Michael Ma
Markham—Unionville, Ontario · Liberal · Canada
“Despite these injustices, Chinese Canadians have preserved and shared a rich heritage that continues to strengthen Canada's multicultural mosaic.”
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition on behalf of constituents to designate February as Canadian Chinese heritage month. The petitioners note that there are over 1.8 million Chinese Canadians, representing one of the largest and most established communities within the country.”
“Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member on his great speech, particularly around misinformation. As we know today, AI feeds on all sorts of comments, whether they are right or wrong, collectively on social media, and misinformation will obviously lead to a bias in the AI results. I wonder if the hon.”
“Mr. Speaker, as digital capabilities evolve, so do crimes and threats to our national security. For decades, law enforcement agencies across the country have asked for updated tools to combat crimes like extortion, child exploitation, auto theft and organized crime.”
“Mr. Speaker, while I now sit on a different side of the House, my priorities remain the same: standing up for my constituents and making sure their concerns are acted on. Last fall, I held a crime prevention town hall in Markham—Unionville.”
“I wish this were the end of my immigration critique, but there is another unfortunate layer. I do not know whether this is a tragedy or a comedy. We know, for instance, that nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle here.”
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“Despite these injustices, Chinese Canadians have preserved and shared a rich heritage that continues to strengthen Canada's multicultural mosaic. The petitioners highlight that February is an important period for Chinese communities because of the cultural significance of the Lunar New Year, making it a meaningful and appropriate time for recognition. Given that Chinese heritage month initiatives have taken place throughout numerous municipalities across Canada, Markham included, and have reached provincial legislatures, with Ontario among the first, it is time to take the most reasonable next step at the national level. Such a holiday would provide an opportunity for education, reflection and celebration while truly capturing the unique identity of the Chinese Canadian community.”
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition on behalf of constituents to designate February as Canadian Chinese heritage month. The petitioners note that there are over 1.8 million Chinese Canadians, representing one of the largest and most established communities within the country. For generations, Chinese Canadians have played an essential role in shaping Canada's social fabric. Their contributions date back to the 1800s, with their vital role in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. However, the petitioners remind us that this history includes deep hardship. Chinese Canadians have endured systemic exclusion and discrimination, including the Chinese head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.”
“Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member on his great speech, particularly around misinformation. As we know today, AI feeds on all sorts of comments, whether they are right or wrong, collectively on social media, and misinformation will obviously lead to a bias in the AI results. I wonder if the hon. member could speak on the impact of that for society in general.”
“Mr. Speaker, as digital capabilities evolve, so do crimes and threats to our national security. For decades, law enforcement agencies across the country have asked for updated tools to combat crimes like extortion, child exploitation, auto theft and organized crime. Can the Minister of Public Safety elaborate on the importance of the lawful access measures in Bill C-22 to keep Canadians safe?”
“Mr. Speaker, while I now sit on a different side of the House, my priorities remain the same: standing up for my constituents and making sure their concerns are acted on. Last fall, I held a crime prevention town hall in Markham—Unionville. What I heard clearly and repeatedly were concerns about auto thefts and home invasions and the impact these crimes have on families' sense of safety. Can the minister outline how Canada's new government is strengthening public safety and ensuring—”
“Mr. Speaker, the fact is that, as I said, there are more seniors lining up at food banks than in previous years. That means whatever the Liberal government is doing it is not enough to address the challenges our seniors are facing. After the pandemic, inflation and food costs rose significantly, yet the government has not really addressed that inflation to help our seniors live with grace.”
“Mr. Speaker, with this budget, we are not helping Canadians who have contributed to the Canadian economy and to building Canada strong throughout their lifetimes in Canada. We are not taking care of them when they need it now. It is shameful that a lot of seniors have to line up at food banks and so forth. We need to do more for seniors who helped bring this country to this point. We need to enable them to live gracefully.”
“Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind the Liberal government that it had 10 years to fix any such problem. It had 10 years to address it. Look where we are today. As I said in my speech, the numbers I provided show that it has actually gotten worse. Let us not go back through history to see who did what when. We are talking about how the current Liberal government is unable to resolve this problem to make Canada strong and make Canada better.”
“Young Canadians cannot get the jobs they need, the housing they deserve or the health care services they are entitled to. With money printers working overdrive, what future does Canada have under the Liberal feudal regime? I do not see a future here, and it worries me.”
“They represent the most ancient of feudalisms with a fake paper economy bolstered by something that very nearly approximates a slave system. While over two million Canadians visit food banks each month and 700,000 of those are kids, the Liberals work every day to inflate asset prices, whether through deficit spending or by letting any warm body pass into the country to keep those rents sky-high. Team feudalism has the audacity to run a $78-billion deficit with over $90 billion in new spending, which equates to over $5,000 per Canadian household, yet still says they wish to build Canada strong. The question is, strong for whom? The Liberals have not been playing as a referee in the great game of factions. They have chosen to play for team asset inflation and they have made us all poorer for this decision.”
“This is not the labour force we need to build Canada strong. A promise was made to many of these students that this would put them on the immigration track in Canada, when the simple fact was that there were not enough permanent resident slots to accommodate the huge volume of students we let into the country. What conclusion are we now led to? Team feudalism used international students not as a value added to our skills mix, but as a form of quantitative easing to inflate the assets of its rentier economy. It just needed more bodies in the country to boost up rent and housing prices, while suppressing the wages of hard-working Canadians. The Liberals do not represent team Canada. They do not represent the average hard-working Canadian.”
“I wish this were the end of my immigration critique, but there is another unfortunate layer. I do not know whether this is a tragedy or a comedy. We know, for instance, that nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle here. This finding is confusing unless we realize that we have not been matching our international student intake to our labour market needs. The main field of choice for international students has been business studies and, at the college level, nearly 50% of all international students are enrolled in business programs. In the 2022-23 academic year, there were over 90,000 international students enrolled in college business programs and close to 60,000 international students in university business programs.”
“Just as it engages in deficit spending to map more units of currency to a stagnant suite of goods and services, team feudalism has flooded an increasing number of people into Canada against a roughly steady state housing and jobs situation. What does team feudalism produce in both situations? It produces its time-honoured goal of asset inflation under a rentier model. (1255) The Liberals have used both the temporary foreign worker program and the international mobility program as a business model to keep wages artificially low, to keep paper profits high and to price Canadians out of the job market. The interventionist red Liberals pick their winners, and they have chosen to give a discretionary government subsidy to unproductive rentier businesses that can only function on the modern equivalent of slave labour.”
“We issued over 681,000 study permits to international students, 761,000 work permits through the international mobility program and over 183,000 work permits through the temporary foreign worker program. I grant there is some overlap between these categories, as a single person can be counted under two categories. Nonetheless, we are in a situation where our economy has been flooded with at least an extra million foreigners in any given year. The rapid growth of temporary residents overall in 2022 and 2023 contributed to Canada having the highest annual population growth rate since 1957. These figures are madness when we realize that only 30 years ago, we used to admit around 30,000 international students per year. Team feudalism across the aisle knows what game it is playing.”
“As a member of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, I have learned over the past several months how the immigration file is deeply affecting housing, health care and employment for everyday Canadians. The Liberals admit, on page 95 of the budget, that, “the pace of arrivals began to exceed Canada’s capacity to absorb and support newcomers”. On the same page, the Liberals further admit, “In 2018, 3.3 per cent of Canada’s population were temporary residents. By 2024, that number had more than doubled to 7.5 per cent, an unprecedented rate of growth that put pressure on housing supply [and] the healthcare system”. These expressions in percentages do not do the raw numbers justice. Let me take one of the most devastating years on record, that is 2023, and repeat the figures.”
“It is picking winners and losers through that age-old enemy of human progress, central planning interventionism. As the Liberals see themselves as a player, they have always stacked the game in their favour. They are team asset inflation. They are team rentier economy. They are team feudalism. The Liberals do not believe in a productive economy that works for hard-working Canadians. One of the chief ways team feudalism has empowered its rentier economy with unending asset inflation is through immigration. The immigration file has been noticeably absent from the debate on the budget and its implementation, so I will ask members to please allow me to give it some floor time. Affordability for Canadians is a core Conservative focus.”
“Mr. Speaker, as we get into the details of the budget implementation act, it is important to take a step back to assess the philosophy that has informed the budget itself. The big picture of the budget rests on a single question: Is the government a player or a referee in the arena we know as Canada? Of course, this arena is not hosting a game of hockey or soccer. This is a game of factions. This is a game of competing private interests. The government, as a referee, would take no sides. The referee gets out of the way. He draws the lines of the arena, and lays down the rules that allow the best players and teams to win. This is the North Star of the Conservative world view. Unfortunately, the red Liberal government sees itself as a player.”
“Mr. Speaker, if the member had listened to my speech, I said that, for $90 a month, we end up with a $5,000 deficit for each household. In my simple math, that does not really work out well. When we look at the various components of this, eliminating one tax and then piling up other taxes would not benefit Canadians.”
“Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for highlighting the fearmongering slogans the Liberal government used to scare Canadians. However, with the stroke of a pen, it was able to eliminate the tax, and the world did not crash. How can we now believe that, with this budget and going forward, the Liberal government can continue to deliver benefits to Canadians?”
“Mr. Speaker, this is another demonstration of the Liberal government mismanaging the taxes it has collected. The so-called carbon tax, back then, was ineffective. It did not do anything for Canadians and did not do anything for carbon reduction. It is a reflection of the Liberal government's mismanagement.”
“Mr. Speaker, if we look at what is happening today, we are seeing reciprocal tariffs between China and Canada. When Canada imposed a 100% tax on electric vehicles, China imposed reverse tariffs on Canada. What we need to look at is how effective the Liberal government has been in negotiating all the tariffs around the world, whether it is with China, the U.S. or Europe. We seem to be getting more tariffs rather than reducing them. I would like to understand how the Liberal government is going to be addressing this and demonstrating to Canadians that it is working for Canadians.”
“They can do this by stopping their nanny-state, central-planning interventions, stopping the industrial carbon tax, stopping the fuel standard and stopping the packaging tax. My Liberal colleagues, please get out of the way of hard-working Canadians and have the conviction that people can make this economy thrive.”
“Finally, the third shift is amplifying the power of a common Canadian paycheque. Canadians are already putting in the hours, day in and day out. Why can Canadians not afford basic necessities through the income they are already earning? It is an insult to every hard-working household to receive handouts after putting in an honest day's work. I believe the Liberals need to do some soul-searching around how they have created this macro trap where the average monthly salary is not enough to afford the average monthly bills. The bottom line here is very clear: The $90-per-month benefit in Bill C-4 is wiped out by the $5,000-per-household cost of deficit spending in the new Liberal budget. If the Liberals want to address affordability, their first step should be tackling the basket of items in every Canadian's monthly spend: groceries.”
“The Conservatives will keep on repeating this until the Liberals hear us: Remove the industrial carbon tax, remove the fuel standard and remove the packaging tax. When I say, “Get out of the way”, there is a very literal way to do this. Why are the Liberals hindering every single step of the grocery supply chain? Food is such a fundamental part of total monthly spending, and this is the one, single area where a concerted effort to get out of the way would yield genuine results. The Liberals do not need a history lesson from me, but one of the core drivers of the French Revolution was the elevated price of grain. There is no area where the Liberals should be more incentivized to get out of the way than the total supply chain that affects grocery prices. When it comes to food, the issue extends beyond partisanship. This is life or death.”
“(1235) Allow me a moment to address how the Liberals could get out of the way and, in so doing, alter the course of Canada's affordability crisis. We can do this only by empowering hard-working Canadians to take the lead. The first shift is one of mindset. Do the Liberals believe in the capacity of their fellow citizens? Do they believe in the entrepreneurs and businesses that move the needle economically in this country? If they do not, I completely understand why they are so attached to interventionist measures. It all makes sense. Otherwise, if the Liberals actually believe in the people, they should get out of the way and create opportunities for everyday Canadians to step up through grassroots initiatives. The second shift consists of removing all the hidden taxes that pile onto the price of groceries.”
“If they stopped their environmentalist overreach, Canadians could do good by themselves. I want to affirm, right now, that all parties in the House seem to me to be committed to making lives more affordable for Canadians. What separates us is not only our methods but also what we can call accumulated technical debt from previous approaches. No matter how many one-off, targeted measures the Liberals put on offer, they are weighed down by the second-order effects of having engaged in far too much deficit spending. The cumulative path of dependence on 10 years of out-of-control spending is a national situation where monthly income cannot meet monthly bills. Therefore, what we must address here is the root of the mindset behind all the deficit spending.”
“The interest payments on our debt already exceed what is transferred to provinces for health care, yet the modus operandi of the nanny state is rather to add to this debt instead of simply letting the natural drive of hard-working Canadians carry our economy forward. Instead of getting out of the way, the Liberals choose to continually stand in the way of a naturally productive, real economy. How can we meaningfully affect prices at the grocery store when the industrial carbon tax makes it harder to grow food, when the fuel standard makes it harder to ship food and when the packaging tax makes it harder to sell food? The Liberals operate in a system of intervention and then propose branded, one-shot measures to create the image of doing good by Canadians.”
“We cannot print our way out of economic stagnation. We are already in this situation because of all the deficit spending engaged in during the Trudeau years. Why are we doing more of the same? How insulting it is to hard-working Canadians for the Liberals to create a macro situation where paycheques are not enough for food and rent, then pat themselves on the back for doling out welfare in various guises. It is no different from throwing rocks at household windows and offering window replacement services, or pushing us into a pool and offering us a floater, yet this is the world view of the interventionist, nanny-state central planners.”
“Anything on offer in the bill is already wiped out by interest on the Liberals' deficit spending. The central-planning Liberals are committed to interventionist tactics. We, as Conservatives, are simply asking them to get out of the way of hard-working Canadians so they can build our country strong. We are in a shameful situation in this country, where over two million Canadians are visiting food banks every month. At the end of every month, paycheques are not going far enough. Why is that? The Liberals want to deflect and blame this solely on the trade deficit. However, there is a simple economic fact: When we create more units of currency and map them to an economy that is not meaningfully producing more units of goods and services, we get inflation. As a case in point, in the last five years, grocery prices have risen more than 20%.”
“Mr. Speaker, there is one message the Conservatives have for the Liberals when it comes to their overall approach in bills like Bill C-4 : Get out of the way. On the surface, the Liberals are selling Bill C-4 as a way to give a tax break to 22 million Canadians, among other components. That is the headline. That is the label on the package. What is in the fine print on this packaging? The Conservatives took a look. The fine print is about embedding this proposed tax break in the bigger picture of Liberal deficit spending. We just passed a new budget running a $78-billion deficit. The government is adding $90 billion in new spending. That is $5,000 per Canadian household. Meanwhile, the tax break on offer for Canadians in Bill C-4 checks out to $90 per month.”
“Mr. Speaker, there is one message that the Conservatives have for the Liberals when it comes to their overall approach in bills like Bill C-4 : Get out of the way. On the surface, the Liberals are selling Bill C-4 as a way of giving a tax break to 22 million Canadians, among other components. That is the headline. That is the label on the packaging. What is the fine print on the packaging? The Conservatives took a look. The fine print is about embedding this proposed tax break in the bigger picture of Liberal deficit spending. We have just passed a new budget that runs a $78-billion deficit. The government is adding $90 billion in new spending. That is $5,000—”
“Mr. Speaker, 2.2 million Canadians line up at food banks every single month, and the unemployment rate is 6.9%, yet as chair of Brookfield, the Prime Minister helped the company avoid $6.5 billion in Canadian taxes through offshore tax havens. While the Prime Minister dropped the most expensive budget in Canadian history outside COVID, the Liberal government has shown us its top priority: making Brookfield richer. Canadians need transparency about the total incentive structure acting on our Prime Minister . Canadians need to know that the doubling of Trudeau's deficit is serving our total national interests, not simply those in the Prime Minister's circle. Canadians need to know whether the Prime Minister is incentivized to serve all Canadians.”
“Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether the member has been paying attention to television and all the reported crimes, including financial crimes, especially of seniors being cheated out of money. With the bill, will the government protect seniors and others who are subject to financial crime and fraud?”
“Mr. Speaker, today, when we are discussing Bill C-14 , the Liberal government seems to be rushing us through its consideration and wants to send it to committee. Members have talked about the ineffectiveness of committees. We are rushing through a bill that does not address the fundamental issues in Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 . I would like to ask the member to comment further on that. Why is the Liberal government rushing us through Bill C-14 , an incomplete bill with shortfalls?”
“Mr. Speaker, the point is that this does not fundamentally address the issues laid out in Bills C-5 and C-75 . Let us get to it. Let us repeal Bills C-5 and C-75 , fix the problem fundamentally and address—”
“Mr. Speaker, what we are looking at with the Liberal government is that, even when bills are sent to committee and recommendations are approved, it still ignores them, so I am not sure we would be addressing this issue. We are appealing for a fundamental fix. Let us repeal Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 .”
“Mr. Speaker, we are hearing from Canadians and from law enforcement that the current bill, and the existence of Bills C-5 and C-75 , are not working. In fact, over the weekend, we had a seminar on crime and heard a very emotional testimony from an elderly couple who lost their 25-year-old daughter. That is the reason we need to fix the fundamentals of what is going on. Let us not give bail to all of the repeat offenders.”
“Mr. Speaker, if the Prime Minister is serious about delivering his promise, he should attack the fundamental root cause of this problem and repeal Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 . As I said in my speech, let us not fool around with more compromises. Let us get at the root cause of this problem. We hear this from our Canadian citizens. We hear this from our police force. Let us fix this once and for all, and stop fooling around with all these compromises.”
“If they continue with this patchwork of compromises, what will the spillover effects be? How many more Canadians need to be shot dead in their own homes by repeat offenders for this systemic madness to bleed into genuine societal chaos? We are not talking about riots in the streets, though that is always possible. We are talking about the everyday chaos of a low-trust society, a slow and steady descent into balkanization and tribalization when citizens see they cannot trust their justice system to serve their interests. If the Liberals continue to wine and dine on the luxury belief of restraint for criminals, the least of their concerns will be the fractioning of their own coalition. They are to fear the fracturing of our society and of the tax base that funds their capacity to engage in those ludicrous luxury beliefs.”
“Second, once the public safety of law-abiding Canadians is set as the true north of our justice paradigm, it becomes impossible to uphold the errors of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 . Restoring mandatory minimums, ending the catch-and-release system and removing the house arrest option for serious offenders are the logical consequences of accepting a new set of priorities. Finally, Liberals will have to come to terms with their big tent and prune the factions that are clearly against the well-being of law-abiding Canadians and the productive society they enable. The principle of restraint for criminals is a principle of constraint on our productive economy. In conclusion, I want to remind the Liberal colleagues that the situation with our justice system has deteriorated to such an extent this is no longer a question of partisan politics.”
“To use a metaphor from earlier, the Liberals have more than one elephant, but only a single elephant rider to rationalize policy commitments post hoc to the entire world. What a mess. The Liberals will be perpetually locked into half measures to keep a tenuous coalition together. With my remaining time, I want to outline some potential positive directions for Bill C-14 if the Liberals accept my commentary on the justice paradigms. First of all, the Liberals need to put law-abiding Canadians first by choosing to commit to the maintainers of order. It is already impossible to hold the principle of restraint as a core value. When we put something together at the centre of our value hierarchy, we will necessarily build a new system around it.”
“They keep saying that they are a new Liberal government and are different from the old Liberal government. Well, I ask that my colleagues show us. Bill C-14 succeeds, from a pro-order lens, where it would move in the direction of undoing the damages of C-5 and Bill C-75 . The bill fails where it would retain the principle of restraint. There can be no balance in our system of justice between competing world views. The Liberals need to take one path and go all the way. What Bill C-14 represents is a patchwork of compromises. The Liberals have found such a big tent that competing factions sit uncomfortably together under a single roof. (1045) The ideological incoherence in Bill C-14 maps the incoherence of the Liberals' factional support structure and the basis of power.”
“We can look at the facts of physics through the paradigm of Newton and the paradigm of Einstein, but we can never hold two competing paradigms at the same time, because each is a totalizing way of looking at the world. In what we might call a justice paradigm, the Liberals are committed to catering to criminals. When they speak of restraint, they speak only of their favourite little lawbreakers. There is no room to look at the world from the world view of the everyday Canadian when the Liberals have chosen to take up a pro-criminal paradigm of justice. This has been a prolonged build-up for what is a very simple solution. The Liberals must know in their heart of hearts that they need to go all the way and repeal Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 in full.”
“The principle of restraint is embedded in the very core of the Liberal doctrine on justice, so much so that even though the Liberals were forced to make numerous concessions to Conservative advocacy around the errors of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 , they have still left the principle unchanged in Bill C-14 . Let me remind the House what Bill C-14 really is: a direct Liberal admission of failure regarding their soft-on crime policies, without altering the underlying pro-criminal commitments that undergird their doctrine of justice. There is a good parallel to this in the world of science. Scientific paradigms are world views that are ways of looking at and interpreting bodies of facts.”
“We are treated like a tax farm to be extracted from and then fed to the bandits like in some sick joke. The world the Liberals have legislated into being through Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 is madness incarnate. Human narratives are post hoc rationalizations. We commit to a position dictated by our incentive structures, and then we invent reasons why we took the given position. A metaphor I have encountered that captures this dynamic equates our gut instinct to an elephant, and our rational mind to an elephant rider: The elephant moves around any which way it wants, and the rider invents the reasons why the movement occurred. The Liberal elephant is committed to sitting with criminals, and the Liberal elephant rider creates narratives to justify soft-on-crime policies.”
“Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to be here speaking for Markham—Unionville. The Liberals claim they want to “balance firmness with fairness” in Bill C-14 and that they want "a justice system that works for everyone." This is a false equivalence. There is no “everyone” when it comes to our justice system; there is a value hierarchy, and there is only one spot at the top. Whom do we choose to serve? Whom do we build our justice system around? Day in and day out, the Liberals have shown us whom they truly value. They cater to the common criminals, with fairness for the thief, the murderer and the drug dealer, and firmness for the honest citizen and the compliant taxpayer. They do not value the everyday hard-working Canadian upon whose back this nation was built.”
“Madam Speaker, truly we are talking about the values of being a Canadian citizen. My grandfather came to Canada when he was 15 years old, but because of the law of the day, my grandmother could not come here. My mother was born in China, and later I was born in Hong Kong. Therefore, by definition, I am a lost Canadian. However, we went through the proper immigration channels, the residency requirements and all the various citizenship tests. That proves to me that it is valuable to go through the process so people can integrate into Canadian society and be positive role models for the country.”
“Madam Speaker, we truly worked together and considered the value of Canadian citizenship and what it means for Canadians. The amendments we put together would have addressed, as the member mentioned, the naturalization process. People should have a clean criminal record, understand Canadian culture and, most importantly, speak English or French. That is not too much to ask, so we do not understand why the Liberal government and the NDP are trying to rip this away from us so the bill would create another class of Canadian citizens who know nothing about Canada and who do not necessarily value Canadian citizenship.”
“Madam Speaker, let me remind the Liberal government again that when the law was struck down by the Ontario courts, the Liberal government had every opportunity and all the time it needed to repeal that decision, but it never did. It has done nothing about it. Now that the deadline is coming, the government just all a the sudden wakes up and says it needs to do this. It is rushing this through without due consideration for all Canadians.”
“When the next geopolitical flashpoint emerges, how much will the NDP-Liberal coalition take from the pockets of hard-working Canadian taxpayers to fund a vacation bailout for Canadians of convenience?”