SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Mark Gerretsen

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of the Board of Internal Economy Deputy House leader of the government
  • Liberal
  • Kingston and the Islands
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 67%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $112,228.33

  • Government Page
  • Mar/22/24 12:40:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I am rising to respond to questions of privilege. I have some comments, and I appreciate the House's acceptance to allow me to introduce those now to contribute to the previous question of privilege that has been raised here. This is specifically in response to two questions of privilege raised on March 20. The first matter was raised by the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes respecting the 17th report from the Standing Committee on Government Operations, and the second concerns the deliberations on an NDP opposition day motion considered on March 18. The matter raised by the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes concerns a potential breach of privilege concerning witness testimony at a Standing Committee on Government Operations in its study of the ArriveCAN application. As the member notes, the committee unanimously agreed to adopt a motion to present a report to the House outlining the potential breach of privilege concerning Kristian Firth's refusal to answer questions from committee members and his prevarication in answering those questions. If the Speaker finds that this is a prima facie question of privilege, the government supports sending this matter to the procedure and House affairs committee for study. The standard modern practice of dealing with breaches of privilege of the House or of individual members has to be to move a motion to refer a matter to the procedure and House affairs committee. In the case of contempt, the most recent example, which was cited by the member, was to summon the individual to the bar of the House of Commons for reprimand. These are two avenues that have been pursued by the House for the last 100 years. As the chamber that is based on practice and procedure, these are the two most well-characterized ways of dealing with such affronts to privileges of the House and its members. I suggest that there is nothing with the current situation that suggests that we now take a different approach. I also find it somewhat bizarre that the only precedence that the member used to try to make his case for his proposed motion dates back hundreds of years. I would submit to the House that times have changed since 19th century England, and so have the rules and practices of the House. On March 21, the member for Beauport—Limoilou intervened on the matter and concluded that a prima facie question of privilege be found and that the member had referred to the procedure and House affairs committee. I agree with the member on both points. The procedure and House affairs committee is the appropriate committee to which this matter should be referred. Page 966 of the third edition of the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, in relation to the specific mandate of the procedure and House affairs committee, states, “The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs deals with...the review[ing] of the Standing Orders, procedure and [House] practice[s] in the House and its committees.” The footnote attached to the quote states, “Should the Speaker find prima facie grounds, it is established practice for the House to refer matters of privilege to the Committee for further study. In his ruling of March 9, 2011, Speaker Milliken reminded the House of this practice”. I would like to refer to the ruling of Speaker Milliken on March 9, 2011, in which he states: Before I invite the member for Kings—Hants to move his motion, however, the Chair wishes to explain the procedural parameters that govern such motions. House of Commons Procedure and Practice, Second Edition, at pages 146 and 147 states: In cases where the motion is not known in advance, the Speaker may provide assistance to the Member if the terms of the proposed motion are substantially different from the matter originally raised. The Speaker would be reluctant to allow a matter as important as a privilege motion to fail on the ground of improper form. The terms of the motion have generally provided that the matter be referred to committee for study or have been amended to that effect. I hasten to add that the powers of the Speaker in these matters are robust and well known. In 1966, Mr. Speaker Lamoureux, having come to a finding of prima facie privilege on a matter, ruled a number of motions out of order. As House of Commons Procedure and Practice, Second Edition, tells us at page 147, footnote 371, in doing so, Mr. Speaker Lamoureux “more than once pointed out that it was Canadian practice to refer such matters to committee for study and suggested that this should be the avenue pursued”. The Chair is of course aware of exceptions to this practice, but in most if not all of these cases, circumstances were such that a deviation from the normal practice was deemed acceptable, or there was a unanimous desire on the part of the House to proceed in that fashion. In cases of contempt, a similar approach has been taken and is supported by precedent for the past 100 years. The most recent example is the Speaker's Ruling on June 16, 2021, with respect to the alleged non-compliance with an order of the House. The Speaker ruled in this case: As a result, in the opinion of the Chair, the failure to comply with the order of the House of June 2, 2021, constitutes a prima facie question of privilege. There is one last point to settle. The Chair has read the wording of the motion suggested by the member for Louis‑Saint‑Laurent in his written notice. It departs considerably from established practice. The scope of this type of motion is limited, as indicated in House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, at page 150, and I quote: “The terms of the motion have generally provided that the matter be referred to committee for study....” A review of the rare exceptions shows that there was a certain consensus on the procedure to follow and, thus, on the wording of the motion.... There are also precedents that support censure. In short, given that the parameters for such motions are clear and that the practice is well established, the proposed motion should be a motion of censure or to refer the matter to the appropriate committee for study. Even if it were procedurally admissible or if there was a unanimous consent to have these witnesses appear before the bar to be questioned, it is unlikely to yield a different result. Then, the only recourse for the House to take in the matter would be to censure the individual, as in the situation described in the Speaker's Ruling of June 16, 2021. The Conservatives are trying to set up a new trend. We think that before proceeding with calling the individuals to the bar, and certainly before we start talking about questioning witnesses at the bar, which has not even been contemplated in more than 200 years, the matter should be referred to PROC so that its members may, firstly, review the evidence and make recommendations on procedures, safeguards and criteria for calling and questioning individuals before the bar. This is a very serious matter, and we cannot operate on an ad hoc basis. We need some clarity on how we should proceed. The House is, therefore, faced with two well-established options in my opinion, to refer the matter to the procedure and House affairs committee or to summon this individual to the bar for censure. That is for the Speaker to choose and the House to decide upon.
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  • Jun/13/23 8:35:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on his first point, a lot of people would say that bringing cameras into this place in the seventies was a bad move because of the theatre it created. A lot of people would say that putting video online so that people could clip it in real time was a bad move. I think that hindsight is 20/20. An hon. member: Oh, oh! Mr. Mark Gerretsen: I listened to the member, and I am going to answer his questions, if he does not want to talk to me back and forth through the middle of it. I think that it is important to reflect on the fact that maybe decades from now they will look back and say that it was a bad idea, but I can tell members that from my perspective right now, it looks like it is going to allow more people to engage, just based on the participation from Conservatives. On the member's second point about the resources, we should not spare any expense at making sure our democracy functions in the way it should. If we need to put more resources into that by building out the structure of resources we have, then we absolutely must do it. To that point, I do not disagree with him that I share similar concerns, but I do not think that needs to be the reason we cannot proceed. What it says to me is that we need to be investing more in the interpretation services and more in the resources, so that we can continue to function like this.
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  • Mar/20/23 4:16:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Yukon today. I would like to start today by speaking directly to the seriousness of these allegations, the seriousness of foreign interference generally and what the government has been doing. I would say to the member who spoke just before me that the claim that we have done nothing is absolutely ludicrous. I would remind the member that on December 18, 2020, the then minister of public safety mailed a copy of a public report regarding election interference specifically as it relates to China to every single member in this House of Commons. I am sure that she received and reviewed it, as did all Conservative MPs, yet they have the gall to stand up in this House and suggest that we are being secretive or that information is not being shared with them. In addition to that, what has this government done? We created NSICOP, which specifically allows parliamentarians and senators to review highly classified information. We passed the Election Modernization Act to help tackle foreign interference, Bill C-76, which Conservatives voted against. We created a panel of experts to monitor in real time what was going on with respect to foreign interference during an election and gave them the ability and the power to act on it. We put in tighter controls on advertising and online platforms. We closed fundraising loopholes to keep foreign money out of elections. We enhanced the integrity of the voters list. Foreign election interference has been going on for about 10 years. Now, as a result of the real concerns that Canadians have, and rightly so, it is at least being talked about a lot more in the mainstream, as we have seen in other countries. The Prime Minister and indeed this side of the House are seized with what is going on. We take this very seriously. That is why the Prime Minister empowered NSICOP and NSIRA to specifically look into the issue of foreign interference and why he has appointed an incredible Canadian, David Johnston, to look at the issue and recommend to the Prime Minister the best course of action to move forward, which very well might be a public inquiry. This government has already said, in advance of knowing what any of those recommendations might be, that we will accept and implement them. Therefore, for the member for Thornhill to come in here and suggest that this government has done absolutely nothing about foreign interference and has been secretive is just completely untrue. I find it very interesting that we are getting this lecture from the member for Carleton, the Leader of the Opposition, and his MPs about sending staff to committee. It was the member for Carleton who, in 2010, said this to the CBC. I will read it out again because I think it is just so telling, and the video is widely available for anybody to go back and review. He said: ...ministers answer questions on behalf of the government and not staff. We are not going to be changing 300 years of history all of a sudden at the behest of the coalition parties. We are not going to have the staff members appear in question period to answer on behalf of the government. We are going to do it the old-fashioned way, the way it has always been done right up until the last several months. We are going to keep ministers, the guys in charge, responsible for their duties. I always get a kick out of the use of that terminology, “the guys in charge”. Of course the member for Carleton would phrase it like that. That was the member for Carleton when he was in government. He was answering a question as to whether staff, in particular, Dimitri Soudas, the then prime minister's director of communications, would go to committee. I think the hypocrisy here is literally oozing out of that side of the House and dribbling down towards the aisle here when I listen to what is coming from over there. At the time, the NDP, I believe with other political parties, were able to get through a motion to require Mr. Soudas to appear before committee, yet he never did. Do members know who appeared? Stephen Harper sent John Baird, one of his ministers at the time, to deal with the situation. In response to Mr. Easter asking why he was there and not the person who was called to the committee, Mr. Baird said, “the government believes the opposition is playing politics with parliamentary committees and is not respecting due process and fair play.” Does that sound familiar? “They are conducting random interrogations without due process or any rules of fairness. That might be how things work in the United States Congress, but it's not the Canadian tradition. In Canada the constitutional principle is ministerial responsibility.” That is what John Baird said when Stephen Harper defied the request of Parliament for Dimitri Soudas, the director of communications in the Prime Minister's Office, to appear before committee. This new-found approach from the Conservatives is to suddenly be so incredibly hypocritical. I will not even hold it against the new members who have come along since 2015. However, in particular, the member for Carleton was not just an MP who happened to be around the House at the time, but he was actually leading the file. Is he suddenly standing here saying it is completely appropriate now? I asked the member for Thornhill, just before my speech, why it is okay now, and she was totally unable to give an answer. Her answer basically was that the chiefs of staff have already come forward from the government. What she is basically saying is that we should never have set the precedent, because now Conservatives are running rampant all over it, using every possible opportunity. Where does it end from here? That is the question. Every time Conservatives want to drum up a fake scandal, they are going to run in here and use the same language they are using now. No one is doing China's work better for them than the Conservative MPs right now, who are sowing the seeds of distrust in our democratic institutions. That is what is happening right now, and it is Conservative MPs' responsibility for all of it. This comes down to politics, and I am not the only one saying this is politically motivated. Push aside all the people who are Liberal, NDP and non-partisan. Push them aside for a second and let us just talk about Conservatives who are calling out this rhetoric. Fred DeLorey, the campaign manager from a year and a half ago, is on nightly. It is like he is lining up to get on every talk show or every panel he can on CTV and CBC. He is everywhere right now, basically saying that the Conservatives are just trying to score political points. Vern White, a former Conservative senator, has referred to what is going on as “BS”. That is what he actually said. He is a former Conservative senator because at some point he came to the realization that this political party is way further to the right than where it had been when he was appointed a senator, if we can believe that. Former senator Hugh Segal, who represented my area and whom I have an incredible amount of respect for, has also—
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  • Feb/6/23 1:30:15 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-34 
Madam Speaker, the member has identified some areas that she suddenly feels need to be addressed. I am curious if she could tell the House how many times, because we are in fact only amending a piece of legislation here, she has raised her concerns with the minister before today, specifically about how the legislation should be changed.
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  • Jun/21/22 4:24:02 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-21 
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for her thoughts and reflections on this. I have a question regarding her criticism of the requirement for time allocation. I know she spends a lot of time in the House and is certainly aware of what goes on in this House. I am sure she is aware of the fact that on numerous occasions the Conservatives have been continually using any tactics possible to literally make the government grind to a halt. They do not even pick one or two issues that will be the hills they die on, but seem to just be willing to do anything at any point to stop debate. Given the member's comments and concerns with respect to time allocation, I wonder if she can reflect on that.
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  • May/12/22 10:39:27 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened to the members for South Surrey—White Rock's and Wellington—Halton Hills' interventions, and I do not disagree with a lot of the concerns they raise. Specifically, I heard about national security, foreign affairs, economic relations and supply chain issues. We have committees that deal with all of these things. I am just curious why the opposition feels as though we need a special committee. Is the member not afraid that might actually take away from the work of these other committees, when we are basically telling them not to deal with this issue, because we have a different committee for it?
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  • May/3/22 1:42:29 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-8 
Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-8, but like some of my colleagues who have spoken before me, I too want to bring up the fact that I am gravely concerned about what we are hearing coming out of the Supreme Court of the United States, the leaked document that suggests that it will be rolling back its ruling on Roe v. Wade. I think it is incredibly concerning. I think that, as a global community, we should be concerned about such a regressive form and attack that the United States is taking as it relates to such an important issue. Equally as alarming, I am very concerned that the leader of the Conservative Party sent out an email to all of her MPs today telling them that they are instructed not to speak to the leaked document that has come out. I see some people shaking their heads, so I better quote this for them. It says, “Conservatives will not be commenting on draft rulings leaked from the Supreme Court of the United States.” That was sent to Conservative members by the Leader of the Opposition this morning around 9:00 a.m., and I think that the Conservative opposition leader should allow her MPs to stand up and say exactly what they think about this because I think it is extremely problematic. Conservatives should stand united with the vast majority of Canadians in their feelings toward this. Nonetheless, we are here to talk, once again, about Bill C-8. Bill C-8 is the bill that keeps coming up in the House. It is, for some reason, the hill that the Conservatives have chosen to die on, and I do not understand why. This is a fall economic statement implementation act from the fall of not this year but last year. It is very likely that budget 2022 may be passed before we actually see the fall economic statement of 2021 passed. In any event, it is there to provide very important supports for Canadians during the conclusion of, and coming through the end of, the pandemic and into the endemic state that we are going to see COVID enter into. For this to be the hill that Conservatives have chosen to die on is absolutely outstanding to me. I cannot, for the life of me, understand their strategy. This is because most times, when a political party chooses an issue that will be the issue that it will define itself by through filibustering and doing everything possible to influence the way the House treats it, there is a common theme behind their approach. Normally, if it is something like, for example, we were suddenly going to do something dramatic to the health care transfers, I imagine that the Bloc Québécois would put up an endless fight on that, and I think that everybody on this side could appreciate and understand where they were coming from, given the fact that they raise it on a daily basis. The Conservatives are not doing that. They seem to be all over the place in their approach when it comes to Bill C-8. They are picking and talking about this little bit, and then they are talking about another thing over here. Then they are talking about farmers. There is no common theme. I am left to conclude that the only common theme is the absolute stalling of Parliament, doing whatever necessary, for whatever reason, for any reason at all, to make sure that legislation cannot get through the House. The rationale for their approach to Bill C-8 is entirely politically motivated. I do not know if they have just dug their heels in so far that they are now just saying, “Well, we have come this far, we may as well not stop now.” They need to explain to the House what it is that is so offensive within this piece of legislation. I have heard Conservatives talk about the fact that they have some concerns about stuff that is missing from this legislation. That is fair. I think that is a good way to be critical about it. It is part of the democratic process, but it went to committee. It came before the House, was debated, went to committee and was discussed. Ideas were put forward, and I imagine some ideas were adopted and some ideas were shot down. Then it came here, and we are debating it again. That is the democratic process. As I said earlier to the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, one wins some, and one loses some. One gets some, and one does not get other things. At the end of the day, we eventually should be voting on a piece of legislation that we do know is going to impact and help a lot of Canadians. I bring this up, because on this bill at report stage alone, as of my count yesterday, 51 Conservative members had already spoken to it. That does not include today. Just for comparison, and this is before today, four members of the Bloc spoke to it, two members from the NDP, two Green members and four Liberals. That is just to put it into context for members. The Conservatives have monopolized the time of debate on this particular issue. The Conservatives are going to stand up and say, “Well, that is part of the democratic process: rigorous debate.” Of course it is. It is important to discuss and bring forward members' ideas, but it is very clear to people after a while that we have passed the threshold of vigorous debate, and they are just being obstructionists for the sake of being obstructionists. There is no desire among the Conservatives to actually see this go through. They just want to ensure that they can inflict as much damage as possible, in terms of allowing this government to move forward its political agenda, and nothing made it clearer than when we debated the motion yesterday about extending sitting hours. One would have thought we had done something dramatically unparliamentary and undemocratic: those two terms, by the way, were brought up by the Conservatives. One would have thought we had done that, but all we did was say, “Let us debate more. Let us have more time to talk into the evenings and all the way until midnight.” The Conservatives had a problem with that, so they wanted to ensure that we could not even do that. Members will forgive me if I come off as being very cynical about it and as assuming that there is some ulterior motive here. I cannot seem to wrap my head around why the Conservatives would take this approach, again, on a bill that would provide supports to Canadians. It is not a hill that, in my opinion, any political party would be willing to die on, but the Conservatives have chosen to do that. In the last few minutes that I have to speak, I want to talk about some of those incredible supports that were introduced in the fall economic statement, which we are talking about on May 3. I will speak specifically to the one that really is important, and I think it should be to all members of this House. This is supports for safe schools and teachers. This is about increasing the ability to provide quality air ventilation in schools. This is about allowing teachers to claim certain expenses on their income tax. This is stuff that none of the 50-plus Conservatives who have spoken has brought up. They have not commented on them at all. I am not just talking about being against them: they have not commented in favour of them, either. However, those are some of the supports we are talking about here. Teachers are literally beyond the deadline to do their taxes for 2021, and they cannot, because the Conservatives have still held this issue up. There are so many other things, such as employment insurance details, supports for businesses and the underused housing tax act. These are all things in here that, in my opinion, should be passed. If we missed stuff, and members of the Conservative Party are still very upset about the fact that they have been missed, then they have representation on the finance committee and should bring forward a motion. They should go and garner support from a majority of members of Parliament on the committee, have a study on it and then make a recommendation to Parliament. That is how this body works. That is how the democratic process works in our chamber, and that is certainly how I would encourage the Conservatives to approach it, despite the fact that they have completely chosen not to do that. I am running up against my 10 minutes, but I am very glad that we finally have some time allocation on this bill so that we can get moving on it and pass the fall economic statement from the fall of 2021.
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  • May/2/22 10:52:31 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-8 
Madam Speaker, now we see that after 51 Conservatives have already spoken to this at report stage, the Conservatives have decided that it would now be in the best interests of the bill to be sent back to committee, believe it or not. Here we have a member who has given his thoughts and comments on some concerns that he has in the bill. I am curious if he could inform the House as to the degree to which the Conservative members on the committee brought up these issues, how that was reflected upon, whether or not we have been going through the democratic process to get to where we are right now, and how he sees that process unfolding differently if this were going to return to committee?
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  • Apr/4/22 5:47:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would be happy to talk to the member about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and how they were infringed upon as soon as he can bring forward to the House an actual example of how that has been determined to be a fact by the court, which it has not. Nonetheless, if the member is so concerned about being labelled far-right, he might want to talk to his seatmates and indeed personally reflect on the comments that he is making because doing that will certainly give him the ability to control that narrative. However, we are here talking about this motion and this particular report. I am going to focus my comments on pages 191 to 193 of the report. That is the dissenting report from the Conservative Party, those that decided to dissent on this report. What I found very interesting about their dissenting report is that it is a quick read with not a lot of complex words. People can get through that pretty quickly. It is only two pages long and a sentence, so I would encourage anybody out there to read it and see for themselves that this is not a report to provide recommendations. There is not a single recommendation in it. It is just whining on with the same talking points that we hear over and over in the House. There is not a single actual recommendation of how to do something different. They do have four points in here, which I will address specifically. They say in their first point that there is no plan that has been recommended by the committee to balance the budget. I find that very interesting, coming from a party that ran on balancing the budget not after one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight or nine years, but 10 years. The party opposite, which in this report is so incredibly critical of this government's position on running deficits during this pandemic as a way to empower Canadians and our economy to get through this, somehow is able to be so incredibly critical of it. However, their former leader, the member for Durham, was more than willing to tell the Canadian public back in September that he was willing to wait 10 years to balance the budget, yet they have the audacity to be so overly critical about it. Let us go to point number two. There is no plan to control spending. That is what the Conservatives are saying, but we might recall from that same platform that I just referenced that the party ran on a platform of spending way more money than our party did when we were elected in the fall of 2021. I find it fascinating how they are suddenly so concerned about running deficits and about balancing budgets when they literally ran on the exact opposite six months ago. Point three is interesting. They said in their report that they have concerns over the fact that there is a lack of attention paid in this report to supporting growth and prosperity. We have the highest GDP in the G7. How can they possibly make that claim, if nothing more than to try to score political points from the hundreds of thousands of people who will read this report, that we do not have a thriving economy when we have the best GDP right now in the G7? Hon. Ed Fast We have the lowest investment, Mark. Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, the member for Abbotsford is correct. We do have the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio. What does that mean? That means it puts us in the position of being able to rebound out of the economic hardships of the last two years better than any of our counterparts. That is what it actually does. They failed to mention that, and they said that we do not have a plan. I would argue with them, as the member for Winnipeg North and other people have mentioned, that growing the economy is not strictly done by reducing taxes, in particular for the wealthy, which is what the Conservatives would like to do. There are other ways of doing that. One of the ways is to empower and put more people into the workforce. There are two ways they can do that. One, we can get more parents who are sitting at home with kids into the workforce. How are we doing that? I do not know. Maybe we will do it the way that every single premier of Canada agreed to, including all the Conservative ones, and bring in $10-a-day child care. We do not have to look that far to see it is a successful program. Just look at Quebec. Quebec, for quite a while, has had a low per-day child care rate. It is $7-a-day child care, and look at the success. More women, in particular, are in the workforce in Quebec, and so that is one way we put more people into the economy and grow our economy. What is another way we can do it? It is by having robust, meaningful immigration programs that can bring more people into our country, just like the programs that attracted my parents in the 1950s after World War II. These programs can bring more people into our country so we can help to stimulate and grow our economy even faster. Therefore, when the Conservatives say that there is a lack of attention being put on prosperity and growth, they are absolutely out to lunch. The actual data does not support their claim. It is very well known that we have one of the strongest economies in the world. Indeed, we have programs in place, or that are coming online, that will even further enhance that. The fourth and final point, which I find to be very interesting in the Conservatives' report, is that they talk about significant proposals to attack the immediate threat to Canadians, specifically in respect to housing. They seem to be suggesting that there is nothing in the committee report's recommendations to support that. I know that there are 220 recommendations in the report, and maybe they did not get to read all of them before filing their dissenting report, but there is actually a recommendation in there, recommendation 203, that calls for the creation of half a million, quality, affordable homes. There is a plan in there, despite the fact that the Conservatives are suggesting in their dissenting report that there is not. In conclusion, as it relates to the dissenting report, I would suggest that the next time the Conservatives put together a report to try to be critical of the work the committee has done, they should do two things: One, put some thought into what they are putting down on paper and see if it reflects the actual report; and two, perhaps more importantly, put some suggestions in there as to what they are recommending we do. It is very easy to be critical. We hear it all the time from across the way. They are always critical about this person and that person, or that something is happening in this part of the economy or in this sector, but there is never an actual suggestion, unless it is to unlock more oil. There is never an actual suggestion to do anything that would have an impact. It is all just a rambling on of complaints about this government, which we could get just by sitting here in QP. In my remaining time, I would like to talk about a couple of the initiatives that are in the report that I really appreciate and really like. I will start off with those that specifically have to do with the electrification of our environment, of our vehicles and of just about anything. The world is changing. I know that the Conservatives, whenever the word “energy” comes out of their mouths, are only ever talking about oil. An hon. member: Hear, hear! Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, they even just said “Hear, hear!” However, believe it or not, energy comes in other forms than just oil. I do not know if the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, who just heckled me, would know this, but I encourage him to walk into—
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