- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
- May/9/24 10:12:42 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I was also one of the 18 parliamentarians targeted by APT31. What is really disturbing in all this is that not only were we targeted because we are part of the IPAC, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, but some were also involved in diaspora communities and, in my case, as the shadow minister for national defence, dealing with sensitive information.
Often, people in diaspora communities come to us or send us emails talking about certain issues they are concerned about, whether they are things happening in the Communist regime in Beijing; issues surrounding the corruption and human rights abuses that we are witnessing in Ukraine by the Russian Federation, as in my case, or the kleptocrats in the Kremlin; or, of course, having to do with the theocracy and human rights abusers in Tehran. Those in diaspora communities send us emails, and if this APT31 hack had been successful, sensitive information about the identities of individuals who came to Canada seeking asylum and now call Canada home could have been jeopardized. They could have been targeted even more than what we currently see reported by the foreign interference commission and Justice Hogue.
We have dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, such as the People's Republic of China, that are trying to undermine our democratic institutions and target Chinese nationals right here in Canada. Could my colleague talk to the fact that this is not just an attack on our parliamentary privilege or on us as parliamentarians but on all Canadians and our democratic institutions?
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- Mar/20/24 10:55:43 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, I want to thank the member for his kind words toward me. I do appreciate that.
This is an issue that has all-party support, this new strategic security agreement between Canada and Ukraine.
I was not going to ask a question, but he did raise the misinformation out there. Research has been done, both in the Ukraine by NATO itself, through its Estonia cybersecurity and misinformation centre of excellence, which I had the chance to visit this past summer, as well as here in Canada. Everybody always wants to talk about the far right, and there is no doubt. The Tucker Carlsons of the world, the PPC types out there, are actually out there promoting all the Kremlin propaganda.
There is also a growing mountain of evidence to show that the far left, the alt-left, the Antifa types, are also saying that Russia is justified in its attacks on Ukraine and that Ukraine does not actually exist. It is all the same revisionist history that is pushed out by Putin and his troll farm in St. Petersburg.
I just want to ask the member if he recognized the fact that there are extremes on both sides of the political equation that are squeezing all of us who are supporters of Ukraine, and it requires us to fight back even harder on the misinformation and disinformation and to unite Canada and the world, including our American cousins, in their support for Ukraine.
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- Nov/22/23 6:41:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do want to thank the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan for his passion and his advocacy, and for the leadership he has shown on this.
I was disappointed that the Liberals voted against the amendment to the act that would have provided more opportunity to produce weapons and ammunition to send to Ukraine. We started advocating the provision of weapons in 2018. We had sniper rifles and the Carl-Gustaf anti-tank weapons. We had rocket propeller grenades and side arms that we wanted to send to Ukraine that were sitting in storage, collecting dust and going nowhere. We asked the Liberals to send them, but they did not send them until after the war started in 2022, four and a half years after we started asking them to send them. The Liberal-NDP coalition called me a warmonger.
The truth is that we all knew Putin was going to try to fully invade Ukraine. We are coming up to the Holodomor commemoration on Saturday. We are having a commemoration here on the Hill tomorrow. It was the genocide of several million Ukrainians by Stalin and his Communist thugs to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the earth. It is happening again. It is being done again by Moscow, by Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats. We have to stand with Ukraine. It needs weapons and not a carbon tax.
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- Mar/23/23 2:09:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in a secret courtroom in Russia, an unjust trial of a courageous freedom fighter is taking place.
Our friend, Vladimir Kara-Murza, is facing a sentence of 25 years in prison, which would beat the longest verdict ever sentenced and handed out to a Russian political prisoner. His crime is high treason, but what did he actually do? Vladimir Kara-Murza spoke out against Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine. He called out corrupt oligarchs and the kleptocrats in the Kremlin. He stood up for liberty, the rule of law and democracy.
While Putin wages his genocidal war in Ukraine, Kara-Murza called for peace. He languishes in prison, exacerbating his poor health, which is a result of the poisonings that he survived from two previous assassination attempts ordered by Moscow, yet he continues to fight for a better future for the people of Russia. In the words Kara-Murza, “The biggest gift that those of us who oppose Vladimir Putin could give to the Kremlin would be to give up and run away”.
I call on the House to demand Putin to immediately end the show trial against Vladimir Kara-Murza and set him free.
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- Oct/17/22 2:00:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested in April by Vladimir Putin's thugs on a trumped-up charge of spreading false information about the Russian military. His supposed crime: condemning Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine while speaking on U.S. soil. Just last week, the Kremlin kleptocrats and their kangaroo court have upped the ante by charging Mr. Kara-Murza with treason, which carries a 20-year sentence. This is a despicable show trial by Putin and his cronies.
Clearly, the corrupt Russian court system is helping Putin punish his political opponents and muzzle anyone who dares to speak the truth about his barbaric invasion and genocide he is committing in Ukraine. These are the kinds of gross human rights violations the Magnitsky act was designed to address. If Russia refuses to bow to pressure and release Vladimir Kara-Murza, the full force of sanctions must rain down on all responsible for this abuse of authority.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a political prisoner, a prisoner of conscience and a human rights defender. Canada must speak up on the international stage and forcefully call for his immediate release.
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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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