44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2023 10:00AM
- May/11/23 11:09:00 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very proud and, especially, very grateful for having been born here in Canada. It is a major victory to be born here in Canada, because it is a country full of opportunity. I was born to a single mother and adopted by two teachers who always taught me that here in Canada, no matter where you come from, you can achieve whatever you want as long as you work hard. This is the same country where my wife arrived as a refugee and it is the country we want for our children.
Unfortunately, it is not the country we are seeing today. Everything is broken in Canada, after eight years under this Prime Minister. He does not like it when I say that, so I will say it again: everything is broken after eight years under this Prime Minister. This includes the immigration system. Our country had a reputation for its immigration system, which is one of the best in the world. It was based on common sense. People were invited to come work here, people like the Italians who built our infrastructure. Workers from around the world have come here to build hospitals, houses and our economy, and to enrich everyone's lives.
What do people see when they come here now? They see no houses. Nine out of 10 young Canadians are convinced they will never be able to buy a house. We lack health care services. Why? It is because our immigrants are being blocked from working as doctors and nurses. Over a million immigrants who are interested in coming here, to Canada, have had to wait longer than the government's prescribed waiting period.
Even when they do manage to get here, immigrants have a hard time getting work permits. People want to work, but this Prime Minister and his utterly incompetent government stand in their way. Not only that, but the strike that the Prime Minister caused led to even longer wait times for families living apart, potential workers who cannot start their jobs, and refugees seeking safety and security here in Canada. The Prime Minister's utter incompetence is the cause of these problems.
Instead of focusing on the job, which can be boring, and repairing the damage he has done, the Prime Minister and his multinational executive friends, like Dominic Barton, want to create grand utopias for us. Instead of building our country on the basis of common sense, which has worked for over 100 years, the Prime Minister wants to create a great revolution and paint a utopia that will never exist. He should focus on the backbone of our system, in other words, reduce the time it takes for a small or medium-sized business or a farmer to hire a foreign worker when no Canadian is available to do the job. He should unite families, especially in the case of grandparents, so that they can take care of their grandchildren when the parents are at work. Finally, he should allow more non-profit organizations to sponsor refugees and provide them with care, opportunities to learn English or French, and access to a job and housing.
He should do the common-sense work. Instead, the Prime Minister wants to focus on the priorities of large multinationals, such as McKinsey, and its former CEO, Dominic Barton. That company has received over $100 million in contracts from this government and dreams of turning the country into a utopia.
I will never listen to those people. I am going to listen to the common sense of ordinary Canadians, the people who do the work. That is how the common-sense Conservative government I will be leading will repair the damage.
That is why I will be voting for this motion. Because I want to reject Dominic Barton and the Century Initiative and to base our immigration system once again on the common sense of ordinary Canadians.
Speaking of common sense, I will be splitting my time with the common-sense Conservative member of Parliament for Calgary Shepard, Mr. Speaker.
I am so proud and grateful that I won the lottery of life to be born here in Canada. I was born of a teenage unwed mother, who put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They taught me that it did not matter where I came from; it mattered where I was going. It did not matter who I knew; it mattered what I could do.
That is the country my wife came to as a refugee. That is the country that a lot of her family, her brother to be a soldier, her other brother to be a carpenter, her sister to be a nurse and for her family to work hard and achieve great things. That is the country I want all our kids to inherit, but that is not the country we see today.
Canada, after eight years of the Prime Minister, the out-of-touch Prime Minister, is broken. What is especially broken is the immigration system that leaves a million immigrants waiting longer than the acceptable wait time to get into Canada.
We see international students abused and exploited by human traffickers, shady consultants, some of them losing their lives and being sent back to places like India in body bags because the Prime Minister and his government have failed to protect them from the predators and the scam artists who are destroying their lives.
We see 20,000 brilliant immigrant doctors blocked from working in their professions by government gatekeepers. We see 32,000 immigrant nurses blocked from their jobs. It boils my blood to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours with my daughter who has a migraine headache because there are not enough doctors and nurses, while gatekeepers block brilliant immigrant doctors and nurses from doing their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister gleefully tells us about all the wonderful meetings he is having with mayors about housing and infrastructure. I do not really care about their meetings, because the gatekeepers at municipal governments, the governments that the Prime Minister is funding with billions of dollars, are blocking housing construction, so our immigrants, working class and youth cannot get homes.
After eight years of the Prime Minister everything is broken. However, instead of fixing the basics, he is focused on another grand utopian project, that of his friend, Dominic Barton, the multinational CEO, former ambassador to Communist China, who helped bring about the opioid crisis that is savaging our working-class families. He has come up with a bright, new idea that he is going to triple our national population to 100 million. We do not need anymore utopian schemes from globe-trotting millionaires and multinational insiders. We need common sense for a change.
Here is our common-sense plan to get back to the basics. The first is to clear the backlog so immigrant families can be reunited, so our farmers and small businesses can fill jobs for which there is no Canadian available; allow our churches, mosques, synagogues and other non-profit organizations to sponsor more legitimate refugees; get them language training so they can learn how to speak French or English, get a job, get working and get contributing; speed up work permits for those people who already here waiting for their cases to be heard. They might as well be out earning a wage, contributing to the economy. They want to work. Let them work. It is common sense, for God's sake.
Speaking of work, let us bring in a blue seal national standard for all our professions. We have a Red Seal standard that allows tradespeople to take a test, prove they are qualified, get to work and move across the country to fill needed vacancies in the job market. Why do we not have a blue seal standard that would allow foreign-trained nurses, doctors, engineers and other professionals to prove they are qualified and within 60 days of applying to work in their field, get a yes or no based on their tested ability, not based on where they come from? We would have more doctors, more nurses, more common sense.
What I am saying is let us get back to the basics. Our immigration system was the best in the world eight years ago, but now we have immigrants who come here and then say they want to go back because this is not what was promised.
I have said that everything is broken, but what is broken most of all is the promise, the promise of Canada; the promise that we will reinstill a promise that in Canada it does not matter where people come from, but where they go. It does not matter if their name is Martin or Mohamed, or Singh or Smith, or Chong or Charles, or Patel or Poilievre, if they work hard, they can achieve anything they want in the greatest and freest country in the world. This is the common sense of the common people united for our common home. It is their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- May/11/23 11:21:01 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what interests me are the figures for small- and medium-sized businesses in the Saguenay—Lac‑Saint‑Jean region that are looking for workers but facing a labour shortage. During a labour shortage, immigration numbers will be higher than average. When jobs are more scarce, the numbers drop.
Immigration numbers should be based first and foremost on Canada's needs. When companies and farmers need more workers because there are no Canadians to fill the vacancies, the process has to be fast-tracked to allow them to sponsor the workers they need. When the economy slows, there will obviously be fewer.
We have to base our numbers on common sense, not on the hopes and dreams of the CEOs of multinationals, like Dominic Barton. That is what common sense is all about.
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- May/11/23 11:23:07 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do support allowing people from the gay and lesbian community who are being persecuted around the world to come and seek refuge in Canada. In fact, I think our previous Conservative government was the first one to allow that as a grounds for seeking asylum from countries where dictators, like in Iran, persecute people based on their sexuality, on who they are and who they love. They should be allowed to come here and enjoy the wonderful freedom and blessings of this land.
Our freedom is what brings people here; it is not our warm weather. Why do they come here? Because we are a free country. They want to enjoy freedom. Therefore, not only should we welcome people like the ones the member just mentioned; we should remember why they came here in the first place. They came here for the freedom that our forebearers defended on battle fields around the world. That is why we must work every day, in every way, to make Canada the freest nation on Earth.
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- May/11/23 11:25:21 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has again demonstrated just how out of touch this Prime Minister's Liberals are. Two‑thirds of Canadians believe that Canada is broken after eight years of this Prime Minister. Housing costs have doubled. One in five Canadians is skipping meals because they cannot afford groceries, and 1.5 million Canadians have to use a food bank if they want to eat. Violent crime has increased by 32%. Nearly 30,000 Canadians have died of an opioid overdose since this Prime Minister, who is now legalizing heroine, cocaine, crack and all sorts of other drugs, took office.
Everything is broken after eight years of this Prime Minister. However, the good thing is that we will replace the pain he has caused with the hope that Canadians need. We are going to use good old common sense. We are going to bring back common sense.
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- May/11/23 2:18:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with his woke, egotistical, liberal ideology, the Prime Minister is trying to delete our history by erasing Terry Fox, who fought cancer, by erasing Quebec City and by erasing the soldiers at Vimy, only to replace them with a colouring book that includes a picture of the Prime Minister swimming at Harrington Lake.
I am announcing today that a common-sense Conservative government will restore our history and our passport, which includes Vimy, Quebec City, Terry Fox, and all of the history that makes us proud.
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- May/11/23 2:20:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the current Prime Minister's woke and out-of-touch ideology is so egotistical that he cannot imagine there are any Canadian stories bigger than him. That is why he deleted Terry Fox, the soldiers who died at Vimy, the city of Quebec and the RCMP from our passport to replace them with a colouring book that includes an image of him swimming at Harrington Lake when he was a boy.
I announce that a common-sense Conservative government would bring back Vimy, our memory of Terry Fox and pride in our country, and it would restore a passport that all of us can be proud of.
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- May/11/23 2:22:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is out of touch and in hiding. Yesterday, as he left the House, he challenged me to have more of these debates, and now he will not even get out of his seat and answer my questions.
We know why. He is afraid. He is afraid to defend not only his first carbon tax, which he admits will increase the price of gas by 41¢ a litre, at thousands of dollars of net costs per family, but he now has carbon tax 2, a second tax with no rebate, that will increase food, heat and gas prices even further.
How much will the second carbon tax increase the cost of gas for hard-working Canadians?
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- May/11/23 2:23:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the question that the Prime Minister was too afraid to stand up to answer and debate me on was about the cost of the second carbon tax.
We know that the Prime Minister's first carbon tax will cost 41¢ a litre, at a net cost to average families of over $1,500. However, that is not enough for him. He wants a second carbon tax, which will add even more costs without any rebate at all.
We know that he told falsehoods about the first tax. Will he finally have the guts to stand up and tell us how much his second tax will cost Canadians?
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- May/11/23 2:26:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, he is woke, and so Canadians are broke. I will say what “woke” means in practice. His government approved dumping millions of litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River; that is what “woke” means. “Woke” means charging a single mom higher costs to drive to work and feed her kids while the Prime Minister jets around using Canadian tax dollars and pumping emissions into our atmosphere. That is the woke hypocrisy across the way. If he has the guts to tell the truth, he will tell us this: How much will carbon tax 2 cost Canadians?
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