing our cities and the housing shortage that has driven the dream of home ownership out of the reach of so many Canadians. The government wants to double, triple and quadruple down on that and ram its agenda through. While Canadians are going through this cost of living crisis, as they have to pay more because of the Liberal Prime Minister, he has decided to put everything on pause and to use this valuable House time to effectively try to make changes to the Standing Orders.

If one went door knocking in their constituency and hit 100 doors this evening, how many Canadians does one think would say they are really concerned about how the House of Commons manages its time and to please go back to Ottawa to sort that out? The government is wasting the valuable time of the House and of members of Parliament because the government cannot admit its failures. The Liberals cannot put their egos aside. The Liberal Prime Minister cannot put his ego aside and admit he is the reason so many Canadians are suffering right now.

The Liberals also have a coalition partner in the NDP. It used to be that the NDP and the Conservatives could agree on a few things. We disagreed on many policies. I live in Saskatchewan, and we know what NDP economic policies can do to a province over time. NDP members promised in the last election that they would not enter into a coalition with the government. They broke that promise. Canadians believed them when they said they would not enter into a coalition. As soon as the election was over, they started hatching their scheme.

One thing Liberals and Conservatives used to agree on is transparency and accountability. The NDP members have decided to protect the Prime Minister personally against political embarrassment and to help him cover up his corruption. Time and time again at committee, we see the NDP vote against Conservative motions to investigate corruption and scandals, vote against our attempts to summon witnesses and vote, in essence, to protect the Prime Minister from his corruption being exposed. Their policy agenda is not working. That is why Conservatives are holding them to account.

I will make one final point about how Liberals are handling the proposed changes to the way the House operates. These are substantive changes that would fundamentally alter the timeline for bills to be debated and moved through the House. It would give the government incredible new powers that are not in the Standing Orders and that have not been contemplated by any of our procedural books. Normally, those types of major changes require all-party support and go through the proper process of procedure and House affairs examining the proposal, studying it and allowing all recognized parties to have some kind of say in it.

The government is establishing a precedent today by using this type of motion. I want to point out to the government that it is now doing, through government motions, what used to be done through consensus and through all-party support. If its members want to talk about protecting democracy, one of the most fundamental ways to protect a democracy is to ensure that even when there is a working majority, because of the NDP support, they still hold that tradition of not making major changes without all-party support. That would mean any party could work with the government, in a minority parliament, and could ram through massive changes to the Standing Orders over the objections of other recognized parties. That has consequences.

However, they are choosing to do it this way, and they are establishing a precedent for future governments. They cannot come to this place and start talking about the rights of members of Parliament and the ability of opposition parties to hold the government to account if they are going outside the normal process to make major changes in the House.

That being said, we are going to continue to oppose their agenda because it has failed. Their economic agenda continues to drive up inflation and interest rates. Their housing agenda continues to drive up home prices by rewarding local gatekeepers and by preventing new homes from entering the market. Their crime and justice agenda continues to let dangerous and repeat offenders back out into the streets where they terrorize law-abiding Canadians. For those reasons, we are going to oppose this motion, and we are going to oppose the rest of the government's agenda.

Public Services and Procurement February 15th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals voted against calling in the Auditor General in the first place and blocked multiple attempts at committees to get to the truth. While the rest of the country viewed the pandemic as a difficult time full of hardship, the Liberals saw it as an opportunity to enrich their friends. They got caught funnelling a billion dollars to the WE organization. A former Liberal MP got a sole-source contract worth millions from the pandemic. Now we find out that the Liberals' app cost 750 times what it should have, did not work and was not needed.

The Auditor General says the RCMP is going to have to get a court order to get the documents. Why should it take a warrant for Canadians to find out what the Liberals did with their money?

Public Services and Procurement February 15th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost or the corruption, and his arrive scam app is just like the Liberal government: costly and corrupt.

Look at the facts: two buddies, a basement office and an IT company that does no IT work yet got a $20-million contract for IT. Now the Auditor General tells us that she cannot track all the costs, saying, “We didn't find records to accurately show how much was spent on what, who did the work, or how and why...decisions were made.”

Will the Prime Minister order his officials to turn over all the documents, stop blocking this investigation and call for a full RCMP investigation?

Points of Order February 13th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your accommodating the timing of this. I apologize to the members who are involved in debate, but because the matter is currently under consideration by the House, I think giving the Speaker as much time as possible to consider it would be appropriate.

I am rising to ask that you rule the amendment made to the motion, Government Business No. 34, out of order, since according to Bosc and Gagnon, at page 541, it introduces a new proposition which should properly be the subject of a separate substantive motion.

The main motion proposes two things in relation to Bill C-62. Part (a) would establish committee meetings on the subject matter of Bill C-62. It proposes one hour to hear from a minister and two hours to hear from other witnesses.

Part (b) deals specifically with the time and management for each stage of the bill. Part (b)(i) would order the consideration by the House of a second reading stage and provides for the number of the speakers, length of speeches, length of debate and deferral of the vote at second reading. It would also restrict the moving of dilatory motions to that of a minister of the Crown. Part b(ii) would deem that Bill C-62 be referred to a committee of the whole and be deemed reported back without amendments, and it would order the consideration of third reading on Thursday, February 15, 2024.

Nowhere does the motion deal with the substance or the text of Bill C-62; it is a programming motion dealing with process, not substance. While this can and has been done by unanimous consent, it cannot be done by way of an amendment. The consequence of an amendment to allow for the expansion of the scope of Bill C-62 and, at the same time, proposing to amend the text of Bill C-62, is that it would, if accepted, expand the scope of the motion.

The process to expand the scope of the bill outside of unanimous consent is to adopt a stand-alone motion after the proper notice and procedures were followed. Page 756 of Bosc and Gagnon describes that procedure as follows:

Once a bill has been referred to a committee, the House may instruct the committee by way of a motion authorizing what would otherwise be beyond its powers, such as...expanding or narrowing the scope or application of a bill. A committee that so wishes may also seek an instruction from the House.

Alternatively, a separate, stand-alone bill would suffice to introduce the concept of the subject material that is under the amendment for MAID. It is not in order to accomplish this by way of a simple amendment to a programming motion dealing with the management of House time on a government bill.

If you were to review the types of amendments to programming motions, and I am not talking about unanimous consent motions, they all deal with the management of House and committee time, altering the numbers of days, hours of meetings, witnesses, etc. As recently as December 4, 2023, the House disposed of an amendment that dealt with the minister's appearing as a witness and the deletion of parts of the bill dealing with time allocation. This was also the case for the programming motions for Bill C-56, Bill C-31 and Bill C-12.

Unless the main motion strays from the management of time and routine procedural issues and touches on the actual text of the bill, an amendment that attempts to amend the bill is out of order. For example, on May 9, 2023, the House adopted a programming motion for Bill C-21, the firearms act. Part (a) of the main motion then stated that:

it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, that during its consideration of the bill, the committee be granted the power to expand its scope, including that it applies to all proceedings that have taken place prior to the adoption of this order...

The motion went on at some length, instructing the committee to consider a number of amendments to the act. This in turn allowed the Conservative Party to propose an amendment to the programming motion and offer its own amendments to the bill itself, which addressed illegal guns used by criminals and street gangs and brought in measures to crack down on border smuggling and to stop the flow of illegal guns to criminals and gangs in Canada, to name just a few.

The point is that if the main motion does not address the text of the bill, an amendment cannot introduce the new proposition of amending the text of the bill to the programming motion, which should properly be the subject of a separate substantive motion.

Foreign Affairs February 13th, 2024

Mr. Speaker, the Blessed Sacrament church in Regina was subject to arson and vandalism, and I believe you will find unanimous consent for the House recognizing the right of Canadians to gather to worship or celebrate their faith—