Christine Normandin

“Madam Speaker, we are here today to put Canada first, as a remarkable group of Canadians did in 1925, almost 100 years ago exactly, when they came together to form the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, an organization that hired First World War veterans to do what they have always done best: protect their fellow Canadians. A century later, the Commissionaires is still the largest non-governmental employer of veterans anywhere in Canada. It protects our public servants, and for years, it protected the offices of the Canada Revenue Agency. By every account, the agency was happy and satisfied with its exceptional work. Then on June 16 of this year, under the Prime Minister, the CRA handed the nearly $12-million contract to Universal Protection Service, a subsidiary of Allied Universal, an American security giant with ties to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation program, otherwise known as ICE. How much did Canadians save by elbowing out of this contract our veterans and giving it to the American parent company? It was a measly $80,000, less than 1% of the contract value. Obviously, when we take into account the taxes the commissionaires would have paid on their salaries back to the Canadian government, that amount is probably eliminated altogether. This is not a one-year deal. It runs for two years and can be extended five more after that, for a total of seven. That is seven years that our veterans could be shut out of this important work. The head of the Commissionaires for the Great Lakes said that he had never seen a contract this size change hands on such a slender difference when the client was happy with the work of the Commissionaires. Here is the part that should make every member of the House stop and think. The government’s own tender said, “This solicitation is open only to Canadian suppliers.” If it was only open to Canadian suppliers, how is it that an American-owned subsidiary got the deal? The answer is that the government’s so-called buy Canadian rules allow any foreign company to simply open a Canadian address in order to compete for Canadian-based work. As long as someone has a post office box, they can be from anywhere in the world and get a job paid for by Canadian tax dollars. The commissionaires themselves were shocked. One said, “Any foreign company can set up an office in Canada” and, in the words of this commissionaire, “poof”, the entire contracting rule goes up in smoke. To use another metaphor, it is maple-washing when an American giant with a Canadian mailing address counts the same as a 100-year-old charity, the largest employer in the country of Canadian veterans. Do members remember when the Prime Minister said only a few months ago that Canada is “at war” with the United States? Now he is hiring them to protect our tax office. That is not exactly the thing to do. This is not an accident. The contradictions are a pattern. On the U.S.-Canada file, the Prime Minister says one thing and does exactly the opposite. It is all an illusion for his political benefit. He is all talk and no results. He is out of touch while Canadians, in particular Canadian veterans, are out of money. Let us go through the list of these contradictions. He promised a buy Canadian policy, and then he increased the amount spent on American firms by 55%, to a total of $7.8 billion, of which the betrayal of the Commissionaires is just one example. In January, he told the world that we are in a “rupture, not a transition” with the U.S. Then he went on to say that our ties with the Americans had become our biggest weakness. Days later, he said that Canada and the U.S. would be “stronger together”. He warned against a world of fortresses in his Davos speech. Then he gave another speech where he said that he was in favour of something called “Fortress North America”. He said that “integration” had become “subordination”. Then he wanted more integration to, in his words, “make America great again”. In the election, he promised that if the Americans put tariffs on us, he would respond with dollar-for-dollar tariffs. He said that Canadians were in no mood for any concessions. Two months later, he admitted that his government had already moved off of dollar-for-dollar tariffs, and then quietly, he dropped reciprocal tariffs altogether. His energy minister said that energy was the best leverage we had in our negotiations for a deal. A week later, the Prime Minister said that resources were not leverage at all. At the summer 2025 G7 conference, he promised a deal within the coming 30 days. He missed that deadline, and almost a year and a half later, there is still no deal and there are still no wins. On the Gordie Howe bridge, the Prime Minister said he had secured a deal to ensure that no tariff revenues would go to the United States until all of Canada’s debt to build the bridge was repaid. After all, we had built the entire thing with our money. Then it came out that in fact the Americans were getting half of the net tolls from day one, not waiting until we paid off the enormous debts we incurred to build the bridge. Last week, the Prime Minister said that he was willing to wait until there was a new president before we get a deal. To be clear, that means two and a half more years of American tariffs killing Canadian jobs. How out of touch was that? However, worry not, because less than 72 hours later, he put out a tweet saying that he had called the president and restarted formal talks for a mutually beneficial trade deal in the coming weeks. We hope he is serious this time. We hope this is for real, but forgive us if we hesitate to pop the champagne until we see the actual results. It is an incredible reversal to say in the span of three days that he is willing to wait two and a half years without a deal and then say that he is kicking off negotiations to complete talks in the next several weeks. The Prime Minister has a phrase for this. He calls it “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” He was right about this phrase. He just did not realize that he was describing himself, because after all the speeches, all the slogans and all the deadlines, where are the results he promised? His single biggest promise in the last election was that he would deliver a great deal with the U.S, he would handle Donald Trump and he would negotiate a win. There is still no deal, still no tariff relief and still no results. Our economy has flatlined, 110,000 jobs have been lost in two months, there is a 9% increase in food bank demand, homebuilding is down rather than doubled, as the Prime Minister promised, and Canadian veterans have been pushed aside so an American company could guard our tax office. The Prime Minister will do anything to keep us distracted from his costly failures here at home. That is not leadership. It is political theatre. We do not need more grandstanding over the next month and a half from the Prime Minister. We need him to actually get the deal he promised. We as Conservatives have laid out a clear plan on how to get that deal. It starts with using the leverage we have. We have the things that Americans need. We have 10 of the 12 NATO-defined defence minerals right beneath our feet. Let us unlock their production and put them in strategic storage facilities, along with a new above-ground oil reserve that we can provide tariff-free to allies on a right-of-first-refusal basis to incentivize them to remove their tariffs. Let us align with our key trading partner to combat China’s abuse of our country. Let us use our massive military buildup and our willingness to take on more responsibility protecting our share of the continent as further leverage to get the tariff-free deal that we want. None of this should stop us from solving the problems we have here at home. Our youth need jobs and homes. Our families need affordable food. Our economy needs homegrown growth. Criminals need to go to jail. Drugs need to come off our street. Government spending must fall, and we must ultimately deliver for the people. All of these things are in our hands. The Prime Minister likes to say that we want to be masters of our own destiny. We could not agree more, but we cannot be a master of our own destiny if we are constantly making excuses about what we cannot achieve. There is no tweet from the U.S. president that can stop us from fixing our problems here at home. Let us save Canadians money, save their jobs, keep them safe, fix broken immigration and, most of all, put Canada first. Putting Canada first means putting our veterans first and voting for this motion.”