- 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
- May/6/24 5:47:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we oppose this particular plan simply because we know it is nothing more than the cost of the agreement between the NDP and the current federal government. It is not a serious agreement in the sense that we are actually getting a national pharmacare program; as I said in my previous comments, which would have already answered my colleague's question, this is much better delivered through provincial jurisdiction.
I am an Albertan, and as the member is a Quebecker, he ought to know that there is one thing Albertans and Quebeckers often have in common: We know how to look after our own people best, and we do not need these federal intrusions into provincial jurisdiction.
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moved for leave to introduce Bill C-364, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing).
He said: Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for Peterborough—Kawartha for seconding this bill.
I want to thank all my colleagues who are a part of the rural crime caucus that we have in the Conservative Party. During the first term of the current government, we struck the rural crime task force. We consulted with Albertans and Canadians from coast to coast. We put together a report called “Toward a Safer Alberta”. That report had numerous recommendations in it, including legislative changes that could be made. Even though we have been through the pandemic, the rural crime statistics still apply today. The police have done what they can. They have reorganized themselves.
Governments that are not in charge of the Criminal Code have done everything they can to take this seriously, and there seems to be a new-found interest across the way in the plight of rural Canadians. We can just imagine someone setting up a chop shop or a meth lab in a rural area, far away from the various police stations and communities, which is done purposefully to avoid detection. They cause absolute hell for people in rural communities, because the crime from organized crime elements is absorbed by just a small number of residents. That is why this bill is so important.
I encourage my colleagues across the way to give consideration to it. It would change the Criminal Code at the time of sentencing and make it an aggravating factor if somebody is purposefully targeting somebody in a rural area, where proximity to emergency services and police services is a very difficult thing.
It does a number of other things, including strengthening provisions for sentencing, when it comes to using or carrying a weapon to a crime scene. It also changes the term “dwelling” to “place”, because lots of break and enters happen to barns and Quonset huts. Lots of other valuables are kept in storage in rural areas.
I really encourage all my colleagues in the House to take a look at the bill. Let us get this bill adopted post-haste.
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- Apr/27/23 10:42:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to get up on my feet today and thank the fine people I represent in my riding of Red Deer—Lacombe in central Alberta. They are some of the hardest-working people we will ever find.
Red Deer, for those who may not know who are watching, is Alberta's third-largest city. It is in a tier of communities, after Edmonton and Calgary, which are, of course, cities I think everybody in this country has heard of. However, places like Red Deer, Lethbridge, Fort McMurray and Grand Prairie would be the next tier of cities that we have in Alberta. Red Deer is the epicentre of central Alberta with a quarter of a million people. The city services that community all the way from Maskwacis to Ponoka to the north; down to the Olds-Didsbury area in the south; to Stettler, in my friend from Crowfoot's riding to the east; and, of course, the Rocky Mountain House community that I used to represent to the west. That is colloquially known as central Alberta, with all the communities and people that are there.
I was on Facebook earlier today and I saw that the Viking pipeline and Viking Projects in central Alberta is closing its doors and there will be a liquidation sale early next month. Every time I see these things happen in my constituency, I think I age a little more, because I know these people. They are my friends and my neighbours. One of my dearest friends had a very successful oil field trucking company. He fought to hang on through the eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, and through four years of Rachel Notley as the premier of Alberta. He hired numerous good people, paid taxes and grew our hometown. We live in Lacombe, and these are the stories that are all too common.
It is really a shame that even though Albertans seemingly are working harder than ever, and it seems that Albertans have never worked so hard, they have a feeling that they just cannot get ahead. That is because the dollars they earn, the jobs they have, the businesses that they try and keep afloat in the middle class, and those desperately trying to cling to it, simply do not have the purchasing power, and their dollars do not go as far as they did even though they might be working harder. Of course, I do not have to go too far back in history to give examples in my constituency where people doing the same job just a few years ago are getting paid substantially less for the same job today, because the profitability and the viability of industries, such as agriculture, oil and gas, manufacturing and technology, are simply not as valued by this current government as not only the previous Conservative government, but might I even say the previous Liberal government.
It seems like the only time that we face economic and political crises in Alberta in the context of Canada is when we have a Liberal government with a prime minister that holds a certain last name. Members would be surprised to know that as I go and talk to people in my riding, of course, they certainly miss the policies of the previous Conservative government, which rewarded hard work, innovation, those who took a risk and those who were willing to work hard to get ahead, but even the previous Chrétien-Martin government is remembered somewhat fondly in the context of the Kyoto protocol and everything else that was not necessarily good for the industries in Alberta.
I just wanted to give that context to those who might be watching at home today, because as hard as Albertans are working, as optimistic as we remain, as strong as the Alberta spirit is, it is still very difficult for many people in my constituency.
We hear the stories in this country, but there is simply nobody in my riding talking about this. The budget was tabled on March 28 and it was a two-day story. Nobody is talking about anything because people realize their lives are still just as difficult as they were before the budget. Little do they know that their lives could get more difficult.
I want to talk about our position. Contrary to what others are saying in this place, we made our decision. We had conditions. The leader of my party had conditions of three things to be met. We wanted to bring home powerful paycheques with lower tax and scrap the carbon tax so that hard work would pay off, and that is certainly something we can relate to in central Alberta. We wanted to bring in homes that people can afford by removing government gatekeepers to free up land and speed up building permits. We wanted to bring home lower prices by ending inflationary debt and deficits that drive up inflation and interest rates. It is because none of those things are happening in this budget that we are voting against it.
I want to talk about the carbon tax and the effect it has had, the anti-energy policies the current government has had in Alberta and the massive closures we have had. Some of my colleagues touched on this earlier.
When Stephen Harper became the Prime Minister of Canada in 2006, the year I came to this place after being elected, we virtually inherited nothing insofar as major energy projects from the government. Of course, it was involved in the Kyoto protocol and its discussions.
We left the government that is in place today a balanced budget after going through the recession of 2008-09. We left the government in a strong fiscal position with fiscal anchors and decreasing debt-to-GDP ratios that had gone down from the mid 20s to low 20s during that tenure.
We also left the legislative framework here, notwithstanding the fact that prime was going down. The Bloc Québécois and the notion of separatism in this country and alienation in parts of this country were at an all-time low. There was relative peace and political harmony in this country, notwithstanding all of the bluff and bluster from the other side. During that time, things were pretty darn good in Canada. People were generally fairly happy and we certainly were not talking about the myriad of scandals and problems that we are talking about today.
In 2015, the government inherited numerous pipeline projects. It inherited the northern gateway project. It inherited the energy east project. It inherited Keystone XL. It inherited the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion.
All of these projects were proposed and going through the regulatory process with private money. It was money from shareholders, money from investors and money from risk takers. They were creating jobs. They had partnerships with indigenous communities where those pipelines happened to go.
During my time on the NATO Parliamentary Association, I had frank conversations with members of Parliament from Europe who were keen to have a conversation with me and with our Canadian counterparts every time we went to Brussels, every time we went and had these conversations, because they wanted to have the option to remove their dependence on Russian energy.
They had an interesting policy because they understood that part of keeping peace was creating economic prosperity on both sides. They wanted to have that ability. The government inherited over 15 LNG export projects, but one of the first things it did, which is why we cannot balance a budget and we do not even try any more in this country, was it clamped down on the most profitable and prosperity-generating industries this country has. Our number one export industry was the oil and gas industry. That is what it did.
I look forward to answering some well-articulated questions on the absolute economic disaster the government has caused the people of central Alberta.
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Mr. Speaker, I will reassure my friend from Fort McMurray—Cold Lake that one of my favourite places to visit in our beautiful province is Cold Lake. I have already booked camping and fishing at Cold Lake, so I am happy to go there and reacquaint myself with not only the good people in her constituency but also the great fishing opportunities there.
Aside from that, Albertans are sometimes a little culturally different from the rest of Canada, and I accept that, but we want responsible government. What I have heard from my constituents by and large is that they do not want to be told what they can and cannot watch, and they do not want the government regulating them.
Here is Canadian content. For digital content creators, “CanCon is defined using criteria applied by three bodies: the CRTC for regulation; Canadian Heritage to access tax credits; and the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to access its public financing.” That trifecta of bureaucracy is going to be governing what Canadian content providers can do. They know impossible odds when they see them. Dealing with one government department on an issue is bad enough. When they have to deal with three for the same issue to try to get something done, good luck.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her eloquent speech and articulate thoughts in the House this morning. She is exactly right.
The government is proposing to be the solution, but it is actually the problem. The problem can never be the solution. We are witnessing, coming out of COVID, the massive inflation-induced problems that Canadians are facing, making their paycheques shorter. There is more month now left than there is money on those paycheques. Canadians are struggling.
I am not talking about Canadians who have always or have typically struggled. I am talking about Canadians who just a few short years ago did not need the government to do anything at all for them. They were business owners. They were working in the private sector. They had the ability to earn a living and make their paycheques cover their cost of living, pay for their homes, pay for their energy, pay for their food, raise their children, put them through school and even save enough for their retirements.
These are Canadians who just want their government to provide them with the services only it can provide and get out of their way. This is the mentality of the people I represent in the constituency of Red Deer—Lacombe. This is why Alberta, my home province, is one of the lowest-taxed jurisdictions and one of the provinces in this Confederation that creates wealth in abundance, or at least it used to create wealth in abundance, for everybody to share in.
The problem is the philosophy of the current government. In its rush to make everybody equal, it is making everybody equally miserable. This is the problem with the philosophy of the socialist-bent NDP-Liberal coalition. It does not work. History has shown us throughout time that this kind of thinking only leads to everybody being worse off.
This bill specifically talks about rent and the dental program. The reason the government believes it needs to bring these things forward at this time is that my constituents who used to be able to pay for these things on their own, who used to have jobs where their employer made those payments or had a dental care plan, no longer find themselves in that calibre of employment anymore. That is because of the ideology of the current government across the way and its ideological attack on energy.
I want Canadians at home to realize that, if they take a look around their home, everything they have was either made from, brought to them by or manufactured with energy. When we attack that energy with things like a carbon tax, it underpins everything we do in our economy. The government's hell-bent position from the very first press release it issued was to rework the northern gateway and energy east pipelines and basically cancel those projects. The short-sightedness for cheap political gain of critical energy supplies, not only within Canada but around the world, is showing itself today.
The Chancellor of Germany was just here and our government was too dim-witted to even know that he came here asking for help in the way he could without embarrassing himself in front of his own people. What did our government say in response to our friend, our NATO ally and our economic trading partner? It basically gave him the bum's rush out of town and said we would have some renewables for him in three to five years. Meanwhile, the good people, our friends, our western liberal democracy philosophical allies are going to be left in the dark by the current government, which cannot see past the end of its nose in its ideological crusade against oil and natural gas. I think 14 to 18 LNG proposals were cancelled, shelved or tabled because of the current government. That is the legacy we have.
I want to get back to how that is relevant to the citizens of my province and the citizens I represent in the constituency of Red Deer—Lacombe. Central Alberta is a hub of the service industry of the oil and gas sector in Alberta. We have numerous pipeline companies, service rig companies, drilling rig companies. We even have, hopefully, a formerly Russian oligarch-owned steel pipe company that was providing services to the oil and gas sector. These were good-paying jobs.
I have good friends who have had multi-million dollar businesses. The way to get rid of a $10-million trucking company in Alberta is to vote Liberal and just wait a couple years. There is nothing left at the end of it. That is exactly the story, sadly, of some good friends of mine back in central Alberta. That is the misery that has been inflicted on the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Albertans who are victims of this policy.
Now the good people of Germany and the rest of the free world are being held hostage by dictator energy in places like Germany, Ukraine and Poland. These are our friends, and they are being held hostage by the ruinous imperialism of Vladimir Putin right now. They are being held economically hostage. Putin has used energy as a weapon.
We could be energy independent. We do not need to import a single drop of gas or oil into this country. As a matter of fact, we have the third-largest proven reserves of oil in the world, and we have trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under every province and territory in this country. We could be supplying our friends, neighbours, allies and like-minded citizens in liberal democracies. That is small-l liberal democracies, because today's Liberals are not liberals. We could be providing that energy, relief and security to our friends.
The reason my constituents do not have the buying power they used to have, the reason my constituents are now in the same boat that many other Canadians find themselves in is that they do not have the security of that job they used to have, that well-paying energy sector job, a job with a company that actually could provide a benefits plan for them. I watched it happen. It has been absolutely disastrous and absolutely ruinous.
The problem I go back to is the philosophical bent of the government, which cannot see past the end of its nose. We can look at the pipeline policies and the unfair application of these things. For example, the upstream and downstream emissions on oil and gas that is produced in Canada are not applied to oil that is imported into Canada. Why the double standard?
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- Apr/26/22 1:55:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it never ceases to amaze me that the Bloc Québécois is actually here to tell Albertans how to live their lives. They seem to be more obsessed with the industries and businesses in Alberta than they are with the industries and businesses in their own province.
If the member was actually listening to my speech, I talked about carbon capture, utilization and storage. This is not oil sands development at all. This is putting liquefied carbon dioxide down into a well, a sweet crude well, to recover sweet crude. The fact that the Bloc Québécois member does not even understand these basic elements of the oil and gas sector leads me to believe that I should not be taking her advice at all on how Alberta's economy should work.
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