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Corey Tochor

Member of Parliament
Member of Parliament
Conservative

Saskatoon—University
Saskatchewan
Voting Attendance: 66%
Expenses Last Quarter: $125,428.08

Government Page

Context: House Hansard - 319 - May/28/24

May/28/24 7:41:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have been speaking through the Speaker. I have respect for this place. I view the debate that goes on here as the most important debate in all of Canada. Canadians from all corners of this great country send 338 people here, and when we get here, the first order of business is to elect a Speaker. It is the most crucial thing we do to start a term in this place. I note that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Battlefords—Lloydminster. An important part of our role is to elect an impartial Speaker. Obviously, we have erred. The Speaker has blind spots that are too large to paper over. The last time we had a violation of this magnitude, we talked about procedure, saying that it was going to go through a certain lens, that we were going to have certain people informed. However, there is another group. Interestingly, when I was preparing for my speech and talking to some of my colleagues, pages came up, and I started talking about the role of a page. Do members know that not a single page has been fired this term? Pages, for the people watching at home, are the people who help us. They bring over important documents. They let us know if a guest is here. They facilitate the debate. An important role for them is to be impartial. The first thing they learn in page school is that they have to be impartial. They cannot post on social media. They cannot share an opinion publicly. If they do, they are fired. Not a single page has been fired from this place because they take their role seriously. How this relates to the Speaker, which is an interesting twist, is that he was a page at one time. I think he knows what is right and wrong, but unfortunately he keeps picking the wrong decision, not once, not twice, but six times. We are soon to find out about a seventh time. To the NDP members who will be voting in this, I would say, historic vote, our debates here cannot happen without an impartial Speaker. It is one of the most important roles we have, so we need a Speaker we can trust, not one who is an agent of the Crown. That Crown, unfortunately, with the Prime Minister and his unholy alliance with the NDP, is lacking in common sense. This lack of common sense is, I think, born into these members. It is the common sense to know that if one is the referee, one cannot take part in partisan activities. As pointed out earlier, I was once honoured to hold this position in Saskatchewan. I was the 25th Speaker of the Saskatchewan legislature. It was an honour, and it is a peak of my career that I do not know if I will ever surpass. I loved that job; I loved it with all my heart. However, there was another calling that was greater: this country. I was worried about the country that my two boys were going to inherit after the ruinous Liberal Party was done with it. What did I do? Knowing that I could not be in a partisan role as Speaker, I put down my robes. I resigned my speakership so that I could take part in a partisan event, which was the nomination for my seat. I did that because I hold ethics, being impartial, being a referee, to a much higher role than just someone who wears a pointy hat and funny robes. However, even that is important. Madam Speaker, you wear those robes because they identify you as someone different who holds that seat in this chamber. It is something special to be identified with the uniform of a Speaker. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I ask the current Speaker to lay down his robes. He has discredited, embarrassed and tarnished the office he holds.

669 words

Context: House Hansard - 261 - Dec/4/23

Mr. Corey Tochor

Dec/4/23 1:02:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is the context my colleagues were talking about. I was the 25th Speaker of the Saskatchewan legislature and I resigned. Why did I resign? It was to take part in a partisan event, a partisan meeting I could not attend because I was Speaker. That is the point. We should all be asking ourselves why the Speaker, knowing the rules, being the referee and being the subject expert on the rules, did not see the conflict in attending a partisan event. I was relatively new, as I had only served one term before becoming Speaker. The tradition of this place is that we elect someone who has served many terms or has shown a great grasp of the procedures and traditions of this place so that we do not find ourselves in the situation we find ourselves in today. December 4, 2023, is a date that will be repeated in this place. I feel that it is so important to have the respect of an impartial Speaker. All else does not matter in this place unless the Speaker is impartial.

183 words

Context: House Hansard - 261 - Dec/4/23

Mr. Corey Tochor

Dec/4/23 12:55:22 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will make my remarks as short as possible, but they are important, because they boil down to what the issue is here today. When we explain what we do here and how Westminster democracy is supposed to work, we say it is through vigorous debate that we arrive at a conclusion and answer questions that face our country. How that debate is administered is through the impartial position of the Speaker. That is why Speakers have a distinctive look, a look that is different from that of other members. They have a uniform that identifies them as something different in this place. That is why pages have a uniform. That is why the officers at the table are wearing their robes, which signify how differently they need to act. The Speakers need to be the impartial rulers of our proceedings. That is one of the reasons they wear robes, the uniform. When school groups come here, we explain that in the process of debate, when the Speaker rises everyone should zip it because of the respect we have for whoever is in that position. After what we witnessed over the weekend, I do not know how we would explain to a school group on its next visit to this place how a Speaker can be impartial if they have taken part in a political partisan event. It is wrong. Everyone knows it is wrong. We talked about how this individual was a page at one time. There is a parliamentary tradition of trying to encourage the pages to take a side or give an opinion. I have been elected for two terms provincially and two terms federally and have not been able to get one partisan answer from any clerk or any page in both the legislature and the House of Commons because they take this seriously. When they go through training, they know they are not to partake in partisan activities because of the importance of their roles. For our Speaker to have this lapse in judgment and throw away hundreds of years of tradition to take part in a political event blows my mind. I will get into some new remarks on how I got to this location. As I was serving as the 25th Speaker of Saskatchewan, my country was hurting. Canada's direction was obviously taking us down a dark path. We could see this as early as 2018, and this is where—

411 words

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Member of Parliament

Corey Tochor