- Member of Parliament
- Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
Leader of the Opposition
- Conservative
- Carleton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $61,288.13
- Government Page
- Apr/9/24 10:32:00 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do not need to criticize the government's immigration policy because the Prime Minister has done it for me. He has said that the immigration system is out of control. Those are his words, reiterated by his immigration minister, both of them apparently blaming the preceding immigration minister for screwing the entire system up so badly that they allowed hundreds of thousands of students to come in to study at fake institutions that do not even exist. They are diploma mills, by the government's own description. Now those kids are abused, taken advantage of and forced to work 20 hours a week. They are going home in body bags and forced to rent out half a bed for four hours a day, paying $700 a month.
It is absolute chaos in our immigration system after eight years of the cocktail of total incompetence and radicalism that has defined the Prime Minister and his appallingly incompetent immigration and now housing minister, the member from Nova Scotia, who has given us 35 homeless encampments in the biggest city in his home province.
That is the deplorable record that someone, having fallen into a coma eight years ago, would be shocked to wake up to.
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- Feb/1/24 2:20:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, this Prime Minister is not worth the chaos.
His Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship admits that Quebec's housing and services are under intense pressure as a result of the refugee crisis. This crisis followed the Prime Minister's decision to remove visa requirements for Mexicans, increasing the number of refugee applicants from 250 to 17,000. Only 11% of them are accepted as genuine refugees.
Will the Prime Minister reverse his decision, do an about-face and restore order to our system?
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- Nov/29/23 2:43:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is the Prime Minister who brought up immigration. I was about to point out that in Canada, according to his housing agency, home construction is down 32% year over year and in the United States it is up 5%.
It is true that the Prime Minister has much more expensive federal government programs to build more government bureaucracy and fewer homes. Will he adopt our common-sense plan to build homes, not just bureaucracy?
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- May/11/23 11:21:01 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what interests me are the figures for small- and medium-sized businesses in the Saguenay—Lac‑Saint‑Jean region that are looking for workers but facing a labour shortage. During a labour shortage, immigration numbers will be higher than average. When jobs are more scarce, the numbers drop.
Immigration numbers should be based first and foremost on Canada's needs. When companies and farmers need more workers because there are no Canadians to fill the vacancies, the process has to be fast-tracked to allow them to sponsor the workers they need. When the economy slows, there will obviously be fewer.
We have to base our numbers on common sense, not on the hopes and dreams of the CEOs of multinationals, like Dominic Barton. That is what common sense is all about.
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- May/11/23 11:09:00 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very proud and, especially, very grateful for having been born here in Canada. It is a major victory to be born here in Canada, because it is a country full of opportunity. I was born to a single mother and adopted by two teachers who always taught me that here in Canada, no matter where you come from, you can achieve whatever you want as long as you work hard. This is the same country where my wife arrived as a refugee and it is the country we want for our children.
Unfortunately, it is not the country we are seeing today. Everything is broken in Canada, after eight years under this Prime Minister. He does not like it when I say that, so I will say it again: everything is broken after eight years under this Prime Minister. This includes the immigration system. Our country had a reputation for its immigration system, which is one of the best in the world. It was based on common sense. People were invited to come work here, people like the Italians who built our infrastructure. Workers from around the world have come here to build hospitals, houses and our economy, and to enrich everyone's lives.
What do people see when they come here now? They see no houses. Nine out of 10 young Canadians are convinced they will never be able to buy a house. We lack health care services. Why? It is because our immigrants are being blocked from working as doctors and nurses. Over a million immigrants who are interested in coming here, to Canada, have had to wait longer than the government's prescribed waiting period.
Even when they do manage to get here, immigrants have a hard time getting work permits. People want to work, but this Prime Minister and his utterly incompetent government stand in their way. Not only that, but the strike that the Prime Minister caused led to even longer wait times for families living apart, potential workers who cannot start their jobs, and refugees seeking safety and security here in Canada. The Prime Minister's utter incompetence is the cause of these problems.
Instead of focusing on the job, which can be boring, and repairing the damage he has done, the Prime Minister and his multinational executive friends, like Dominic Barton, want to create grand utopias for us. Instead of building our country on the basis of common sense, which has worked for over 100 years, the Prime Minister wants to create a great revolution and paint a utopia that will never exist. He should focus on the backbone of our system, in other words, reduce the time it takes for a small or medium-sized business or a farmer to hire a foreign worker when no Canadian is available to do the job. He should unite families, especially in the case of grandparents, so that they can take care of their grandchildren when the parents are at work. Finally, he should allow more non-profit organizations to sponsor refugees and provide them with care, opportunities to learn English or French, and access to a job and housing.
He should do the common-sense work. Instead, the Prime Minister wants to focus on the priorities of large multinationals, such as McKinsey, and its former CEO, Dominic Barton. That company has received over $100 million in contracts from this government and dreams of turning the country into a utopia.
I will never listen to those people. I am going to listen to the common sense of ordinary Canadians, the people who do the work. That is how the common-sense Conservative government I will be leading will repair the damage.
That is why I will be voting for this motion. Because I want to reject Dominic Barton and the Century Initiative and to base our immigration system once again on the common sense of ordinary Canadians.
Speaking of common sense, I will be splitting my time with the common-sense Conservative member of Parliament for Calgary Shepard, Mr. Speaker.
I am so proud and grateful that I won the lottery of life to be born here in Canada. I was born of a teenage unwed mother, who put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They taught me that it did not matter where I came from; it mattered where I was going. It did not matter who I knew; it mattered what I could do.
That is the country my wife came to as a refugee. That is the country that a lot of her family, her brother to be a soldier, her other brother to be a carpenter, her sister to be a nurse and for her family to work hard and achieve great things. That is the country I want all our kids to inherit, but that is not the country we see today.
Canada, after eight years of the Prime Minister, the out-of-touch Prime Minister, is broken. What is especially broken is the immigration system that leaves a million immigrants waiting longer than the acceptable wait time to get into Canada.
We see international students abused and exploited by human traffickers, shady consultants, some of them losing their lives and being sent back to places like India in body bags because the Prime Minister and his government have failed to protect them from the predators and the scam artists who are destroying their lives.
We see 20,000 brilliant immigrant doctors blocked from working in their professions by government gatekeepers. We see 32,000 immigrant nurses blocked from their jobs. It boils my blood to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours with my daughter who has a migraine headache because there are not enough doctors and nurses, while gatekeepers block brilliant immigrant doctors and nurses from doing their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister gleefully tells us about all the wonderful meetings he is having with mayors about housing and infrastructure. I do not really care about their meetings, because the gatekeepers at municipal governments, the governments that the Prime Minister is funding with billions of dollars, are blocking housing construction, so our immigrants, working class and youth cannot get homes.
After eight years of the Prime Minister everything is broken. However, instead of fixing the basics, he is focused on another grand utopian project, that of his friend, Dominic Barton, the multinational CEO, former ambassador to Communist China, who helped bring about the opioid crisis that is savaging our working-class families. He has come up with a bright, new idea that he is going to triple our national population to 100 million. We do not need anymore utopian schemes from globe-trotting millionaires and multinational insiders. We need common sense for a change.
Here is our common-sense plan to get back to the basics. The first is to clear the backlog so immigrant families can be reunited, so our farmers and small businesses can fill jobs for which there is no Canadian available; allow our churches, mosques, synagogues and other non-profit organizations to sponsor more legitimate refugees; get them language training so they can learn how to speak French or English, get a job, get working and get contributing; speed up work permits for those people who already here waiting for their cases to be heard. They might as well be out earning a wage, contributing to the economy. They want to work. Let them work. It is common sense, for God's sake.
Speaking of work, let us bring in a blue seal national standard for all our professions. We have a Red Seal standard that allows tradespeople to take a test, prove they are qualified, get to work and move across the country to fill needed vacancies in the job market. Why do we not have a blue seal standard that would allow foreign-trained nurses, doctors, engineers and other professionals to prove they are qualified and within 60 days of applying to work in their field, get a yes or no based on their tested ability, not based on where they come from? We would have more doctors, more nurses, more common sense.
What I am saying is let us get back to the basics. Our immigration system was the best in the world eight years ago, but now we have immigrants who come here and then say they want to go back because this is not what was promised.
I have said that everything is broken, but what is broken most of all is the promise, the promise of Canada; the promise that we will reinstill a promise that in Canada it does not matter where people come from, but where they go. It does not matter if their name is Martin or Mohamed, or Singh or Smith, or Chong or Charles, or Patel or Poilievre, if they work hard, they can achieve anything they want in the greatest and freest country in the world. This is the common sense of the common people united for our common home. It is their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- Apr/26/23 2:26:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, all he has delivered is a bureaucracy that costs $20 billion more per year. That is $1,300 per Canadian family, a 50% increase, and for what? It is for immigration services not being delivered, for veterans who cannot get answers to their requests, and now for taxpayers who will not be able to get answers to their tax questions before the filing deadline on Monday.
Given that Canadian taxpayers are not getting the services they pay for, is it time for them to go on strike as well?
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- Dec/13/22 2:25:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we all wondered how it was possible for the government to build up a 2.2 million person backlog in the immigration system, and now we have found a clue. There are 60,000 people whose cases have been handed over to employees who no longer work for the government. Just imagine someone calling up and saying, “I'd like to speak to Jack. He's my case officer. I've been waiting for my immigration." and he is told that Jack has not been there in 10 years. No wonder things are delayed for so long.
These are people who are separated from their families, refugees who need to get here quickly for their safety. How could the government have been so careless?
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