Pierre Poilievre

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, October 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the principal purpose of government is to protect its citizens. It is the purpose that we must, above all else, serve in our response to ISIL. To guide our course, I believe we must answer the following questions. First, does terrorism threaten Canada? Second, does ISIL in the Middle East add to that threat? Third, if so, how do we counter the threat of ISIL?

The first is the threat of terrorism in Canada.

Since 9/11, we have a clear chronology of threats on our soil. April 2004, Sleiman El-Merhebi firebombed the library of United Talmud Torah's Montreal Jewish School. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison.

In 2004, RCMP arrested Momin Khawaja and courts later convicted the born-and-raised Ottawa resident for financing terrorism and building a remote controlled device, dubbed a “Hi Fi Digimonster”, to trigger terrorist bombs.

In 2006, police announced they had uncovered the Toronto 18 terrorist bomb plot, which also included a plan to assassinate the Prime Minister, kidnap MPs and blow up the Parliament Buildings. Eleven of the eighteen were convicted or pled guilty and the ringleader, Zakaria Amara, got a life sentence.

Then there was Misbahuddin Ahmed, also from Ottawa, found guilty three months ago of facilitating terrorism, or his inspiration, Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh, who just received a 24-year sentence for plotting an attack within Canada and possessing the explosives with which to do it.

In July 2013, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were charged for an alleged al Qaeda-inspired plan to use pressure cooker bombs at festivities in Victoria.

To answer my first question, does terrorism threaten Canada? The answer is proven yes in roughly two dozen convictions by Canadian courts since 9/11, showing clear and present danger that terrorism presents to Canada.

Yet some will ask, what does any of this have to do with ISIL? That brings me to the second question: does ISIL in the Middle East add to the terrorist threat against Canada?

Ask Farah Mohamed Shirdon. He is a Calgarian, a recent student at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. This summer he appeared in an ISIL video from the Middle East where he now fights, saying “This is a message to Canada...we are coming and we will destroy you.” If Farah Mohamad Shirdon can commit terrorist atrocities with ISIL in Iraq or Syria, why could he not have done the same when he was a college student in Calgary?

There is Salman Ashrafi, a privileged and prosperous business analyst also from Calgary, who helped murder 19 people in a suicide bombing in Iraq in November 2013. What would have stopped him from orchestrating the same suicide bombing at the Calgary Tower, or the Saddledome or Encana's skyrise building, The Bow? Does it sound far-fetched? Consider this excerpt from a recent National Post article:

But in Calgary, [Ashrafi] had apparently fallen in with a circle of extremists who lived in the same apartment building above a small Islamic centre....According to an account posted online by one of the men, who now goes by Abu Dujana, they worshipped Anwar Awlaki, the pro-Al Qaeda propagandist whose videos urge Muslims in the West to either go abroad and fight or conduct terrorist attacks at home.

Again, while they lived and operated in downtown Calgary, they worshipped a pro-al Qaeda propagandist who urged them to attack their home communities.

They were not alone. Three months ago, the RCMP charged Hasibullah Yusufzai with travelling for the purpose of terrorism, alleging the B.C. resident had joined a terrorist group in Syria.

Then there is Ali Mohamed Dirie, the same terrorist who served two years for plotting to blow up this very building along with the Toronto Stock Exchange. He recently turned up again. He was fighting for al Qaeda in Syria. Thankfully, he was killed there. However, his life and story illustrate the overlap between Middle Eastern terrorism and terrorism based in Canada. This individual tried to attack here before going to fight there.

CSIS indicates that roughly 130 Canadians have travelled to conflict zones, including Syria and Iraq. They are thought to be taking part in front-line combat, fundraising, operational planning and disseminating online propaganda. This phenomenon is not unique to Canada. There are an estimated 2,000 westerners who are fighting alongside these terrorists.

I want Parliament to consider this question. If such terrorists walked freely on Canadian streets yesterday and are killing civilians as part of ISIL in Iraq today, what makes members think they will not execute the same atrocities in Canada tomorrow?

Imagine the platform they will have if their dream of ISIL statehood is fulfilled. They are close already. They have seized control of an area as large as Belgium. They rule lands covering 40,000 kilometres and 8 million people from northwestern Syria to within an hour of Baghdad. Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, has fallen into the hands of these terrorists, as have Tikrit, Fallujah, Tal Afar and the main power base in Syria, Raqqa. The group reportedly has $2 billion in cash and assets, making it the wealthiest militant group on planet earth, according to the BBC.

Within ISIL's territory, it is beginning to lay down the foundations of government and state, hence the name. The group has erased old borders and videotaped itself literally kicking down border fences between two different countries. It now has a court system, law enforcement, taxes, tolls, administrative buildings and street signs, all of which could eventually form the apparatus of a state.

To answer the second question, does ISIL add to the terrorist threat against Canada? Undeniably. The risk to Canadian civilians multiplies exponentially with a new terror state intent on attacking us. Imagine the launch pad it would have from which to carry out these attacks.

To my third and final question on how we counter this threat. Some say with humanitarian aid. Aid is worthy, and we are providing it. We will feed, clothe and treat the victims, but that will not stop the victimizer. Members of ISIL beheaded a taxi driver from London last week, precisely because he was an aid worker.

We must remind ourselves that the root cause of terrorism is the terrorist himself. He, and he alone, has chosen his path. It is he and the evil within him that we fight. We know we must degrade and, where possible, destroy him before he destroys us. That means delivering critical military supplies to Kurdish Peshmerga forces, using CC-130 and CC-17 cargo planes to airlift military supplies, donated by countries like Albania and the Czech Republic. It means using special ops Canadian Armed Forces personnel in northern Iraq to advise and assist. It also means that Canadian CF-18s will join with President Obama's coalition to strike ISIL terrorists from the sky.

It takes purpose and planning. What is our purpose? It is to protect Canadians from ISIL terrorists. What is our plan? To block them when they enter Canada, to lock them up when they are here, to strip their citizenship when we can and to join with our allies in order to attack them abroad before they can attack us here at home.

[Democratic Reform, September 22nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I think the member is speaking from his experience with the overly controlling leadership of the NDP, which prevents people from speaking out freely. During a two-year period investigated by The Globe and Mail, in fact the NDP did not have a single member of its caucus vote independently from the leadership. In one in four votes on this side of the House of Commons during that same period, there were members who stood up and voted independently.

We do have a bill before the House now, the reform act, that would take away the leader's legal veto over candidates. The Prime Minister has announced his willingness to accept the elimination of that section of the Elections Act, and we will continue to work with the member on the bill.

[Taxation, September 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, that is a great question from that side of the House.

Before our government took office an elderly couple with a single pension paid much higher taxes than a dual income couple that earned exactly the same amount. That is why we introduced pension income splitting, which saved thousands of dollars and brought tax fairness for our seniors. Now the Liberal leader announced that he plans to raise taxes on these middle-class seniors by cancelling pension income splitting.

Our seniors have worked hard all their lives. They deserve to keep their pensions for themselves to invest in their communities and create jobs. This Prime Minister will let them do that.

[Reform Act, 2014, September 18th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am taking this occasion to rise on this bill, titled the reform act, 2014. I would like to thank the member for Wellington—Halton Hills for presenting us with the occasion to debate that very subject before this chamber. This debate allows us to highlight the important improvements we have witnessed under this Prime Minister and this government in the area of democratic reform.

I understand that in politics, one of the idiosyncrasies with which we must be faced is that sometimes narrative departs a long way from the facts. People have a tendency to confuse, for example, strength with centralization, competence with control, and so it is when many critics in the public sphere judge the degree of central power in the various parties that are in the House today.

I think we should examine the facts to see how the parties actually add up on this very question. Let me examine some of those empirical facts.

The Globe and Mail published an analysis of 162,000 votes cast on the floor of this House of Commons by individual MPs. It found that during a two-year period, between June 2, 2011, and January 28, 2013, the Liberal Party voted as a unanimous block 90% of the time, with no difference of opinion whatsoever.

The Conservative Party had independent votes; that is, members of the caucus voted differently than the leadership in one in four votes on the floor of the House of Commons.

The NDP whipped 100% of its MPs 100% of the time. That is to say, in that two-year period, there was literally not one MP who dared disagree with their leader even once, which is an exceptional statement of the centralization of powers that has occurred in the NDP.

We move to the subject of the Senate. I think all of us are frustrated with the outcome of the Supreme Court ruling on that question. However, it is important to note what was at stake. The reference to the Supreme Court on the question of the Senate was actually very ironic.

I am not aware of another occasion in our history when a Prime Minister has gone to court to ask judges to take powers away from him. He actually went to the court and asked the court to allow him to give the people authority over who would represent them in the Senate. He agreed that if provinces held elections, he would respect the outcome and he would oblige himself to do so in federal statutory law.

Equally ironic was that it was the courts that actually refused to let him give away the powers he wanted to cede, but no less, it is interesting to note that he wanted to cede them in the first place, an action and a motive that is not normally part of the constitution of any leader of government, but with this Prime Minister it is, as I will further elaborate when I come to our position on this particular bill.

On the question of private members' bills in general, I should note that under this Parliament, with a majority Conservative government, and this Prime Minister, we actually have had more private members' bills passed into law than at any time since 1972. In that Parliament, many of the bills were just name changes to constituencies.

In terms of legislating, this Parliament, under a majority Conservative government, led by this Prime Minister, has had more backbenchers enact legislation than at any time in history.

Some have become cynical about this fact and have said that it is actually just the government putting private members up to passing legislation. They offer no proof of that except that the government actually voted for the legislation.

There is the Catch-22. If the government had voted against this backbench legislation, they would say that the government was blocking it, but with the government having voted for it, they now say that it cannot be that independent if the government supported it at the end of the day. Members will see that with these critics, there is no winning.

However, Canadians are winning. They are winning because of the democratic action of members of this House, such as the member for Kildonan—St. Paul, who was able to introduce legislation to protect vulnerable people from human trafficking, and the member for Okanagan—Coquihalla, who was able to amend legislation from the Prohibition era that prevented Canadians from transporting wines and other spirits across borders. The legislation now allows Canadians to actually drink Canadian-produced wines and beers. We also had the member for Kitchener—Conestoga, who succeeded in passing suicide prevention legislation through the House of Commons. This was serious, substantive legislation passed by backbench MPs under this government.

We now have another bill before the House of Commons, the reform act. That bill would address the 45-year-old requirement in law that a leader sign off on the candidacy of every single person who is on the ballot for the party. Since 1970, it has been a requirement in law that a party leader sign off on every candidate. Without that signature, one cannot be a candidate. Even parties that would prefer to have another form of approval for their candidates cannot do so, because the statutory law in paragraph 67(4)(c) bans them from doing it.

When my friend in the Liberal Party, whom I congratulate on giving his maiden speech, said that these matters should not be codified in law, I point out the fact that they already are codified in law in this instance. That statute forces parties to give leaders veto power over their candidates, even if the party constitution disagrees. The treasured party autonomy of which he is in pursuit does not exist in the current law.

The member for Wellington—Halton Hills seeks to change that by removing this veto power from the leaders and allowing parties to select any officer or officers they think fit to approve their candidacies.

I suspect the Liberal Party would oppose that idea. The leader of their party has abused that power in order to prevent numerous people from running for the Liberal Party. Just today, six former MPs for the Liberal Party spoke out against their leader and said that he was abusing his veto power to impose his ideology on every single candidate who runs for the Liberals. He has further had preferences for friends whom he wanted to have on the ballot for his party. He has basically used the legal authority embedded in the Elections Act to hand nominations to those friends at the expense of other people who would probably have more merit and be able to win the nominations if they were held democratically.

In our party, that decision is left to local party members, the grassroots. In practice, our leader has not used his whip, his legal power, in an abusive manner.

Furthermore, in another instance of this Prime Minister acting in a manner more democratic than any of his predecessors, he becomes the first leader in half a century to declare his support for the removal of the legal veto power of party leaders over candidates. Once again, that speaks to his willingness to cede power to the Canadian people and to grassroots political participants so that they can exercise their own will. That gesture on behalf of our Prime Minister demonstrates that he is ahead of his predecessors on the question of democratic reform and certainly ahead of his competitors in the House of Commons.

The member who brought forward this legislation has congratulated the Prime Minister for creating a space in which this kind of debate can occur. The member is absolutely right that there is no other party, no other caucus, under no other leader, in which this kind of debate would ever have been permitted, because only on this side of the House and under this Prime Minister can we openly discuss the nature of our democracy and propose substantive reforms to improve it.

For that I thank our Prime Minister. I look forward to continuing this debate.

[Democratic Reform, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, with royal assent, the fair elections act will be enacted today. Identification will now be mandatory in order to vote.

With today's royal sanction, we have finally and happily achieved the fair elections act, and it will be passed into law.

We will have royal assent. We will have a requirement for physical ID every time someone votes. No longer will politicians be able to use loans to get around donation limits. We will have independent investigations. It is fair, it is reasonable and, as of today, it will be the law.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative Party believes in family tax fairness and choice for parents. That is why we brought in the universal child care benefit. Instead of giving money to bureaucrats, researchers, and activists who failed to create daycare spaces for years, we give it directly to parents so that they can choose what kind of child care they want. That is the fundamental debate we have.

On the question of income splitting, more popularly known as family tax fairness, I support it. I believe it is fair that a single-income family earning $60,000 should pay roughly the same taxes as a dual-income family earning $60,000.

We know from the public opinion data that, overwhelmingly, parents favour the option, if they have a choice, of having one parent in the home in the very early years. However, right now it is difficult for people to afford to do that, except for the very rich. We want to make that a possibility for all of those families who would choose it, regardless of their income.

I wonder if the member across will support family tax fairness and support the Conservative proposal for that fairness.

[Democratic Reform, June 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the Toronto Star's factual error was in stating that voters can, “....continue to prove their identity through the vouching system at the ballot box”. That is a clear factual error. In the next election, it will be impossible to have someone identify anyone through a form of vouching. Anyone who shows up without a physical piece of ID will not be permitted to vote.

The good news is that Canadians overwhelmingly support our decision to require ID: 89% of Canadians believe that voters should have ID when they vote. We agree with them. It is fair. That is the fair elections act.

[Terrorism, June 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I recently saw the exhibit that celebrates notorious terrorists such as Dalal Mughrabi, Abu Jihad, and Abu Iyad. Together, these terrorists slaughtered dozens of innocent civilians. As a minister for the national capital region and on behalf of the Government of Canada, I condemn this appalling celebration of terrorism in the strongest of terms.

[Democratic Reform, June 3rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the government believes that Canadian voters should have an ongoing connection with Canada in order to be able to vote. The five-year limit has been in place for two decades. It is reasonable and comparable to what other similar democracies around the world are doing.

The NDP does not share Canadians' values and principles on these issues. The NDP believes that people should be able to vote without even showing any ID. Approximately 90% of Canadians disagree with that approach, and that is why Canadians vote for us.

[Democratic Reform, June 3rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, non-residents should have a meaningful and direct connection to Canada and to their ridings in order to vote. For two decades, Canada's policy limited to five years the length of time one can be abroad and still vote. That is fair and reasonable, and it is comparable with other similar democracies around the world.

I understand the NDP's position is completely out of touch with everyday Canadians on these matters. Those members believe that people should be allowed to vote without bringing any ID whatsoever. We disagree with the NDP and its approach, and Canadians are on our side.