SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

John Brassard

  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Barrie—Innisfil
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 67%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $99,360.72

  • Government Page
  • Feb/14/23 2:16:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is never the crime; it is always the cover-up. As journalists were getting wind that some random Liberal had stayed in what we now know was a $7,000-a-night, posh London hotel, the Liberals went into full panic mode. They tried to spin and twist the story in any way possible, even blacking out emails identifying who stayed in the room. Imagine that, Mr. Speaker. Does anyone remember when the Prime Minister said that this was going to be the most transparent and accountable government in history? Many Canadians are barely able to afford food, groceries and heat; moms are going to bed worried about keeping a roof over their families' heads. While Canadians are suffering the pain of the Liberal's self-inflicted inflation and affordability crisis, I wonder who on that side thought it was okay to spend $7,000 a night on a hotel and then try to cover it up. After eight years of scandals and ethical violations, Canadians are now seeing that this out-of-touch and entitled Prime Minister cannot be redeemed and must be replaced.
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  • Nov/18/22 1:01:37 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-32 
Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise today for the people of Barrie—Innisfil, representing them as their member of Parliament, to talk about the fall economic statement. Let me begin by saying that those who are residents of Barrie—Innisfil and the businesses within Barrie—Innisfil are really feeling the inflation and the affordability crisis that is happening right now. Despite the rosy picture painted by the government, this lollipops, gumdrops, rainbows and unicorns scenario, people are finding the affordability factor to be real. They are hurting. Businesses are hurting. People are wondering, as we head into the winter heating season, how they are going to heat their house. I hear from seniors and families all the time about their circumstances and how bad things really are, particularly for seniors on fixed incomes who are making healthy nutrition choices about what they are going to eat. This should never be happening in a G7 country such as Canada, yet it is, and the government sits here with the fall economic statement somehow portraying this rosy picture, when in fact it is not the case. I am just one of 338 representatives in this place, but I know from talking to my colleagues that they are hearing about it. I am sure those on the Liberal and NDP benches, and others, are hearing about the problem of inflation and affordability, the housing crisis and the issue of rent prices. We are hearing about the affordability and attainability situation with houses and about the many young people who are being priced out of the market. They are losing their hopes, their dignity and their dreams of aspiring to be a homeowner, which is being lost as a result of the self-inflicted wound of inflation and affordability that has been caused by the Liberal government. I have spoken to many young people, not just within my riding but also across Canada. They feel like they have been lied to and let down by the Prime Minister and the government. I will go so far as to say that they are despondent. They are despondent they are not going to have the same opportunities, hopes and dreams as earlier generations. Something has to change, and this fall economic statement does nothing to change the current situation. What is required here, and I know Conservatives put this forward in advance of the fall economic statement, is the need to lower taxes. We need to put a halt on the carbon taxes, stop the payroll taxes and the CPP taxes, which are impacting not only the people who are employed but also employers. We did fire a warning shot across the government's bow that we would support the fall economic statement if certain measures were put in, but this one was not. It was that, for every new dollar being spent, the government would find a dollar in savings from government waste. There is nothing in the fall economic statement that actually addresses that. In fact, I read the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report this week, and interestingly, in it he talks about an additional $14.2 billion in spending with no indication at all of how that money is going to be spent. One would think a government, when proposing $14.2 billion in additional spending in its fall economic statement, would at least have line by line items or details on what it is going to spend that money on. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that there was nothing in the fall economic statement to give that indication. Here we are, as parliamentarians, looking over a fall economic statement that talks about billions and billions of dollars in additional spending without the ability to hold the government to account or ask those questions on a line-by-line basis. The government and the Prime Minister expect we are just going to willy-nilly pass this thing through. That is not the function of Parliament. It is not the function of parliamentarians. Our function is to hold the government to account, and the government needs to reciprocate that by being as transparent as it can. The fall economic statement, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, does little of that. Those were the two criteria we set, and we gave the government ample advice and ample warning that we would support the fall economic statement if those two issues were met, and neither one was. We find ourselves in a situation right now where, yes, we are going to dispute the fall economic statement. No, we are not able to support the measures the government is going to implement, because it did not abide by those simple principles, like every Canadian family does: If we are going to spend something, then we have to find those dollars. Throughout COVID, we have seen a lot of wasteful spending. In fact, recent reports show that $200 billion of the $500 billion that was purportedly allocated toward COVID measures were actually not put toward COVID measures. Where did the money go? We are starting to find out. There was the multi-million dollar arrive scam app. We found out about $240 million in ventilators that were never used. There was $150 million for SNC-Lavalin to provide field hospitals that were never built. Parliamentarians on this side of the House have every right to question government spending. They have every right to question what is in budgets and in this fall economic statement. I know the government does not like that, but that is our job. As I said at the outset, there are many things going on around the country, not just in Barrie—Innisfil, but it is important to highlight some of the challenges this inflationary and affordability crisis is causing for Canadians. Debt interest payment costs have doubled this year. Next year, interest payments will be nearly as much as the Canada health transfer. We are back in that cycle again, under a Liberal government, where the cost of servicing debt is more than the health transfers that are provided to the provinces. Something has to give. It always does when we increase debt and deficits. One of two things happens, which we are certainly seeing this with the government: Taxes go up or services get cut. Interest rates, as we all know, are increasing at the fastest rate in decades. Families that bought a typical home five years ago, with a typical mortgage that is now up for renewal, are paying $7,000 more a year. The Bank of Canada has signalled that interest rates will have to continue to rise even higher, and that will continue the pain. I mentioned the carbon tax earlier, and that is expected to triple. This is despite the promise of the Prime Minister heading into the 2019 election that it was going to be capped at $50 a tonne. A year after that election, the government announced that the carbon tax was going to increase to $170 a tonne. That is a threefold-plus increase in the carbon tax. Who is paying for that? Homeowners are paying for it with home heating, hydro, groceries and everything else. Wholesalers and producers are paying that on the manufacturing and production side, and they are passing that down to the consumers. It is having a cascading effect across the economy. The government's argument is that this is what it needs to do to fight climate change. We found out this week from COP27 that Canada ranks 58th out of 64 in the world for a reduction of carbon emissions. Clearly, the plan is not working, but Canadians are suffering as a result of the carbon tax that is being imposed. The government will then again argue that more families in Canada are getting more money back than what they pay in the carbon tax. The Parliamentary Budget Officer again says that is not true. The government picks and chooses what it wants to hear from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is an independent agent of Parliament, but when he tells the truth, it does not like the truth. That is part of the problem that exists today. Liberals are not living in reality. They have lost touch. Their ideology will not allow them to solve the problems that they have created with respect to inflation. Until and unless we get to a point where we reduce government spending, or at least if there is new spending then attach it to dollars found and start reducing taxes to make life more affordable and attainable for Canadians, this situation will be prolonged for a long time. Canadians will continue to suffer, and the only way that we can change that is with a change in government.
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  • Jun/23/22 10:51:40 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, if this were not so sad, it would actually be funny, but it is not. What the government House leader is proposing is that we return to a hybrid system in the fall, when no other legislatures in Canada, provincially or territorially, and no other legislatures around the world, are doing it. Not even the mother Parliament, which returned to an in-person, non-hybrid sitting last July, is doing what the government House leader is doing, and complicit is his NDP partner, the NDP House leader. There is no reason we cannot revisit this in August or September. If there is a need to go back to a hybrid Parliament, then we can agree to do that, but we are precluding this now. I have heard the argument from the government House leader and the NDP House leader, who, by the way, must think they are doctors. Dr. NDP House leader and Dr. government House leader are predicting that some sort of variant is coming in the fall. Obviously, they are the world's pre-eminent immunologists, virologists and epidemiologists, because public health officials in this country are saying that we have to return to normal. There is no reason for doing this. Why are the Liberals forcing us back to a hybrid Parliament when there is no reason to do it? It is because they want to hide. That is all this is. They hide from accountability and hide from transparency. They want to hide and not be accountable to Canadians, the voices that sent us here.
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  • Jun/21/22 3:08:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do apologize, but this is not drama. This is about direction to a commissioner of the RCMP to actively be involved in a case, an ongoing investigation in Nova Scotia, from the Prime Minister's Office and the then public safety minister's office. That is the accusation that has been made in this case, so this is a serious matter. The police were actively investigating something, and they were being told by the Prime Minister's Office and the public safety minister's office that the commissioner was to interfere. Who told them?
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  • Jun/21/22 3:08:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am sorry, but this is not drama. This is about a police commissioner actively— Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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  • Jun/21/22 3:06:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is not funny, because in his notes, in particular, the Nova Scotia RCMP superintendent said that Lucki had accused them of disobeying her instructions to include specific information about the firearms used by the perpetrator. In his notes, Campbell also wrote that he had told the RCMP strategic communications not to release information about the perpetrator's firearms out of concern that it would jeopardize the investigation. The RCMP commissioner said that she had received instructions from the Prime Minister's Office and Mr. Blair's public safety office— Some hon. members: Oh, oh! Mr. John Brassard: Mr. Speaker, they were from Mr. Blair's public safety office to interfere— Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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  • Jun/21/22 3:05:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there can be little doubt that there was political interference from the Prime Minister's Office and the then public safety minister's office because of the handwritten notes by Darren Campbell, a superintendent in the RCMP in Nova Scotia. In his notes, he wrote, “The Commissioner said she had promised the Minister of Public Safety and the Prime Minister's Office that the RCMP...would release this information.” To release information in an active investigation could have jeopardized the investigation. Who in the Prime Minister's Office, and who in the public safety minister's office, authorized Commissioner Lucki to speak to the RCMP?
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  • Jun/21/22 2:56:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is contradictory evidence, according to the commission's report. According to the commanders on the ground, Commissioner Lucki became extremely upset that the commissioners were not releasing the information in an active investigation, despite the fact that the commanders on the ground said they were not willing to do it because it would compromise the investigation. Again, I ask this: Somebody in the Prime Minister's Office and somebody in the public safety minister's office directed Commissioner Lucki to get that information. Who was it?
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  • Jun/21/22 2:55:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is critical, because, according to the commander's notes in the Mass Casualty Commission report, Commissioner Lucki promised the Prime Minister's Office and the public safety minister's office that they would release the information in an active investigation that she was discussing. It would appear that somebody from the Prime Minister's Office and the public safety minister's office was directing Commissioner Lucki to interfere in an active police investigation, when the investigators on the ground said they did not want to. Who in the PMO and the public safety minister's office directed Commissioner Lucki?
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  • May/19/22 8:49:17 p.m.
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Madam Chair, can the minister confirm that there has been a 25% decline in the number of staff interpreters employed by the translation bureau since 2019?
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  • May/19/22 8:48:47 p.m.
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Madam Chair, she may be disappointed, but those are the facts. Does the minister agree her government's neglect is sabotaging the House's constitutional duty to hold the government to account?
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  • May/19/22 8:48:04 p.m.
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Madam Chair, earlier I mentioned the great concerns the opposition parties are having in terms of our ability to hold the government to account, and it is at the mercy of the resources the government makes available for that purpose. Has the government been gaming the system to ensure the resources are unavailable for the committees it does not like, such as the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency and its motion to order the production of documents on the Liberals' increasingly flimsy invocation of the Emergencies Act?
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  • May/2/22 1:28:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, once again, it gives me pleasure to rise and speak to government Motion No. 11. However, before I get into the specifics of it, let me just address a couple of issues that came up during the closure debate earlier. It was a very vigorous debate. I want to address one issue. There were several claims, both from the government side and the NDP side, which is the same side, about members of the opposition not wanting or being willing to work. Let me state unequivocally that Conservatives are here to do the business of the nation. We want to work. I have no problem with extending the hours. I really do not. My profound concern, and I stated this in my interaction on Friday, is about the staff. We have seen, over the course of the last couple of years, that staff have been tested. The measure of the staff has been certainly tested around this place. We have heard about the interpreters, about the health challenges that have gone on. We have seen an increase in occupational injury risk for the interpreters. We are concerned about that work-life balance. For two parties that espouse and say they are for the working class, they are not showing any empathy or compassion for what families are going to have to deal with, with respect to this motion, specifically the timeline for the extension of those sitting hours. It is causing me, as I said the other day, tremendous concern that with just one minute's notice, the government can come, with the NDP's help, and say they want to extend the hours. What is that going to mean for the staffing around this place? What is that going to mean to committees, when we start transferring resources to deal with some of these late-night sittings? My staff in the House leader's office just informed me before I got up to speak that two committees already today are going to be cancelled: the Afghanistan committee and the medical assistance in dying committee. The meetings that were scheduled for today are going to be cancelled because they are going to have to allocate or transfer resources from those committees to the extension of the House sitting hours. The government has said, and I heard the justice minister say, that this happens all the time. This happens, actually, once the agreed schedule is applied. All of the House leaders get together and we discuss. In fact, we are in the process of discussing the schedule for next year. Within the last two weeks, there are asterisks in the schedule. Those asterisks indicate there will be an extension of hours. It is agreed to. It is understood. However, what this does is basically give the government last-minute appeal. It can impose late sittings when it wants to. We saw some news coverage over the weekend of the government saying that this was not what it was going to do and that it was going to give enough notice. If it is going to give enough notice, why would it put it specifically in this motion that it could do it up until 6:30 p.m. of any given day? I would suggest that this is the intent of what the government is going to do. Cynically, I can think of only one reason this would happen: to keep the opposition parties, both the Conservatives and the Bloc, on their toes. This means that every day and every night, we are going to have to carry debate. We are prepared to do that. This is not a rubber stamp factory where multiple billions of dollars and pieces of legislation are debated and proposed, and where amendments are proposed at committee. We are already seeing the committee work being affected, but this is not a rubber stamp factory. There is a constitutional obligation on the part of the opposition to hold the government to account. That is our constitutional obligation. With this motion, the Liberal Party and its Prime Minister are getting exactly what they have always wanted, with the help of the NDP. I will talk about the NDP in a second. With the help of the NDP, the government and the Prime Minister are going to get an audience, not an opposition. That is what he has been hoping for over the past six and a half years, and now with the NDP in the government's hip pocket, they have it. Going back to the debate before, I just cannot believe the hypocrisy of the House leader of the NDP. For six and a half years, I have sat in this place and we have all sat in this place, those members who were elected in 2015, and how many times did the opposition House leader of the NDP talk about the fact that the Prime Minister was worse than Stephen Harper when it came to time allocation? He said it many times, and yet, the hypocrisy is that he stands here today and blames Conservatives for obstructing. Nothing could be further from the truth. They talk about Bill C-8 as their benchmark piece of legislation that they look at. Bill C-8 was introduced on December 16. The House rose shortly thereafter. We sat in our constituencies and worked there for six weeks. We did not come back until January 29. It received second reading on March 1, went to committee and came back on April 1. There was a time allocation motion that was put in on April 4, and the NDP refused to support the government on time allocation. For them to sit here and blame Conservatives for obstructing that bill is disingenuous and, I would suggest, misleading the House, because maybe someone should hold the NDP House leader to account as to why he did not agree to that. Here is the problem. When we look at the motion and we look at all the things that are in the motion, as I said earlier, it gives the Prime Minister exactly what he wants: an audience, not an opposition. I appreciate the ruling of the Speaker this morning, but the reality is that, in previous circumstances, the issue of quorum was let go for non-votable matters. It was agreed to by the House leaders. Anything to do with take-note debates or emergency debates, we would allow quorum not to be called as part of an agreement. What the government is doing with this is basically imposing a sledgehammer to say that the Liberals are not even required to show up. The NDP is not even required to show up. In theory, what we could have is opposition-side members debating themselves on pieces of legislation that the government is proposing, asking ourselves questions and comments when the Liberals are not even required to be here. As I said the other day in question period, they can effectively be sitting at home in their PJs and their fuzzy slippers watching reruns of This Is Us and those socialist documentaries that they covet so much. That is what they could effectively be doing without the constitutional obligation of having a quorum call in the House. Who does not want to show up to work? Why are they putting that in this motion? Conservatives will be here; I can guarantee that. With this motion and no quorum call, it means that the government and the NDP do not even have to show up to debate their own legislation. How ridiculous is that? I talked about the “without notice...to adjourn the House”. This is egregious, in the sense that what the government is proposing with this particular part of this motion is that it can prorogue Parliament without proroguing. I will take us back, as I said earlier, to the WE Charity scandal. When the heat got really hot on the Prime Minister, he did the very thing he said he was not going to do in 2015, and that was to prorogue Parliament. Let us picture this scenario. There is a situation where we have a scandal brewing. We have the RCMP potentially deciding to investigate the Prime Minister on whether he granted himself permission for that vacation to that luxurious island that cost over $200,000. What if, with regard to the Winnipeg lab document scandal, we were able, through committee or some other means, to have those documents produced and they show that the government did something? What if we had another SNC-Lavalin scandal or any other scandal that gets too hot for the Prime Minister to handle? One minister of the Crown, just one, can decide to shut this place down. Can members imagine that? It is stunts like these that cause further erosion in Canadians' respect for our democratic institutions and the faith they have in our democratic institutions. When a government of the day, with a fourth party in its hip pocket, can decide that it is going to seize control of this place and do whatever it wants, how can Canadians not be cynical of the institution? How can they not be cynical of our Parliament? How can they not be cynical when they are witnessing right in front of them, as we all are, a decline in our democracy? There are measurements used that determine that decline. We have seen that over the course of the last six and a half years, and we are further seeing an erosion in the decline of our democracy as a result of stunts like this by the government. It can shut it down with one minister of the Crown proposing it. Yes, it will come to a vote. Surprise, surprise: I wonder what that vote will be when it has the NDP in its hip pocket. There is a lot to be concerned about in this. What we are seeing, and perhaps Motion No. 11 is further evidence of this, is the shady, backroom deals that are going on here. The government House leader does not even give me the courtesy, nor does he give the Bloc Québécois House leader the courtesy, of saying what is going on. What do the Liberals do now? They do not go to the official opposition or the third party in this place. They do an end-around to the fourth party, say what they are going to do and ask if it will support them. There are shady, backroom deals: exactly the thing that further diminishes the confidence that Canadians have in our democracy. As far as the standing order changes, I am really appreciative of the ruling that the Speaker made earlier in having a separate vote for that. What the government was doing, with the help of its NDP partner, again led to this cynicism and further erosion. The Liberals were putting a poison pill in the motion to force the opposition to vote against it. I stood here the other day and said very clearly that Conservatives unequivocally supported call to action 80 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to make sure that we had a stand-alone day for truth and reconciliation. I was very glad for the Speaker's wisdom in that decision. The Speaker saw right through what the government was trying to do: putting in this poison pill, probably under the suggestion of its partner in the NDP, to force the Conservative Party to vote against it as an omnibus procedural motion. I am glad the Speaker did that, because we will be supporting that particular part of the motion when it is carved out of this omnibus motion and will vote in favour of national day for truth and reconciliation. Of course we all know the history of the Prime Minister on this one. Last year, what did he do? He did not get involved. He went surfing in Tofino. The schedule for the Prime Minister even said he was having private meetings. It did not give a true indication of what was happening. What was happening was that, on the most important day in this nation, he went surfing in Tofino. How dare the Liberals use this poison pill for political purposes to further wedge, further stigmatize and further divide Canadians, especially those who supported the Conservative Party in the last election and who understand the importance of truth and reconciliation, because it was Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper who started that commission from which those recommendations came. I am obviously profoundly disappointed. I am really concerned about where this place goes from here. I really am. The government was elected with a minority. The NDP was the fourth party in the last election and now, between the two of them, they are going to be able to control every aspect of this place. What about those voices who elected a minority government? What about those people who said they wanted the government to be held in check? They wanted the government to be held to account, they wanted transparency from the government, they wanted to make sure that multi-billion dollar bills that the government proposes, these big-money appropriation bills, deserve the level of scrutiny that they should. What about those voices? That is not going to happen anymore because of this alliance, this coalition, between the NDP and the Liberals. I said earlier the impact this was going to have on committees. What about the finance committee? What about the ethics committee? What about other committees, such as important committees on Afghanistan and the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act? How are they going to be impacted? The resources of the House will now go towards evening sessions, further putting in jeopardy the ability not just of those committees but of parliamentarians on the opposition side and Canadians in general to get to the bottom of what they are looking for. When I go back to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, we have already seen that the government is not going to allow cabinet confidentiality. What other documents are not going to be available to the committee because the committee is not going to be able to sit? This is a government that ran in 2015 on the principle of being accountable and transparent by default. How times have fallen. The hypocrisy of those words is being shown by the government. This is a government that is anything but transparent and accountable. This is a government that has undermined the very role of this institution of Parliament: the constitutional obligation of the opposition parties to hold the government to account, not to basically ram legislation through when it sees fit. This is not a rubber stamp factory. This is a place for vigorous debate. It is a place where the government is held to account. It is not a place where, as much as the Prime Minister wants it to be, he gets an audience. This is a place where he gets an opposition. Conservatives will work as long and as tirelessly as we need to in order to hold the government to account. We are going to expose this coalition unholy alliance, and these backroom shady deals that are being made by the NDP-Liberal government. We are going to work as hard as we can to make sure it is held to account, that there is transparency and there is accountability on behalf of every single Canadian who did not vote for them, but voted for a minority government in this Parliament. With the little time I have left, the opposition party is proposing what we consider to be reasonable amendments. Again, I thank you, Mr. Speaker for your judicious, intelligent ruling this morning to carve out those pieces that are poison pills meant to obstruct the opposition and in fact make the opposition vote against something that none of us would ever consider voting for. I do appreciate that. I am going to move the following amendments. I move: That the motion be amended (a) in paragraph (a), (i) by replacing the words “a minister of the Crown may, with the agreement of the House leader of another recognized party” with the words “a House leader of a recognized party may, with the agreement of the House leaders of two other recognized parties”, (ii) by replacing the words “but no later than 6:30 p.m., and request that the ordinary hour of daily adjournment for the current sitting or” with the words “request, with at least two sitting days' notice, that the ordinary hour of daily adjournment for”, (iii) by adding, after the words “a subsequent sitting”, the words “, other than a Friday,”, and (iv) by adding, after the words “a day when a debate pursuant to Standing Order 52 or 53.1 is to take place”, the words “or a day appointed for the consideration of business under Standing Order 81(4)(a)”; (b) in paragraph (b), (i) by deleting subparagraph (i), (ii) by deleting, in subparagraph (ii), the words “quorum calls or”, and (iii) by deleting, in subparagraph (iii), all the words after the word “Crown”; and (c) in paragraph (c), (i) by replacing, in subparagraph (ii), the word “35th” with the word “15th”, and (ii) by deleting subparagraph (iv). He said: Mr. Speaker, I am hopeful for these reasonable amendments I am proposing, which take into account not just how this place functions and how properly it should function but also take into account, as I said at the onset, the concern that we have for the lives of the people who work here, and how they are going to be impacted. I am not specifically referring to members of Parliament, but to the work-life balance of the staff who make this place operate, whether it is the clerks, the administration, the bus drivers, the security officers, the food services branch or any others, and not least the translators, who have seen tremendous injury and impact. I do not understand why the government would want to expose them to that.
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  • Apr/29/22 11:23:25 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is what Motion No. 11 does. The NDP-Liberal coalition is scrapping the constitutional requirement of quorum in the House of Commons. That means that NDP and Liberal members do not even have to show up to work. They can sit at home in their PJs and their fuzzy slippers watching reruns of This Is Us or socialist documentaries. It also gives the power to the Prime Minister to shut down Parliament at any point if one of his many scandals gets too hot, like the RCMP investigation, for example. Therefore, I ask this again: Do the Liberals and the NDP not understand that they are contributing to the decline of democracy in Canada, or do they simply not care?
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  • Apr/29/22 11:22:11 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, what a week it has been. It is a week that has seen a further decline in Canadian democracy. Yesterday, with the support from their NDP partners, the Liberals introduced Motion No. 11, which gives the NDP-Liberal coalition complete control over Parliament until June 23. With the NDP's help, the Prime Minister now has exactly what he has always been looking for, which is an audience, not an opposition. Do these Liberals not understand that these types of tactics contribute to declining public confidence in our institutions and to a further decline in our democracy, or do they simply not care?
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  • Dec/16/21 1:25:22 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-2 
Madam Speaker, that is an interesting point, although I am not fully aware of the details of that particular case. More broadly, the government, in its haste to get this money out the door, should have been considering oversight. It should have been considering accountability and transparency as well. It should have been putting in place measures allowing investigative bodies and jurisdictions that have authority, such as the CRA and others, to investigate more quickly where this money had gone. As I said in my speech, the CRA has not yet investigated this, despite the fact that FINTRAC has identified thousands of cases of fraud with the CERB. No charges have been laid at this point. This speaks to the will of the government to really investigate this. Is it just going to turn a bind eye to it? We need to get to the bottom of this, and the amendments we proposed for Bill C-2 would have certainly helped in that regard.
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