44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 30, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am grateful to rise in this debate about securing the future for Canadians. With your indulgence, this is also my inaugural speech.
As I first stepped into the chamber, Fania Wedro, or Fanny as she was belovedly known, was on my mind. The last I saw her, she had offered up a bottomless spread of her legendary blintzes. I loved Fanny and even as her body began to fail it was the intensity of her eyes I remembered. This was a woman of indomitable strength. She survived the Holocaust. She built a business and a family with her husband Leo. She founded the Canadian Magen David Adom.
At the University of Calgary convocation where she received her honorary doctorate of law, the woman who was forced to shovel dirt over Nazi mass graves, which would have included her mother; the woman who escaped a fire-engulfed ghetto, taking refuge in empty pits; and hid in a forest for nearly a year, said this, “Don’t think that standing here before you is a 95-year-old woman. In front of you is a 14-year-old girl whose life was taken away, was left with no parents, no grandparents, no relatives, no one. And yet I had to go out into the world. And let me tell you...it’s a wonderful world. Spread light into the world. Cherish and respect your country.”
Shadows define the light. In her final days, as her new member of Parliament, I made a promise to Fanny that I would fight those who would tear our country down. I bade her farewell with a kiss on both her cheeks and, on her insistence, I took a blintz on the road. Fanny died days before her birthday, on August 27 this year.
As I stood at the entrance to this chamber, her memory was the blessing I carried here with me. Five days later, I watched this chamber be desecrated by the presence of a Nazi whose hate-filled collaborators were Fanny's oppressors.
In the last 21 days, I have watched the world forget “never again”, replaced instead with the horrifying resurgence of the ancient hatred unleashed by tyrants determined to unravel our alliances: an anti-Semitic regime in Iran; the anti-Semitic pogrom at a Russian airport; Beijing's anti-Semitic propaganda imposed on its people; mobs across our streets glorifying terror and death; trafficking in tropes and hearts having turned to darkness.
A soul I treasure deeply in Israel today reminded me recently that the opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference. Across every issue I have watched debated in this chamber, I do not see a determined government rising to this moment. I see indifference and the politics of division: the single mother who may not have a home come December, waking up to news that one part of the country would get relief from the carbon tax destroying her dreams, but that she would not; waking up to an indifferent government offering up electing Liberals as her answer rather than axing the hated carbon tax for everyone; the newcomer and young couple presented with performative announcements rather than shovels in the ground to build homes and generate jobs, unshackling the lives they wish to lead; and seniors who, after paying into the system for a lifetime, watch the invisible thief of inflation denying them the retirement they were promised and they earned. These are my neighbours. Across the country, our neighbours are hurting and, for them, the promise of Canada is broken.
As I stand here today, I represent a riding of people, including former MP Bob Benzen, a gentleman businessman, who goes to work every day for an energy sector under systemic attack by a government indifferent to the consequences of its decisions. Unlocking our resources and enabling investment is the single most important nation-building decision Canada could make today for the benefit of every Canadian.
The just transition legislation would kill directly 170,000 jobs. It would reward our rivals in Russia and Iran as they scale production, subvert sanctions and fund their war machine at discounted prices to Beijing. It would punish our friends who need more Canada.
At precisely the time when Canadian resources represent over $3 trillion that would fuel, feed and secure the world; bring home paycheques for our people; build energy projects reducing emissions; build economic reconciliation with first nations; and rebuild our Armed Forces, the Prime Minister and his radical NDP-Liberals repeat Trudeau the father's failed legacies such as the national energy program that former MP Bobbie Sparrow ferociously fought and rampant inflation of non-stop tax hikes. One retired prison guard in eastern Ontario told me that in his lifetime he had never seen the government give money for food since war time.
Do members remember what Preston Manning said when eulogizing his father, the premier who unleashed Canada's energy sector? He said, “Do not let...[apathy] do to Canada what wars and depressions and hard times were unable to do. Continue to build.” I take heart in knowing it was not just democracies that won the wars of their age but that it was also Conservatives. It was Sir John A. Macdonald who fashioned and forged what today is among the oldest democracies on earth, upon ideas of freedom and ordered liberty rather than linguistic or religious division. It was Sir Winston Churchill who was recruited, after experiments with appeasement failed, to confront fascism with iron will while cautioning about an iron curtain in the age to come. It was Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney who pursued policies of peace through strength to defeat communism and reverse bad economic decisions.
I rise in Parliament from a seat once held by Preston Manning, who built the modern Conservative movement, and by Stephen Harper, whose Conservative government, even through global economic calamity, delivered a prospering Canada at peace with itself and confident in its future. Today, in Parliament, the leader of His Majesty's official opposition, our Conservative leader, the next prime minister of Canada, has been described by Daniel Hannan, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, as the most important Conservative in the world today because his is the leadership of conviction and not division.
Amid all the crime, chaos, drugs, disorder, economic anxiety and diplomatic disaster, I have been reflecting on what constitutes the kind of strength it takes to be the fighter my neighbours elected. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes the following about government:
...it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.
If what Lewis described is the purpose of the state, then what Natan Sharansky later writes about is the resiliency of the people for whom the state serves. He describes a town-square test, one in which anyone can walk into the middle of the town square and say anything they want, however odious it might be. The test distinguishes between a society of freedom and a society of fear; between a country capable of fierce debates and one ruled by state control, social unrest, and mob rule; between true patriot love at the heart of national life and the indifference of financial and moral corruption destroying it; and between those who build and those who are determined to tear everything down.
In the past eight long years, we have seen an NDP-Liberal wrecking ball take aim at and undermine 175 years of democratic tradition, resulting in broken trust across every institution in this country. We have seen Parliament and its honour be desecrated, in a chamber where government and opposition are separated by three sword lengths to engage in the fierce debates defining their age, with words not war, and where parliamentarians are elected as servants, not as masters of the people. All this is as clouds of war gather across faraway oceans: wars in the Middle East, war in Europe and the steady drumbeat of war in the lndo-Pacific, wars now threatening to overtake our streets and requiring leaders of conviction to step forward, pursue policies of peace through strength and unleash the freest, most prosperous country on earth.
Let me rise today in Parliament, the home of our democracy, as its newest member from Calgary Heritage, with an answer to the mob of woke ideologists and their allied extremists rolling across this land. Let me rise with an answer to those people, foreign and domestic, who would undo our democracy, imperil lives, erase history and attack our freedoms. Calgary Heritage is the rock upon which the woke wave of tyranny will crash and fail. Calgary Heritage will be a strong voice in a chorus of voices restoring the promise of this great country. Our heritage, our inheritance, is the very promise of Canada itself. For all the single mothers, we are going to restore the promise. For the senior, we are going to restore the promise. For the young couple and newcomer, we are going to restore the promise. We will never give in, never back down and never surrender before the cancel culture rage. To my dear and beloved friend, Fanny Wedro, I will never forget my promise to her. We will spread light into the world, we will cherish and respect this country and we will restore the promise of Canada, for her.
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Madam Speaker, that was partisan invective. I think it is always enriching to hear that in the chamber. We know that the member is a master of that in all his interventions. I have been here for only a minute, but I have been able to listen to his commentary. Sometimes I wonder what kind of fantasyland he is living in.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper left this country as a singularity among its peers. It was the fastest-growing economy on the planet. Its middle class was expanding while every other middle class in the world was retracting. It established trade deals with every region of the world, from Atlantic to Pacific, preparing us for the world to come and giving Canadians the opportunity to compete, invest and grow in stature in the world. He led a principled foreign policy that did not equivocate over simple issues of good versus evil. Let me just say that the former prime minister was a giant of our times and the best prime minister of my lifetime, and that I am grateful for his service.
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Madam Speaker, of the 55,000 doors that my campaign members knocked on, 24,000 of which I did with a couple of friends, I had the opportunity to meet Canadians from all walks of life, Calgarians who are hurting and struggling under the yoke of NDP-Liberal tyranny. I have watched the NDP-Liberals spend the last number of years destroying their livelihoods, imposing a carbon tax on them that makes life completely untenable.
For the women, seniors, newcomers and young couples whom I represent and serve, the savings that would be accomplished by axing the carbon tax alone would allow them to think beyond the next two or three months. It would allow them to think about the way they would respond to the inflationary pressures of the time. Mortgage payments are out of control. The cost of groceries and food is out of control. The cost of fuel is out of control. This is all because of the poverty-crushing, identity-trafficking, NDP-Liberal coalition government.
I am here proudly to represent the idea that every human being has inherent dignity and worth, and that in us, they have a fighter.
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Madam Speaker, when government invents means to interfere in the lives of people, to control what they see and think online, and when government is sitting around wondering about ways in which it can try to solve problems for people, we usually see the expansion of the government doing things which are utterly unhelpful, ultimately. I appreciate the comments by my hon. colleague because I agree with him wholeheartedly. I think the best government is the one that gets out of the way—
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