Warren Steinley

In response to a question from John-Paul Danko

“The Liberal child care plan has failed because it did not create enough spots and forced private centres to close. We want a voucher system instead, so parents have more choices.”

“Madam Speaker, I believe this is the House of Commons in Canada. However, I want to go back to the member’s comments about day care. The member should be ashamed of himself for his day care program, because it has created very few spots. The Liberals have actually misled Canadians, which they do all the time. We brought forward solutions at committee, actually, to make the day care program better, where people could use a voucher and pay for private sector day care or government sector day care if it works. We believe in giving people choices and not forcing them into one thing. I would love for him to go to Hamilton and see how many people are actually looking for day care spaces and cannot get them because the Liberals’ program caused private ones to shut down.”

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“The government's economic policies have caused a recession. Life has become unaffordable, many people cannot afford food, and the national child care program has made it harder to find day care spots. The government is also planning new taxes and grounding the Snowbirds. We need to cut spending, lower taxes, and support our energy sector instead of creating more government programs.”

“Madam Speaker, it is with pleasure that I join the debate today on Bill C-31, part of the budget implementation act. This budget is from November 4, 2025, so it seems a bit weird talking about a budget when we are in a different year already. Nevertheless, there are some comments I would like to get on the record about the budget. Obviously, we cannot talk about the budget implementation act without discussing the current economic situation we have in Canada. Canada is the only G7 nation that is in a full-fledged, Liberal-led recession. How did we get here? Over the last 10 years, and I have been in the House since 2019, time and again I have seen the Liberal government bring in legislation and regulations that curtail growth and development in our energy sector. Whether it was Bill C-69 or the shipping ban off the west coast, all of these have led to less investment and development in our country. This is the actual end result of an anti-growth, antidevelopment Liberal agenda. We see that our country has shed 112,000 jobs in the first three months of this year. That is 112,000 people who had to go home to their families and talk about how they were going to pay the bills that month. These are not just numbers but Canadians’ lives we are talking about. The Liberals have an obsession with not admitting there is a problem. The first step to addressing any crisis or issue is to admit there is an issue. That has not happened with the Liberal government. It tries to keep the grand illusion time and again. The Liberal Prime Minister is just another Liberal. He is an illusionist. It is all an illusion about what the economy looks like to him and how he wants to continue to make it appear to Canadians. As he said himself a couple of weeks ago, affordability has never been better in Canada. I have not heard from one single constituent of mine in Regina—Lewvan over the last couple of years that affordability is on the right track. The Prime Minister keeps trying to mislead Canadians by saying that. When we go to the grocery store, which I know the Prime Minister does not, we see people grabbing things off the shelf, looking at the price and then putting them back. We see people rolling their shopping cart past the meat counters, looking at the price of meat and not buying it because they cannot afford it. That is a literal everyday occurrence for people who are trying to get by in Regina—Lewvan right now. I want to talk about some things that are not in this budget implementation act that we now see the Liberals bringing forward. The new streaming tax was not in this budget. They did not tell Canadians they were going to tax their streaming services in the budget of November 4, 2025. Also, the sovereign debt fund was not in the budget we are talking about. I do not know where the Liberals are going to find the billions and billions of dollars to put into the debt fund, which would put Canadians even more in debt, with larger deficits, which would then cause inflation to be even worse, especially food inflation. Selling airports was also not in the budget last year. There was a conversation around selling off airports across Canada to keep giving out more money. I do not know who would want to purchase the airports, but I bet it is probably someone the Prime Minister knows, maybe even a company he knows quite well, possibly Brookfield. Are Brookfield airports all across Canada a possibility that the Liberals did not talk about in the budget last year? One thing that is very close to our hearts in Saskatchewan that was definitely not in this budget is that the Snowbirds are going to be grounded. The fact that the Liberals had someone from Saskatchewan at the cabinet table who did not fight to keep the Snowbirds in the air is absolutely appalling. They are an iconic symbol to this country and have been around for 60 years, but under the Liberals, the Snowbirds are going to be grounded until, they say, 2030. The government has never met a deadline, so I am very scared as to how long the Snowbirds will be grounded. That is something that each and every member should listen to their constituents about. I know people are reaching out and saying that this is something that should never be done. Our Snowbirds should be in the air, flying, because they are a national symbol of hope and an iconic symbol. I hope this wrong-headed decision will be reversed and we will keep our Snowbirds in the air. I am going on to some of the other things that we have seen in the last couple of days. I just saw this, a new food bank report. After 11 years of the Prime Minister’s Liberals, life has become completely unaffordable. Food Banks Canada released its latest poverty report card, warning that “Something fundamental has shifted in Canada”, after finding that one quarter of Canadians are food-insecure. Can members believe that in our country, with all of our farmland and all of our agriculture, 25% of Canadians are food-insecure? We have the Liberals standing up here in question period. I would submit that question period is probably my most frustrating hour of the day, every day. We sit here and we ask questions about how Canadians are going to be able to afford their next meal, how Canadians are going to be able to pay for rent. Some people are employed, yet they spend 120% of their income on food and rent. Day after day, we sit here and ask questions on behalf of Canadians, and the Liberals get up and tell Canadians they have never had it so good. That is actually what they say every day. An hon. member: Oh, oh! Warren Steinley: Madam Speaker, a Liberal is heckling across the way, but they do say that. They think that having a grocery benefit is a good thing, but it means they are failing. It means the economy is going down the dumpster, because they have to give food stamps to Canadians. The fact that they have to give out food stamps is not a measure of success. Those guys should wake up over there. It is actually a sign of how badly they have governed this country over the last 10 years. Another report came out, on child care. This is one of our Liberal friends’ favourite comments, about child care. Do members know that a child care report came out about child care spaces in Saskatchewan? Ninety-two per cent of people say it is hard to find child care in Saskatchewan since these Liberals brought in their day care program. They promised to make 255,000 day care spaces. They have missed that. They have done only 65% of that. In the GTA, there are fewer child care spaces now than in 2019, and there are a lot more people. That is going backwards. Before this program, there was a 5% to 7% increase in child care spaces a year in the GTA. Now, for some years, it has actually gone backwards and there are fewer child care spaces. That is what happens when they make promises they cannot commit to fulfilling. Saskatchewan was actually called a “child care desert” because there are so few spaces right now. Saskatoon and Regina are bad, but if we go out to rural Canada, rural Saskatchewan or Alberta, there are hardly any child care spaces for anyone, especially the ones that are government-run, because they have very strict hours. The people who need child care the most, the people who work shift work, sometimes cannot find a day care because the government ones have kicked out all the private day cares that were open before and worked different hours. Now, even if people got on the list and waited two years to get into the child care program, it does not work the hours that people need it to work anyway. That is what happens when the government takes over where there are actual private sector solutions. Just to go back to our frustration on this side, I find it very funny that the Liberals always bring up day care in their answers in question period. They talk about programs. Parents would prefer to actually feed their own kids, if they were not taxed to death and could make enough money to feed their own kids, instead of having a government program do it. They talk about the grocery benefit. They brag about giving people food stamps. We should cut government waste, decrease taxes and let more economic engines run in this country in the energy sector. We lost $60 billion in investments in the energy sector this year. That is why this Prime Minister is an illusion. The fact is that he is the only leader in the G7 who has led his country into a recession. He cannot blame anyone but himself. If he wants to know what the problem is with Canada right now, why we cannot get anything done and why we cannot grow, he should look in the mirror.”

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• Echo ×22

  A repeated line

  “The Prime Minister is just another Liberal.”

  Said 22 times by 14 members since April 23.

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“The Prime Minister spent $195,000 on airplane food for three trips. It is wrong for him to spend this much while many Canadians cannot afford their groceries.”

“Mr. Speaker, while millions of Canadians struggle to put food on their table, the Liberal Prime Minister’s luxury inflight catering costs soared to $195,000 for three trips, at a time when one in three employed Canadians is using debt to pay for their food. In my home province of Saskatchewan, people are talking about whether or not it is okay to steal groceries from grocery stores. How out of touch does the Prime Minister have to be to cater luxury meals for himself and his buddies while Canadians are struggling to put food on the table?”

“The Liberals break their promises and fail at everything they do. They did not lower grocery prices, they did not make a trade deal with the United States, and their child care plan is failing parents. I want them to answer for these failures.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to take to my feet today to ask for a more substantive answer to a question I asked in question period about a month ago. I asked the Liberal finance minister if he should be held to his own words. I remember back in 2023 that minister had said he would have grocery prices under control by Thanksgiving 2023. Those are not the only comments we have heard about grocery prices over the last few years from the Liberal government members. We also heard the Prime Minister tell all Canadians that he should be judged by the prices they see at the grocery store. I think it is fair to hold people accountable to their own words. Even my kids know they are responsible for the words that come out of their mouths. I would expect the same from these Liberals when they say something. I would also ask about the fact that this Prime Minister was elected on a promise to Canadians that he would have a trade deal done with Donald Trump in the United States by July 1, 2025. That has long since passed, so I would ask the Canadian public to hold the Liberals accountable to the words they have actually spoken and the promises they have committed to. We have seen these Liberals cheerlead and pat themselves on the back because they are giving out tariff relief. If they had kept their word and gotten a trade deal with the U.S.A. and handled Donald Trump, as the Prime Minister said on the campaign trail, they would not have to be handing out tariff relief to companies. They would be able to make their own money, trade, do what they do best and make great Canadian products and sell them from coast to coast, to our neighbours to the south and around the world. I would like an answer on why the Liberals keep cheering for themselves when they have failed at every measurable thing they have committed to. They committed to lowering grocery prices. They failed. They committed to getting a trade deal done with the United States. They failed. They committed to child care. I know there is going to be an answer on this from whoever is going to answer over there that they do have child care, but, right now, the child care program has failed miserably. They promised 250,000 new spaces by the end of March. They are at 155,000 spaces, which is 62% of what they promised. Once again, the promise was made, but the promise was not kept by these Liberals. It is really a lie of the left. They commit to things, but they never follow through. We see the Desjardins report, which says, “the share of respondents mentioning the lack of available childcare spaces or long waitlists rose sharply over this period, from 1 in 15 [in 2019] to...1 in 5 [now].” It is harder and harder for parents to find child care spaces because the private ones could not compete. We saw this in the GTA also. Before the child care program, child care spaces were rising from 5% to 7% a year. Now, during some years, we have seen decreases in child care spaces. It is an abject failure of a program that we had questions about from the start, and parents are being burdened by the failures of the government. Whether it be child care spaces or food prices, it is a fail. Trade deals with the U.S.A. are a fail. Is there anything the government has succeeded at? Can it show us any segment of the Canadian population that is better off now than before the Liberals’ last 10 terrible years of government?”

“I have a question for the NDP member. Earlier, a Liberal member laughed about seniors who cannot afford food.”

“Mr. Speaker, I have an honest question for my friend from the NDP. Earlier, we had the member for Winnipeg North laughing about seniors not being able to afford food in one of our members’ ridings. He said—”

In response to a question from Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

“This debt fund is not open or clear. We do not know who will run it or how they will make choices. The government should not pick winners and losers. Taxpayers will lose money.”

“Mr. Speaker, that is such a great point from my colleague from the Bloc. I did not get a chance to comment on that in my speech. We have no idea who is going to be the head of this debt fund. We have no idea who is going to be on the board and how those decisions are going to be made. There is such a lack of transparency. I would say to my hon. colleague that this is a case where the government is picking winners and losers once again and not letting the free market decide. That is where we get in trouble. That is why taxpayers are going to lose money.”

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In response to a question from Pat Kelly

“Families have to cut spending in other areas when they want to save money. The government is not doing that. It is just adding more debt, and taxpayers will be stuck paying the bill.”

“Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comment and the opportunity. I will walk them through it the way my wife and I would walk through budgeting at home. We have three kids, and we want to make sure that money is put away for their education. There is only so much money at the end of the day, when groceries are getting higher and the kids are getting bigger and eating more. If we want to put money away to make sure that they get an education, we have to look at cutting spending in other areas. Then we would have a surplus, extra money to put away for our kids’ education. This is not being done with the sovereign debt fund. The Liberals are piling debt upon debt. If we did that in my household, instead of actually finding the money to put away for my kids’ education, I would put it on my credit card, and my kids would be left with a student loan and then a credit card bill at the end. That is what taxpayers are going to be left with.”

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In response to a question from Kody Blois

“Nutrien is building a port in the United States instead of Canada because this government has too much red tape. That is the government's fault.”

“Mr. Speaker, what I would recognize is one thing that the member for Kings—Hants left out. Nutrien, which is headquartered in Saskatoon, has decided to build a port in Washington state instead of Vancouver because there is so much red tape and bureaucracy. They have no faith that the federal government would allow them to build in the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert. They had to go to the United States. That is shameful, and it lies at the feet of this government.”

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“I want the government to cancel its plan for a 25-billion-dollar investment fund. The government should not borrow money to invest when it already runs huge deficits, because it will waste taxpayers' money on corporate insiders.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to join in debate today on our opposition day motion on the sovereign debt fund. The motion reads: That, given that, (i) sovereign wealth funds must have wealth that comes from budget surpluses and resource revenues, (ii) this government has run no surpluses, only deficits for the last 11 years and has no funds to invest, (iii) the Prime Minister is proposing to put his 25-billion-dollar fund on the national credit card, which will cause further inflationary pressure, (iv) the Prime Minister has already created 12 new Crown corporations, agencies and bureaucracies, (v) when government directs capital, it always goes to the politically powerful and not the deserving, (vi) there is over 1 trillion dollars in pension fund money that Liberals have pushed out of Canada that we could bring back with faster permits, lower taxes and free enterprise, (vii) the rising cost of fuel and food is already burdening hard working Canadians who cannot afford to pay more for handouts to Liberal insiders and corporate elites, therefore, the House call on the government to abandon this sovereign debt fund. This is what we are talking about today. I find it so ironic. I come from the province of Saskatchewan, with hard-working and good people in agriculture, mining, oil and gas, manufacturing, small business and entrepreneurship. We have been through this before. We have seen this movie before in Saskatchewan, where the government thinks it knows how to invest money better than the private sector. It was called “16 years of nothing under an NDP government”. There is someone in the House who was part of that NDP government, from northern Saskatchewan, and they were a disaster in government in Saskatchewan. Actually, the old joke in Saskatchewan when the NDP was in government was that the last one to cross the Alberta border turned out the lights. That is how dim it became in Saskatchewan under the NDP. I see this same movie replaying itself nationally with the Liberal government, the tired 11‑year Liberal government. It looks very similar to the NDP government that was in Saskatchewan. I would like to look back and talk about some of the investments a tired old NDP government made in Saskatchewan. There were failed investments, and it lost hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. This was back in the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s. It lost $15 million in Channel Lake. It lost $72 million in Navigata. One of the biggest boondoggles in Saskatchewan was $35 million with Spudco, a failed potato company. All these just bring back memories. When I hear the Liberals talk about the sovereign debt fund, it reminds me of all the money we lost in Saskatchewan under an NDP government that thought it knew how to invest money better than the private sector. The actual total loss in Saskatchewan over those years was 283.5 million tax dollars in failed investments by the government. That was in 1995 dollars to 2000 dollars, which would be over $1 billion now. That really looks like what we are talking about today. The government never does better than the private sector. That is why we continue to talk about why we need better investments. If the government wants to attract more investment in this country, it should start with getting rid of red tape. It should start with getting rid of Bill C-69 and the shipping ban on the west coast of Vancouver. There are so many things the government could do that would not put more tax dollars at risk, which is what it is doing today with the sovereign wealth fund. Lots of these Liberal members want to be compared to Norway, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They want to be compared to all the other wealth funds that were set up. There is one huge difference, and Canadians need to realize this. The biggest difference between those funds and this one is that their government did it with surplus dollars. Surplus budgets went into a sovereign fund to be used to make sure the next generations had money. They did not put it on a credit card. If the government of the day wants to start something like this, the first thing it has to do is get its budget in order. It needs to get to a point where there is enough investment in the country to have surplus budgets to then invest dollars. Another huge difference between what this Prime Minister wants to do and what was done in Norway is that the money was not invested in Norway; it was invested outside of Norway. Those are huge terms of reference that are very different from what the government is doing here today. I really appreciate the comments by the previous speaker, my friend from Calgary Centre. He is very knowledgeable about the financial sector. He said that this fund is just like all the other funds the government has set up, such as the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank, which made a pipeline in China and did not build one in Canada. We do not realize that this fund is very similar to the green slush fund. Sorry, Mr. Speaker, that was the Asian infrastructure bank that they put money into. I will correct the record because, unlike some other members, I like to be as factual as possible and not misleading. I remember that right before the last election, this Parliament was seized with another slush fund, the green slush fund. Actually, a Liberal Speaker approved a question of privilege where we could not go past the debate about the green slush fund, and $300 million to $400 million of taxpayer money was given to Liberal insider friends and elites. There were 186 conflicts of interest in that $300-million slush fund. Can members imagine, once the banker buddy of the Prime Minister gets appointed as CEO and all of his Laurentian elite friends become board members, how many conflicts of interest are going to be in the sovereign debt fund by the time the Liberals are done giving out $25 billion to some of their best friends and insiders? That is what we are talking about right now as being a political economy. The average hard-working Canadian is $200 away from being bankrupt at the end of the month. There is always more month left than there are dollars in their bank account. However, politically connected insiders with the Liberals have never had it so good. I cannot go on without talking about the fiscal update. This spring fiscal update is fantastic for bankers and bondholders. They have never had it so good. The fastest-increasing budget item is $60 billion in deficit spending, putting that money to the debt. Debt financing is higher than health transfers to provinces, and that is shameful. Seeing how much money is going to corporate insiders is why we believe this sovereign debt fund is such a terrible idea. The Liberals are awful money managers, much like the NDP in Saskatchewan in the 2000s. They are terrible at managing people’s money. They will lose it, and that is why we are so concerned about what this sovereign debt fund would look like. I would end on the fact that we do not have any confidence in the current government to manage the money without having more conflicts of interest. This is the most ethically problematic government we have had in our country. There were more ethics violations and conflicts of interest in the government in the last 10 years than in all Canadian governments combined. Justin Trudeau was found violating ethics twice when he was prime minister, for the first time ever. Now, this Prime Minister has a blind trust and does not think that he is going to be found in a conflict of interest with all of his dealings. I think he believes that PM stands for “portfolio manager”, not “prime minister”. He is in it for Brookfield and himself, not for the people of Canada. That is why this sovereign wealth fund, or sovereign debt fund, would just be another vehicle for him to make his corporate buddies richer. The Canadian taxpayers would be left paying at the end of the day. It would make Canadians poorer, but the Prime Minister and his buddies on the champagne cocktail circuit would be richer.”

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  This statement targeted a person rather than their actions or views: “He is in it for Brookfield and himself, not for the people of Canada”.

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• Echo ×25

  A repeated line

  “After 11 years of the Liberal government.”

  Said 25 times by 19 members since April 30.

  Every time it was said →

“The member from Kings—Hants misled Canadians about Norway's sovereign fund, which was built on extra money, unlike our debt fund. He also made light of my question about the Humboldt Broncos crash, and he should apologize for that.”

“Mr. Speaker, generally, I enjoy the speeches from my colleague from Kings—Hants. We worked on the agriculture committee together. However, I think he has been listening to the member for Winnipeg North too much, because he made a lot of misleading comments toward Canadians throughout his whole speech, specifically around the sovereign debt fund. He talked about the Norway sovereign fund. It is unbelievable that he did not mention that Norway’s fund was built on surpluses. That fund is not allowed to be invested in outside Norway. There is no comparison between the Canadian debt fund and the sovereign fund of Norway. The second comment I would leave with the member, something about which I am truly disappointed, is that yesterday I was able to get to my feet, because of our leadership team, and I asked a very important question about the Humboldt Broncos crash. The member made light of that, and I think he should apologize, because we are allowed to bring forward things that are important to our communities.”

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“The member said I made a false statement. I want him to tell me what I said that was false.”

“Mr. Speaker, the member said I made a false statement. I would like him to clarify what statement was false.”

“The government fails every time it tries to invest public money, just like it did with its infrastructure bank. Its policies print money and cause inflation. I do not trust this government to invest our money properly.”

“Mr. Speaker, this sovereign debt fund is nothing new. The Liberal government has had funds like this before. One is the Canada Infrastructure Bank. The Canada Infrastructure Bank is supposed to disburse its $35‑billion capital envelope by 2027-28, but on July 10, the PBO reported it had disbursed only $14.9 billion and it was $21 billion short of its target. These Liberals fail every time they try to attract investment. There is nothing but failure that has followed this Prime Minister everywhere he has gone, whether it be the Bank of England or the Bank of Canada. He has printed money and caused inflation everywhere. People from Saskatchewan have seen this movie before where the government thinks it can invest their money better than they can, and it has ended in a complete failure and out-migration. I am scared to see the same thing happen to Canada, which I love. How can people trust this unethical, corrupt government to actually invest money properly?”

“I am dividing our party's remaining speaking times in half.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to give notice under Standing Order 43(2)(a) that all remaining Conservative caucus speaking slots are hereby divided in two.”

“Which one of the Prime Minister's banker friends will be chosen to run this fund?”

“Mr. Speaker, I have a very simple question. Which one of the Prime Minister’s banker buddies is going to be the CEO of this fund?”