John McCallum

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I actually have read it. At least I said which way we are voting on the motion as a whole, which is more than can be said for the NDP.

In terms of members not speaking much in the House, does he not know our member for Winnipeg North? I think he speaks more than all the New Democrats put together.

With regard to our leader, any moment that he is not in the House, he is out connecting with Canadians and reaching out to them. I have no doubt the NDP would be much happier if our leader was in the House all the time rather than reaching out to Canadians and presumably taking a good number of votes away from the NDP, which is certainly not at risk for the Liberal Party when the NDP House leader goes on ad nauseam about nothing.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is a bit odd that the member is saying that the Liberals are not speaking in the House. I think I opened my mouth and am therefore speaking and I am a Liberal.

I did not speak for long because it would take too long to say what needs to be said. That is what the NDP does. What we are saying is that we need to take the necessary time to debate the nation's business in the House. If we spend hours debating issues that are not important to Canadians, then it is a waste of time. That is why I am limiting what I have to say about this.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, in the spirit of not wasting time I will not devote much time to that long intervention by the NDP, except to repeat that for purposes of carrying out our work, we in the Liberal Party do support this motion.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would cordially remind my colleague that his province is Newfoundland and Labrador.

However, on the substance of his comments, I guess he would not know what governments do to limit or encourage debate at the end of a session because his party, thankfully, has never been a government at the federal level. However, we and the Conservatives have both been in that position. I think while our objectives are different, as governments we have a lot of work to do at the end of the session. The NDP would not understand this, not having been one. I think it is appropriate to give good return to the taxpayers, that we expend a little more energy and time ourselves in order to get this work done before we break for the summer. I would encourage the NDP to think about that principle.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

I thought that since the hon. member was contributing so much, at least in terms of time, to this debate that the nature of his remarks was relevant to the topic at hand, but I think he just was, I would say, blowing bubbles anyway, so I think I can move on from that.

In the spirit of the Liberal Party wishing not to waste time but to get on with the business of the House, whether or not we, as a third party, agree with the outcomes of that business, and more often than not we do not, we at least agree that Canadians want this House to work and to achieve results. The NDP talk, talk, talk, and do nothing. We, on the other hand, do believe that it is normal for the House to have late-night debates toward the end of a session. I have been here a number of years and I believe that has occurred every year. I am not sure whether the NDP opposes that or not. It keeps objecting to the government cutting off debate on closure and, now, we do not know whether or not it wishes to accept the government's offer of more debate in the evenings in the weeks that will follow this week. The NDP's position continues to be contradictory.

However, in the interest of brevity, since I did complain that the NDP was talking too long, I will be very brief and simply say that we, in the Liberal Party, believe that taxpayers do want members to work additional hours toward the end of the sitting in order to get the business of the House done and so, we will be voting in favour of this government motion.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is quite amazing that the New Democrats should go on for such enormous lengths of time without telling us the bottom line as to whether they vote for or against. I do not know what the point of that long discourse was when there is no conclusion to it. In fact, sometimes it is said that in some of the debates here we are living in a bubble, in the sense that not that many Canadians are interested. However, in the case of the member's speech, that is too charitable. At best he is speaking inside a bubble that is inside this bubble. More likely, I would go one step further. He is speaking inside a bubble that is in a bubble that is inside this big bubble. No one is really listening and no one really cares what he is saying because we are not getting any work done. We are just listening to empty rhetoric and we do not have any resolution to the outcome of this motion.

The member complains we do not get enough done in the House. Why do we not get enough done in the House? It is partly because he uses his unlimited time to waste incredible amounts of time in the House.

I remember well when he was finance critic and he went on for days and days. Does he think he got thousands of votes out of that? I do not think he got any votes. All he did was waste the time of the House, prevent the work getting done, which he claims he wants to do. However, given those long speeches leading nowhere, I would surmise that he is the greatest impediment to work getting done.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I do not usually agree too much with Conservatives, but I must agree that this was a lengthy discourse we just received from the NDP. However, over the course of this long discourse, I was not able to discern whether the NDP is voting for or against the government motion.

Are New Democrats voting for this motion, or are they voting against this motion?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my question with a quote from The Globe and Mail, in the summer of 2001. The quote is:

“I'm quite encouraged”, said FCM president Jack Layton. “Tomorrow's meeting is the most important meeting in the history of housing policy in Canada since the creation of the CMHC. And what we're seeing here is a welcoming of federal funding back into housing.”

If Jack Layton was “quite encouraged” by these Liberal plans back in 2001, why does the hon. member say that these plans did not even exist?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the short answer to that question is we did not fund affordable housing in the city of Toronto because the NDP defeated our budget and, therefore, deprived the city of Toronto of its share of the $480 million.

However, in years prior to that, Liberals did fund it. I recall conversations with stakeholders, perhaps unlike the member's counterparts, who were very pleased with the program and were very pleased that it had made an impact through the efforts of Claudette Bradshaw on both housing and homelessness. Liberals were certainly on a roll until the NDP stopped us in our tracks by bringing down that budget.

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his comment and the fact that he said it was such a funny speech I will take as a compliment. I thought I was quite amusing myself.

I know math has never been the New Democrats' strong suit and understanding the economy is not their strong suit. He seems to have trouble with the pluses and minuses, so I will have to explain it to him again. It is zero on the positive side federally because New Democrats have never been the government and private members' bills cannot spend money. It is minus $560 million on the negative side because they brought down the Martin government and the Wynne government at a cost of $560 million for housing.

On the Liberal side in Trinity—Spadina, the voters can choose between Adam Vaughan, a passionate advocate for housing who can help a future Liberal government really deliver in the future, or some NDP candidate who will campaign on minus $560 million from his party for the housing sector. I think voters will be able to make up their minds.