- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33
- Government Page
- May/9/24 11:35:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, health care is super important to Canadians. Our health care system is ailing. We do not have enough doctors as it is. What drives me crazy is not just that we are going to pay $56 billion of interest on the debt, but also the fact that we have turned down $59 billion for LNG from Germany, $59 billion of revenue from Japan for LNG, another $60 billion from the Netherlands for LNG. Those are all things the Liberal government has turned down. That money could help pay off the debt and help our health care system.
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- May/7/24 10:15:56 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member is from Quebec. He knows that Quebec already has a pharmacare program.
Would he rather have a program run by the federal government or by Quebec?
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- May/6/24 8:20:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, by now, Canadians are used to broken promises from the Liberals. In 2015, members will remember that they were going to make housing affordable, and now housing prices, mortgages and rents have doubled. They also promised the last election under first-past-the-post, but maybe not.
However, on pharmacare, I think maybe Canadians need a history lesson because the Liberals have been promising to do pharmacare since 1992, and they have never done it. The bill before us is also not pharmacare. It is a plan to get a plan to maybe do pharmacare. It is not going to be national. Quebec has already said that it is not going to participate.
Could the member just admit that this is an attempt to pacify the NDP to make sure that it does not pull its support and trigger an election?
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- May/6/24 7:35:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when I studied pharmacare at the health committee, we heard from the Parliamentary Budget Officer and multiple stakeholders that 95% of Canadians already have prescription medication coverage, and most of them are covered for 15,000 drugs, not two, like this lame bill that we have before us. Not only that, but the Liberals want to have the critical medications for Canadians delivered to them by the same fantastic bunch that cannot get a passport out the door in seven months and that have a 30% error rate in CRA. Is that who we want to manage the critical medications of Canadians? What could possibly go wrong?
Would the member just admit that this bill is a pacifier for the NDP, to keep them from pulling their support and calling an election?
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- May/6/24 7:03:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I studied the pharmacare system when I served on the Standing Committee on Health. The Liberals did not do anything until they introduced this bill.
The Quebec system has a list of drugs, a formulary, and I think it is the best system in the country. What does the member think about the fact that this bill targets only two drugs for this pharmacare system?
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak once more to Bill C-35, an act respecting early learning and child care in Canada, with respect to the amendments that were provided by the Senate.
First, let me reiterate the Conservative Party's support for child care and for supporting women entering or re-entering the workforce as they balance their family lives. We want to see Canadians have equal access to child care in the forms that fit their families. This goes far beyond the Liberals' $10-a-day day care spots to include traditional day care centres; centres with extended, part-time or overnight care; nurseries; flexible and drop-in care; before- and after-school care; pre-schools and co-op child care; faith-based care; unique programming to support children with disabilities; home-based care; nannies and shared nannies; au pairs; stay-at-home parents; guardians who raise their own children; and family members, friends or neighbours who provide care. This is what it means to make up and support community, and our children and our grandchildren are some of the most vulnerable members in our communities. They all deserve high-quality care in the chosen style of their caretakers.
However, my Liberal colleagues have been clear that they do not want to amend the bill overall to include choice for parents. This is unhelpful for a variety of reasons. So many Canadian parents are not in a position to send their children to traditional day care during conventional work hours. First responders, medical personnel, military members, truck drivers and a whole host of others must work through the nights, weekends and holidays, when many traditional day care centres are closed, and they thus require specialized care. Do they not deserve flexible options that suit their needs, especially when so many of their jobs are community focused? Anyone working unconventional shifts to provide for themselves and their families is just as deserving of high-quality affordable child care as those who work Monday to Friday, nine to five.
I have personal experience in this realm. I raised my two daughters while travelling extensively for work as a chemical engineer. I have previously in the House discussed the challenges of securing child care for them while working around my busy travel schedule, especially when factoring in the realities of travel, which include delays, changed timelines and flights cancelled altogether. Families absolutely need options that work for their individual needs. When Conservatives form government, we would honour the provincial and territorial agreements and ensure parents have the choice and flexibility they deserve to remove the Liberal ideological shackles, if they so desire.
With regard to the Senate amendment of Bill C-35, the bill already contained references to the official language minority communities, or OLMCs, when it was sent to the Senate. However, the bill did not originally include any reference to them until the Conservative amendments were made during the clause-by-clause review done at HUMA and we introduced these safeguards. The references to the OLMCs in the bill now include a provision that federal investments related to programs and services for the education and care of young children should be guided by the commitments outlined in the Official Languages Act, and the inclusion of OLMCs and indigenous peoples in the composition of the National Advisory Council on Early Learning and Child Care.
We are grateful to the hon. senator from Acadia who proposed an amendment to include a reference in clause 8 to eliminate any ambiguity before the courts, and we continue to support his amendment today. The amendment would add the words “official language minority communities” to the first sentence of clause 8, after “including early learning and child care programs and services for Indigenous peoples”, and would divide clause 8 into two paragraphs. The first paragraph would then outline the government's financial commitment, while the second would specify the mechanisms through which the federal government would provide funding. To allay any remaining hesitancy, under no circumstances is it the intention to create a new direct-negotiation mechanism between the federal government and the OLMCs. The amendment text is very clear on this matter. Furthermore, adding a mention of OLMCs after the word “including” would not in any way diminish the rights of any other minority or indigenous peoples.
Clause 3 of the bill explicitly states that it would not infringe upon the rights of indigenous peoples as “recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982”. The amendment is simply to clarify the intent to ensure the consideration of OLMCs as stipulated in clauses 7 and 11.
There has been much study done on early childhood as a critical period for language development and the identity development of children. Access to French language early childhood services is often a necessary condition for the transmission of language and culture in French communities. These services help young children acquire the language skills they need to prepare for education, especially for children who will enter French language or immersion schools across the country. This is all upholding the right to education enshrined in section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Critically, and to assuage fears from across the aisle, this amendment does not introduce any new funding mechanism and merely aims to clarify financial commitments. Especially with Sarnia—Lambton recently receiving the official Francophone designation and with French language use in danger throughout the country, it is more critical than ever to establish and protect these services for our official language minority communities.
This amendment was adopted by a large majority of senators, who clearly understand and appreciate both the need to increase child care spaces and access to them and the need to deliver services across the board in both of our official Canadian languages. It is clear now more than ever just how important and critical child care is, in terms of both obtaining an early child care space and maintaining it if one is lucky enough to have one, for recruiting and retaining women in the workforce.
The employment rate for young women has been on a strong downward trend since last February, with a cumulative decline of 4.2% over that period. This is the lowest since May 2020, excluding the pandemic. More than 46% of parents reported difficulty finding child care in 2023, which is up from 36.4% in 2019, so more parents are having trouble finding child care now, in the era of the Liberals' $10-a-day child care, than before.
A column in the Financial Post last week alleges that the Liberals' national child care plan is proving to be “an expensive shambles, creating widespread shortages and destroying private child care businesses”. This problem spans the country, with issues from Newfoundland and Labrador to British Columbia.
This week there has been a slate of news reports across the country, with headlines despairing over the lack of access to child care, including the Liberals' $10-a-day program. Day care operators, including the owner of Little Heroes Daycare Centre here in Ottawa, say they cannot turn a profit and are not even breaking even since opting in to the $10-a-day program, which they did out of their desire to assist their families, to their own detriment.
To further illustrate, as part of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women's current study of women's economic empowerment, the executive director of the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, which represents independent licensed child care centres, said, “[W]e have a sector of the economy that was largely created by women. It's essential to women's equality in the workforce. It's one of the only economic sectors in the country where women are fairly represented as owners and managers, and it's being not only undervalued by government but targeted for replacement by a government-run system.”
The Liberals are undercutting their own economy once again and pushing costs onto taxpayers while denying Canadians the freedom to choose what works best for their families. What is more is that one of the main goals of the $10-a-day plan was to enable women to join the workforce in greater numbers, but a recent Fraser Institute report looking at that issue indicates there is “little evidence” whether the Liberal program is reaching its stated goals. It reads, “There is also little evidence that the federal government is achieving [the second] goal of boosting the labour force participation of women with children.”
As the StatsCan data I quoted earlier shows, the employment rate for young women is on a downward trend. It is another example of the problem of the Prime Minister's fake feminism.
I will be generous and allow that the pandemic exacerbated the issues of child care, and many well-meaning parents changed their plans and their lives to accommodate for a more precarious world, either changing work hours to watch children, changing jobs or leaving the workforce altogether. However, the Liberals owe Canadian parents and families that much more for letting them down in the first place.
Conservatives, when we form government, will put Canadians first and prioritize freedom of choice and family life, empowering parents to make the decisions that best serve their child care needs and not just what the government prescribes.
If I look over the history of my own journey with child care, I will say that it is very difficult when only one in 10 families are covered by the existing program. That is nine out of 10 families that are not. I have people calling my office asking if I can help them find child care. It is almost impossible.
I had some very wonderful child care providers and some not-so-wonderful child care providers. Ms. Betty was a school teacher who was off with her own kids. She was probably a better mother than I will ever be, so that was great. She was flexible, because I could drop the kids off at 5:30 in the morning if I had to catch a flight at six o'clock. If a flight was cancelled, late, or the kids had to stay late, she had flexibility. That is really important for a lot of workers today.
Similarly, I had Joanne, who was wonderful. She was a stay-at-home mom with her kids. Once again, she was flexible and gave excellent care. However, she moved and I was left in a cycle of trying to find child care. It started with Sarah, who was a mom at the preschool that my kids went to, but once my kids were eating cat food on her stairs, I had to find another one. Then there was the student who was smoking weed and hanging out with her boyfriend. That one went away. Then there was Karen. I should have known maybe just by the name, but she was watching soaps when I came home and found out she has let my kids go swimming with a male neighbour some place up the road. That was not so great. There was a happy occasion with Generations Day Care in Petrolia, which was a wonderful experience. It was certainly expensive, but worth it. The pinnacle was Andrea, an ECE worker who became my nanny. She was able to stay overnight if I needed, make meals if I was travelling, and do anything that was needed. When my kids got older and went to high school, she opened her own day care and they ended up working there, so that was fantastic.
There is a lot of need. We need more care and in order to get more care we have to build on the $10-a-day child care and we have to allow parents to have choices. We have to figure out how we are going to help with those, because I think that is fair.
We also need to consider that, with the inflation we are seeing, the cost of food and heating is going up, and the interest rates are going up. All of these pressures are really affecting the cost of providing child care. I know when we studied this issue at the status of women committee we looked at the Quebec model. At the time, Quebec was charging less than $10 a day for day care and the actual cost was more like $47 or $48, which would have hugely increased now. However, the comment was that there were still long wait-lists. Therefore, I do not think it is good to have $10-a-day day care if there are no spaces. We need to provide more spaces. We need to be creative in figuring out how we help people get child care and broaden their freedom of choice so that people who work weird hours can get coverage, and people who have special needs children can get the care they need. All of these things I think will be important.
I know all of the provincial and territorial agreements have been signed. I always hear the Liberals whining about Conservatives wasting the time of the House on concurrence motions, but here we are debating something where the agreements have already been signed. Why do we have everyone state on the public record that we support this program when that is the case? We should move on.
Finally, I want to reiterate some of the things that have been implied. The members opposite have implied that Conservatives do not support this program. That is not true. We do support child care. Anyone can go to openparliament.ca and see that we all voted yes on Bill C-35.
I think there is more work to be done in this area. I certainly would like to see the government come forward with something that would not only address an increase in spaces but also help those who are less fortunate. We see that 71% of people who are taking advantage of the $10-a-day day care are higher-income people, whereas only 41% are lower-income ones. That does not seem right to me. I think there needs to be a means test. There needs to be something that favours those who need the help the most, because obviously we do not have enough spaces, so we have to prioritize.
If we could work with the provinces and territories to create some flexibility, I think that would help the private day cares. We need more spaces. We cannot afford to lose the ones we have, and that is what is happening. I am hearing from day care providers that are not eligible for this program that they are struggling, and many of them are even going out of business. I have heard from the ones that are in the program that they are having issues with cash flow because of the way the remuneration works.
I think there is more work to be done on this, but certainly we need to move in this direction. We want to see more women in the workforce. I certainly experienced the highs and the lows of child care, and would rather head in the direction of highs.
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- Feb/29/24 5:11:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, just to clarify, if people have been listening to the debates, they will know that Conservatives have consistently said that we support child care, and our leader is on the record as saying he is going to honour the agreements with provinces and territories, so I do not appreciate the efforts of the members opposite to spread misinformation and disinformation.
My question for the member is this: One out of 10 people is actually being served by the $10-a-day day care program that exists now, and there is a huge need, so does the government recognize that this is the tip of the iceberg and that so much more is needed if we are really going to solve the problem of affordable day care in Canada?
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- Feb/15/24 12:21:00 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I acknowledge the member's work with his palliative care motion, which led to my bringing the palliative care bill to Parliament. He may be aware that the five-year review shows an increase in people who have accessed palliative care from 30% to 58%. There is still a long way to go.
My question for the member has to do with the Truchon decision, which he talked about. I agree that it should have been appealed to the Supreme Court, but the government today can still ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on it. I think that is what the government should do. Does the member agree?
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- Feb/14/24 2:10:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, Canadians know that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. In this era of insane inflation, housing crisis and food prices that are through the roof, the Prime Minister is hiking the carbon tax again on April 1. The Liberals want to quadruple it to 61¢ a litre. Canadians are crying out for relief, but the government instead wants to keep digging deeper into our pockets to fund its corrupt overspending. The carbon tax makes food more expensive at every stage. When one taxes the farmer who grows the food and the trucker who transports the food, one taxes the people who buy the food.
The carbon tax does nothing to reduce emissions but forces Canadians into poverty and homelessness. The end result of the Liberals' failed carbon tax experiment is the two million Canadians who are now using food banks. This is unacceptable.
Conservatives will continue to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
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- Feb/13/24 2:53:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister wasted more than $60 million on his ArriveCAN scam app, and he is going to make Canadians pay more by quadrupling the carbon tax. It is going up 23% on April 1. After eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, it is no surprise, but this Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Why do Canadians have to foot the bill for the government's corrupt spending?
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- Feb/6/24 1:52:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I understand that our leader is visiting the Port of Montreal. Apparently, when it comes to cars that have trackers on them, owners can tell that their cars have gone to the Port of Montreal overnight and are shipped away to foreign countries. Clearly we need more resources there to detect and to retrieve these cars.
Would the member like to elaborate?
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- Feb/6/24 1:51:14 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, I was really surprised to see the Liberals issue a press announcement that talked about the huge increase in car theft since they were elected in 2015. It is interesting that they did nothing about the problem, other than make it worse with Bill C-75 and Bill C-5, until we started raising the issue. Now the Liberals' answer is a meeting.
Would the member agree that this is simply not enough?
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- Feb/2/24 10:57:39 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have signed more than 50 trade agreements that have never contained any clause at all about carbon pricing. Ukraine already has a carbon price. I do not know why we would put equal carbon pricing, protection against carbon leakage and all of this kind of stuff into the contract. That is exactly what it does not need. Therefore, why will the Liberals not just take it out? We can then unanimously support the trade agreement.
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- Feb/2/24 10:27:02 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do not think that the Liberal government can fix anything at all when it comes to corruption, because they are experts in the matter.
We have signed many agreements with other countries and none of them mention the carbon tax. Why does the Canada-Ukraine agreement now talk about that? I do not know. We would support the agreement if any mention of carbon pricing were removed and replaced with something else.
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- Dec/13/23 5:14:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member opposite certainly has tried to summon every boogeyman he can think of.
Canadians are seeing in their pocketbooks that they cannot afford to buy groceries and they cannot afford to pay their heating bills. They are seeing the carbon tax line. I get calls to my office all the time about it. I am sure that the member opposite is getting the same kinds of calls from people who are concerned about the increasing cost of groceries and the increasing cost of the carbon tax on everything.
Is he not receiving those calls?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for highlighting the importance of getting Bill C-234 across the line. Could she once again explain to the members opposite how the carbon tax escalates the cost of food throughout the supply chain?
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- Nov/2/23 4:08:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there was a lot of talk about hypocrisy in this debate, but maybe the member opposite could help me understand something.
For eight long years, we have been listening to the Liberals try to justify a carbon tax based on driving people to lower their carbon footprint, but then they take the tax off heavy oil and continue to punish people who are using lower-carbon fuels like propane, natural gas or electricity. Could the member help me understand this ridiculous policy the Liberals have come forward with?
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Mr. Speaker, that was a good speech.
Before question period, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government said that Canada was a good place for investors.
However, investors keep leaving. There are a lot of rules, like those arising from the passage of Bill C‑69, the carbon tax is too high, and we have measures that do not exist in other countries.
Why is there nothing in this bill to deal with that problem?
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- Oct/26/23 10:55:16 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, on a point of order, I would say that, according to the new rules, we are not supposed to be name-calling. On it referring to a specific individual, there were two members opposite who raised the specific issue of cars on fire, which was raised by me. I did correct the record that the transportation statistics say that 3.5% of those vehicles—
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Madam Speaker, I would say that it is a global problem. If we look at the percentage of the global problem that is due to people using heavy oil and coal, we can talk about that 50% and how Canada's LNG could actually cut that by 75%. That would be something worth doing in the world. Instead, our 18 LNG projects were cancelled. Can we guess what happened then? The 18 LNG projects popped up in the Nordic countries, so the carbon footprint did not leave the planet; only the jobs and prosperity for Canadians did.
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