- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Board of Internal Economy
House leader of the official opposition
- Conservative
- Regina—Qu'Appelle
- Saskatchewan
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $172,932.98
- Government Page
- Nov/6/23 2:33:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, they are in complete carbon tax chaos over there. Their pause on the pain does not apply to 97% of Canadians, and it punishes those who use cleaner Canadian natural gas or propane to heat their homes. What did the Liberal rural affairs minister have to say? She said that, if people in other areas want the pause too, they should elect Liberals. The people in North Bay did elect a Liberal MP.
Again, I ask this of the Prime Minister: Will he allow a free vote so the member for North Bay can vote on our motion to take the tax off and keep the heat on?
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- Nov/6/23 2:32:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is just not worth the cost. Now he wants to quadruple the tax on home heating, gas and groceries. He has now decided to pause the pain for the 3% of families in the areas he is plummeting in the polls and his MPs are revolting.
The Liberal rural economic development minister said that, if people in the Prairies wanted a break from the carbon tax exemption, they should have elected more Liberal MPs. The people in Sudbury did elect a Liberal. I visited there last week and people there want to know why their MP has been unable to get them a pause on the pain.
I have a simple question for the Prime Minister: Will he allow a free vote for the member for Sudbury on our motion to take the tax off and keep the heat on?
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- Oct/31/23 2:37:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the carbon tax is a complete failure. It drives costs up and has not allowed the government to hit its own emissions targets. Now the Bank of Canada confirms that the carbon tax alone is responsible for 16% of the extra inflation plaguing Canadians. With this announcement, families that heat their homes with clean Canadian natural gas will be punished just for living in areas where the Prime Minister is massively unpopular.
He once said, “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”, so will he stop his divisive tactics and take the carbon tax off home heating for all Canadians?
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- Oct/31/23 2:36:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is just not worth the cost. He is desperate and in total free fall, so he announced a gimmicky plan to give a temporary pause to just some families in mostly Liberal-held ridings. The senior Liberal minister from Newfoundland is proud that this exemption only applies in her region. She even called out Liberals from other parts of the country for not protecting their communities.
The minister for Prairie development is a Liberal member of Parliament from Manitoba. It gets cold in Manitoba, so why was he so useless in protecting Canadian families in his area?
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- Dec/1/21 4:25:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, very quickly, I have to correct the record. The Conservative government restored the health care funding that the previous Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin government slashed in the 90s.
It is the Conservative government that stands up for provincial autonomy and innovation when it comes to the health care system, standing up against the Prime Minister's threats to claw back Saskatchewan's health care transfers during the election.
The member asked whether President Biden understands the global issues around oil and gas. I know the President cancelled Keystone. He cancelled a project that would have brought western Canadian energy from a safe ally and a trusted partner. It was an ethical source of energy. Just a few months later, the President of the United States is begging OPEC, and countries like Saudi Arabia with terrible human rights records, to supply the United States with more oil and gas. That makes no sense.
Those are the types of ideological decisions that the Prime Minister supports, and that is why Conservatives will always stand up for our western Canadian energy sector.
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- Dec/1/21 4:11:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Edmonton—Wetaskiwin.
As this is my first time rising in the chamber in this Parliament, I want to first thank the voters of Regina—Qu'Appelle for once again selecting me to represent them in this chamber. I have had the good fortune to serve in several different roles in the House of Commons. I was Deputy Speaker and Speaker, House leader of the official opposition and Leader of the Opposition, but every time I walk into this chamber, I am very aware that there is no role I can serve in the House if I do not first earn the trust of the people back home in Regina—Qu'Appelle. I sincerely thank everyone who supported me in the last election.
There is once again a great clash of ideas dividing the world. As Canadians look hopefully to the future about how to emerge from the pandemic and its aftermath, there are two very distinct versions of what comes next. This clash of ideas and philosophies is basically the same as it has been at several times throughout human history, especially in the 20th century.
There are those like the Prime Minister and his friends in the global elite who would use COVID as an excuse to expand the size of government. They believe in more government intervention in the economy and more restrictions on individual liberty. Then there are those who understand that it is not government that creates prosperity, it is the free market, people buying and selling freely, that creates wealth and lifts people out of poverty. In essence, it is the age-old debate of whether we should put our faith in government or put our faith in people.
It is often said that the best indicator of future results is to look at past results. History is clear on this matter. When we look at the examples where the ideology of government control was put into place, in every country it was tried, it failed miserably. After all, nobody was ever shot trying to get over the wall to get into East Berlin, and nobody ever tried to paddle a raft to get to Cuba. The terms for that ideology changes from time to time. What we once referred to as communism and socialism, those on the left now call their progressive agenda, but changing the name does not change the reality.
In November, we marked the 32nd anniversary of the Berlin Wall being torn down. Throughout the course of human history, walls were generally seen as a good thing. Walls kept us safe. In times of danger, people would run toward the walls to get inside, but that started to change with the rise of socialism. The Berlin Wall was to keep people in.
Berlin was a real-time experiment in economics and human behaviour. In the east was socialism, state control of the economy. Government officials planned what would be produced, by whom and how much of it. They set wages and prices. They also took away basic human rights like free speech and prohibited any criticisms of their regime. The result was misery, bread lines, shortages and a stagnant quality of life.
In the west, the free market decided. People buying and selling relatively freely set prices and signalled to the market what needed to be produced. The result was plenty, huge increases in the quality of life. The difference between life in a free market and life in a society controlled by the government was stark. While the people of East Berlin could not vote in real elections, they could vote with their feet, and they did. There was a steady stream of people fleeing the horrors of socialism.
That is why the wall went up, not to keep enemies out, but to keep people in. This is the hallmark of big government intervention in our lives. Those on the left are constantly telling us how wonderful their socialist policies will be, but then they have to build walls, sometimes virtual, eliminating our choices and taking away our freedoms to keep people in.
When I was first elected in 2004, Canada had its own experiment between the free market and government interference. The difference between Alberta and Saskatchewan throughout the course of Canadian history was also very stark. For decades, Saskatchewan was ruled by the NDP, which adopted big government intervention policies. They stifled the free market and drove away private sector investments. As a result, my province had a long history of economic stagnation and a relatively flat population. In Alberta, there was growth. In Alberta, there was opportunity.
When I was fortunate enough to visit Alberta while I was leader, I always asked how many people in the audience were from Saskatchewan or whose parents were from Saskatchewan originally. In almost every room across Alberta, when I asked that question almost half the audience would put up their hands. I used to like to tell people that the good people of Saskatchewan built two great provinces in this country.
The language changes, but the policies remain the same. Communism proved to be such an epic failure that its most loyal promoters conceded that it would never be accepted again. However, we are now seeing a resurgence of that same type of thinking, that government knows best approach.
As we emerge from the aftermath of the pandemic, we can already see the drastic negative impacts of the large expansion into the free market by the government. In March of last year, the Bank of Canada started doing something unprecedented in Canadian history: It started creating money out of thin air, to the tune of $5 billion a week. The government had run out of money to borrow from people, so it had to turn to the central bank to crank up the printing presses to buy the government debt that nobody else was buying.
I am often asked by people back home in Regina—Qu'Appelle how the Prime Minister is going to pay for his massive deficits. He is not. The Canadian people are paying right now, through inflation. We are paying the cost today today in real time as prices continue to go up, because the government forced the bank to flood the system with brand-new money created out of thin air. What happens when we have more dollars chasing the same number of goods? Prices go up.
We had a decline in economic activity due to the restrictions imposed on our economy because of the COVID pandemic. Not only did economic production go down, but the money supply grew exponentially. Governments love inflation.
Back through the course of human history, we will find examples that show when governments spend too much money, they start to devalue the currency. It is a fraud committed on the people who have worked so hard to earn their pay cheques and to put a bit of money away for savings when the government comes and essentially devalues that work by creating new money.
If any of my colleagues has ever been to a silent auction, there might have been a print up for auction of a beautiful painting. At the bottom it is numbered one out of 100 or one out of 500. That is a limited edition print. It means the artist only created so many of those types of paintings. If someone buys that for what they believe the value is and then the artist goes and creates 5,000 more copies, that person has been defrauded. They purchased something that has had its value stripped away by simply having more created of it. That is what is going on in real time with the money that hard-working Canadians are earning.
What can we do to get our economy back on track? In the time I have left, I wanted to make a pitch for the government to listen to the concerns of the people in Saskatchewan, Alberta and across Western Canada.
We have an amazing source of wealth in our country with our oil and gas sector. We are now living in a completely topsy-turvy world where the first thing that President Biden did upon taking office was cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. This is something that the government did not even raise with the incoming President. The Prime Minister cancelled northern gateway and cancelled the energy east pipeline, which would have taken Western Canadian energy to Eastern Canadian markets.
I see a lot of alarmists and radical activists chaining themselves to trees and laying down in front of bulldozers in Western Canada to try to prevent the exportation of our oil and gas. However, I never see them lining up along the St. Lawrence protesting tanker after tanker of foreign oil coming into Canadian markets. We have an opportunity to provide the world with ethical Canadian energy, and that benefits everyone. Since 2018, Canada's oil and gas production has paid almost $240 billion to provincial governments and $66 billion to Ottawa.
Conservatives will always be champions of the hard-working men and women in our energy industry. It is something that the world needs more of, not less of. We can get off of foreign oil coming from brutal dictatorships that have no respect for human rights, and get Canadians back to work.
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