Michelle Rempel

[Salaries Act, October 26th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, when the Prime Minister first announced his cabinet in November 2015, something odd happened. Although I do not agree with the politics of people like the former minister of health and the justice minister, they arguably have very strong CVs and have definitely earned their place in cabinet. Rather than let those CVs speak for themselves, what did the Prime Minister do? Rather than let that gender-balanced cabinet speak for itself, he had to make it about himself with a big announcement, the day before, about gender equity. Similarly, his wife posted, on International Women's Day, a picture of her longingly looking at her husband, saying that on International Women's Day, we celebrate men.

I am wondering if my colleague can elaborate on how damaging it is when someone purports to be a feminist and instead makes it about himself.

[Foreign Affairs, October 24th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the confines of multilateralism, and I understand that the government is raising the issue in multilateral formats, but to be honest, the people of Venezuela and the people of Venezuela who are in Canada right now expect us to do more than just provide decorations and statements. That is great, but we need to advocate for concrete action.

I am wondering if my colleague would commit to at least taking the suggestion back to his minister, both for the Lima Group meetings and also for a position that could be taken to the UN, to at least look at Canada advocating for the United Nations to appoint a humanitarian aid coordinator specifically for Venezuela. This would acknowledge the fact that there is a humanitarian situation in Venezuela but would also hopefully help coordinate the efforts of NGOs that are trying to deliver aid in the region and get food and supplies to the people of Venezuela who are suffering.

[Foreign Affairs, October 24th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I come before the House tonight with a weighty issue. The question I originally asked was some months ago, and it related to the fact that the government bought Broadway tickets for a representative of the corrupt government of Maduro in Venezuela. That was wrong, but I want to get to the heart of the matter. What is the Liberal government going to do to help the people of Venezuela? What material action is the government going to take?

Why is this important? I have a large Venezuelan community in my riding and in the broader community of Calgary. It is very vibrant. There was just a Venezuelan Cultural Day celebration. My friend, Miguel Arturo, is a proud member of that community. What gets to my heart is that when I talk to him and members of his community, as much as they are proud of their heritage, they are panicked. They are beside themselves because of what is happening in their country.

What is happening in Venezuela right now should light the world on fire. We should not be looking at this as a partisan issue. What this corrupt dictator has done to that country should be a concern to all Canadians who believe in democracy, the rights of parliamentarians, and human rights in general. Economic collapse aside, the reality is that parliamentarians are being violently harassed. The parliament now is illegitimate.

My friend told me that there were regional elections for the governor of each of the states on October 15. The elections were held without supervision or audits, and anyone who might have been elected from an opposition party basically had to swear fealty or be approved by the illegitimate parliament.

I was at the Inter-Parliamentary Union meetings that took place last week. It was astounding to watch what happened to the woman from Venezuela who brought forward a motion for an emergency debate on this crisis, in a multilateral situation. I am speculating, but I think she was harassed into removing that resolution from the floor.

If Canada is going to have a place in the world, we have to respond to Venezuela, and I would like the government to do this. I would like the government to stand up at the United Nations and ask it to appoint a humanitarian aid coordinator. It is a sort of back-door, easy way of getting the United Nations to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian crisis. It would also acknowledge the fact that aid organizations cannot deliver aid to Venezuela right now. Any aid shipments are either being turned away or expropriated and distributed to people who are loyal to the government.

We have to realize that this is not just a quasi-crisis. There is no food in Venezuela. There are no human rights. People who are any sort of political dissident are being rounded up. This is happening in a country that was once economically viable and that was once marginally peaceful. It is in our backyard.

There is a huge community of Venezuelans in Canada who expect us to put our money where our mouths are as legislators.When we stand up and say that Canadians or Canadian legislators support human rights, it is not about nice words. We have to take action. My plea to the parliamentary secretary, who is a reasonable human being, is to show the Venezuelan community what the government is going to do as a tangible action to support them.

[Status of Women, October 24th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, earlier the Minister of Status of Women made some insinuations around Barbies and feminazis. I could stand here and point out that the Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary, in 2007, posted “hahahaha.......... I'm sure you cleaned it up nicely, with you being a woman and all!!! It's in your DNA...”.

My question for the Prime Minister is this. Will he get his female cabinet ministers to stand here and have an argument about who is more sexist than the other, or will he start doing actual things for women, like protecting Yazidi sex slaves, like correcting the sham of the missing and murdered indigenous women, like condemning the ruling around—

[Foreign Affairs, October 4th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, my colleague opposite talked about the government's commitment to ensuring the promotion of human rights around the world. Right now within the United Nations, only 2% of its budget is allocated to human rights promotion activities. I was shocked when I heard that number from several leading human rights experts. I believe there will be an international campaign to reallocate some of the UN's budget toward specifically human rights promotion activities within the UN. I think that will have huge international support.

To reiterate, or to put some meat behind my colleague's assertion that the government stands up for human rights, will he commit the government to working in the UN to ensure that a greater percentage of the budget, at least doubling that amount, is reallocated to the UN, specifically to human rights promotions?

[Foreign Affairs, October 4th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, earlier this year we received news that Saudi Arabia had been voted as a member of the United Nations committee charged with promoting and furthering the rights of women. Certainly, I think anyone in the House would be hard-pressed to defend Saudi Arabia as a champion of women's rights. A lot of people across the political spectrum in the House raised their eyebrows, and rightly so, at that decision.

The 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly occurred in New York about two weeks ago. In his speech the new Secretary General spoke about the need for reforming the United Nations.

In this regard, there are related issues that we have been charged with here in the House in Commons, and certainly near and dear to my heart is the global response to the Yazidi genocide. It took many months for the House, government, and department of immigration to respond to the fact that Canada had not brought in any Yazidi genocide survivors. Even to this day, the number has been really low.

One of the questions related to UN reform was how the UNHCR, for example, works to ensure that victims of genocide who might be internally displaced make it onto their list, and that people in these cohorts are not discriminated against in their camps but their passage expedited. This is not a partisan discussion, but a reflection of the fact that the world has changed since the original refugee conventions were signed after World War II. When there are big big bureaucracies like the UN, they are slow to change. It is up to member states such as Canada to push to ensure that positive changes happen.

We have gone through the UNGA and heard the charge by the Secretary General to look at reform, and yet have seen the example of states such as Saudi Arabia becoming members of the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN. All of this really speaks to the soul of the UN and how we as a member state are pushing and advocating for change.

The government has signalled how keen it is to get a seat on the UN Security Council, which is one of the only bodies that can compel member states to do something. However, the government cannot just campaign to get on the Security Council, but should have an agenda, and I would like to see reform as part of that agenda.

If Canada is successful in its bid to get a seat on the Security Council, will the Liberal government stand up and oppose countries such as Saudi Arabia sitting on the women's rights commission, or North Korea sitting on the human rights commission? If the government were given this mandate, I want to get a sense of what it would actually do with it.

[Business of Supply, October 3rd, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I would be curious if this is a record. Has a member of the opposition party who has made a speech on an opposition day motion never been asked a question by a member of the governing party before? I think this is a first. It is certainly a first for me. It shows the public the extreme disinterest of the Liberal Party in this. Can anyone believe that? When I finished my speech, not a single Liberal MP got up to refute my argument, so I hope that failure will be reflected in their votes.

[Business of Supply, October 3rd, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I certainly do. For people watching at home, what they need to understand is that this motion will be voted on by all members and that the Liberals will likely be whipped by the Prime Minister. That means the Prime Minister will say, “Regardless of what your constituents are saying, even though this is not a confidence motion and it is only asking for an extension of the consultation period, I am so big-headed with my ego to get this passed that you should go against the views of your constituents, the thousands of calls you have been getting, and should vote against this.”

I would say to the people watching at home that I can promise Liberal MPs that when they vote against this motion, there will be tens of thousands of people who will be angry about this and that we will certainly do our best on this side of the House to help those people point that fact out to those MPs.

[Business of Supply, October 3rd, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I could speculate about Kyle's question of why he is being punished and say that is because we have a government that believes fundamentally that the state can run the country better than small business owners and individuals can. That is the macro level philosophy of the government. It is why it has increased the deficit to the point where I am not sure if we will ever, especially under a Liberal government, be able to pay it back or get it back to balance. It has done that without any discernible metrics or growth. All it has done is increase the size of government in and of itself. It feels that someone like Kyle should not have the independence and ability to run his own future. That is really what this tax is about. It is about stealing the entrepreneurial spirit of Canadians.

This is not just about farmers. This is about doctors, dry cleaners, people with small convenience stores, or someone who started a home-based business to stay at home with the kids and was super-excited that he or she was able to hire another employee. The fact is that Kyle was duped, because the government claims to stand up for the middle class, but what has it done instead? All it has done is punish the middle class.

[Business of Supply, October 3rd, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I just want to clarify for people who are watching that the motion before us today states:

That, given the proposed changes to the taxation of private corporations as outlined in the Minister of Finance's paper “Tax Planning Using Private Corporations” will have a drastic negative impact on small and medium sized local businesses, the House call on the government to continue, until January 31, 2018, its consultations on these measures.

Many of my colleagues today have made the point that they have heard that this proposal would be detrimental to small business and the middle class in Canada, but I want to focus on the substance of the motion and hopefully convince some of my colleagues to vote for it, because I do think that a reasonable motion to extend the consultation period is something that would cross party lines and that many Canadians watching this today would find reasonable. I will try to go through all of the reasons.

The government cannot and has not communicated the actual impact of this tax hike on the Canadian economy in real terms. The Liberals have not communicated the impact of this on small businesses that will not of this be able to take on new projects, that is, the small businesses that will not be created, or the employees that will be let go because of these measures. They have not calculated that or communicated it. They have not talked about the resulting drain on our social assistance programs when people who have put in place retirement savings under this tax regime right now would have to draw upon social assistance if they cannot access their retirement savings, thanks to these draconian tax measures.

The minister cannot say how much net revenue it would create and on what assumptions the Liberals are basing that revenue. The fact that they have not been able to communicate how much revenue this would generate is problematic. We need to consult Canadians to make sure that they buy into a tax hike from which the finance minister and Prime Minister cannot even say how much revenue would result from it. We also do not know how much it would decrease tax revenue for the government. We know that in our former Conservative government, we saw the lowest federal tax burden in over 50 years, yet something interesting that happened was that government revenue went up. That is because the economy was growing. What is concerning for me is that today we heard from the Macdonald–Laurier Institute that we have had the fourth straight month of weak growth. Their report was done by senior and lauded economists. If we look at the federal budget this year, we see an increase year over year in deficit spending and debt, and a decrease in projected economic growth.

The fact that the finance minister cannot say what this would do is a problem. He also cannot say how much this would cost the government. We do not know how much government revenue would decrease and we do not know how much this would cost to administer. How many more bureaucrats will we have to hire for the CRA to chase small business owners as a result of these punitive new tax measures?

The government has also not explained why it is raising taxes. The Liberals use vague, very discriminative, very terrible, divisive terms like “tax cheats” and “tax on the wealthy” to describe hard-working small business owners who form part of the middle class, but they cannot tell them why they would take this money from them. There is no discernible benefit for the Canadian economy from their deficit right now. It is over $30 billion, and for what? I have not seen any increases in growth. In my province, the economy has certainly continued to worsen.

In sum, the Liberals cannot say how much revenue the government is going to bring in from this and why they are doing this. Why are they taxing Canadians? Why are they bringing this up? The fact that this has not come out begs the question of more consultation.

The Liberals also cannot explain why they broke their promises to small business owners. Not only did they break their promise to not increase the small business tax rate, but they are also raising taxes on small businesses. The reason we need more consultation is that the Prime Minister should be able to explain that broken promise to the many small business owners who gave him the benefit of the doubt in the last election.

I also think that the Liberals have not explained why they are raising taxes on the middle class instead of getting their spending under control. I am the official opposition critic for citizenship and immigration. This year alone, not including social assistance payments, any sort of welfare scheme, or deportation, just the cost of processing people who are legally crossing the U.S.–Canada land border will be half a billion dollars.

The Liberals cannot explain how much revenue the government is going to bring in or how much this would hurt the Canadian economy. They cannot say how much this would benefit the Canadians whom they are taking this from and they cannot explain why they are not getting their spending under control.

I could list hundreds of other measures the government has taken in which it has just blown the federal budget, and on what? Liberals should be talking about this and explaining their lack of spending controls to Canadians before they go back to them to try to raid their pockets for more money.

The government should extend the consultation period because people are furious and this is not a partisan issue. This is about people who voted Liberal in the last election, who hoped in the Prime Minister and are now saying, “No, I do not think so”, because the Liberals broke their promise and are now not even listening to the people. The Prime Minister owes it to these people who gave him the benefit of the doubt to hear their concerns.

I have had over 1,000 Canadians write to me or contact me at my office, either by email or phone. I had over 300 people who showed up at a town hall with virtually no notice. I have had tens of thousands of messages on social media. In a one-month period, over 43,000 Canadians signed a petition that I sponsored, e-1239, against these tax measures. That is unheard of. People are furious and the Prime Minister owes it to them, given his lack of detail on this, to hear them out because this is the future of the Canadian economy.

A further consultation period would also create an opportunity for the Liberals to correct their divisive, insulting rhetoric about small business owners. That is something that I have heard in virtually every email that has come into my office. They say: “Why is the Prime Minister calling me a tax cheat? Do you know how much extra I pay as a small business owner to employ tax lawyers, to prevent auditors from coming in and looking at me? And you are calling me a tax cheat? Now you are going to call me wealthy, like somehow he has no understanding that small business owners are actually part of the middle class.”

An extended consultation period would give the Liberals and the Prime Minister an opportunity to perhaps correct the record in this regard. It would also give us a further opportunity in the House to say what we value as a country. Are we going to punish small business owners for the fact they take on risk and create jobs without the safety net of sick days, vacation time and guaranteed pensions? Are we going to say to them that we as their representatives want to take away their entrepreneurial spirit, tax them, and change the rules such that they cannot see further out? That is something that could also be addressed in a further consultation period.

It would also be an opportunity for the Liberals to clarify the following egregious statement by the Minister of Small Business and Tourism: “The longer we're talking about this, the more people are concerned that they will be impacted, which is really raising a fear and not allowing people to be as productive as possible.” That is an old fearmongering canard. It is fantastical.

The Liberals have been taking so much heat on this that every single Liberal member of Parliament is getting called by everyone in their riding. What did the small business minister do? Imagine being a Liberal backbencher and watching the small business minister say that if we're consulting, we're fearmongering. It is kind of crazy. I would love to have a little more time for the small business minister to go out, correct the record on this, clarify what she meant, and perhaps take more heat from the small business community.

This also came out in the dead of summer when farmers were at their busiest. There were floods in Quebec and fires in B.C. The Prime Minister owes it to people in these communities to extend the consultation period. It would also allow us to fully examine the regional consequences of this proposal.

My province of Alberta has been struggling with the detrimental policies of the government with its changes to the rules for downstream regulations on emissions for our pipelines when the government does not do the same for Saudi oil. My province has been struggling with the minimum wage increase and municipal property tax increases. The government has made political decisions to block the build-out of northern gateway pipeline and has worked against the energy east proposal. This small business tax hike is kicking Alberta while it is down and I would love it if the Prime Minister came to my riding to hear how my constituents feel about it.

I wish I had time to read all the messages that were sent to my riding, but to anyone watching at home today, we need them to amplify their concerns and their voice. Canadians do not have a lot of time on this. They need to pick up the phone and call every single Liberal backbench MP and hold them to account for the fact that those MPs will be voting against something as simple as extending the consultation period. The Liberals are a government that consults on everything. Canadians should get out and call a Liberal MP.