Ryan Williams

[The Budget, April 18th, 2023]

We will work together.

[The Budget, April 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, it is an easy answer. We had house prices that were half of what they are now. However, I want to focus the answer to the member's question specifically on how we have more collaboration.

In our region, we have an amazing group. Hastings County has put together a “7 in 7” plan where it is going to build 7,000 homes in seven years. It is going to do it by working with the municipalities, the province and innovative groups like Phil Spry and Bob Cottrell who have discovered how to put developers together with not-for-profits. The developer takes the risk and the not-for-profit runs the programs using the government. They have actually been able to build homes faster.

Seven thousand homes in seven years, which I know the member for Kingston and the Islands will benefit from, is an innovative program that is going to benefit eastern Ontario. That is the kind of innovation we look at in the future—

[The Budget, April 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, a budget is supposed to tell people where their money is going to go, not have them wondering where it went. However, after eight years of the Liberal government, Canadians are not only wondering where it went but how much more it is going to take to get results.

Canadians see grocery bills going up and a carbon tax that is adding to the price for groceries, to heat their home, to drive to work and the trucks that deliver their food. They see a health care crisis that has many people waiting for a family doctor, let a lone waiting months and months for appointments with doctors they already have. They see a mental health and addictions crisis. Military and NATO are underfunded in Canada. The cost of government has doubled to more than $39 billion just for wages alone, and consultants are $17.7 billion and counting. Farmers are seeing as much as $150,000 per farm for carbon tax, with only $862 back. A lot of farmers are wondering whether they should keep their farms or sell them. There is a housing crisis that has never been seen before in Canada.

It is the housing crisis that I want to focus on today as it, bar none, is the biggest legacy the Liberal government is going to leave for my generation and it is, bar none, the biggest issue that Bay of Quinte residents are seeing in our riding. We focused on it last week alone at two summits: one, a homelessness summit in the city of Belleville put on by the municipality of Belleville; and another housing summit by the Quinte and District Association of Realtors.

People in our generation are having to live with their parents because they cannot afford a home of their home. Homelessness, addictions and mental health are at record highs. Builders and developers are mired in red tape on every level of government. We have, this week, renovictions with respect to 120 residents in Trenton, Ontario, who are being evicted from their homes so a new owner can renovate their homes. Of course, it is a free market, but there is nowhere for them to go.

When so many Canadians are feeling down about the housing market, we need to pull them up. There is only one answer to the housing crisis, and it is three words, “build, baby, build”. We need more supply in Canada, which means we build for everyone. We build with more trades. We build affordable housing that is innovative. We build housing for our military and for our indigenous communities. We build faster and targeted, and we build to own. We need to build, baby, build.

When we build for everyone, I think we all can agree that it should be a fundamental human right that every Canadian should have a roof over his or her head. When we look in this nation right now, we see the amount of homelessness. In my region, and we count it, it has doubled in the last four years alone. It should be fundamental that we provide a shelter for residents. It is one step only to become homeless, but there are three steps to come out of it.

When we talk about homelessness, a lot of people lose their homes for a lot of reasons. The myth is that it is because of mental health and addictions. People do not lose their homes because of that. A lot of times it is because of a domestic dispute, a missed paycheque, many missed paycheques, the fact that it costs more to live, a family matter or just lack of supply. When people lose homes, it is devastating to hear their stories about what happens on the street.

I and others here have one thing that many people do not. We have a home. We are able to lock our stuff away and we have a secure place to call home, which means to have security. If people are on the street, they do not have the luxury of security, which means oftentimes they have to turn to drugs. Why drugs and why is that important? If people are up all night trying to protect their stuff and look after, God forbid, a child or a pet, a lot of times they turn to drugs because it numbs the pain and it keeps them alert because they do not have that luxury of locking their door.

There are three steps to get out of homelessness and one step to become homeless. Of the three steps to get out of homelessness, the first is to have a shelter. Step two is to have transitional housing, which is the most important because that moves people from a shelter into programs where they get mental health and addiction counselling. They also get supports for keeping a job, learning life skills and they get a place to lock up their stuff. The third step, which is really most important, is affordable rental housing. If people are on the street and the cheapest apartment they can find is $1,800, they are probably going to end up back on the street. Affordable market rent is about $700 to $900, and that is really important. However, we build for everyone.

We have heard members today talk about building for indigenous, absolutely, and building for our military, but building for every kind of person who lives in our country should be an absolute human right. The government has three programs for that. Something I am going to get into is the fact that we are not targeting on that.

There is the $40 billion national housing strategy. There is the $1 billion rapid housing initiative. There is the $1.5 billion for homelessness. All of that combined over 10 years with other programs, of the 1.8 million homes that were needed last year, only 300,000 homes were built. The government talks about $89 billion, but only 300,000 homes were built.

We are a great nation and we need a lot of immigration, especially skilled workers. We brought 955,000 immigrants in last year. Again, that raises the number of homes needed to 2.8 million. When the government touts that it spent $89 billion, that was for 300,000 homes of the 2.8 million needed. It is a dismal number.

When we talk about homes, we need 300,000 affordable rental units. When we think about what our most vulnerable in society need, it is a place they can rent and call home. We are building 70,000 a year. We needed 300,000 units by 2026 as noted in a report by the Royal Bank of Canada. We are way behind.

One of the biggest parts of immigration that we need to focus on is bringing more trades into Canada. We have a lot of new immigrants, but we also need to focus on the trades. We need home builders, drywallers, framers and well drillers. It is not only the workers, we need those people to start their own businesses. I know many who are, but we need to really focus on that.

A normal builder in my region is capped at 50 homes a year. When builders look at how many homes they can build as a whole and the limits that they have hit in the last four or five years, they can only 50 units. We are seeing that across the country. A report this week talked about how Canada had the lowest supply of real estate in 20 years, yet prices are still going up.

A report last week, when we were supposed to have initiatives that lowered prices for Canadians, including a cap on foreign homebuyers, prices went up a whole lot. I think they are up 3% or 4% in March alone.

I want to mention a great program in our region. It is for people who have been on Ontario Works, people who sometimes have not had a job for a while. It is called elevate plus. It is put on by Quinte Economic Development Commission. It trains people for six weeks in programs that teach them about construction and how to get into home building. It is pretty amazing going to these graduations.

It is powerful for people to get trained for a job that will give them a paycheque. From being at those graduations, I can say how emotional it is for those individuals and their parents. Elevate plus is a new program, but it is something we can replicate across Canada. It is training people for jobs in the trades where we desperately need them.

As a hotelier, I have built hotels. When we talk about building hotels, we talk about building hotels by key, the price per door. The average house price for affordable housing in Canada is $465,000 a unit. It is quite unaffordable. It is ironic to me that affordable housing is actually unaffordable to build. We need to get these units down to about $200,000 to $250,000 to make them affordable.

If developers are building a house and then trying to rent that house out, to try to even make back the interest alone on running that house, how can they afford to rent that for less than $1,500 or $1,600 given interest rates today? Housing needs to be affordable.

When we talk about building, we need to build for our military. I have talked about this a lot of times. We need 4,000 military houses. It is the only housing the government actually builds. We need 4,000 units in Canada, 50 in CFB Trenton alone where we have 360 families on a waiting list. We have not done it. Money was announced in budget 2022, but it still has not been started. We have heard from other members today about indigenous communities desperately needing housing. It still is not happening. We really need to get focused on how we can make that happen. We need to build faster.

Our leaders talked about withholding federal infrastructure funding from those who do not comply with ensuring we get things built a little faster. Being a former municipal councillor, I know it is not easy but we really need to work with those municipalities on how to get that done. Part of it is looking at nimbyism. Nimbyism kills us all. It is inherent to a lot of Canadians. Nimbyism is just part of our brains. Perhaps it goes back to when we used to have caves and had to protect our stuff. We really have to work with municipalities.

I will go back to this. When it comes to the budget, housing was not even mentioned once. The Liberal government does not see housing as a priority, yet it is the biggest crisis we face. A Conservative government would build housing and ensure we build it up by build baby build. We need to build for everyone. We need more trades, affordable housing for our military and indigenous communities. We need to build faster, and we need build to own.

[Telecommunications, March 31st, 2023]

Madam Speaker, Canadians pay the highest cellphone prices in the world. In fact, Rogers telecommunications is the most expensive telecommunications carrier in the world. How expensive is it? It is three times as expensive as Australia and twice as expensive as the U.S. and Europe. The Rogers-Shaw deal will only make the priciest and the biggest company only bigger. We need more competition in Canada, which means not just a fourth carrier, but 40 carriers to supply more choice to Canadians, and lower prices. When will the minister get serious about competition instead of pandering to just one monopoly?

[Online Streaming Act, March 30th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, the bill specifically states there would be criteria determined by the government that would determine what is Canadian and what is not. That very definition is what we can see and what we can say, and that is censorship. On this side of the House, we are against that.

[Online Streaming Act, March 30th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, in 1951, when Ray Bradbury was writing Fahrenheit 451, it was a time not unlike 2023. Fahrenheit 451 presented an American society in the year 2049 where firemen were employed to burn outlawed books, along with the houses they were hidden in, because of a government deciding what people could see and what they could say.

Ray Bradbury described his book as depicting political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book. He called it the real enemy and labelled it as thought control and control over freedom of speech.

When the book was written, it was a time of massive social change and technological revolution. Hearings in the U.S. investigated Americans with alleged communist ties. Nuclear warfare was fresh. The golden age of radio occurred between the 1920s and the late 1950s and the television launched into living rooms in the 1950s, which changed how people consumed media and news.

Governments took actions to make sure the news and the artists they thought should be promoted in this technological shift would be promoted, and the ones they did not like would be censored.

The house un-American activities committee held hearings to investigate alleged communist ties. The Hollywood 10, a group of influential screenwriters, were blacklisted, and of course everyone remembers the Truman Doctrine and McCarthy hearings.

The government's interference in the affairs of artists and creative types infuriated Bradbury, who was bitter and concerned about government intervention, and he then wrote Fahrenheit 451. Fast forward to 2023, and we have absolute parallels with those government interventions in Bill C-11. Just like Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury would not be impressed with the government's looking to interfere in the affairs of artists and creators at a time of immense technological change.

We have the Internet, social media and AI. We use smart phones every day and we use tablets. It is an incredible time and certainly we all, in the House, want to see our Canadian artists and content creators be successful. In fact, we want to release the shackles and ensure all creators are immensely successful.

It is not done by government intervention; it is done by breaking down barriers so artists can succeed. There is no culture without freedom of expression, but do not take it from me. Take it from the creators themselves. We have heard all week how Margaret Atwood called this “creeping totalitarianism”.

A YouTuber and TikToker named Kallmekris has said, “I am scared...Bill C-11 was supposed to promote Canadian storytelling online. In reality, the bill has ended up so broadly worded that it lets the CRTC interfere with every part of your online life. That includes manipulating your feed and search results.” Another YouTuber, J.J. McCullough, says, “What Canadians want is what Canadian culture is, not what the government says it should be.” According to a Regina TikToker named Tesher, “C-11 would limit that reach by requiring creators to prioritize government criteria for domestic distribution over making content optimized for global audiences.”

Through this legislative measure, the government is preparing to give itself the power to control what Canadians can listen to or watch online. For example, instead of offering people more content based on their interests on platforms such as YouTube, the government would force those platforms to promote content that it deems to be a priority. It argues that the order of priority would be established according to the Canadian nature of the content.

For example, instead of giving a Canadian more of what they want on platforms such as YouTube, the government would choose what it wants Canadians to see. Let us be clear: Big tech would still monopolize algorithms and government would shut down the voices of individual Canadians.

What is worse is that it would open the door for other governments to do the same. We already know how strict buy America has been for Canadian manufacturing, and we fight it every day. What would happen if they emulated the strategy against Canadian creators by emulating a “buy or view America” against Bill C-11? If we control Canadian content, sooner or later they would control America content, shutting Canadian content creators out of America. It is cultural warfare.

Another glaring fact is that people have to want to watch it, not be forced to watch it.

Let us talk about innovation and competition as an alternative to this bill. The answer to seeing increased competition and innovation is to release the shackles of Canadian content creators, and I have an idea for creators. Let us see a Canadian Netflix competitor created that plays Canadian content. We would call it “Canuck-Flix”. Does that not sound good? Canuck-Flix would have the ability to showcase Canadian talent, showcase Canadian television and, of course, have creators put that content online. That is real competition.

There is a great show in my riding, airing right now on Bell's Fibe, called Stoney Lonesome. It is filmed entirely in Belleville. It stars some really great professionals in some great local backdrops. They are 10-minute episodes that are very funny, content-created and something they want to see outside and to compete with others. That is a great example of great Canadian content, and we should be promoting it.

Tomorrow is a very special day, my eldest son Jack's 10th birthday. I look forward to his future, and all of us as parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents wish all our children, Canada's children, equality of opportunity for success in whatever each of them wants to achieve and do in this country, whether that be in sports or as researchers, volunteers or, dare I say, politicians, to be whatever they want to be. The government's role is not to tell them what to be; it is to assist in breaking down any barrier that does not allow them to be what they want to be, and this bill would not do that.

Today's creators do not function according to the same rules as previous generations did. Today's creators exist in a new space and have new ideas, freedoms and choice. Choice is a fundamental right of Canadians and an absolute necessity for competition. Competition allows Canadians to make their own choices so they themselves can choose which content goes viral and which does not. It allows Canadians to succeed or to fail, but it allows Canadians to allow the free market to dictate what success is like and what it is not.

I share the desire of the member for Lethbridge, who has been an incredible advocate for this cause and for which she deserves a round of applause, for Canadians to know that this bill would impact them in two areas. It would censor what they see and it would censor what they say. With regard to what they see, if a Canadian government determines what gets promoted and what gets demoted, it means it is censoring what Canadians can see.

Furthermore, this bill would censor what an individual can say or post online. Creative talent here in Canada would no longer succeed based on merit, as it does now. Instead, content would be subject to a list of criteria that the government has not released yet. Let us make that clear. We would have a list of criteria by which the government would determine just what Canadian content is, and yet we have not seen it. As parliamentarians, we have no idea of the content of that list or how it would determine what is Canadian or not. Therefore, it would be left up to interpretation or, as I like to say, to the greatest line I have ever heard, “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

Through that, the government directed that those criteria have to be weighed and measured to see if they are met by the artists. If they are, they would be deemed Canadian. How do we fancy that? If they are not, they would not be discoverable, and those that are not discoverable would be bumped down the list of search engines, on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, or whatever. That is censorship, not only what viewers can see but also, for creators, what we can say.

The bill is a travesty of Canadian freedoms that needs to be replaced. Here are the alternatives: a bill that updates the Broadcasting Act, that promotes all Canadian artists and creators without censorship, what one sees and says; the promotion and development of our arts and culture in Canada, celebrating great artists, great content and the arts, which we know all do well and are incredible; and a new tax code that taxes big tech. Conservatives agree with that.

Some have said this bill is all about only taxing big tech. It is a little part of this bill. A larger part of the bill is what people can say and what they can see, but we need to also have a separate bill. If that were the case, why was this bill not separated into a tax bill that just did that? We are all about doing things we say we are going to do. If this were about Canadian creators creating more content, this would be under creative arts funding and entrepreneurship. There are a lot of great things.

I am going to leave everyone with a quote before I end. It is a great quote by Diefenbaker, because it really summarizes what we believe on the Conservative side and what we believe for Canadians. He said, “I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”

Another great saying that is attributed to Voltaire is, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Fahrenheit 451 ends with the symbolism of the legendary phoenix. It is an endless cycle of long life, death in flames, rebirth and the symbolism that the phoenix must have some relationship to mankind, which constantly repeats its mistakes, but men and women have something the phoenix does not. Mankind can remember its mistakes and try to never repeat them.

Let us repeal this bill, let us come back and get it right and let us make sure we respect the fundamental right of freedom of Canadians.

[Liberal Party of Canada, March 28th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, as members of Parliament, we stand in the House of Commons for the good of the common people, for their paycheques, their savings, their homes and their country. However, in order to work for the common people, one must have common sense.

With 40-year high inflation, families are having to make common-sense decisions each and every day about their budgets, and they expect the government to do the same by getting by with what it already has, reining in spending, imposing no new taxes and improving the services Canadians are already paying for. Families have to make those decisions each and every day, with respect to grocery items, whether or not the children play sports, and cancelling family vacation plans.

However, the Prime Minister is displaying none of the common sense Canadians are, with his $6,000 hotel rooms and the $162,000 Jamaican vacation plans, while Canadians are cutting back and expecting common sense from the government.

We need a new Prime Minister who displays real leadership and real common sense, and looks after the common people.

[Telecommunications Act, March 23rd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, collaboration from government agencies is key, but those who are really going to solve this, which is the same in the U.S., are Canadian businesses, inventors and entrepreneurs who can develop software and technology for cybersecurity that can be world-leading, help Canada, help Canadians and help the world in combatting this awful thing.

[Telecommunications Act, March 23rd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, yes, there has to be a lot of different options, and not just in this bill. There are a lot of bills that suggest to give broad powers to one minister, which makes no sense. I do not know how the minister has time to deal with that.

Certainly we are open to a lot of suggestions and some suggestions sound good, like an ombudsman. There have been suggestions of tribunals to make sure we have broad bodies that can oversee this so we do not just give power to one minister. One hundred per cent we support that.

[Telecommunications Act, March 23rd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, absolutely. We are seriously concerned in an ever-evolving world about national security, cybersecurity, infrastructure and investment security, protecting Canadian interests in IP and making sure we have fair, open and honest inquiries. If there are breaches and interference in our democracy, they should be tackled openly and honestly. We are certainly asking for that every day, and when it comes to the bill before us, it is no different.

We are at war with joysticks and software that threaten our infrastructure and the very livelihoods of Canadians and Canadian businesses. Let us get this right. Let us work together openly and honestly and make sure that we pass a good bill that protects Canadians.