- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Edmonton Manning
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $109,026.29
- Government Page
- May/7/24 12:47:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my question for the member from the Bloc Québécois is this: How much extra hydro energy does Quebec have, and what does it do with the product?
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Madam Speaker, Bill C-64 is a classic example of the legislation the Liberal government has brought before this Parliament. Once again, it has over-promised and under-delivered.
When the leader of the NDP sold his party's soul and coincidentally guaranteed that he would receive a pension for his efforts, many people thought he got too little for it. New Democrats did not even get 30 pieces of silver, as they betrayed their ideal and the Canadian people.
What has this betrayal cost Canadians? Inflation continues at record levels, fuelled by the carbon tax. Housing costs have doubled. Health care has vanished. Food bank use is at record levels. The immigration system is broken. Our military suffers from neglect, and foreign governments try to influence our elections. The Liberal response is to shrug. Canada has become a joke on the world stage.
What does the NDP receive for this blind support of the Prime Minister and his disastrous policies? It receives a promise to look at what it would take to establish a national pharmacare program. It is not even that, really.
Canadians thought a pharmacare plan would cover their drug costs. For the majority of the country, this was not a pressing issue. According to The Conference Board of Canada, 97% of Canadians are already eligible for some form of drug coverage, although the final report of the advisory council on the implementation of national pharmacare indicated that 20% of Canadians receive what could be termed inadequate coverage. In December of last year, a Leger poll indicated that only 18% of Canadians thought the establishment of a national pharmacare program was a health care priority.
It may come as a surprise to the Liberals and the NDP, but Canadians are worried about rising prices on everything, due in large part to the carbon tax. When people are worried about being able to feed their family, pay the rent or mortgage and put gas in their car so they can get to work, they do not spend much time thinking about a drug plan that does not cover the medications they need.
Canadians were hoping the Liberals could get it right. That turns out to have been a false hope. On this issue, as on many others, the Liberals are proving once again to have no idea what they are doing. The Liberal idea of pharmacare is restricted to just two types of medication. If one suffers from heart disease, one is out of luck. Heart disease is the second-leading cause of death in Canada, but medication for it would not be covered.
The Liberals' approach to pharmacare reminds me of their approach to Canadian liquid natural gas, or LNG. When the chancellor of Germany came to Canada looking to buy Canadian LNG, the Prime Minister told him there was no business case for such exports. That was a huge surprise to those companies looking to expand their markets.
Not only is there a business case for Canadian LNG, but there is a moral one as well. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, countries are looking to replace Russian LNG and have turned to Canada, only to be told by the Canadian government that it does not want to sell Canadian LNG. The Prime Minister needs to learn that when there is a customer willing to buy the product, there is indeed a business case to support it. If Germany and Japan and Greece want to buy Canadian LNG, why would we not want to sell it to them?
A previous prime minister asked farmers, “Why should I sell your wheat?” This tells buyers there is not a business case to sell them the product they are asking for, while at the same time offering Canadians a pharmacare program they did not ask for, a plan so flawed it is unlikely to work.
This is the government that promised a firearms buyback program four years ago. So far, it has not managed to launch it, yet it wants Canadians to believe it has the skills necessary to design and implement a pharmacare program. Put simply, what is being offered is not pharmacare.
It is just another Liberal election gimmick, a promise they will campaign on in 2025, hoping that voters will not look at how many promises they have already broken. Anyone who has looked at the current state of drug coverage in Canada is concerned by this attempt to create additional bureaucracy. We already have some public drug plans; they do not seem to be as good as the private ones. Private drug insurance plans cover many more different medications than public plans do. The difference varies by province, but, on average, private coverage is 51% more extensive than its public counterpart is. In Quebec, the figure is 59.6%. Then there are the delays. Once a drug is approved by Health Canada, it takes an average of 226 days for a private insurer to approve the coverage. By contrast, it takes 732 days for approval by Health Canada, or a little over three times as long, for a public plan to add a drug to its list of covered treatments. These figures do not paint a rosy picture of the ability of public insurance to meet the Canadians' needs.
The marriage contract between the Liberals and the NDP required that the bill come before us last year. It did not. It took the Liberals two years to come up with the legislation, a bill that seems to have been put together without much thought, just to meet a deadline. Given how weak the bill is, I can only imagine what the first draft looked like. Maybe it was just one line, such as “We promise to look at establishing a pharmacare program in the hopes people will vote for us before we have to deliver.” Wait, is that not what Bill C-64 is?
After almost nine years of misgovernment, incompetence and mismanagement from the Liberal-NDP coalition, Canadians have lost all faith in the government's ability to discharge its responsibilities. What is the cost of this national pharmacare program? With two years to look into it, the Liberals either did not think to ask or are afraid to tell Canadians just how much more they want to raise taxes to pay for a plan that would benefit almost no one.
The bill is a public relations exercise by an utterly desperate government that is disliked by more and more Canadians every day. The inability of the Liberals to deliver on their promises is well known. Already, two provinces have opted out of this program. There is no indication that other provinces are interested. One would have thought that, in attempting to create a national program in an area of provincial jurisdiction, the Liberals would have consulted with the provinces. One might have expected that they would have hearings and consultations with stakeholders to see what exists now, what needs to be improved and the best way to do that. As far as I can tell, all they did was ask the NDP the minimum they could promise to keep the NDP's support.
Can the Minister of Health tell us what impact the bill will have on the 27 million Canadians who rely on privately administered workplace plans? If he is an honest man, he cannot, because he does not know. There was no consultation with the insurance industries when the bill was being drafted. Maybe he felt there was no need to check the facts. A promise had been made by the NDP, and the Liberals had to deliver. The needs and wishes for the Canadian people were not worthy of consideration. What is not worthy of consideration is this sad attempt at legislation; Canadians deserve much better than that.
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- Feb/15/24 11:32:55 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member read a letter from a constituent. Conservatives also receive letters that speak in a different way about the dignity they look for and how they want their lives to be treated based on MAID and the new law that will be put in place.
If the hon. member's emphasis is on the humanitarian and compassionate side of this, would it not apply to every Canadian rather than just narrowing it to Quebec? I understand and respect that he represents a Quebec riding, but we need to look at something that applies to all Canadians. I think that is the purpose behind what we are debating today.
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- Feb/1/24 11:35:54 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the hon. member talks about wanting to solve the environmental issues, but only from lens of what suits Quebec. It does not suit other places, such as Alberta, where the temperature was -50°C a few weeks ago. The carbon tax is not working. Emissions are not being reduced, and Canadians are paying more than they receive.
If the system is not working, does the member believe that we should continue with it, or should we halt it to move to another way of dealing with the environment?
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member touched on many subjects and topics in his intervention. He talked about Quebec separating. In his opinion, what is stopping Quebec from separating?
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- Jun/1/23 3:55:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it does not seem that Quebec has this problem to begin with, so I am not sure where the Bloc Québécois is coming from on this specific point. I am not suggesting, and I have not suggested ever, that we should really allow corporations or anyone to do whatever they want. We have to work with everyone. That is why I spoke about technologies. That is why I spoke about innovation. Those are going to be done only with businesses that they know better and with us, to make sure we remove any red tape and the gatekeepers from their way so they can do their job. At the end of the day, we are all Canadians and we all have to work with each other to achieve a worthy goal.
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- Oct/31/22 3:59:28 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, on the same note, there is going to be a time, as I indicated in my speech, when we all have concerns about the environment. No one has more concerns than others in that competition toward a better environment, clean water.
I am surprised to hear the question from Quebec, where sewage is being dropped in the rivers in Quebec. Where is the Bloc Québécois on that? Why have they never raised that in the House of Commons? Why are they trying to question the Conservative Party on our vision and our belief in a better environment, cleaner water and cleaner air?
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Madam Speaker, Quebec was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the law that was passed under the Harper government in 2011.
The hon. member was asking about the fluctuation of the numbers here and there. I think the speech made it very clear how this happened and what the formula should look like. The bill that is presented here is also very clear. We will wait and see what happens with the vote in a few hours.
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- Feb/21/22 12:16:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, yesterday, I was listening to a speech of an NDP member who was talking about the far right and the far left. I will call members of the NDP today the far lost. They are lost and do not remember their history. Quebec is remembering the history, but the members of the NDP are not. I would call on those members to vote no today just to be on the right side of history.
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- Feb/21/22 12:14:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I can see that the Bloc Québécois and Quebeckers remember that dark chapter when people were arrested without any link and victims were lumped together with criminals. At that time, what was done was unnecessary and it was done on an imaginary basis. I will support an apology to Quebec and Quebeckers, because I believe that chapter of our history has to be turned forever.
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