Blaine Calkins · TranslatePolitics.ca

Government Orders

Bail and Sentencing Reform Act

2026-06-12

“I want to talk about how bad the Liberals are. Their bill on crime has a big hole in it. It's like giving someone a seat belt but never making them use it.”

Statements by Members

The Economy

2026-06-12

“The Prime Minister is failing. Our country is struggling while he spends money on fancy airplane food. You could feed a family for 55 years with what he blows on catering. That money should go to real problems. I want the Prime Minister to show up and do his job.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, the verdict is in, and the Prime Minister is in way over his head. He is the only leader, not just in the G7 but also in the G20, who has led his country into a recession. What does this mean practically? Since the Prime Minister will not stand in this place to answer questions about his record, I will: two in five Canadians struggle to put food on the table; 60% of Canadians feel anxious about their personal finances; 40% lose sleep over how far they can stretch their paycheques; 38% face food insecurity; and last year, a whopping 2.2 million Canadians visited a food bank in a single month. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's office spent nearly $1 million in the last year alone on luxury inflight catering, including $175,000 for one trip last November. That catering bill would have been enough to feed a Canadian family for 55 years. Every dollar spent on luxury catering is a dollar that cannot go towards lowering taxes, building homes, improving public safety or helping Canadians put food on their own tables. Conservatives are here and ready to get to work. Where is the Prime Minister?

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Government Orders

Strong and Free Elections Act

2026-06-11

“Foreign foundations are funding left-wing campaigns to block our jobs and industries. This frustrates my voters. Let's name specific groups and foundations so voters think that all foreigners are socialist meddlers like them.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, I think my friend from Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies and I would have very similar constituents. They are hard-working, honest, patriotic, law-abiding Canadians who love going hunting and fishing. They work in forestry, mining, oil and gas and agriculture. These are folks who are very concerned about foreign money coming from foundations. Folks at home who want to go and look this up can take a look at some of these foundations, like the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation or the Tides foundation. These organizations do not just have a few thousand or a few hundred thousand dollars, or even a few million dollars. They actually have assets worth billions of dollars, and they are able to create organizations, like Leadnow, in another country and then fund them, with this massive foundation that they have, to influence policies in another country. This is very problematic. A good friend of mine, Vivian Krause, has actually exposed much of how this money gets brought into Canada to fund various organizations and groups to block resource development in Canada. It is very frustrating.

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“I want the bill to pass. Our party has some small problems with it. The other party has different small problems with it. We still mostly support it. But I want to criticize the government for not accepting my changes. My changes would boss people around more. I want the Canada Elections Act to micromanage people more. I want the bill to pass so elections can be more fair.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is not on the procedure and House affairs committee anymore, but we spent years there, particularly in the previous Parliament when foreign interference was front and centre and prevalent not only at the committee but also in the national spotlight, and I want to thank her for her work there. The Bloc Québécois has some issues with the bill. The Conservatives have some issues. Some of those are the same, some of those are different, but we broadly support the measures contained in the bill. We are disappointed that the government voted down certain important amendments that we put forward, like mandating better security at ballot boxes and closing third party advertising loopholes, for example. We are going to continue to call on the government to strengthen the Canada Elections Act to make sure that we can have confidence and trust in the institutions of the Government of Canada, particularly in the institution that is responsible for delivering elections, which are the foundation of our democracy.

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“You ask what we don't like. We don't like third party funding. It's allowed in general elections. We want to clamp down more. The elections commissioner has too much power. A judge should check them. The longest ballot committee is okay but it could be better. We want a foreign interference registry too.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of issues that are certainly a bit problematic. I laid that out in my speech. I trust that my colleague, who sits on the committee, was also there when we were asking specific questions about just how third party funding is still allowed to happen in the general elections of Canada. Our position as Conservatives is that we should be clamping down on that even more. Is it being clamped down on a bit more than it was before? Yes, it is. Has it gone far enough? No, it has not. Are there still issues with the commissioner of elections potentially having a bit too much power and authority now, without having a second set of eyes like a judge or somebody? The amount of administrative penalty that can be levied right now is certainly a bit problematic. Obviously, we are happy with what has happened with the longest ballot committee, but we think more could have been done there as well, and it would be nice if we could finally get that foreign interference registry stood up.

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“I want to ban foreign money in Canadian elections. This bill doesn't go far enough. Liberals are finally accepting our ideas after opposing them for years. But there will still be loopholes for foreign money in our elections. This bill won't fix that.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today to speak to this government legislation again, Bill C-25, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act. I am a member of the procedure and House affairs committee and have scrutinized this proposed legislation in my capacity there. I also spoke about this bill a couple of months ago, in mid-April. In that speech, I highlighted that this is a much-needed piece of legislation, one that Conservatives have been calling for since before the 2019 election. There are some good things in the bill, some much-needed tools to help handle foreign interference in our elections. However, as I noted not even two months ago, it does not go far enough, especially with how it pertains to third party fundraising and foreign contributions. As we heard clearly from expert witnesses at the procedure and House affairs committee, Bill C-25 would improve the protection that Canadians have with respect to the electoral process, including from dangers posed by hostile foreign actors. However, it would leave some major holes, primarily regarding foreign contributions outside the election period. How do we know this? We know because we as Conservatives are the ones who have been advocating for changes to the Canada Elections Act to deal with this very issue for quite some time now. I will take some of the folks in this room way back with me to May 8, 2019. That is the day that my private member's bill, Bill C-406, was voted down at second reading in this very chamber. The goal of the bill, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act with respect to foreign contributions, was to deal with exactly this problem then, the same problem we are talking about now, seven years ago and three elections before the one that we just had. The bill I proposed, Bill C-406, was a bill that would have amended the Elections Act to prohibit foreign contributions to third parties for election advertising purposes. This is very important to me, because third party funding certainly comes in the form of advocacy and is used by third parties in campaigns to campaign against what I would consider to be the financial interests of the people I represent and of my home province, Alberta. I also understood at that time that, just out of a matter of principle, Canadians and Canadians alone should be the ones funding, debating and voting in a Canadian general election. It does make sense. Foreign entities and countries outside our borders likely should not be able to fundraise or spend money for political purposes here in Canada. That in itself is a breach of public trust and is, I think, by very definition of course, a semblance of foreign interference, whether it is happening covertly or not. If we do not know about it, it is a problem. My private member's bill would have stopped that foreign fundraising that influences our elections here in Canada. It would have addressed the very issues that Bill C-25 claims to address. Here we are, nearly a decade later. Members will never guess what happened. The Liberals voted against the bill, including the Liberal MP for Scarborough—Guildwood—Rouge Park, who is now the public safety minister, the same one who is now overseeing a new foreign agent registry that was recently introduced by the Liberals, despite his having been rabidly opposed to such a registry when it was the Conservatives, my former colleague Kenny Chiu, who proposed it. This is one of those that make a person go, “hmm”. It is almost as if the Liberals will support a good policy only once they have been dragged through the wringer to actually see that it is a good idea. I do not know why that is, but they just genetically oppose every idea we pose to them until their ideas start to miserably fail and afflict Canadians some four to eight years later. Then, all of a sudden, they see the light and do the things we have been telling them they should have been doing all along. It does not exactly breathe confidence into the issue of dealing with foreign interference, does it? We know that this is a theme. The Liberals often chastise Conservatives for big, sweeping policy ideas, but give it half a decade, and once the chickens come home to roost on the cabal of bad ideas across the way, they will eventually adopt Conservative ideas, rebrand them and package them as their own. The Prime Minister did it at Oxford with his thesis and is doing it here as well in the House of Commons. I only wish the Liberals had long ago adopted my idea of banning foreign nationals and entities from donating to and supporting third parties for election advertising purposes. It seems like common sense to me, but that might not be such a common thing across the aisle. We studied the issue at length at committee, where we heard from several witnesses, including, most recently, Gerald Chipeur, that the bill does not go far enough and would need to crack down even harder on foreign monetary contributions. In other words, there would still be a gaping hole that would allow foreign entities to send money to third parties, which could end up influencing, affecting or being spent in our general elections. The bill would crack down, but it would not prohibit. It would not go far enough. There would still be wide open loopholes for foreign funding to pour into Canadian elections. Foreign contributions for political purposes would still be allowed in Canada; Bill C-25 would not change that. Lots of witnesses who came before the procedure and House affairs committee testified that, in their opinion, this is completely unacceptable. I think that most Canadians, if they knew money was coming in to third parties from outside Canada and being spent on elections advertising, would be quite concerned. What also came out of our foreign interference study at committee, perhaps most notably, was our former candidate Joe Tay's testimony. Mr. Tay was our Conservative candidate of record in Don Valley North. Former Liberal MP Paul Chiang put a bounty on him during the 2025 election. Chiang encouraged folks to turn Mr. Tay in to the Chinese consulate in Toronto for a cash reward. There was already an arrest warrant for Mr. Tay, issued by the Communist regime in Beijing for making pro-democracy comments from here in Canada about what is going on in Hong Kong and China. This was a Liberal MP at the time basically encouraging the kidnapping of a political adversary. Goodness knows what would have happened if Mr. Chiang had actually gotten his way. We also know, based on testimonies at the committee from volunteers on Mr. Tay's campaign, that they were stalked, followed, intimidated and harassed by individuals. These were campaign volunteers, for crying out loud. It is hard enough to find people to come out to participate in our elections. The last thing we need is foreign entities and foreign funds coming in to discourage, intimidate and harass campaign volunteers, regardless of the political party they are helping. This is just wrong across the board. It is wrong not just when it happens to Conservatives; it is wrong when it happens to Liberal, NDP or Bloc members, or to anybody. Since these incidents, the Prime Minister has praised Paul Chiang as a person of integrity, and he has also strengthened Canada's ties with the People's Republic of China through trade and security partnerships. Just over a year ago, on the debate stage during the 2025 election, the Prime Minister admitted that the biggest threat to Canada's security was the Communist regime in China. I am not sure, but I would like to know where that Prime Minister went. Across the aisle, the Liberals expect us to believe that they are serious about halting foreign interference. They will have to give me a bit of a break, because I am not buying what they are selling. I try to make it make sense, but it just does not. We are talking about the individuals who are interfering in our elections and meddling in our campaigns. They are targeting our people, and they are spending money on propaganda campaigns that endanger Canadians, especially those in specific diaspora communities. The bill would do nothing to solve these problems. Sure, the bill would crack down on foreign spending during the writ period, but it would leave a massive hole for foreign entities to pour money into political advertising outside the writ period. For folks that are watching at home and wondering what the writ period is, I will explain. There is a writ period, and when we have a fixed election, there is a pre-writ period, and then there are the three years in between. During those three years, third parties will not be required to separate the molecules, per se, so any money that comes in to those third parties from foreign entities during that time frame will not be scrutinized by Elections Canada. They can just bankroll all these things in the pre-writ period and then spend as much as they want during the writ period during a fixed election. Do not take my word for it; this comes directly from constitutional legal experts who gave their testimony at a committee and said that they agreed with the exact interpretation we had when we read the bill. It would still leave that gaping hole. Conservatives have been talking about foreign interference for nearly a decade. After 2021, our leader at the time brought up the issue of foreign interference in our elections. He was supported by our former colleague, Kenny Chiu from Steveston—Richmond East, who warned for years about foreign interference before being a victim of it himself. These are the issues we have had. We have had a public inquiry into foreign interference. The government dragged its feet on that and finally succumbed to the mountains of pressure that were put on it at the time. It seemed to be reluctant the whole time. It is almost as if the foreign interference regime that had been orchestrated in the last couple of elections had a blind eye turned to it, because it obviously benefited somebody in the chamber. I am glad to see that it looks like the government is trying to change its ways and is presenting this bill. Conservatives still have massive concerns with it, but we will be supporting the bill and would make sure the Canada Elections Act is, if not perfect, at least better than it is today.

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“I don't understand why the government is rushing to pass an election financing bill when it won't even matter for the next three years. Why are they using our limited time on this?”

Oral Questions

Firearms

2026-06-11

“I want the government to stop spending a billion dollars taking guns from normal people who follow the law. Crime has gotten worse since that started. Even the Supreme Court says the government should take more time. The minister in charge admits it doesn't work right. It's a waste of money, so stop it.”

Government Orders

Build Canada Homes Act

2026-06-09

“You say my kids would love a carbon tax? They can't even afford a house thanks to your government's disasters.”

“I'm not going to say anything concrete about the housing bill. Instead I'll just string together some partisan buzzwords: global agenda, central bankers, scarcity, socialist spending. The real problem is the government spends money on things. I don't like that. It's why we have a deficit.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague knows the answer to this, but here is how the Liberals do it. They take whatever the global agenda happens to be. Financial markets and central bankers, like the current Prime Minister, create global scarcity for a certain product, drive up the demand for it by creating that scarcity and then come up with socialist-type deficit spending to solve the problem, which all of the insiders, their friends and their big corporate interests, then grift on. That is why we are in this mess. They can apply this to housing or any of the other aspect of our economy. Have members ever noticed that nothing ever gets done in this country unless the government spends a bunch of taxpayers' dollars along with it? It does not seem to work, does it? All that happens is our deficit goes up and things get worse.

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“The Harper government had good housing policies. People could spend their own money on their own homes. There were tax breaks for new homebuyers. People could use their retirement savings too. This helped build lots of homes. We didn't spend too much. We had rules so people could afford their mortgages. We built two million homes with only three million more people. The Liberals are not doing a good job like we did.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, I would love to revisit the Harper-era policies. Some of the main housing-related policies were the home renovation tax credit in 2009, which saw massive investments in Canadians to invest in their own home. It helped with expenses of over $1,000 and up to $10,000. There was $1,350 in tax relief for people to stay in their homes and keep those homes current. The first-time homebuyers' tax credit in the 2009 budget was worth up to $750 at the time, helping offset the closing costs for the purchase of new homes. With the expansion of the homebuyers' plan, the government increased the amount Canadians could withdraw from their RRSPs from $20,000 to $25,000. Economic action plan infrastructure spending invested in lots of community housing. We tightened mortgage rules. We made sure that we did not get into a fiscal crisis. We regulated the environment, rather than try to do everything for everybody else. We built two million homes while the population grew by only 3.2 million. We kept up with the increase in population, which is something these guys have failed to do, miserably.

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“I am speaking against the Build Canada Homes Act. The government promised to build many homes. They have not built them. Home prices are still high. The government's solution is more bureaucracy and spending. I think this will not work. Conservatives have better ideas to help build more homes. The government should listen to our ideas.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek. I am happy to stand today and represent the fine folks of Ponoka—Didsbury. I am happy to report that my leader does not yell at me in caucus meetings and that he listens to all my concerns when I bring them to his attention. I humbly rise to speak against this piece of government legislation, Bill C-20, the Build Canada Homes act. The Liberal Prime Minister and his government have been big on their promises over the last year, much like they are big on their bureaucracy, big on their spending and big on creating big-time failures. This piece of legislation is a fraction of the action off the back end of a big promise that guarantees big bureaucracy, big spending and an even bigger deficit. When elected to a minority government last year, the Prime Minister said he was going to “build, baby, build”, but, oh, baby, he has not built a thing. How did we get here? Well, it was through broken promises and the promotion of failure. Failing upwards is all we are seeing, it seems. The Prime Minister ran an election campaign on a promise to double our homebuilding construction to 500,000 homes a year and to move at speeds not seen in generations. They have not been seen because we cannot see anything moving when nothing is moving. There is nothing to see. Whom did the Prime Minister hand-pick to help him deliver on this promise to complete the most housing completions in Canadian history? He chose the member for Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby. Listen to this: When he was the mayor of Vancouver, the member raised development charges by 141%, increased the price of homes by 149%, watched the average rent jump by 50%, and saw homelessness increase by 38%. Wow, talk about failing upwards. Under his watch, Vancouver became one of the most expensive markets in North America. It is not just one of the most expensive markets in North America but one of the most expensive in the world. The member is whom the Liberal Prime Minister tasked with delivering on this housing crisis, the same minister who said on day one of the job that home prices in this country do not need to come down at all. It is no wonder homes are not being built in this country. Nothing is being built. There is a theme here: no homes, no pipelines, no energy projects and no infrastructure. The Prime Minister cannot get anything built. It has been more than a year since the PM's grand promise to build half a million homes a year, and the result is in: fewer permits, fewer starts and a housing crisis that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, one of the government's four housing bureaucracies, has declared that Canada must build between 430,000 and 500,000 homes per year for up to a decade to restore 2019 levels of housing affordability. The Prime Minister promised he would build these half a million homes a year, and he said that a big proponent of this building would be the new Crown corporation, Build Canada Homes. However, the reports since that promise suggest that Build Canada Homes has the capacity to build only up to about 400,000 homes across six different Canadian cities. This is a mere 1% of the Liberals' original homebuilding promise of 500,000 homes. Where will the other 496,000 come from, if not from this new $11.5-billion agency? Those six sites across the country are not even new announcements, I will remind everyone. Each and every project is an old project that the Canada Lands Company, one of the government's other housing bureaucracies, was already working on. The government has taken these sites and reintroduced them under a new agency, and it is calling this progress. It is not progress; it is an abject failure. No new homes are being built. It is an expensive photo op, just like the fake construction site the Prime Minister spent $35,000 on last September when he announced this very Build Canada Homes project in Ottawa, a fake solution to a very real Liberal housing crisis. The CMHC says that housing starts in Canada are projected to drop from 270,000 this year to 212,000 by 2028. National housing starts will drop by 18.1% over the next two years as developers are facing skyrocketing building costs. This is an issue that is compounding. Every day it gets worse, and we simply do not have any more time to waste. A year after the promise of half a million homes a year, there is a catastrophic collapse in the market. Maybe the Prime Minister's new Major Projects Office that has not approved a major project yet will take this lofty goal on. The problem is delivery. Deliverology is not working for the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister promised to build at speeds never seen before, at a generational speed, but here we are, a year into his term, and we are just now debating Bill C‑20, which has the capacity to build only 1% of the homes the government promised. The minister said a key component of Build Canada Homes is speeding up housing construction. He is not off to a very good start. It took him nearly a year just to bring legislation to the House, which is still not getting anything done. In recent years, the CMHC's data, which is the government's own data, shows that housing starts are falling in this country, and they will continue to fall nationally this year and next. The Canadian Real Estate Association says national home prices have increased 2.2% from this time last year. The average home price has increased in every province across Canada. The territories have seen a worse fate. The average home price in the Yukon has increased by over $80,000 from this time last year. The housing crisis is not getting better. It is spiralling out of control. What is the government's solution? It is more bureaucracy, consultants, photo ops and broken promises. The job of His Majesty's loyal opposition is to hold the government accountable, promote sound policy and correct the government when it needs correction. One would think the government's job is to listen, but that has not been working. The role of the opposition is integral to the function of Parliament, and it plays an even more important role in the rightful minority Parliament that the Liberals were elected to last year. This job as opposition was given to us by over 8 million voters across the country. Our leader has been clear that we will oppose bad policies and support good ones. This policy is bad policy. It is expensive, it does not deliver any new homes, it pays bureaucrats and consultants and it duplicates the work that several other federal housing agencies already do. It is needless. When the housing minister took office as the mayor of Vancouver in 2008, the average price of a detached home in the city was $942,000. On his last day in office, that same home price had soared to $1.8 million. This is the same theme we are going to see nationally. Home prices have remained at unattainable values and costs, there are no buyers, sellers or new builds, and there is no market. The Liberals' response is an $11.5‑billion housing agency that may have the potential to build up to 4,000 homes. My hon. colleague from Parry Sound—Muskoka has offered a substantive, good housing policy that will move the needle and get homes built across the country, but the housing minister will not listen. He is stuck in his ways. They are the same ways that saw Vancouver become the most unaffordable housing market in North America and one of the most expensive in the world. The Conservatives do not support adding more bureaucratic red tape to our already highly regulated housing sector. We support and have encouraged the government to do the following things. Cut the GST on all new homes under $1.3 million. In turn, this would save families up to $65,000 on the purchase of a new home and unleash new building in every market across the country. Tie federal infrastructure dollars to homebuilding to incentivize construction and new builds. Municipalities would have to permit at least 15% more homebuilding each year in order to receive federal infrastructure spending. Cut development charges by 50%. The Liberals promised this during the last election campaign, but refused to deliver. This would lift a massive fiscal anchor off the backs of Canadian builders and allow them to do what they do best, which is build houses. End the capital gains tax on reinvestments in new housing in Canada. This would unlock billions of dollars of investment in our country's homebuilding sector. These are substantive, difference-making policy proposals for our housing sector, but they are met with crickets from the government benches. The GST tax cut on all new homes under $1.3 million, for example, is a policy proposal that building experts, both Liberal and Conservative, have been calling for for over a year now as a policy that would actually enact change. The housing minister is not listening. In fact, on a podcast last summer, the minister referred to our proposed GST tax cut as “a big, large sweeping change to make”. Under the government's watch, Canada is facing a housing crisis we have not seen since the Second World War. Instead of rising to the occasion, the government has failed and has made things even worse. Maybe big, large, sweeping changes are exactly what we need to get Canadians into the houses they want.

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Oral Questions

The Economy

2026-06-09

“The economy is terrible and it's this government's fault. You say everything is fine but we're in recession. Canada is losing and businesses won't invest here because of you. Your own budget officer says your budget is a fantasy. Some great economic manager! I want you to admit things are bad and it's your fault.”

“Canada's economy is getting worse and worse under the current government. I want to blame the Prime Minister for causing a recession. I'm using facts about our shrinking economy and weak growth to make the case against his leadership.”

Government Orders

2026-06-04

“The Liberal government used to say mandatory minimums were bad. They got rid of them even though the court didn't say they had to. Now the government says mandatory minimums are good again but they want a way to not enforce them. I think this is self-contradictory.”

Official Hansard

Madam Speaker, I want to wind the clock back to 2022 when, in this place, the Liberal government of the day passed Bill C-5, which actually removed mandatory minimum penalties for a number of serious gun crimes, including extortion with a firearm and robbery with a firearm. There were no mitigating court cases or rulings from the Supreme Court of Canada that actually mandated that Parliament do that. That was an ideologically imposed piece of legislation that removed them. Now the Liberals want to bring back mandatory minimums, with what they call a relief valve, which makes them voluntary mandatory minimums. I have also heard voluntary mandatory when it comes to their gun buyback program. Is there anything that is anymore oxymoronic from the Liberal government than this?

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Statements by Members

Ponoka Stampede

2026-06-04

“I want you to attend a rodeo in my riding. Many people work hard on it. It has been successful for a very long time.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, folks can grab their hats, dust off them boots and polish up them buckles. The arena lights will be blazing, the chutes loaded and the thunder of hooves shaking the ground. The 90th Ponoka Stampede is just around the corner, and it is fixing to be one for the books. At the get-go, the Ponoka Stampede was a two-day event organized by local cowboy and veteran George MacKeddie. With an admission price of 25¢, spectators could see saddle bucking, bareback riding, chariot racing, pony races, Roman races and more. Soon after, chuck racing and premium bucking broncs were added to the stampede, which put Ponoka on the map as an internationally acclaimed show and one of the top rodeos in the world. Each year, over 800 volunteers put in over 3,000 hours during the week-long celebration, with support from over 30 local community organizations. From 3,000 spectators in the mid-1930s to over 100,000 spectators today, the Ponoka Stampede sets the standard for celebrating our great western heritage. Folks can come on out and join us in Ponoka between June 25 and July 1 for a grand old time. Yee-haw.

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Government Orders

Protecting Victims Act

2026-06-04

“I want to say the other party is wrong. They passed bills we didn't like. We told them their bills were bad. Now I'm going to list some names of people who said things I don't like. I want to blame the other party for causing problems. I don't like that they blame us. We were right and they were wrong.”

Official Hansard

Madam Speaker, to listen to this minister complain about and blame Conservatives for the situation of our justice system in Canada today is laughable. When Bill C-75 was passed, Conservatives opposed that bill because we knew the damage and the consequences that bill would wreak on our justice system. Jody Wilson-Raybould, the minister at the time, said that passing that bill would speed up all of the delays in the court system, delays that seem to still exist. Arif Virani, during the debate, defended the government's use of time allocation and argued the opposition was blocking. Randy Boissonnault did the same thing and argued that Conservatives were holding things up. We were simply trying to warn Canadians about the damage these guys were doing. Fast-forward to Bill C-5. David Lametti, as this bill's sponsor, said that Bill C-5 needed to move forward quickly and efficiently, and again blamed Conservatives for stopping the government from removing mandatory minimum penalties. Now, fast-forward to the current public safety minister and Mark Holland arguing the same thing. All of this is evidenced in the Hansard and the Debates of those parliaments. For this minister to stand here today and actually blame Conservatives for telling them that they were wrong and we were right all along is ridiculous.

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Government Orders

2026-06-03

“A few years ago, I complained that Liberals let some criminals off easy. Liberals got rid of minimum sentences for bad crimes with guns. I said that must be fun, having a gun to your head. What happened to that crime since then?”

Oral Questions

Public Safety

2026-05-29

“Crime is bad. Liberals caused this. Bad people should be in jail.”

Government Orders

Business of Supply

2026-05-28

“The government taxes and regulates businesses too much. They do that so people need their help. Then the Liberals get to announce funding and act like heroes. I think the government picks favorites like this in every part of the economy.”