- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Board of Internal Economy
Deputy House leader of the government
- Liberal
- Kingston and the Islands
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,228.33
- Government Page
- Mar/21/24 12:21:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will start by saying that I agree with much of what the member for Timmins—James Bay just said. We talk about the Conservative hype. This, as I said in my question for him, is just theatre for Conservatives to motivate their base and raise money. That is all, that is it, and it is nothing more.
The Conservatives talk about bringing in a confidence vote this evening. We have 11 confidence votes this evening. We are voting on the estimates; they are all confidence votes. They would rather play this up, put on the cult jerseys they got the other day at their caucus meeting, go out into the lobby, film their selfie videos and tell the world how they are about to bring down the government. They then say, “You better donate here so we can get an extra 20 bucks from you to make it happen.” Then, of course, it will fall flat. Nothing will happen, and the Leader of the Opposition will be at his fundraiser this evening.
I found it very interesting. I listened to the Leader of the Opposition's speech today, and I heard what he had to say. I heard him talk about headlines. There are a couple of headlines he forgot to bring up when he was speaking, such as one that says, “Corporate lobbyists are flocking to [the Leader of the Opposition's] cash-for-access fundraisers.” Members should listen to this: The “Conservative leader...took aim”, and we will all remember this, “at Canada's ‘corporate lobbyists’ in a speech a week ago to the Vancouver Board of Trade, saying [that lobbyists] were ‘utterly useless’ and that under a Conservative government they would no longer ‘write a policy...and expect it to be implemented.’”
However, it goes on to say the following:
But in the past weeks and months, his party has in fact widely opened the doors to them. [The Leader of the Opposition] has rubbed shoulders with more than a hundred active or recent lobbyists at dozens of fundraising events since he became leader in 2022.... Lobbyists for oil and natural resource companies, big banks, telecoms, large retailers, and real estate investors paid for entry to private cash-for-access fundraisers with [the Leader of the Opposition.]
We have an individual who, on the one hand, will go up to the Vancouver Board of Trade, stand there and say, “Lobbyists are utterly useless. I will never listen to them.” However, then we find out through access to information or getting the lists of donors that the people who are actually going to the fundraisers he is having are all lobbyists. It is the hypocrisy that comes with that.
There is another headline that he forgot to mention, and this one is more recent. This one is from this morning in The Globe and Mail. It states that the Leader of the Opposition's campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, established a second lobbying firm from the same office. Members should listen to this:
But on the Monday after [the Leader of the Opposition's] Sept. 10, 2022, leadership win, the president and senior vice-president of Jenni Byrne + Associates incorporated Forecheck Strategies. Many of the staff who work at Ms. Byrne's firm also lobby federally for Forecheck.
Clients who booked meetings on [the new company's] website were redirected to the booking system for Jenni Byrne + Associates. That function was removed, as was Ms. Byrne's headshot posted to the website, after The Globe's inquiries about the connection between the two firms.
Madam Speaker, look at what we have here. Not only did we raise the hypocrisy of Jenni Byrne being an active lobbyist a couple months ago, but she knew it and the Conservatives knew it. The day after he became the leader, she went out and set up a new company to be a lobbyist. She removed her association from it, or at least tried to, but when people went on that new website, it ended up going to the exact same booking information as for Jenni Byrne + Associates. This tells us that not only did they know what they were doing was wrong but that they also actively tried to pre-empt getting caught. Unfortunately, at least for them, they still got caught.
That is what we have going on here. The Leader of the Opposition is no different from Donald Trump in the United States. He will get in front of his rallies, grab that microphone and tell the crowd what they want to hear. He will throw lobbyists under the bus and say they are the worst human beings ever. Then he will turn right around, just as Donald Trump would, and open up his hand to receive money from them.
When the Leader of the Opposition, or any member, says, “Oh, we are nothing like the MAGA Republicans in the United States,” I call BS. That is absolutely not true. He is exactly like Donald Trump. He is employing the exact same tactics, receiving the exact same money and using it in the exact same way as Donald Trump would.
I find it fascinating that today's motion is a confidence motion to trigger an election on an issue they ran on. In 2021, they ran on pricing pollution. We literally delivered to them what they wanted, and now they are saying they need to call an election on it because they do not think it was a good idea. This is what we are dealing with over there. It is absolutely ludicrous and insane. They cannot even be consistent on anything. It is because they deny climate change. As many members from the Bloc, the NDP and the Liberal Party have said, they deny climate change. They deny that it is something we have to deal with. They deny the reality of it.
I found it really interesting, and I felt for him, when the member for South Shore—St. Margarets said in a passionate question for the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader that he is a Progressive Conservative, was from the days of Progressive Conservatives, and how dare they suggest that he does not belong to that party of the past, the former Progressive Conservatives. I would say to the member for South Shore—St. Margarets that he did not leave the Conservative Party; the Conservative Party left him.
It is true. Look at people like Flora MacDonald, the last Conservative to be elected from Kingston and the Islands, in 1984. Flora MacDonald went on to be the first female to run in a national leadership campaign. She worked side by side with people like Brian Mulroney. These were Progressive Conservatives who cared about the environment. They brought countries together from around the world and said, “Listen, there is problem with the ozone layer. We need to fix it, and we need to work together.” They were not just protecting the Canadian environment; they were leaders on the global front when it came to saving the ozone layer in the 1990s.
As for acid rain, George Bush Sr. was against doing anything on it. It was Brian Mulroney who pushed George Bush Sr. and kept asking the Americans, saying that we needed to do something about acid rain. It was he who finally got them to sit down and come to an agreement on how we could control acid rain on this continent.
Those were the Progressive Conservatives. Those are the Conservatives that the member for South Shore—St. Margarets is hearkening back to. He unfortunately does not belong to a party that any longer bears any slight resemblance to that Progressive Conservative Party. People like Flora MacDonald, Kim Campbell, Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney were leaders when it came to the environment. The current Conservative Party has absolutely no interest in it.
Let us just get out of Canada for a second and look at what is going on globally. Globally, we are seeing a price on pollution, in one form or another, throughout the entire world. The Leader of the Opposition wants to try to suggest that having a price on pollution is an uniquely Canadian situation. I would say to him that every country has a price on pollution in one form or another. We often hear that the United States does not have a price on pollution. Yes it does. Many of the states are part of the cap-and-trade system. It is called the western initiative.
In the early 2000s, the environment ministers of provinces like Quebec and Ontario went to negotiate with California and other U.S. states to implement a cap-and-trade system. Cap and trade is just another form of pricing pollution. When Conservatives get up and imply that we are the only country that has a price on pollution, they are absolutely wrong.
The hypocrisy does not even end there. There are even Conservatives who sit here today who not only ran on pricing pollution, and I have already talked about that, but have also implemented pricing pollution in this country. The member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge was in the provincial legislature in B.C. when it brought in pricing pollution. Two members currently sit here, the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent and another member, who were sitting in the Quebec National Assembly when it unanimously adopted pricing pollution. The member for Louis-Saint-Laurent was the leader of his party at the time when they did that. We cannot make this stuff up.
Now they come back in here and speak as though it were such a foreign concept, and they say they could never understand how anybody would ever be interested in pricing pollution. Given their record, I would be embarrassed to be them, to even stand up to ask questions or even vote on issues regarding this, when they are one hundred per cent doing a 180° turn from where they were before.
What we know, despite the rhetoric, is that pricing pollution works. More importantly, eight out of 10 Canadians get more back than they pay into it. This is Groundhog Day, as NDP members have said. I remember talking about this just two days ago, and I will remind the House what I said. My home is in Ontario. It is heated by natural gas, which I get from from Enbridge. Just before we broke from sitting three weeks ago, in all the discussions about pricing pollution, I looked at all of my bills from 2023. I added up the price on pollution, the carbon tax, that I was paying. It totalled, in my house, $379.93 per year.
I drive an electric car, and my wife drives an electric hybrid plug-in. It would be unfair for me to just stop there. Let us assume that I did also drive a fully gas vehicle. The average gas vehicle consumes 1,667 litres of gas per year. In 2023, which is the year for which I am doing the calculations, that would amount to $238.55 that I would have paid on that car. If my wife and I both drove gas cars, plus I added the heating that I already talked about, it would come out to $855 that my household would have spent on the two highest contributing factors to what people pay on a price on pollution.
I am not trusting what the government tells me or what is posted on a website. I looked at my actual bank statement to see what was actually deposited into my account. When I combined the four rebate payments, it came out to $885 that I got back. In the scenario that I laid out, I am still ahead, given all of that.
When Conservatives say that the vast majority do not get it back, they are absolutely wrong. That is why 94% of households with incomes below $50,000 received rebates that exceeded their carbon tax costs in 2023. I do not even have to believe anybody; I just know that I benefited. I am in the net positive. Therefore when I read stats that suggest that 94% of households with incomes below $50,000 get more back, this is extremely easy to believe, given that I have seen what the impact is on me personally.
Only about 55% of households with incomes above $250,000 receive more back in payments than they paid. This is because when we consider who those two out of 10 are, and members can question and have a discussion about that, they are people who probably live in big houses with multiple vehicles and probably toys that consume a lot of gas or fossil fuels.
Do Conservatives care about the eight out of 10? No, they do not. They care only about the two out of 10. That is why they keep fighting with a false narrative and driving the false narrative based on misinformation back to people, in particular the eight out of 10 people. They would like to dupe them into believing their claims so the two out of 10 can benefit more.
I will close with a couple of quotes. One that I found very interesting was on Radio-Canada recently. The interviewer asked the chair of energy sector management at HEC Montréal, Mr. Pierre-Olivier Pineau, “When you hear [the Leader of the Opposition] say that carbon pricing increases the burden on taxpayers, while this week we also heard [the Minister of the Environment] retort that 80% of Canadians receive more back than they pay, who is telling the truth?” I can understand why people want to know that.
The chair of energy sector management said, “Well, [the environment minister] is telling the truth, and [the Leader of the Opposition] is acting in very bad faith when he claims that it adds to the burden, because in provinces where the federal carbon pricing applies, the federal government sends cheques to all households, which net-benefit the majority of Canadians. So, in fact, in [the Leader of the Opposition]'s plan, if it were implemented, a large number of households would no longer receive these cheques, making them poorer, on the contrary. So it's really playing on perceptions because it's true that at the pump, there's an extra cost, but in the taxpayers' pockets, it's beneficial.”
These are experts saying this. These are the people who are contradicting the Conservatives on a daily basis, and who are out there trying to inform the public as to what is really going on, what the reality is in these situations. Conservatives can continue to harp on ad nauseam about the price on pollution, but in reality, more people get back more.
What do the Conservatives really want to do? What do they really want to axe? Conservatives want to axe the rebate. Conservatives want to axe the measures we have put in place to help Canadians get through the effects of climate change and to help Canadians deal with the reality that when we price pollution, we are putting a price on a bad product.
We all pay property taxes to dispose of our garbage that we put at the curb. We all do that without batting an eyelash, because we accept the fact that producing garbage and putting it in a landfill or disposing of it one way or the other has to be dealt with. The exact same logic applies to carbon that is being put into the atmosphere and that will stay there for generations and have impacts for generations to come.
Putting a price on carbon will do exactly what putting a price on garbage does: It incentivizes people to make different choices, to recycle more, to put less in a garbage bag and to develop strategies and ideas as to what they can do to reduce their impact. The nice thing is that in the process, when people do start to make those choices and transitions, they will end up even farther ahead as a result when it comes to how much money they are getting back.
I certainly will not be voting in favour of the opposition motion today. I am very glad to hear around the room that it appears as though all of my colleagues in the other political parties will be following suit. It is incredible to work with adults in the room from time to time, because they do exist in here, unlike the Conservatives. A couple of minutes ago, I heard a Conservative member ask what the NDP has done. The NDP has done more in the short time that it has had an agreement with the government than the Conservatives have done in the over eight years I have been here. The only thing the Conservatives ever do is whine and complain about everything.
Finally we have adults in the room. New Democrats might be small in number, but the impact they have far outweighs any of the impact that the Conservatives have. New Democrats have actually been able to get things done. They have been able to put forward their initiatives. They understand what it is like to work in a minority Parliament. They understand that at the end of the day, our job here is to do things on behalf of Canadians and improve their lives, not just come here to yell and bark at the Prime Minister and accuse him of everything they can possibly come up with.
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- Jan/29/24 5:32:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in the midst of this ordeal that occurred late last fall, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle tweeted this in reference to this issue: “It’s...totally unacceptable.
“When I was Speaker the only fundraiser I attended was for my own riding. This is something all Speakers are allowed to do because they must run under a party banner, and other parties run candidates against them.”
We now know that this was categorically false because, prior to that, and I know the member for Barrie—Innisfil is finding this surprising too, and he should, we have a photo of the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, who was the Speaker at the time, along with the member for Regina—Wascana and the member for Carleton, posing at that fundraiser he attended. We know that he was not telling the truth in that tweet.
I am wondering if the member can comment on whether we should also be opening up an investigation into not only the untruthfulness of the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle but also the fact that he did something that he categorically claims to be unacceptable.
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