- Member of Parliament
- Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- Conservative
- Red Deer—Lacombe
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,499.79
- Government Page
- Jun/15/22 2:41:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Emergency Preparedness made it clear last night at committee that the Minister of Public Safety has misled Canadians. The Prime Minister's “Open and Accountable Government” document also reads:
Ministers cannot dissociate themselves from or repudiate the decisions of Cabinet or their Ministry colleagues unless they resign from the Ministry.
Only one of these two ministers can be right. The Prime Minister cannot agree with both of them, so which one does he agree with, and when will the Prime Minister fire the Minister of Public Safety?
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- Jun/15/22 2:40:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Public Safety's own department confirmed that the police did not ask for the Emergencies Act to be invoked, and now the Minister of Emergency Preparedness has also publicly agreed.
In the Prime Minister's 2015 “Open and Accountable Government” document, he wrote:
For Canadians to trust our government we must trust Canadians, and we will only be successful in implementing our agenda to the extent that we earn and keep this trust.
The Minister of Public Safety has shattered that trust. When will the Prime Minister fire him?
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- Jun/14/22 2:37:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in 2015, the Prime Minister outlined his ministerial standards of conduct in his “Open and Accountable Government” document, and let me quote what it said:
To be worthy of Canadians’ trust, we must always act with integrity. This is not merely a matter of adopting the right rules, or of ensuring technical compliance with those rules. As Ministers, you and your staff must uphold the highest standards of honesty and impartiality....
The Minister of Public Safety no longer meets any of those standards. When will he resign?
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- Jun/14/22 2:35:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Public Safety continues to spread misinformation and cannot be trusted. As a former Crown prosecutor, he knows full well that his choice of words matters. He would have also known, when invoking the Emergencies Act in Canada, that everything he said would be tested against the law. However, the minister cannot find anyone to corroborate his story that law enforcement asked for the Emergencies Act to be invoked.
The only matter left unresolved is the minister's resignation, so when will he resign?
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- Mar/2/22 7:42:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what do we have here? We have a Liberal government that through its members' rhetoric and tone and the way they talk to Canadians, does an amazing job of sticking up for, and rightly so, the rights and freedoms and the jobs of the people here in Ottawa who were impacted, but with no consideration for the jobs that were lost by everybody who came here to protest.
The situation we end up with is that the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, according to the Liberals, are going to co-chair this committee. The Liberals would not even have been able to do this if it were not for the support of the NDP. Now the Liberals and their NDP coalition partners, who have been propping them up all along, are going to basically decide who gets called as witnesses, who gets to speak at the committee and whose testimony they are going to adopt at the committee as the basis of the report.
Any other political entity in this Parliament that supports this motion will be complicit in that. It is a dangerous precedent, because bypassing the official opposition and the role that it has here in Parliament is a dangerous precedent to set.
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- Mar/2/22 7:39:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is a completely asinine argument. The job of the official opposition is to hold the government to account and to make sure through robust debate and robust challenging of their decisions and of the policies they implement that the best thing happens for Canadians.
Suggesting that the opposition should not do its role and should align itself with an NDP chair who is complicit in implementing the act in the first place is not actually putting an opposition MP in the chair. It is putting a coalition MP in the chair. This is bypassing the actual adversarial effect of what our democracy is supposed to do when we challenge each other to get the best results for Canadians. I simply do not understand why the Liberals want an audience instead of an opposition.
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- Mar/2/22 7:28:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague for Calgary Shepard.
It is an honour to rise today to discuss this extremely serious matter. The unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act requires the utmost scrutiny, and the committee that will be struck is obviously going to play an essential role. The government's attempt to strong-arm the opposition and rig the committee to deliver a favourable outcome is not shocking given the history of the current government; nonetheless, it is unacceptable.
I want to start today by reminding Canadians how we got into this situation in the first place. When we take a step back to consider the actions taken by the Prime Minister and the Liberal government, the need for strong opposition oversight becomes even clearer.
In the early days of the pandemic, the Prime Minister acknowledged that mandating vaccinations would be a deeply divisive and socially harmful policy. That was about 13 months ago. He then saw an opening to try to move from a minority government to a majority, and decided that dividing Canadians and threatening the social fabric of our country would be worthwhile if it gave him a blank cheque for another four years.
While the Prime Minister has always been keen to divide Canadians and others who do not agree with him, recent months have seen him take it to a whole new level, charging those people who do not like his policies as racists or misogynists, or as holding unacceptable views and taking up space. He has taken to suggesting that hon. members of Parliament, even descendants of Holocaust survivors, are standing with Nazis.
What we are seeing is an increasingly tired, scandal-plagued Prime Minister clinging to the reins of power by stoking fear and division. Common-sense Canadians can see right through this. That is why thousands of Canadians from coast to coast left their homes to protest the Prime Minister's divisive policies and his decision to double down on vaccine mandates and restrictions when many provinces and countries around the world were lifting them.
The protesters came with a very simple message for the Prime Minister: Canadians want their rights and freedoms back, and it is time to allow Canadians to manage their risk tolerance for COVID-19 themselves, just as friends and family in other countries have been doing for months. Instead of speaking with them, understanding their concerns and trying to assuage their fears, the government continued to override Canadians' freedoms with no end in sight, and the Prime Minister resorted again to more name-calling.
Then, in a move I cannot fathom, the government and the NDP refused to support our Conservative motion asking for a plan to lift the mandate restrictions. Two years in, the Prime Minister does not believe that Canadians can be trusted with the metrics the government is using to justify public health measures. This is far from the commitment that the Liberal government made: In an open and accountable government, government data and information should be open by default. I wonder if the Liberals remember that pledge.
We cannot accept illegal activity at our borders or on our streets. Infringing on the rights and freedoms of fellow citizens while protesting the government cannot be accepted as the norm, but neither should we as Canadians accept dangerous and divisive rhetoric from the executive branch of our government meant to incite Canadians who disagree with it. It is clear that the Prime Minister no longer shares the guiding philosophy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier's sunny ways, but instead is relying on the winds of bluster.
This is in large part the backdrop against which the Emergencies Act was invoked. After years of insulting, shaming and marginalizing Canadians who disagreed with the Prime Minister, those Canadians rose up in opposition. The use of the Emergencies Act does appear to have been wholly inappropriate in this matter. Conservatives are extremely concerned that in striking the committee as the Liberals are proposing, they intend to simply stack the deck to skirt over the great many concerns that Canadians rightly have.
It is important to note that the existence of an emergency does not mean that the Emergencies Act is the proper tool to be used. I know that many Canadians impacted by the blockades felt that this was an emergency that required extraordinary intervention, but that is not the threshold for using it. In order to use this legislation, the predecessor of which was the War Measures Act, there can be no other options in our federal or provincial laws. We must not lose sight of this fact.
I have listened carefully to experts, including to police officers who were tasked with cleaning up the mess that the Prime Minister instigated. It is clear that the powers under the Emergencies Act were helpful in clearing the blockades, but again, whether they were used or were helpful is not the test for whether the act should have been invoked. It is whether the situation could have been dealt with in any other way through existing authorities. So far, I have seen no compelling evidence that it could not have been.
We know that the police can compel reasonable assistance from others at any point in time. This authority is laid out in the Criminal Code, and that would include calling tow-truck drivers.
We know that if police see a crime in progress, they are able to act on it even if they are outside their regular jurisdiction. Further, there is a process to deputize police from other departments or areas to act. This was done in Ottawa prior to the Emergencies Act being invoked, and it worked.
The Emergencies Act may have been more convenient, but it was not necessary. Convenience is not the test in the legislation. The increased offences that were granted under the Emergencies Act were not necessary, because there are already viable offences and authorities in the Criminal Code. The border blockades were coming down before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, so clearly it was not necessary in those instances. The financial measures were not necessary to bring down the blockades at our international borders, and we were already seeing crowdfunding platforms that were voluntarily cutting off funds without the need of this legislation. They also do not appear to have been charter-compliant, as individuals were assumed guilty and sanctioned by their banks without any due process.
These are all things that the committee needs to consider, and that we cannot simply allow to be swept under the rug by a committee designed to exonerate the Liberals' actions and justify the NDP's backing of them in an attempt to wipe the egg off their face from when they voted to affirm the act's use, only to have it withdrawn 36 hours later.
The government’s proposal for the structure of the committee is totally inadequate. As I have outlined, this committee has a very serious task ahead of it, and it ought to be credible. I appreciate that the views I have laid out, and that I have heard from my constituents, are likely not going to be universally accepted in this Chamber. However, they are valid views and deserve to be heard and considered.
A strong and represented opposition is essential for the functioning of our democracy. Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is beholden to the people of Canada, not to the cabinet, to members of the governing party or to their coalition partners. To try to minimize our role because they do not like what we might say or what we might have said in the past flies in the face of our parliamentary system.
While the Liberals have proved to be too comfortable in criticizing Canadians who disagree with them as holding unacceptable views, and it is their right to say so, no matter how arrogant it makes them sound, they are not the arbiters of acceptability for our parliamentary system. That is a role that is reserved for Canadians at the ballot box, not for the government House leader and the caucus that sits behind him.
While he may have threatened an election over the Emergencies Act, it did not happen and our voices are just as valid in this place, or at committee, as his or any other member's on the government benches.
To quote Sir Wilfred Laurier, a Prime Minister greatly admired by Liberals:
...it is indeed essential for the country that the shades of opinion which are represented on both sides of this House should be placed as far as possible on a footing of equality and that we should have a strong opposition to voice the views of those who do not think with the majority.
I ask the government to take that advice now.
While the government may be inclined to disavow its claimed beliefs for the sake of politics and retaining power, my colleagues in opposition should not have the same concerns. While I have spoken at length about the government’s attempt to vilify Canadians who disagree with it, it is important to remind hon. members that the government has also attempted to curtail the powers of the opposition on multiple occasions. The fact that it is now trying to marginalize the official opposition’s role in the committee because it knows we disagree with it is another link in a concerning pattern by the government to use policy and now procedure to punish those who disagree with it.
We should remember Motion 6, which attempted to marginalize the role of opposition back in 2016 and give the government broad sweeping powers here in Parliament. We should recall the attempts by the government in 2017 to change the Standing Orders so that the opposition would lose numerous tools to hold the government to account. In the early days of the pandemic, the Liberal government tried to give itself the authority, unilaterally and without parliamentary oversight, to raise or lower taxes as it saw fit for up to two years.
When these things happened, opposition parties banded together to say no and oppose the government. The ideological and policy differences that existed then still exist now, but that was not the point. We knew that for our democracy to function effectively, there must be a strong and capable opposition, even if we did not necessarily like what the other parties had to say. It is in that spirit that we should come together now.
In the absence of consensus, the Emergencies Act provides a formula that can be used for striking this committee. While I understand the frustration that some Liberal MPs may have, given that they do not have a Senate caucus, despite the independence of senators appointed by the Prime Minister being questionable, that frustration lies at their feet and at the feet of their Prime Minister who made that decision. They had every ability to harmonize the Emergencies Act with the current structure of the Senate over the past six years, and they did not do so.
Unfortunately, with a closure motion being forced on us to stifle debate, a decision must be made, and I would suggest that adhering to the formula set out in the Emergencies Act will help to ensure a fair and impartial assessment of this incident.
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- Feb/21/22 6:24:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today at a press conference the Prime Minister suggested, which he did not have the courtesy to do in the House but did so in front of the media, that a matter of this importance would of course be a matter of confidence before the House.
This is again a threat to his own caucus to keep the members in line, and a threat to the NDP. How mightily it has fallen. It is no longer the party looking after the working class. He is strong-arming both the NDP and his own backbench MPs through fear for an election that nobody wants at this time.
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- Feb/21/22 6:22:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, people who are scared do desperate things.
The Prime Minister is scared of losing the vote in the House, because he is scared of his own backbenchers. He is not only quelling protests across the country, he is quelling protests within his own caucus.
It is absolutely shameful that the Prime Minister grabs power wherever he can to cover up for his inability to properly govern this country and to cover up the mistakes. The fact of the matter is that he is a weak, ineffective prime minister.
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- Feb/21/22 6:21:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, how the Liberal government and Prime Minister have fallen.
Twenty months ago, we went from, “wash our hands and stay home so we can flatten the curve” to vaccine procurement bungling. Then we went to, “get vaccinated or we can't travel”, to “get vaccinated and still spend two weeks in a hotel against our will when we return to our home country”, to “get vaccinated or lose our jobs”, to “get vaccinated or we don't even get employment insurance”. Now there is the imposition of this act for the government to hunt down and seize the assets of Canadians based on intelligence from illegally hacked data sources of financial transactions.
This is a gross overreach of power. It is politically—
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- Feb/21/22 6:10:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what is a good prime minister?
A good prime minister cares about all of the people and all of the citizens he represents. A good prime minister takes every opportunity to bring people together and build consensus, thereby providing peace and harmony in the social fabric of the nation. A good prime minister will consider numerous factors in making decisions that are in the net best interests of everyone. A good prime minister puts the needs of the nation and its citizens ahead of the needs of his or her own political interests. This is especially true when issues of gravity and magnitude are before the nation.
A good prime minister de-escalates and reduces tensions and fosters co-operation and agreement wherever possible in the governance of the nation. A good prime minister does what is right and just without demonizing or belittling those who disagree with him. A good prime minister understands the concept of majority rule with respect to minority rights. A good prime minister would admit when he is wrong and change course before it is too late.
I do not believe we have a good Prime Minister. I believe we have a Prime Minister who cares more about his political fate and political future than he does about the needs of his citizens. I believe we have a Prime Minister who looks at moments of crisis as political opportunities to be used for political benefit, rather than managing the crisis and bringing peace and harmony back to the nation. I believe we have a Prime Minister who picks and chooses the facts or the science that supports his ideas and his ideology rather than looking at all sources of information and providing good governance for everyone. I believe we have a Prime Minister who does not understand the consequences of the decisions he makes.
It should have been entirely predictable in mid-August of 2021 that the politicization of mandatory vaccinations would divide the nation. A good prime minister would say this is not an issue that we should be politicizing and that we should never bypass people's charter rights and freedoms and force law-abiding Canadians to do something they fundamentally disagree with, even if many other Canadians disagree with them.
It should have been entirely predictable that when someone only accepts a particular source of science that confirms their beliefs and rejects and challenges all other sources, they are bound to make mistakes and fail the citizens of their country. I am referring to the science of mental health. Right now our nation is struggling. It is one thing to struggle against COVID-19, but it is quite another to struggle against the powers and forces of the people's own government working against them.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is widely accepted in the field of psychology. It is the theory of human motivation. The bottom of the pyramid of needs is represented by physiological need, such as food, clothing and shelter, as well as the need to belong and to be loved. A good prime minister would know these basic concepts and their impact on Canadians. A good prime minister would know that denying people the ability to travel and see their loved ones, their children and grandchildren, their parents and grandparents and other family members, and to participate in celebrations of life, weddings and other important milestones, would have a detrimental psychological effect on the nation. It is traumatizing.
A good prime minister would also know that one cannot deprive people of their basic physiological needs: food, clothing and shelter. A good prime minister would never take away the right of his citizens to work and earn a living to be able to pay for food, clothing and shelter for themselves and their loved ones. A good prime minister would not use the powers of the state to coerce citizens to abide by his policies against their free will. A good prime minister ought to know the trauma that this would cause in the population of the nation. A good prime minister would know that this trauma, over a period of months and now approaching two years, would leave people in a position where they have nothing left to lose.
A good prime minister knows that when people are traumatized and in crisis, they have two options: fight or flight. A good prime minister should know that at times like this, his words matter. I think the Prime Minister does know, and he also knows that when he name-calls and degrades Canadians who disagree with him, it hardens people's resolve and inflames tensions.
The mental health and social damage done by the imposition of mandates cannot be measured the same way that COVID cases and hospital counts can be measured, but a good prime minister would know his people and their sufferings and find solutions for all his citizens. It was entirely predictable that the politicization of vaccine mandates would create this trauma and inevitably force Canadians to cower or to fight. A good prime minister would never put his citizens in this position. A menacing prime minister would do this on purpose for his own political gain.
Here we are, with, at best, a careless and reckless Prime Minister who does not understand the consequences of his choices and actions or, at worst, a malicious Prime Minister whose only concern is winning the game of political division, and who is now invoking the most powerful law of the land: a law meant to be used for the absolute worst moments in our nation's history. It is not to be used by a Prime Minister to grab ultimate power to crush those who dissent and would dare stand and challenge him, embarrass him and humiliate him.
This power is immense, but this power has to meet certain thresholds in order for it to be used, and the government has not met that threshold. There is no police action being taken right now where the powers did not already exist for the police to break up blockades and restore peace and order. Every police officer in Canada has the full authority of the Criminal Code, in every part of Canada, to address any crime in progress. The Criminal Code has numerous provisions in it to end blockades and illegal protests. The argument the government is making is that the RCMP needed the ability to write parking tickets and enforce municipal bylaws in order to break up this blockade. A good Prime Minister would know that his citizens are not so stupid as to believe this argument.
However, the most fearsome power the government has claimed is that of using the banks and financial institutions of this country to deny Canadian citizens from effecting transactions from their bank accounts. Everything we do in our lives as citizens requires the ability to transact. Virtually every freedom we exercise as citizens has behind it a financial transaction. We have the right, or at least we used to have the right, to free speech and peaceful assembly, to worship as we choose and to travel without restrictions in our nation. All of that requires money. We are all, as Canadians, innocent before the law until proved guilty in a court where evidence is cross-examined before a judge, and none of us, as Canadians, could be punished without the due process of law, until now.
By invoking the Emergencies Act, the government has chosen to restrict the freedom to financially transact for those Canadians whom the government disagrees with. Without the freedom to transact, Canadians lose all of their freedoms. Our freedom of speech might involve paying for an Internet service provider, so that we can post messages on social media, paying for the use of a cellphone or a landline, or paying to print signs or brochures. Our freedom to protest would likely involve paying for gas, flights, signs, placards and hotel rooms. Our freedom to worship would include being able to make donations that pay for the salaries of staff and worship leaders, and the facilities they congregate in. All of this now is subjectively enforced by financial institutions without due process according to the whims of the government of the day under this emergency order. A good Prime Minister would never do this.
A good Prime Minister would use the existing laws of the land and the existing institutions of the land to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. The overreach is massive.
The threat to the nation it claims to address is minimal, so much so that numerous provinces have already said they want nothing to do with this massive intrusion on the rights and freedoms of Canadians; so much so that civil liberties associations, members of the legal profession and objective media are questioning this power grab; so much so that even members of his own caucus have stated they are only supporting this measure because it is a matter of confidence before the House, not because it is premised in the letter or spirit of the law.
I will be voting against giving the Prime Minister a continuation of this power. The Prime Minister has menaced the lives and livelihoods of my constituents ever since he was elected in 2015. He has hamstrung any growth, hope or optimism of the natural resource sector in Alberta. He has created tax and regulatory burdens that drive away investment, and created so much uncertainty that capital investment businesses and people have fled central Alberta to more prosperous places in the world. He is menacing our ability to afford home heating, groceries and every other required cost of living for food, clothing and shelter, vis-à-vis his carbon tax and inflation. Seniors, working-class families and those on fixed incomes are being asked to choose between food, medication and shelter. A good Prime Minister would never put his citizens in this position.
Canadians know that protests, blockades and civil unrest are a symptom, not the underlying problem. The problem is that Canadians do not have a good Prime Minister.
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- Feb/17/22 6:20:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. In accordance with Standing Order 43(2)(a), I would like to indicate that the remaining Conservative Party of Canada caucus speaking slots are hereby divided by two.
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