- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
- Sep/29/23 11:43:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we learned yesterday that the Liberals are cutting another $1 billion from our armed forces. This is in addition to the $2.5 billion they already let lapse last year.
The Prime Minister has no problem wasting taxpayer money and running up massive deficits on things like the $116 million for McKinsey, $54 million on the ArriveCAN app or $20-million bonuses for the Bank of Canada executives. Let us not forget that the Liberals allowed $4.6 billion of abuse under their COVID programs. The Liberals waste money on just about everything but do not spend it on our military.
Why does the Prime Minister cut spending only when it hurts our troops?
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- Apr/20/23 3:01:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the top secret Discord leak in the United States showed that the Prime Minister has no intention of ever meeting our NATO commitment. It showed that many of our allies are frustrated and disappointed by Canada's response to recent global crises like those in Haiti and Ukraine. The Prime Minister has once again embarrassed Canada on the world stage, and his empty promises have killed our reputation as a trusted ally.
Why does the Prime Minister waste billions of taxpayer dollars on his pet projects and lavish vacations while refusing to invest in our military?
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- Apr/19/23 5:03:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member talked about Ukraine, but this budget has absolutely nothing in it for Ukraine. It has nothing in it for the Canadian Armed Forces, and it has nothing to ensure that Ukraine would be victorious over its Russian aggressors. I do not know how she could stand in this place to talk about all that the Liberals are doing for Ukraine. As someone of Ukrainian heritage, I found it was incredibly disappointing and insulting that there was not anything there, other than loans, at a time when the country is getting invaded.
I want to talk about the Washington Post article that just came out this afternoon. It came from documents through the Discord messaging app, which said that the Prime Minister had absolutely no intent of ever meeting our NATO targets. According to the article, the report that was released, and it comes from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “'Widespread defense shortfalls hinder Canadian capabilities,' the document says, 'while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions.'”
Why is the member supporting a government that continues to undermine our bilateral relationship with the United States and our collective security?
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Madam Speaker, if we look at things the Liberals touched and broke, one of the things they broke is Veterans Affairs. We already have a bunch of our veterans who are waiting not weeks, not months, but years before they get any pensions. One RCMP veteran contacted me. He has been waiting for over two years to get his pension from Veterans Affairs.
How is that compassionate? How is that management that people can rely upon? It comes down to these Liberals, despite throwing money right, left and centre, never having been able to provide the services Canadians expect under their leadership. During their time in government, things have gotten worse not better.
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- Nov/1/22 2:52:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians cannot afford this costly Liberal-NDP coalition. These Liberals have showered Liberal friends such as Frank Baylis with $237 million in COVID contracts. They gave $28 million to Liberal donor Pierre Guay for Roxham Road, and they shovelled over $54 million to a couple of guys sitting in their basement who created the ArriveCAN app, which should have been built for under $250,000.
Why is that Liberal insiders under the Prime Minister always get rich while regular Canadians have to pay more for heating, eating and—
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- Apr/27/22 4:52:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, again, it is a perfect illustration of how the Liberals will say one thing but do something completely different, and it continues to undermine the economic prosperity of individual Canadians across this country. Instead of offering things as simple as tax relief, all we get is more ridiculous spending that is unnecessary, and it is ultimately undermining the government's ability to support Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
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- Apr/27/22 4:48:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind the member for Winnipeg North that under Stephen Harper, when we were at war in Afghanistan, there was defence spending. This is before the Liberals cooked the books on how we calculate the amount of money that is allocated to national defence by adding things like the Coast Guard, veterans' pensions and other things that are spent under foreign affairs, not under defence. If we had added those numbers in, we would have been well over 1.5% when we were at war in Afghanistan.
When we pulled out of Afghanistan, defence spending went down because we balanced the books. The government here continues to spend recklessly. This means that the debts and deficits of today are going to be the taxes of tomorrow on our kids and grandkids, and we know the Liberals still have not made the investments, because the money they promise does not get spent.
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- Apr/27/22 4:37:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be able to rise today and address the budget, which I will call “the good, the bad and the ugly”. I am expecting Clint Eastwood to walk through the doors and the music to play.
I will say this, just to address the speech. There is a section of this budget that I agree with. The good part is that the government is promising to give Ukraine $500 million and to provide weapons that are so desperately needed right now in the war against Russia. We need to make sure we send whatever lethal weapons Ukraine has been asking for. I am glad to see the government has made this announcement and will be out there on the market buying up as many weapons as possible.
I know, for example, that there are lethal weapons being built in Winnipeg by PGW Defence Technologies, which builds sniper rifles. It has already done business on its own directly with the Ukrainian government in the past, and has also sent sniper rifles over very recently. I believe those high-quality sniper rifles being made in Winnipeg would be very valuable to the Ukrainian armed forces, and buying more of those weapons with this $500 million would be welcome news.
I have been advocating this for quite some time, going back to early March, right after the invasion started. There is an inventory of Canadian military equipment that is sitting around and that is about to be retired and turned into museum monuments at war memorials and legion halls across this country, but we do have light armoured vehicles, such as the Coyotes and the Bisons. There are 32 armoured ambulances in the Bison configuration that can easily be used and shipped over to Ukraine.
The reason we can use these vehicles to provide armoured personnel carrier protection to Ukraine is that the replacement LAVs, the new super Bisons that are being built in London at GDLS, are almost complete. The parking lot is full of new LAVs. They just need to be accredited by the Canadian Armed Forces. Taking those Bisons, Coyotes and our M113 tracked LAVs and sending them to Ukraine would provide much-needed protection, especially for the civilian domestic defence force that has been stood up with recruits from across Ukraine as they battle against the Russian aggressors.
I have also been working with people here in Canada who want to buy Role II mobile field hospitals, which Ukraine has requested. Unfortunately, the government here has yet to provide those hospitals. We have extra Role II hospitals that are sitting in containers. They were purchased for the pandemic and were never used, so we could be moving them over. There are some mobile field hospitals that are available for sale in the Netherlands. Again, they are ready to go. The Government of Canada could buy those off the shelf and move them over there in under a week. I hope it will consider that and get it done, because Ukraine desperately needs them and has asked for them as part of the shopping list it has given to NATO countries around the world.
Finally, there is the issue of the Harpoon missiles. We had defence and industry experts in Canada who came forward and said that we have over 200 unused Harpoon missiles sitting in inventory. There are launchers sitting on one of the ships that are under refurbishment right now. We could send over a whole cache of truck radar systems, all built here in Canada, with our excess Harpoon missiles that are sitting in inventory, to help protect Odessa from the onslaught that is taking place from the Black Sea. The more we can eliminate the Russian navy's ability to bring its forces to the coastline, the better off Ukraine will be, and the more protected.
I welcome the $500 million. I encourage the government to do more and make sure we are repurposing some of our existing assets. We do not have to actually go there and put cash on the table, just send those and donate them to Ukraine, as well as the $500 million that is approved in this budget.
Unfortunately, that is the only good thing in this budget, and I am not going to be able to support this budget, because of the bad and the ugly that are still in there.
The bad is that the current government continues to print money like it is going out of style. The Liberals have increased the deficit again this year by another $52.4 billion, which has taken our national debt to $1.2 trillion, and all of that has not been entirely tied to, as they would like to say, pandemic spending to support the economy. We know there have been many situations where this budget is about unnecessary spending. It has put increased money into circulation, devalued the Canadian dollar and driven up interest rates and inflationary pressures on our economy.
Canadians are now worse off because of the reckless spending by the Liberal-NDP coalition. They know that they have to deal with higher food prices and higher fuel prices, and that continues to increase the cost of living. In Manitoba alone, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's own numbers, Manitobans are now $2,000 poorer just because of inflation created by the government.
I know they will try to argue that there are supply chain issues. They will try to argue that this is an international phenomenon, but, at the same time, we are talking about 6.7% inflation rate. That is higher than in so many other countries in the G7 and the G20, and it is because of excess government spending and putting too much cheap Canadian money into circulation, which has taken inflation out of control.
The other bad part of this budget is that there is no help there for farmers. We are seeing higher input costs because of inflationary pressures. We are seeing higher input costs on farmers because of the carbon tax, which affects everything from diesel fuel to fertilizer prices. We are seeing that the Liberals continue to push farmers farther and farther down into the deep red hole on their balance sheet because they do not care about protecting our farm families.
They may, as a government, expect that they will be able to import cheap food from elsewhere, but why do we want to make our farmers less competitive on the international market? Why would we not let our beef, pork, grain and oilseed producers flourish and be competitive on the world market? Instead, we are increasing their input costs to such a level that they will never be able to compete on that global scale.
We expect government to actually care about our farmers, our farm families and our rural communities and give them relief from things like the carbon tax, give them relief from rising excise taxes on fuel, give them relief from the increasing costs of fertilizer. We need to know if the government will ever commit to helping out our farmers.
In my riding of Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, our farmers last year dealt with a very devastating drought, the fourth year of dry conditions, and again, the help from the federal government was next to nil. We know that there is no help in the budget for farmers who dealt with that drought, whether it was trying to buy feed for their livestock or having major shortfalls in crop production.
The ugly part of this budget is the way the government continues to treat our Canadian Armed Forces. Our members in uniform deserve to be given the best equipment and the best support, and have a warrior culture that is out there actively recruiting and rebuilding our Canadian Armed Forces. We are 10,000 members short as it stands today, and the government seems not to care about making sure that we have a critical mass of soldiers, sailors and aircrew across the country to serve here at home and to be able to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves around the world, including what we are seeing happening in Europe. Although the Liberals talk about increasing spending and getting it up to about 1.5% of GDP, it is still far short of what NATO members expect of us. Our NATO partners are asking us to spend 2% of GDP, and it is not happening in this budget.
On top of that, the government continues to fall short in spending and buying new equipment. Procurement has been well short of satisfactory. We know that in this budget there is a $15-billion gap between what the government is promising to do and what is actually in the Department of National Defence departmental plans for the next year. We know they already have $12 billion lapsed over time that should have been used to buy new ships, new planes and other equipment for our Canadian Armed Forces members.
It just comes back to the fact that the Liberal-NDP coalition has not made the proper investments in national defence, at a time when the world is getting more and more scary. We are witnessing what is happening in Europe with the Russian aggression in Ukraine, and we are always concerned with other nefarious actors on the world stage who are watching and seeing what Canada does, as well as our allies. We need to do more, not less.
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- Apr/5/22 3:53:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we need to continue to isolate Putin and the Russian regime on the world stage, including taking them off the UN Human Rights Council. We need to make sure Putin and everyone who is responsible for using rape as a weapon and committing the atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, which are being documented, are all pulled in front of the Hague and face the International Criminal Court for committing these atrocities.
Who would have thought that we would be talking about the definition of “human rights” and about war crimes in our modern age, but here it is in our generation. It is sickening.
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- Apr/5/22 3:51:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, first and foremost, the world changed in 2014. As for the investments in the Canadian Armed Forces, without continuing to rely upon the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War, it was time to start making those major investments. That is why Prime Minister Harper signed on to the Wales Summit pledge that we would hit that 2% of GDP. It took the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to get there now.
We have to fix the procurement system. That is the only way we can ensure we get equipment delivered faster, and we can get the kit that is required. We need to use the Defence Production Act as much as possible and ensure that there is not a misappropriation of dollars in things like defence procurement. A lot of the things that we are talking about, including NORAD modernization, are going to require us to buy off the shelf. A lot of companies around the world make it and that is the way we are going to get the best kit for our troops.
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- Apr/5/22 3:49:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is inherent upon all of us to start talking about this publicly so that Canadians realize it is a necessary expense of their tax dollars to make this investment, a huge investment. It is going to take billions of dollars and, in some estimates, upward of $60 billion to make the investments on an annual basis in the equipment, the bases that we need, as well as the wings that need to be modernized to deal with the new threats that we have.
The Soviet Union came to a sudden halt because it went bankrupt and with great diplomacy by a number of world leaders. That has been turned on its head, and not just by what we are witnessing right now with the full invasion of Ukraine. This war started in Ukraine back in 2014 with the annexation and illegal occupation of Crimea by Russia and the war in Donbass. It has been eight years of war and all allies have been slow to rise to this occasion to prevent what we are dealing with right now.
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- Apr/5/22 3:38:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am honoured to stand today to discuss increasing NATO spending to 2% of GDP here in Canada as part of our national defence. I will be splitting my time with the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound. He is someone who has served our country with valour and integrity. He is someone I incredibly respect, and I know his comments later on will be something we should all be paying attention to.
This is also the first chance I have had to get on my feet since we have witnessed the atrocities being committed in Ukraine: the war crimes that are being uncovered north of Kyiv as the Russian forces have retreated back to Belarus. When we look at the images from Bucha, Irpin and Motyzhin, we know that what we are witnessing are some very sickening war crimes that have been committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.
We do not even know the extent of the atrocities that have already been carried out in Kharkiv or Mariupol. We witnessed, in Kharkiv, the bombing of a maternity hospital where women, children and infant babies were killed and maimed. In Mariupol, Russians dropped a large bomb on a theatre where so many were seeking refuge. They had clearly marked in the parking lot that there were children there. The Russians still bombed that theatre, killing hundreds of people by some accounts.
We all have to be concerned with what Russia's intent is in Ukraine. There was an article that came out of one of the newspapers, RIA Novosti in Moscow, that said that Russia had to de-Ukrainianize Ukraine, and tried to associate that with de-nazification. That sends a clear message of where the Kremlin is sitting, where Putin is taking this war and what his entire intent is, which would result in a genocide.
As the person who sponsored the Holodomor memorial bill in the House, along with Raynell Andreychuk, a former senator who sponsored it in the Senate back in 2008 to recognize it as a genocide, I would never have thought that we would be talking about genocide in Ukraine not in historical terms, regarding the famine that happened in 1932-33 and that was created by Joseph Stalin and his communist thugs, but in modern times: right now, in Ukraine in the year 2022.
This clearly demonstrates that our world has changed, and that the security threat that is facing western democracies is in flux and in peril. We had the Cold War peace dividends we were able to collect on after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the move of former soviet states to turn into free, liberated, democratic and independent countries such as Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, among others.
We thought we were onto a new world peace and only had to worry about small state actors, terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations from a standpoint of national security. However, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and his Russian thugs in the army, we know the world has changed. NATO is now more important than ever since the end of the Second World War.
Essentially, the collective security in Europe and the transatlantic sphere has gone on high alert. We have to deal with this Russian threat right away. NATO members are trying to help Ukraine in every way possible so that it can win this war. The only way this war ends in Ukraine is when Ukraine beats Vladimir Putin and his Russian military back across the border.
Ukraine has been asking NATO and asking Canada for more weapons. We could be sending them more things for their coastal defence purposes, like the Harpoons that we have here in Canada and the launch systems. I know there have been proposals made to the Minister of National Defence on how we can take some of our batteries and move those over there with Harpoon missiles so that we can protect Odessa from falling and protect that coastline so Russia does not get in there and take control of the entire Black Sea coastline from Moldova all the way across to Donbass.
They have also been calling for armoured personnel carriers. We know that here in Canada we have some light armoured vehicles that are in the process of either being retired or very soon will be retired with their replacements already in production or completed production. We could be sending our Coyote LAV IIs right now. Our Bisons and our M113 LAVs could also be going over there. We are talking about armoured personnel carriers and fighting machines that have proven themselves in Afghanistan and that can be very well used by the Ukrainian military and self-defence forces.
They have been asking for help. As the Conservative Party leader said after the President Zelenskyy speech, we have to put into place the protection of humanitarian corridors so that those who can flee from harm's way can get out and so that humanitarian supplies can get into those cities that are being besieged.
Just last week, we had five Ukrainian members of parliament here, and when we met with them and when they did their press conference, they were very clear that they needed all these tools, plus they needed to get fighter jets and anti-air defence weapon systems. We know that, even though Canada does not have any of those systems to give, we can go and buy them and give them to Ukraine, so that they can protect their own airspace and secure those corridors so that people can leave.
It is important that Canada spends its 2% of its GDP on national defence in the light of the new security threat, not just to NATO but here at home, as well as in the Indo-Pacific region. We have to be spending and contributing at that level if we are going to be taken seriously when we are sitting at the table. Because we have not been serious about investing in our military and our national defence, we are not a serious consideration when we are talking about how to better serve and protect NATO and NATO allies. We are not getting invited to new tables such as the recent Australia-U.S.-U.K. treaty, where they are doing more security and national defence together in the South Pacific and throughout the Pacific region, for that matter. That is because they know that we have not been there to step up with our own investments in national security, so why would we be investing in things like the South Pacific?
Security starts right here at home and that means we have to invest heavily in our NORAD systems as well. NORAD modernization is important. We do hear that the government has finally made a decision to buy the F-35s. That is the fighter jet that is best to serve our NORAD and NATO missions. It is also the fighter jet that the Royal Canadian Air Force has been asking for over the last 12 years. It is one that Canada has invested in heavily since the Paul Martin government when we originally signed on to the Joint Strike Fighter task force. We have been making annual commitments and payments into that program, so this is the right plane for our air force. It is the right plane for our allies, and it is the right plane for Canada's aerospace industry.
We have to invest in that, as well as the North Warning System and low earth orbit RADARSAT. The Nanisivik naval base is still not open after six years. The icebreakers have to continue to come, as well as the submarines that have under-ice capabilities. As the member for Kingston and the Islands said, ballistic missile defence was part of that NORAD mission and that is why that also plays into investing in our military so we can do more at home, as well as do that NATO mission with new surface combatants, as well as new recruiting and investing in more heavy-lift capabilities so that we can do what is right for those who serve us.
It is our troops, the best of the best that Canada has to offer, that deserve to have fighter jets in the air, warships on the water and submarines under the ice, so that they can serve us not just here at home but protect the world around the entire globe.
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- Apr/5/22 3:33:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I did not realize the member for Kingston and the Islands had such an obsession with me. He referred to me so often in his speech that I am not sure if I should be flattered or concerned.
I want to just point out that we are the ones who brought forward the motion, and when I heckled him it was because he had said it was his motion. This is the Conservative Party of Canada's motion to make sure the government is committed to spending 2% in the upcoming federal budget.
The Liberals talk the game, but they do not play it, and the only thing they have delivered on time and on budget is 17 used F-18 fighter jets. The member talks about going into ballistic missile defence. Will he commit that the Liberal government will actually sign to ballistic missile defence as part of NORAD modernization? Will he also admit that, by adding in the Coast Guard and veterans' pensions, the Liberals have padded the numbers they have today versus the numbers we had when we were in government, when we were spending to meet our commitments at NATO and in Afghanistan?
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