“I do not want this budget bill to pass as it is. It does not make life cheaper or build what we need. I want the government to cut all fuel taxes, end the carbon tax on business, lower taxes on new homes, and cap federal spending. I also want the government to take out the part of the bill that creates a new defence investment agency and have a committee study defence spending instead. Finally, the government must fully fund repairs to Wharf 18 in Port Colborne and use the shipyards along the Welland Canal to build and fix navy ships.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to contribute to the debate today on Bill C-31. The bill is back from committee at report stage, and it is our last chance to amend it before third reading. A budget implementation bill is where promises meet the actual commitment in law, and the test is rather simple. Would it make life more affordable? Would it build what the country needs? Would it respect the House’s duty to examine how money is spent and how power is used? On every count, the answer is, sadly, no. Budget 2025 is the costliest budget outside the pandemic, with the biggest deficit, at least for the next two days. What did it buy? It bought record food bank usage and rising insolvencies. This morning, the Welland Tribune reported that one in 10 Welland residents used a food bank last year. That is one in 10. This Saturday is the Welland food drive, and I urge residents to give generously. It is likely that one of their neighbours needs some help because of food insecurity. The government’s so-called affordability plan is fundamentally a plan to stabilize the problems it created in the first place, and herein lies the difference between Conservatives and Liberals. Liberals have spent a decade ignoring the structural inefficiencies of government and failed to recognize that we need to actually fix the machinery of government rather than subsidize the problems it creates. The government cut 10¢ off a litre of fuel and called it relief. We asked to remove all federal fuel taxes for a year, which would save a typical family about $1,200. Ten cents is a gesture, but $1,200 is a month of groceries. At second reading, our critics moved a reasoned amendment naming what is missing: full fuel tax relief; less tax and red tape on homebuilding; an end to the industrial carbon tax, which touches everything in the food chain right to the family at the checkout; and an end to the waste that feeds inflation. Conservatives voted for it. The government did not. There is a better way: repeal Bill C-69 so major projects only take a few years, not decades; repeal Bill C-48, and if the Prime Minister is serious about his pipeline memorandum, put it in law; eliminate the industrial carbon tax; and cap spending. The government cannot fix affordability by subsidizing scarcity. I want to turn to a few things closer to my home, my riding of Niagara South. My riding is an economic zone where this budget could have a real impact. There is a gap between an announcement and actually building, and it sits right along the Welland Canal. I will take the government’s own words. Division 16 would create the Defence Investment Agency. Clause 12 would require the minister to consider the efficiency of defence and security procurement and the promotion of investment in the defence and security sectors. By this bill’s own test, the Welland Canal corridor belongs in it. It was left out at tabling, and the bill came back from committee with it still left out. At the north end of the Welland Canal sits the Port Weller Dry Docks, with a sister yard in Hamilton. Both are run by Ontario Shipyards, the largest Canadian-owned ship repair and construction company on the Great Lakes. Port Weller has built more than 80 vessels, including icebreakers. The company has invested $107 million there and already fabricates components for federal ships built on the west coast. The company has struggled to get a reasonable share of federal work. A Globe and Mail piece from about a month ago reports that its bid to join the national shipbuilding strategy failed, with Davie being chosen instead. Its hopes now rest mainly on federal corvette work. If the company does get that contract, the CEO says, the corvettes will be built at the Port Weller Dry Docks in Ontario, on the Welland Canal. This is a shipyard with a proud history and a promising future, but it needs to be integrated into the federal shipbuilding strategy. In February, Hanwha Ocean signed an agreement with Ontario Shipyards to bring large-scale shipbuilding back to Ontario, with a training hub in the Hamilton yard alongside Mohawk College. The province has put $11 million into Ontario Shipyards and more than $8 million into Allied Marine in my hometown of Port Colborne. Everyone has stepped up except Ottawa. The government’s own defence industrial strategy promises 70% of defence acquisition to Canadian firms. The navy will need yards to build, maintain and refit its fleet. Right now, coastal yards carry order books measured in decades, and Port Weller is able to step up. Capacity in Niagara and Hamilton would not be a favour to this region. It would be an insurance policy for the navy. The bill would give the new agency up to $1 billion in standing authority and says nothing about these yards or the canal that connects them. At the south end, in, again, my hometown of Port Colborne, which I love to talk about in the House, sits Wharf 18. Ottawa built it, Ottawa owns it, and it has been out of service for close to 20 years. In January 2023, the government announced $22.7 million to rehabilitate it, but there was a catch. It was dependent upon a private sector partner to ante up the next $20 million. Three years on, that money still depends on a match no one will provide. A seaway official confirmed to me at the transport committee that there are no plans to rebuild the wharf, and now the funding is at risk. I have been looking for examples where the St. Lawrence Seaway required the private sector to invest in wharf rehabilitation on property it can never own. There seems to be an evolving plan to move in this direction, but inherently, there are incredible barriers to moving to a P3 business model. The conundrum here is that we cannot ask the private sector to rebuild a dock it can never own. It probably cannot finance it. Ottawa does not ask the private sector to co-fund repairs to federal bridges. The engineering on Wharf 18 is done. It is shovel-ready, and the balance of capital needed could actually lead to year-round shipping through the Great Lakes. The money needed is the equivalent of a rounding error in the billions of dollars allocated to major projects. Sometimes minor projects like this can turn into game-changing opportunities, particularly in short sea shipping. Here is where the government has looked at this project with limited scope rather than at the long-term economic development opportunities, including year-round shipping. However, this also illustrates that many of the problems could be fixed through this legislation like stubborn bureaucracy. I will give an example. The City of Port Colborne needs to acquire about a half-acre along the canal to be merged into a parcel it already owns. The land is useless, both to the seaway and to Transport Canada, which has refused to reclassify the land so it can move through what might be a 10-year disposal process and then be acquired by the city. The city has been waiting decades to move forward with economic development projects but continually hits brick walls with federal bureaucracy, including duelling departments and agencies. The absurdity of bureaucracy drives me crazy. If we could get the seaway and transport to fix this silly problem, the City of Port Colborne could move ahead with a multi-use facility that would dramatically improve tourism, including berthing for over 100 cruise ships per year and expanding industrial and commercial activity along the waterway. This should be easy, but everyone knows dealing with Transport Canada often takes more than a career timeline can handle. A working Wharf 18 would add about a million tonnes of capacity to Port Colborne, and Port Colborne is the only point on the canal that has the potential to move to all-season shipping. Put together, a federal wharf with the engineering done, dry docks that are working and expanding, a training hub on the way and a fabricator backed by the province are not a wish list that needs another study. This is a corridor that needs a federal commitment. Every tonne moved port to port inside Canada does not pay a tariff. Here is my ask, and I admit that it is close to home for me: delete division 16 at report stage, send defence procurement to the defence committee and include Great Lakes shipping and repair capacity in the study; bring back a budget bill that lowers the cost of living, with full tax relief, full fuel tax relief, no industrial carbon tax on food, fewer taxes on new homes and a spending cap; fund Wharf 18 in Port Colborne, with a construction schedule and a completion date; and treat the Welland Canal corridor from Port Weller to Port Colborne to Hamilton as the defence and trade asset that it is. If we do that, we will start to make progress that puts Canada first.”

“We must help people who do not have enough food. But the government cannot just keep mailing them cheques. It needs to fix the basic problems that made them hungry in the first place.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is a sad reality in the country that we have come through so many years where we have government subsidizing the problems it created in the first place. Do we need to help people with food insecurity? Absolutely we do, because they have food insecurity, but we cannot continue to throw cheques at people without dealing with the underlying structural failure of government to deal with the underlying components of what produced that food insecurity. Yes, we need to help people in need. Conservatives will always have that point of view. We will always help those who need a hand, but we need to focus, fundamentally, on looking at restructuring the problems at the granular level of government, to fix those fundamental structural problems, so that Canadians will not need to have cheques mailed to them once a month.”

“This bill should give more resources to border officers. Border communities across the country do not get enough of them. Giving more staff to places like the Welland Canal and the St. Lawrence Seaway would bring millions of dollars in business to my community.”

“Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the work that we have done on the all-party border caucus. The caucus is non-partisan, for the most part, and we talk about issues like this. The allocation of resources from CBSA among border communities is a continuing problem across the country. I guess there are CBSA resources that are going to come to the port of Hamilton soon, but we could have expanded economic development opportunities along the Welland Canal and the St. Lawrence Seaway. If CBSA would provide resources, it would stimulate millions and millions of dollars of investment in industrial and commercial activity, particularly in short sea shipping. Absolutely, the CBSA should have been included in the bill. Additional resources would have an enormous impact on my community.”

“The government's grocery rebates are just the GST rebate under a new name. It is a trick to hide the real problems making life unaffordable. I want my colleague to speak more about this.”

“Mr. Speaker, my colleague’s passionate and very poignant speech was about economic opportunities for his riding that are not being acted on. I would like him to expand a bit. I believe he was in the chamber when the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader mentioned the quiet part out loud, that all the grocery tax rebates and benefits are really just a repackaging of the GST rebate. It is a shell game that the government has been playing to try to obfuscate the circumstances and the systemic problems that have created an affordability crisis. I wonder if my colleague could comment on that.”

“I oppose this budget. The government gives out subsidies instead of fixing its own spending problems. Next year, we will spend more money on debt interest than on health care transfers to the provinces. To pay for new programs, the government just raises taxes, then sends people cheques to make up for the cost.”

“Mr. Speaker, where do I begin? What concerns me as a relatively new member of the House is coming here and looking at a budget document like this, where we have repackaged problems into subsidies. I do not believe that Canadians want to have continual subsidies thrown at them for problems that the government has refused to, has failed to or will not solve. As I said a minute ago, we have fundamental structural issues with how the government operates in the country. That costs billions of dollars. The interest we are paying on the debt next year exceeds what we spend on health care transfers to the provinces. That is an outrageous amount of money. That means the only way we can pay for additional programs is to raise taxes on Canadians. We raise their taxes, and then we send them back a cheque for all the pain those taxes have caused.”

“This bill creates a new corporation to buy military equipment. I am asking the member if she is worried it gives a minister too much power to interfere with military purchases and stop fair competitions, which would hurt our armed forces.”

“Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her intervention on Bill C-31 at report stage. Included in Bill C-31 is division 16, which deals with the Defence Investment Agency, which would now be replicated in Bill C-40. This actually was the second iteration of the BIA. We would now have, under Bill C-40, a federal Crown corporation. Is the member at all concerned that what the Liberals are trying to do is put more power into the hands of a minister, unnamed at this point in time, who would be able to exercise more political interference in procurement, stop competitions and ultimately undermine our Canadian Armed Forces by not buying what it actually needs?”

“I do not want the government to turn the Defence Investment Agency into a Crown corporation, and I do not want it to hand out contracts without competition. The agency has not made military buying any faster. Turning it into a Crown corporation and letting it skip competitive bidding will hide how billions of dollars are spent and lead to political favouritism. We need more oversight of this spending, not less.”

“Mr. Speaker, I have been looking closely at what the government is doing with the Defence Investment Agency in Bill C-31, and I have to say that the more I look into it, the more questions I have. Imagine my skepticism last October when the government announced it was creating a new Defence Investment Agency. We were told that it would speed things up. Creating yet another level of bureaucracy to fight bureaucracy seemed like a bad idea to me. Then they brought in Doug Guzman, a former senior banker and friend of the Prime Minister, to run the agency, promising procurements at speeds not seen in generations. Now, barely a year later, the government is back with another plan. Apparently, the agency it just created is not structured the way it would like, so now the government wants to turn it into a Crown corporation. I have spent a good part of my life in business, and I can say that when something is not working, the last thing anyone wants to do is add another layer of management. We should find out where the problem is and fix it. If people are sitting around waiting for approvals, we should figure out why those approvals are taking so long. We should not build an entirely new organization around the problem and hope things will somehow improve. However, that is what the government seems determined to do. What exactly have we accomplished over the past year? When Mr. Guzman appeared before committee, I wanted to understand what had actually changed since the DIA was created. Had it eliminated unnecessary approvals? Had it reduced the number of signatures required to get a contract approved? Could he point to a major procurement that had moved faster because of this new agency? When I hear the government celebrating another announcement about submarines or aircraft, I want to know whether our military is any closer to getting that equipment. It turns out that he admitted all of those projects were already under way long before the Defence Investment Agency existed, in 2016 or something like that. Believe me, I understand the frustration with government paperwork. I have dealt with enough of it as a farmer to know how ridiculous the requirements can be sometimes. Maybe people find themselves filling out forms to prove something that the government already knows, and then they wait weeks for someone to say they should have filled in a different form. I am all for getting rid of unnecessary red tape, but when we are talking about spending billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and changing the agency to a Crown corporation, I think we need to be very careful about which of the rules we will be getting rid of as we make those changes. Some of those approvals exist for a very good reason. They are there to make sure contracts are awarded fairly, public money is accounted for and somebody can be held responsible when things go wrong. I am particularly concerned about what happens to parliamentary oversight when we move these decisions into a Crown corporation. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report showing that over the next five years, the federal government is projected to run about $333 billion in deficits, but borrow almost $733 billion. That is a difference of roughly $400 billion. Honestly, Canadians must be shocked to hear that the government can borrow that much more money than what shows up in its reported deficits. It turns out that when government borrows money to make loans or investments through a Crown corporation, for example, those transactions do not necessarily count as expenses in the annual deficit. Will we know why one company received a contract instead of another? When something goes wrong, will the minister be responsible, or will we be told the Crown corporation is to blame? When government decisions go badly, Canadian taxpayers are the ones who bear that cost. That brings me to another part of this legislation that I find particularly troubling. The government is proposing broad powers to award defence contracts without going through a competitive bidding process. I understand that there are circumstances where that makes sense. If our military needs something urgently, or if there is only one company capable of providing a particular piece of equipment, obviously we need to move very quickly. However, when I read through the proposed exceptions, I was gobsmacked by how broadly some of them are written. I have to ask where Parliament fits into all of this. If the government can decide that a contract does not need competition, how are we supposed to know taxpayers are getting the best value? How are Canadian companies supposed to know they have been treated fairly? What safeguards will prevent political favouritism from influencing decisions that should be based on what our military actually needs? Let me give another example of why these safeguards matter. Canadians recently heard the Prime Minister talking about how Canada needs millions of military drones. I could not help wondering who was going to build all these drones and how that contract would be awarded. Well, it turns out that a fellow named Eliot Pence, who sits on a trade advisory board with the Prime Minister, conveniently started a company a little over a year ago called Dominion Dynamics. That company has since raised $139 million from an investment firm called Georgian. A man named David Court serves as chair of the advisory board of Georgian, is a member of the board of directors at Brookfield and was previously corporate director of Brookfield when the Prime Minister was chair of Brookfield. Coincidentally, Georgian has recently acquired defence contracts to produce drone vehicles, which will likely be in the millions of dollars, maybe billions. If the DIA turns into a Crown corporation, these kinds of shenanigans will all become so much easier to do. Contracts will be awarded to brand new companies with basically no track record because somebody happens to know the right people. Does this sound familiar? If the government wants to expand sole-sourcing powers while moving procurement into a Crown corporation, should we not be demanding more accountability, not less? I raised a similar concern when Mr. Guzman appeared before the committee earlier this year. I asked him whether defence dollars were at risk of being spent for market outcomes rather than giving our troops the right gear at the right time. His answer was that defence spending will be used to create Canadian economic growth. He said that National Defence needed to be “accepting of more than one solution”. Does that mean it might not get what it needs because a friend of a friend is opening a new business building knock-off night-vision goggles? Is that what he means by being accepting of more than one solution? I certainly want Canadian businesses to benefit from defence procurement. We have some remarkable manufacturers in this country, and I would love to see more of the equipment our armed forces use being made right here at home. If we are sending young Canadian pilots into dangerous situations, mothers want to know that the aircraft they are flying was chosen because it was the right aircraft for the job. They do not want political connections or investment announcements getting in the way of buying the right equipment. The government says there will still be oversight, a board of directors, audits and reporting requirements, but I want to know what happens before these enormous contracts are signed, not simply when it gets reported afterward. Sometimes the problem is not that we need another organization; it is that the organizations we already have are not working together efficiently. As with any business, we know what happens when too many people are involved in making a decision and nobody wants to take responsibility. Everything slows down, costs start climbing and eventually someone has to step in and sort it out. We do not fix that problem by handing someone the company’s chequebook and telling them they can make the decisions with fewer questions being asked. Our armed forces have waited long enough for the equipment they need, and we want to see it delivered as quickly as possible, but we also want to know that when billions of dollars are being spent, somebody is keeping an eye on the money. If the government can create a new agency one year, decide it needs replacing the next and then ask Parliament to give the replacement even more powers, we have every reason to ask whether we are solving a problem or being told, as in The Wizard of Oz, to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. So far, the only thing moving at speeds not seen in a generation seems to be the creation of more government bureaucracy. How many times does the Liberal government expect Canadians to fall for the same line? It is another agency, another reorganization and another promise to cut red tape, and now the Liberals want even more power to spend billions. When does someone finally have to answer for the results?”

“The government wants to reorganize military buying again after just one year. Rearranging staff does not fix problems. I want the government to explain what went wrong with the first plan before it changes things again. Our military needs equipment delivered, not another new chart.”

“Mr. Speaker, I have spent enough time in business to know that when something is not working, we do not automatically fix it by changing the org chart. We have to identify the problem first. The government created the Defence Investment Agency promising procurement at speeds not seen in generations, but barely a year later, it is already proposing another restructure. I think it is reasonable to ask about that. What went wrong with the original plan? Which approvals were causing the delays? What actually improved? How will another reorganization solve the problems? At the end of the day, our soldiers, sailors and aviators do not need another org chart. They need equipment that actually arrives.”

“The government is moving far too slowly. We are still dealing with last year's budget bill right as they introduce the next budget. They also messed up the first budget bill so badly that they had to bring in a second one. I want to hear my colleague's thoughts on this slow pace.”

“Mr. Speaker, the member made a comment toward the end of her speech about how the government is not moving with speed. Here we have Bill C-31. It is from the budget last year, yet on Thursday, the Liberals are tabling the budget for the next year. The Liberals run the calendar themselves. They set the agenda, yet here we are. They passed one budget implementation act, and now we have a second budget implementation act because they messed the first one up so badly that they had to put in a second one. I wonder if my colleague has any further thoughts on how the government is moving at speeds so slow that this is what we get.”

“The government broke its promises to cut red tape and buy military equipment faster. A year after creating a new agency to do this, they are already changing it. Taxpayers want to know what results their money bought, because press releases do not defend the country.”

“Mr. Speaker, what frustrates me most is that we have heard these promises before. We were told that the Defence Investment Agency would eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, speed up decision-making and finally get equipment into the hands of our armed forces. Now, barely a year later, we are being told that the agency needs to be restructured. Taxpayers want to know what they actually received for the money already spent. Have procurement timelines improved? Have unnecessary approvals been eliminated? Are troops getting their equipment sooner? Announcements and signing ceremonies make a wonderful press release, but they do not protect Canadians or defend our sovereignty.”