SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 285 - Feb/26/24

Mr. Eric Duncan (Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, CPC)

Feb/26/24 2:17:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption. The details and cost of the arrive scam app, at $60 million and counting, get worse by the day. Now the NDP is pretending to be outraged by the facts being uncovered. However, when the Prime Minister needed to approve the millions of dollars he funnelled to companies such as GC Strategies, the truth is that his costly coalition partners in the NDP and the Bloc voted to prop him up and allow this spending to take place, further enabling all this corruption and incompetence. GC Strategies did no actual work and got $20 million of taxpayers' money. The record shows that the NDP voted with the Liberals to allow the arrive scam spending to continue, with all these money-for-nothing contracts, at least eight times. It gets worse the more we know. The truth is this: The NDP refused to block this spending and is complicit in it. After eight years, the Prime Minister and his NDP buddies are not worth the cost or the corruption.

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Context: House Hansard - 285 - Feb/26/24

Mr. Eric Duncan (Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, CPC)

Feb/26/24 6:17:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada is in a housing crisis. There is not one part of this country that has not been negatively impacted after eight years of this Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal record. Housing prices have doubled; rents have doubled, and at a time when we need to build more houses, five million homes in the coming years just to meet demand, we are actually seeing housing starts and construction starts drop in Canada year over year. It is a very dangerous trend to begin with, and the numbers ahead only look worse. One of the worst problems we have in this country is with gatekeepers, and I am going to make the argument that the Liberal government, over the course of eight years, has been one of the worst gatekeepers at both a macro and a micro level. At a macro level, we have the Liberals being gatekeepers because they have doubled our national debt, which has resulted in 40-year-high inflation, and now we are seeing interest rates unlike any we have seen in decades. To build a new home in my part of eastern Ontario, whether it be in the united counties of SDG or the city of Cornwall, the cost to build and the cost of a mortgage for any family that desperately needs a place to live are becoming more and more out of reach, not easier. However, the micro level, where the Liberal government is gatekeeping and blocking new homes and units from being built is right in the city of Cornwall by the Liberals' own transport minister and department. Here is a bit of background. For the last eight years, Liberal candidates locally, and numerous ones after that in the Liberal government, have promised to divest a bunch of waterfront lands in Cornwall, and the City of Cornwall and Akwesasne want to return those to local say and local control. For eight years, they have dithered, delayed, done these vague consultations and over and over again spun their wheels, with bureaucrats contradicting each other. It has been an absolute mess. The record is very clear. The Liberals have had eight years, and they have not even moved any of these parcels of land forward an inch to progress. Now it is getting bad, because there is one small parcel, Parcel 6, at the intersection of Water and Brookdale, where the City of Cornwall is reviewing an application to build a private-developer building of 506 units in two towers on Brookdale Avenue, which is a significant investment that is desperately needed to increase supply. We need more places to live, and this gets 506 in the right direction. However, Transport Canada, with lawyers and bureaucrats and back-and-forth, are still dithering and delaying even on getting this one parcel transferred to local control between the City of Cornwall and the Federal Bridge Corporation just south of it, to allow council to know that they own that intersection, that they can put the entrance into it so that the developer can get it under way and council can approve it once it has all the information. Months and months later, the mayor and Akwesasne Grand Chief Abram Benedict are all on record saying that they want to see this parcel transferred. They want to see it come to local ownership so that council has all the tools and information to try to finalize the site plan and approval for this project. However, Transport Canada and the Liberal government are blocking it. I asked my original question on this topic a couple of weeks ago, but I did not get even a semblance of an answer about Cornwall and this project specifically. Now that the Liberal government has had it and knew that I was coming here for this debate tonight on this topic, what is the update from the Liberals on finally getting even this one parcel intersection transferred, so that we can make a decision and try to get more units built in the city of Cornwall?

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Context: House Hansard - 285 - Feb/26/24

Mr. Eric Duncan

Feb/26/24 6:25:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, tonight the Liberals knew that I was coming to ask a very specific question about the negotiations and transfer of a specific parcel that the federal government owns. People who live in the city of Cornwall, are on council, are staff members or are members of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne are getting caught up in red tape. They cannot get a straight answer. After eight years, they cannot even transfer one single piece of property. I do not think the member could even point Cornwall out on a map, let alone know the intersection or what we are talking about here. The bar was so low for me to come here tonight to just get an update on the timeline and the plans to get this done. The City of Cornwall, Akwesasne and the Federal Bridge Corporation are all on board with the solution. No wonder housing prices have doubled. No wonder there are tent cities. No wonder the number of housing starts are dropping in this country. It was a low bar. I told the government I would come here tonight to ask about this and what the government's plan was. It could not even give a basic update. I will ask one more time, and the government has known for weeks what the question is. What is the plan? What is the update on the specific piece of property and the plan to get it done?

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