Scott Reid

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 6th, 2026]

Madam Speaker, I was unaware of the code of conduct issues that had arisen with regard to the member. I will just observe that it is an excellent introduction to what I am about to deal with here, which is our own code of conduct.

The Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons is an appendix to the Standing Orders, and today's debate is therefore the appropriate forum in which to discuss the code and also to discuss the problematic way in which it has been administered.

In my remarks today, I will demonstrate that, in at least one case, the administration of the code by the former ethics commissioner, Mr. Mario Dion, was itself a very consequential violation of the code. I hope that the current commissioner will take heed.

I have already been vocal in my criticism of Mr. Dion. In February 2021, I wrote an essay, which I published on my website, criticizing Commissioner Dion's report finding the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore guilty of an entirely invented breach of the code. Last October, I had the opportunity to speak out against the former commissioner's outrageous 2019 finding that the member for Ottawa West—Nepean had violated the code by transgressing a preposterously stringent interpretation of the term “using her position as a member of Parliament”.

On September 29, 2020, it was my turn; the commissioner went after me. I received a letter on that day in which the commissioner informed me, “Pursuant to subsection 27(4) of the...Code, I am writing to notify you of my concerns that you may have contravened the Code by attempting to use your position as a Member of Parliament to influence a decision so as to further the private interests of a member of your family”. Commissioner Dion further stated, “Upon receipt of your response...I will determine whether an inquiry into your conduct is warranted”.

I will fast-forward to another piece of correspondence from Commissioner Dion, dated November 25 of the same year, in which he wrote:

I am writing further to the letter from your [legal] counsel...responding to my concerns...that you may have contravened section 11 of the...Code....

...I have determined that I do not have reason to believe you have contravened section 11 of the Code and I will not initiate an inquiry into the matter.

That ended things. I had a clean bill of ethical health. However, members will note that Commissioner Dion makes reference to a letter from my legal counsel. Here is that letter, and as members can see, it is over 100 pages long. I apologize for showing it in the House, but I want to make the point that it is over 100 pages. It includes tax returns, audited statements and other documents. Importantly, my legal bill to respond to Mr. Dion's preliminary review was $43,423.53, every penny of which was paid out of after-tax income. At the 50% tax bracket in which all MPs sit, the cost to me was over $80,000.

I have the good fortune to have a significant amount of inherited wealth. However, for the majority of members in this place, the sudden imposition of a legal bill of this magnitude could be ruinous. Had Commissioner Dion decided, as he could well have done, that he would go further and launch an actual inquiry, my legal bills might well have been several multiples higher.

When the costs of responding to an accusation become ruinous, prosecutions, including preliminary reviews and inquiries, can be weaponized. That is to say, the process of prosecution itself can be used as a weapon. Mere accusations, including groundless accusations, become death blows to all but the wealthiest. Our court system has therefore adopted a number of rules to prevent weaponization. One such rule is that the losing party in a court action must pay a share of the court costs of the winning party. Another rule is that the person who is accused has the right to face his or her accuser.

By contrast with the courts, our conflict of interest code contains no version of the first of the two rules I just mentioned, but it does contain an interesting proxy for the right to face one's accuser. Pursuant to subsection 27(1) of the code, the commissioner may pursue a preliminary review only if authorized to do so by a signed, written request from a member of Parliament, who effectively takes on the role of publicly identified accuser, and if at the conclusion of an inquiry, the commissioner is of the opinion that the request for an inquiry was frivolous or vexatious, subsection 27(6) of the code provides that “the commissioner shall so state in dismissing the request in a report...and may recommend that further action be considered against the member who made the request.”

However, in my case, the commissioner ignored the limit imposed on him by subsection 27(1). In his letter of September 29, the commissioner informed me that he had been notified by an anonymous tip. He said, “On June 26...I received a letter from a member of the public alleging that you communicated numerous times with councillors and municipal employees of Tay Valley Township in respect of your spouse's operation of a forest school and community garden at [Blueberry Creek Forest School and Nature Centre] on Highway 7.”

It was on the basis of this letter, from a party whose identity the commissioner subsequently kept secret, that he informed me that he would launch an inquiry unless, within the next 30 days, I satisfied him as to my innocence. It was the act of satisfying him as to my innocence, by exhaustively demonstrating the fact that Blueberry Creek is a bona fide not-for-profit and that my wife derives no financial benefit from the operation of the forest school, that cost me 43,000 after-tax dollars in legal bills. That is a bit like proving someone's innocence of witchcraft by drowning them during a witch dunking: They are innocent but also dead.

The accusation was costless for my anonymous accuser to make. Refuting the anonymous accusation was devastatingly expensive. Even though the request for the inquiry was indeed vexatious, I have no ability to seek the redress promised by subsection 27(6) because the commissioner has made sure that I cannot find out who made the anonymous denunciation.

However, I was able to draw the commissioner's attention to the fact that, whomever it may have been who contacted him, the ultimate source of this information had to be an interested party on the other side of an ongoing legal dispute between Blueberry Creek Forest School and Tay Valley Township. I sent a letter to the commissioner pointing out that one piece of evidence that had been given to him by the anonymous informant “has never been made public”. I am quoting from my letter, which continues, “Only the eight members of the Council to whom this was emailed, plus the township's clerk, Amanda Mabo, and the township's Chief Administrative Officer, Larry Donaldson, would ever have seen the...email.”

An Ethics Commissioner who allows anonymous denunciations to which the cost of responding are ruinous has set the grounds for the serial use of vexatious assertions of ethical breaches in order to settle scores or to force elected officials to resign as the only means of escaping expensive inquiries.

Now, lest the assertion that I have just made be taken as hysterical, let me point out that this is exactly what has happened to Ontario's system of municipal integrity commissioners. Ironically, this was attested to just a moment ago in the last remark by the previous speaker, the member for Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, who said he faced numerous such accusations for reasons that were entirely personal.

The Ontario system permits anonymous denunciations, arbitrary penalties and provides only the weakest safeguards against the integrity commissioners, as ethics commissioners are called provincially, who are usually external counsel retained on contract by the township or municipality, having their own conflicts of interest. For example, they might be simultaneously a town solicitor and its integrity commissioner, a clear conflict of interest.

In 2024, Ontario's integrity commissioner system was variously described as the “wild west” and as being a “cash cow” for the commissioners themselves, most egregiously for Tony Fleming, a lawyer at the Kingston law firm of Cunningham Swan, who served simultaneously as town councillor and integrity commissioner for 35 municipalities, despite repeated accusations that this represents a conflict of interest on his part.

In 2022, it was reported that the legal bills paid to the integrity commissioner in the town of Elliott Lake over the four-year term of the town council amounted to $858,000, or about $80 per town resident. To give another example, at one point in the summer of 2025, the integrity commissioner for the Township of Rideau Lakes, just south of my riding, was involved in 11 simultaneous investigations. The town council in Rideau Lakes has only nine members. A year earlier, the Ontario ombudsman reported that most of the complaints it had received regarding municipal accountability officers were specifically about integrity commissioners.

A similar form of weaponization of our own ethics code is a very real danger should the safeguards that have been built into the code continue to be ignored by the official who is charged with their enforcement.

Commissioner Dion facilitated weaponization. It is my hope that the current commissioner will hear what I am saying today and will firmly reject the dangerous precedent set by his predecessor, and in the event that he takes the position that his predecessor's actions in accepting anonymous denunciations were not a breach of the code, that the House will modify the code to impose this limit in clearer terms in the future.

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 6th, 2026]

Mr. Speaker, I am torn between my sympathy for the idea of shorter speeches with longer questions following them and the fact that I have a 10-minute set-piece speech that I am going to be delivering later on this afternoon.

I do think there is a model for this, and I wanted to ask my colleague about it. Adjournment Proceedings questions, or late show questions, are four minutes of question and four minutes of answer. They are equal length and both of them are longer. It does give time to allow people to put a substantive, as opposed to purely rhetorical question, into what they ask.

I am wondering whether that serves as a model or potentially, as it is not a perfect system, a warning about things we should think about as we look at this question.

[Artificial Intelligence, December 10th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker,

In this week before Christmas, one might wonder why
Write a poem at all, and not just use AI.
AI knows meter and rhyme and all their uses
Can make Clement Moore's verse sound like Dr. Seuss's.
AI seems to do everything better than you can,
Flies drones and drives safer than a real human.
Its advantage in word search is very well sealed.
It found me 29 words that rhyme with “Brookfield”.
But there are things too bizarre for AI to know,
Like what draws Katy Perry to Justin Trudeau.
You can ask, but AI can't give you directions
Why Jagmeet Singh lasted through three elections.
And AI can't explain to me or to you
Why the Grits won't vote to support their own MOU.
Some places there are, where AI just can't fudge it.
It's going to take humans to balance the budget.
Which is why this poem was still written by me
(But the partisan bits are from ChatGPT).

[Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, it could stop spending more than it is bringing in. At some point, we have to return to a budget balance. There is no way one can continue spending with deficits of this size forever. It is fiscally unsustainable. As we do, it is going to lead to more and more debt on which we have to pay interest. It is going to crowd out lending in the private sector, which will drive up interest rates for those who are paying mortgages or have other forms of indebtedness. Everybody who does have debt suffers in a high interest rate environment.

Every individual who is a creditor or who owns shares in a company or has a pension fund that owns bonds is wealthier, and they do better in a higher interest rate environment. In the Parliamentary Budget Officer's paper on the relative amount of spending power for different quintiles in the population, he points out that the result of higher interest rates has been that the wealthier in Canada are getting wealthier and the poorest are getting poorer.

[Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question, but I do not have any expertise on that subject. The issue of seasonal work affects some of my constituents, but it is a real problem for a large part of the population of the Magdalen Islands, which may be one of the most beautiful regions in our country. It is a region where the fishing industry plays a vital role.

I do not believe I am the best person to answer my colleague's question.

[Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, that is of course a question about provincial policy, but I did invite it by saying that federal and provincial policies have been in combination.

I suppose the answer there is that the goal the provincial government had in mind was to encourage more construction for rental purposes. The Ford government's belief was that there is no investment case to be made for building a new rental unit if landlords expect that controls would have the effect of capping their income from that unit. I think that was the purpose of doing that; whether it has been successful, I do not know for sure.

However, there is a basic problem here with rent control, which is this: It is available for those who have been renting for a long time, who typically are older people who in some cases, not in all cases, have more money, and it is not available at all for younger people, which means that they are facing paying full price for rent in a province that has rent control for some and not for others.

[Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to address two general subject areas, if time permits.

For the first of these, I will make some observations about how this budget and the general direction the government has taken over the 10 years it has been in power have caused us to drift away from the goal of Canada being a financially egalitarian society, in which all people have a fair shot at doing well and those who are less well off are taken care of through our welfare state.

As the second part, I will talk specifically about issues relating to the cost of housing, especially as it affects younger people, which obviously is one of the key areas in which issues of affordability and equity are problematic.

The stated goal of Canada's welfare state has always been to redistribute wealth from wealthier Canadians to Canadians who have less. From its very start in the 1920s and 1930s, the goal of wealth redistribution from rich to poor has been supported by a broad national consensus, and all parties. Over the years, Canadians have sometimes complained that taxes were too high or that too much of the redistributed wealth was being used up in bureaucratic churn, but no major political actor has ever suggested a return to the old days when tax rates were very low and the poor received no public assistance whatsoever. However, recent public policy shifts of the last 10 years, and particularly this budget, have caused the welfare state to drift away from this widely supported redistribution from rich to poor and toward something entirely different.

Increasingly, the policy choices of the Canadian government and to some degree of governments at all levels, but particularly of this government, have had the practical impact of transferring wealth not to the poorest, but rather to parts of the population that are already well off. I could give a very long list of both federal and provincial policy, and municipal policy as well, quite frankly. However, let me just give one example that is held up by the Liberal government as being a touchstone of how much they want to help those in need.

This is their publicly funded child care program, introduced last year, which promises to offer significantly more affordable child care to everyone, in principle, but in practice, the program is available, for the most part, only to people who live in larger population centres that are closer to where the regulated day care spaces are located. This creates the following problem: State-subsidized child care spaces are available to urbanites, who are on average wealthier, but not to rural Canadians, who are on average less wealthy.

Similarly, subsidized child care is unavailable for children of shift workers, who are almost always less wealthy, so on the whole, this is a transfer that misses those who need it the most and provides it to those who need it the least. That is not to say that it is not an important policy goal. It is to say that this is a very poor mechanism by which to help those who are parents and who are not wealthy.

Likewise, the programs to give incentives to individuals to purchase zero-emission vehicles are great for those who are in a position to purchase a vehicle at all and who are in a position, because they are urbanites, to be close to where they can recharge their vehicle with ease before the battery runs out. It is of no use at all to someone in a rural area. It is of no use at all to someone who is less well off, but it transfers taxes that were collected from everybody to a certain segment of the population that, in practice, does not need it, rather than to those who need it the most.

Let me turn to the issue of housing. Everybody knows the cost of housing has soared over the past few years, but it seems to me that something should be said to the generally well-off people in this room, those of us who are wealthier, those of us who are older, someone who is a boomer or a generation Xer like me. If that person bought a house a decade ago, two decades ago or three decades ago, the price of housing can be looked at dispassionately. In fact, it is a question that, on the whole, has made us better off.

Prices are high and that is tough for some other people, but for us homeowners, things are actually pretty good. The house that each one of us bought, which seemed expensive at the time, is now worth twice as much or more, and that is when I take into account inflation. If I look at the nominal price, the growth is even greater. For many people of my generation, the resale value of that mortgage-paid house is the foundation of what promises to be a very comfortable retirement.

However, if someone does not own a house, as is the case for most young people, things look and feel entirely different. When I was 25, in 1990, it was possible for me to rent a small, fully detached three-bedroom house in a pleasant neighbourhood in Ottawa for $850 a month, which is $1,840 in 2025 dollars.

Recently, out of curiosity, I took a look online to see how much it would cost to do this now. A comparable home in a comparable location would be about 50% more to rent than it was then. As a result, for 49% of Canadians under the age of 25, just paying the cost of rent consumes half their income, according to a survey conducted earlier this year.

We could just shrug at that and say that maybe it is a bit much for a 25-year-old to expect to live in a three-bedroom house, although nobody thought that in 1990, when I was 25. However, the fact is that most people that age are now living in shared rooms or in apartments far smaller than what I once enjoyed, and the survey shows that the average rent for people in this age range is about $1,400 and that they are living in very small spaces.

It is not just the very young who have this problem. Thirty-four per cent of renters of all ages are paying more than half their income in rent. It is also a problem not just in the big cities; a substantial percentage of residents in Lanark County, in the riding I represent, also pay more for rent than for all other expenditures combined.

Given these facts, it seems hard to deny that in order for most young people to become financially secure, they have to escape the high cost of renting, which means buying a home. However, to state the obvious, it is nearly impossible for them to save up for a down payment for a house, the price of which has skyrocketed, when the high cost of rent is soaking up so much of their income.

This inevitably leads inevitably to some depressing news. StatsCan reports that after 10 years of Liberal government, the percentage of people under the age of 30 who own their own home has fallen by a third. The statistics are for 2011 and 2021; nothing more recent is available, but they make the point that by now, home ownership numbers among the young are falling and appear to be falling with increasing speed.

This produces an even more alarming statistic: While the average income in Canada for people in the bottom half of wage earners has gone up by 250% since 1982, mostly due to inflation, the cost of housing of all sorts has gone up more than three times as much. Housing prices are rising much faster than wages. That means that there is now a divide. It is generational in nature, and it is divided between urban and rural. It is divided in a way where we see the dream of social equity and the dream of prosperity disappearing for a substantial part of the population.

That is why we had the results we did in the last election. Poll-by-poll results are available, so we can look at them. We can see very clearly that, in my own riding, the people who are the least well off were voting for the Conservative Party and against the government. That appears to be a pattern that was true across the country. The people who are the most well off, who enjoy home ownership, who enjoy high-paying wages and who enjoy the benefits of a system that transfers, essentially, to the wealthy, voted Liberal.

I think we have to step back and think about what we can do as a country to make sure the divide ends. The Liberals should have a partisan interest in this. They should, for their own sake, be worrying about and trying to stop the enormous and growing social divide. This is a crisis that is transforming the nature of our society. I think, if it is not dealt with, the Canada our children will have when they are my age will be far worse, quite frankly, than the one we inherited from our parents. That is a great shame.

The budget could have dealt with the issue. Instead, more spending has been piled on and more debt is being accumulated, which will be paid for by the next generation. When the Liberals use the term “generational budget”, I can only think they are talking about a concept known as generational debt, which is what they are imposing on our children, who will pay more taxes into a system that transfers money away from them and structures policy to make sure they cannot move ahead. It is a great shame.

All I can do is hope that, on this basis, the House will reject the budget implementation act when it comes to a vote.

[Petitions, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition relates to a report from the finance committee some time ago that asked for religious charities to be stripped of their CRA tax-exempt status.

The petitioners point out that nearly half of all work done in the charitable sector is done by religious-based charities, and they note that it is inappropriate for the government to be assigning a values test and saying that unfashionable values, those held by religious groups, should exclude them from doing the great work they do for our communities.

[Petitions, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I am tabling two petitions today. Both relate to freedom of religion.

The first petition relates to Falun Gong practitioners. It is an issue I have been pursuing for a quarter of a century. The very first thing I said in the House of Commons 25 years ago was on the subject of the Communist persecution of Falun Gong, which still goes on after a campaign of more than a quarter of a century.

The petitioners point out that Falun Gong practitioners in China have suffered a number of very serious human rights abuses, ranging from detention to torture and forced organ harvesting, which of course involves the death of the person whose organ has been harvested. There is also transnational persecution that extends to Canada. There are attempts to influence the Canadian government to turn it against this peaceful religion. The petitioners ask that we take steps to make sure this does not happen.

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, December 5th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has adopted a perversely restrictive interpretation of the bulk labelling regulations under the Fertilizers Act. If enforced, the interpretation would impose $120 million in compliance costs on retailers, which will be passed on to farmers to achieve, quite literally, nothing.

If the Liberals are truly committed to reducing red tape, they could instantly override the CFIA by making marginal clarifications to these regulations. Will they do so, or will they allow the CFIA to drive small retailers out of business and drive up costs for Canadian farmers?