Eric Duncan
Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry, Ontario · Conservative · Canada
“Mr. Speaker, that was not even close to an answer. New documents reveal that the Prime Minister has spent $1 million on inflight catering since taking office last year. That is enough money to feed a Canadian family for 55 years. Let us look at the list: luxury butter cups, crème brûlée, Scottish salmon and smoked Gouda.”
“That is showing that despite the speeches, the photo ops and the good intentions that are always mentioned by the Liberals, we are seeing that their plan is failing to resonate when it comes to economic growth and creating jobs. We have seen tens of thousands of jobs lost so far in 2026.”
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Lethbridge has an insightful question, and I thank her for the opportunity to reflect. Today, I am thinking, as we look at the struggles, that the data confirms that Canada is the only G7 country going into a recession. Canada is officially in a recession under the Liberal government.”
“This infusion of $20 million saw its key investors suddenly cash out with millions of dollars, and we have a gravel pad with a concrete pad on top of it that is costing $20 million per year. The lease of that land, just for the record, was about $15,000 per year. Where is the other $19.99 million a year going?”
“Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the good people of Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry to add my contributions and views based on what I am hearing in my community, the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, as well as Cornwall and Akwesasne, and bring that to the floor of the House to make sure their voices are…”
“Here we are, seeing that it can take, in cases of getting a mine built, upwards of 25 years to get a mine permitted and built in this country. At the same time, we are seeing the idea or possibility of a pipeline out to the west coast, but we do not know a proponent, a start date, a route or the details.”
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“Mr. Speaker, not knowing their numbers, not knowing their facts, not having a plan is the definition of insanity after 10 years of the Liberal government. This is what the Liberals do. They do not plan properly, do the accounting or do the math. We just get continued chaos and disorder, as we see in our current immigration system. I will tell members that the number one group of Canadians that I hear from as being most frustrated about our immigration system are new Canadians who just went through the system. I hear time and time again about it, whether it is labour and getting their foreign credentials recognized, the cost of living, the bureaucratic process that many members have raised here today or the archaic system that is IRCC, Immigration Canada. After 10 years, we have lost a consensus on immigration.”
“If the member surveyed 100 residents in her community, I am sure that a vast, overwhelming majority would say that a criminal background check is a very reasonable, common-sense approach. The government could have put that in there, and it comes down to trust. It did not do that, again, and I am not very confident that if the bill gets to committee, the Liberals are going to finally see the light on that.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is trust. This is not the first version of the bill that we have seen. We had Bill C-71 in the last Parliament. We also had Bill S-245 , a Conservative Senate private member's bill go through, which was gutted and hijacked by the Liberals and the NDP. I will use the example of the criminal background check's being a requirement. We have advocated for that multiple times, but we have been told, “Oh, take it to committee, and we'll talk about it.” Well, we are talking about it now, because this is about the third time we have had to raise it, unsuccessfully, to get the Liberals and NDP to agree to do all that. Therefore the issue is trust. We could move it along to committee, but we want to take the opportunity now to raise awareness for Canadians.”
“I am very proud of our Canadian citizenship and of those people who are able to join, but the big question on that is the multiple generation aspect that is going to cause a lot—”
“Mr. Speaker, under the current law, I believe that, yes, that is the way it would be. However, the challenge in the legislation is that multiple generations, the children of children who live in another country, may not have that same connection, which comes back to the substantial connection test. This could go on for multiple generations. Eventually, there would be people applying for citizenship, through the legislation being proposed by the Liberals, who would not have a substantial connection to Canada. With respect to the 1,095 non-consecutive days, this is the question people have to ask themselves: Is that really a substantial connection test for obtaining Canadian citizenship and for having the honour and pride of doing that?”
“Mr. Speaker, it is the absolute opposite. I would reference the court ruling and the legislation we introduced here, and passed, to meet what was required, which does provide the opportunity for a substantial connection test. What we are saying is that 1,000 non-consecutive days is not acceptable. However, the government has the right to put that section in the legislation. There are parts of the legislation we do support, and there are some we do not. The court ruling itself says that a substantial connection test is reasonable to do. We are saying that what the government is proposing is not reasonable. That is part of the debate, and the Bloc Québécois should be part of it. There are reasons to criticize, and I think that is one of the things we are going to be discussing in committee.”
“They selected those numbers, which were clearly too high, because the Liberals have actually cut back and restricted them on their own, and they broke our immigration system. Their own actions, over the course of the last year, are a full admission that they failed when it came to numbers and the math on immigration.”
“Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have finally agreed with many others whom they attacked and degraded for so many years, and are saying that the immigration levels and targets they set were way too high. People came into Canada, and many became Canadians, but we did not have sustainable measures. We made a promise, Liberal and Conservative governments for generations, decades, that if a person immigrated to Canada, they could afford to live, they could get a good job, and they could have a good quality of life, but we have seen that eroded over the course of the last 10 years. Therefore, with respect to any numbers that the Liberals cite, attacking anybody else, it is their own record for the last 10 years.”
“We cannot support citizenship by descent for countless generations, we need to change the test for a substantial connections test, and we need to make sure every applicant passes a criminal background check. These are common-sense things my Conservative colleagues and I will continue to advocate for, to make sure, at the end of the day, that anybody who comes to Canada and becomes a citizen has an amazing opportunity to afford a home, to get a good job, to get health care and to enjoy what so many of us have had: a great quality of life in this country.”
“They will not table a budget this spring. They will not tell us what the deficit is. They broke our immigration system by having numbers get out of control. We have another piece of legislation dealing with citizenship and immigration, for which they do not know the cost, they do not know their numbers and they are not doing the math. Canadians have seen this after 10 years, on repeat, over and over and time and time again. Conservatives have said that there are measures of the bill that we will support and that we have been on the record as supporting before. However, we have some serious concerns about several of the provisions that need to be addressed.”
“I will give the Liberals a little bit of a compliment, but I do not want them to take it the right way. They get an A for an announcement. I have never seen people do photo ops and announcements better than the Liberals. That is their compliment. They can get the banners. They get the best backdrops. They have the podium announcement. They have people cheering. They have the news release out. It looks great, and it sounds great, full of Liberal word salad. However, what happens is that they get an A for an announcement and an F for follow-through. Look at their tax cut today. They talk about numbers. Their big tax cut never came to fruition. It is drastically, astronomically smaller than what they said it was going to be. The Liberals are not good with numbers. They are not good with numbers on the budget.”
“Because the government has broken the immigration system, and asylum claimants and the whole refugee system are severely under strain, it had to cancel that program in order to try to get its numbers under control. Now we find the government proposing legislation in Bill C-3 , about which we are asking what the number would be, how many this would impact, and what the impact would be on government departments and the economy in our country. We do not know. I can just see another issue coming of the government's being woefully unprepared for the very legislation it introduces. It just speaks again of virtue signalling on its part, of breaking our immigration system and not learning from those lessons. We continue to see it time and time again.”
“Members do not have to take my word for it; the government has admitted it broke the immigration system when it comes to permanent residency, because now it has rescinded and it is attempting to cap the number of permanent residents admitted into Canada and approved every year. The Liberals have made many changes. They have actually closed the group sponsorship for refugees, which I have been personally supportive of. They have shut that program down. I have done that as a Group of Five; we sponsored a Syrian refugee family. I gave up my house and went to live in my mom's basement for six months, believe it or not. I was part of a Groups of Five sponsorship opportunity, where we came together as a community to help a family in need abroad. They are doing very well in Canada these days.”
“Under the Trudeau government and continuing under the current government, the Liberals keep missing their targets. Even after they have realized the issues they have made and tried to cap numbers, they broke the international student system. We heard stories in the GTA of six, eight or nine people staying in a two- or three-bedroom home and sometimes paying $1,000 or more each in rent. These are ridiculous prices. We have heard of international students having to go to food banks. The reason I raise all of this is that the government and the Liberals, when it comes to our immigration system, in numbers and in a sustainable system, have failed Canadians, new Canadians and those immigrating to Canada, very, very deeply. We have seen it with respect to permanent residency.”
“We have seen them, and we know that the Liberals know they have created a failed and broken system after 10 years of being in office, because they are trying to rescind many of the decisions they made. They are now trying to make major changes to the temporary foreign worker program. (1650) They provided over a million international students with permits, with zero plans for them to be housed safely in appropriate circumstances and with affordability. I have spoken to a large number of international students at St. Lawrence College in Cornwall and in my travels in Eastern Ontario and across the country. It has been incredible the number of frustrated international students who heard for years about the opportunity to study in Canada.”
“Most Canadians would think that if the government is going to introduce legislation that would have a major impact on the number of people eligible for citizenship, passports, services and all of that support, the government would have estimates on how many people would be impacted and what the cost would be to various departments and services. People would think the government would have all of that. It has refused to provide those numbers. Most Canadians would say that they would expect parliamentarians and the government to have that information on hand, available for public knowledge and discussion, when a piece of legislation like this is coming forth. However, when it comes to numbers, we have seen so many times how the Liberal government has broken our immigration system with reckless numbers.”
“There are some unintended consequences that would happen if the flaws and issues that we see in the legislation are not addressed. A key part about this is that the numbers are very important when it comes to immigration. We have seen the Liberal government fail time and time again when it comes to the numbers in our immigration system. We could survey Canadians, and I am sure they would say a few things. I am sure they would say that they believe that in order to obtain Canadian citizenship through this process, it would not be unreasonable in Bill C-3 to add in a provision that would require a security background check. Most Canadians would say that would be common sense.”
“My comment on this for Canadians is to make an observation about the lack of seriousness the Liberals have shown when it comes to public safety to ensure that Canadians who would be granted citizenship through this process are able to pass a criminal background check. The Liberals have had the opportunity to put this in. The fact that we have had to fight and fight for this, while the Liberals have continually obstructed it, says a lot about their lack of seriousness about it. We will continue to push the topic and continue to do all of this at committee, in debates here in the House, and so forth. Another major aspect and concern, as I mentioned, is the cost of the bill, as well as the number of people who would be eligible and the countless generations.”
“The government has had multiple opportunities to correct the issue by putting it proactively in the bill and making a background criminal check a requirement. That was debated in the last Parliament in Bill S-245 . Conservatives did raise the issue, and we debated it substantially, while the Liberals veered in and around it. Bill C-71 was introduced under the Trudeau government as a piece of legislation, and now the same Liberal government has come back with Bill C-3 , yet it has still not put it in. I can assure the House that my Conservative colleagues at the citizenship and immigration committee, if the bill does proceed to committee, will be advocating it. I am very confident that would be an amendment that would come forward.”
“We also raised it during debate on Bill S-245 , when it was gutted by the NDP and Liberals, and vastly expanded to what we see now. There is no requirement for a criminal record check to take place. We talk about public safety in our country and the need to make sure we have a stringent immigration process, a fair, secure and safe immigration process. The fact that there would not be an obligation, it would not be mandatory, to have a criminal background check is completely inappropriate. Earlier, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader made his comments and interventions about that. He kept saying that the Liberals are open to suggestions and to amendments. Conservatives have been on the record about some of the things we would do and what we want to do.”
“It goes back, at the end of the day, to the court ruling the government referenced, which said there is space and an opportunity for the legislation to come forward to have that substantial connection test. The government has chosen for it to be 1,000 nonconsecutive days. (1645) Conservatives are on record as saying that it needs to be consecutive days. There needs to be a substantial test. That would be a fair way to make sure that the value of Canadian citizenship is maintained by a person's having a real, legitimate, tangible, long-term connection, at even 1,000 days, but a substantial connection at that point, to Canada in obtaining their Canadian citizenship. There is another key aspect that Conservatives have raised about the current form of Bill C-3 and about Bill C-71 .”
“There is no number to know that. We do not know the cost on services of obtaining passports. There could be old age security and guaranteed income supplement applications and eligibility that come from it. Some of it could be retro, depending on how all this goes, so it could be very difficult in that way. Therefore, I think that is a major issue we have that we need to discuss and to have further clarification on. One of the challenges is not only the countless generations but also the minimal substantial connection test. I mentioned the 1,000 days the government has put in the legislation. One of the key challenges is that it is nonconsecutive.”
“The NDP and the Liberals then hijacked it and made several significant changes, which is where we are at today, many of which are in the form of Bill C-3 . Conservatives have said that while we support the measures I just spoke about, we cannot support the bill in the current form, because there are several other issues of challenge. It dilutes the integrity of Canadian citizenship by automatically extending it to multiple generations. Several of my colleagues have mentioned this in their comments today and have asked Liberal members to provide a number. We are unable to substantiate the number of applicants and the impact this is going to have on immigration, IRCC and the department in this country. How many more will obtain Canadian citizenship through this? It will be countless as it goes on through generation after generation.”
“There is a smaller number these days, but we have a wonderful Senate caucus over on the Conservative benches there. Senator Yonah Martin's bill, Bill S-245 , was designed with a clear and narrow goal: to restore Canadian citizenship to a small cohort of lost Canadians. I would say her effort was non-partisan and targeted to remedy a situation that came up nearly 50 years ago in our country. Conservatives supported that bill at every stage to ensure the Canadians who were unfairly left out of previous citizenship reforms, including those stripped of their citizenship at age 28 under section 8 of the act, could have justice and a fair process. However, the process went through the Senate, and it was a good part of the way through the House and committee.”
“My colleague from Saskatoon West has done a great job on this piece of legislation and on many of these topics already. There are several quotes that came from the immigration committee, where we have been on the record on that. We stated, quote, we want to see adopted children have their citizenship respected in the same way. That means allowing them to pass it on without going through unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. We have been on the record before in this House and at committee. We will continue to do that here in the House as we go through this part of the bill. Another part of the bill we can support, for which I am going to give two positives, if I could, is restoring citizenship for lost Canadians. We deem that to be reasonable. I want to give, as I did earlier, kudos to our Conservative senator.”
“The bill would treat adopted children the same as natural born. I think that is a step in the right direction. When we talk about cutting red tape, this is one way we can do that, by making it easier for families to adopt. There are still a lot of processes to go through and a very stringent requirement for parents to do so, but when they adopt a child from another country and that adoption process is final, that is when they are treated the same as natural born and get that. It is an easier process as opposed to going through PR and that process, which can sometimes be complicated and difficult for families to navigate as they have gone through many other forms and processes already to go through the child custody and adoption process. Conservatives have been on record on this before.”
“I want to start with some of the areas that Conservatives have found agreement on that need to be addressed. First is the provisions for adopted children. For myself, when reading about the legislation and our briefing notes and hearing other colleagues today speak about this from our side of the aisle, when it comes to the adoption of children and making it easier for Canadian parents and facilitating citizenship when they adopt children abroad, this issue is something that is worthy of merit and consideration in this legislation. (1640) We need to make it easier in this country for parents to adopt, whether that is domestically or around the world. In this measure right now, the current process is a PR process, a permanent resident process, that parents have to go through and so forth.”
“It had the opportunity to appeal and test that in court, but it chose not to. Instead the government committed to changing the law. The court did say, and it is important in our discussions, and I am going to be talking about this, that the “substantial connection test” would be appropriate to ensure that these new citizens were actually connected to Canada. That is a major concern that we have. Right now, the plan is a very poor test, frankly. The fact is that there is 1,095 nonconsecutive days, with no way to know how that is all done. Again, we talk about having a connection to Canada, that privilege of citizenship, that connection to Canada for an individual to have. It is certainly strained in the way the government has this written.”
“They will come in and appreciate that scroll and show just how proud they are to be Canadian. It is an immense privilege to have the chance to do that. Bill C-3 will do that in a few different ways. We agree with some measures and sections. There are others that we have some concerns about, and I will get into that. The bill is a recycled version of Bill C-71 from the last Parliament that was tabled by the Trudeau Liberals. Bill C-71 came out of a Conservative private member's bill from a wonderful senator of ours, Senator Yonah Martin, that was heavily amended, Bill S-245 . I want to say that the reason we are here is that in 2023, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the first-generation limit was unconstitutional. The government chose, in this case, not to appeal it.”
“One of my favourite things is when we get the list, on a monthly basis, from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, of individuals in our ridings who have recently obtained Canadian citizenship. It provides us an opportunity to send them a scroll of congratulations. One of the things my staff and I are proud of is not only signing each scroll and certificate but putting a passport application in there and letting them know that they can come to our office for service, making that connection. One of the things we want to do is to show how proud we are of the value of Canadian citizenship. It is a privilege and an honour. We have people come back in, people I have met from all over the riding, in the community, both in Cornwall and S, D and G.”
“I would be a little while listing the five stepsisters that I have, but I wanted to say how grateful I am for their love, encouragement and support. I am pleased to rise today to add my contributions to the government's legislation, Bill C-3 , an act to amend the Citizenship Act of 2025. This is not the first time we have seen a bill in this form. We have actually seen this as a Senate private member's bill in a much different form, one that I think would be much more beneficial. I will get into that in my comments here over the course of the next several minutes. I want to start by talking about the value and the importance of citizenship in this country.”
“I want to take the time while I have the floor to thank all of those who helped out in our recent campaign, from our campaign team, volunteers and door knockers to the thousands of people who took signs and, at the end of the day, those who marked and cast their ballot for me. It is something that I never take for granted and I am deeply grateful for. I am grateful for my family and my close network of friends. I have a great big group of second mothers, as I call it, not only volunteers but family and a wonderful group of friends that support us in this unique work that we do and lifestyle that we have of, as I always say around home, getting our meals and miles in. I want to thank my family: my dad, Ed; my mum, Bea; my sister Jill; and my step-parents and step-siblings.”
“Mr. Speaker, this being my first opportunity to be on my feet for an extended time, I just want to take the opportunity to thank the great people of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry for giving me the honour of coming back to the House of Commons for a third time. I am extremely proud to serve as their federal member of Parliament. I want to welcome the residents of North Glengarry, who are new to the riding. It is going to be a little bit easier for the Speaker now to say Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, without the “south” in there. We have reunited all of S, D and G, the city of Cornwall and Akwesasne.”
“Mr. Speaker, today's Auditor General reports show the true extent of Liberal incompetence and waste. Taxpayers are on the hook for $14 billion in F-35 fighter jet overruns, the arrive scam report confirms that a two-person firm received $64 million in contracts for little to no work, and zero dollars have been returned to the taxpayer. What does the Prime Minister do? He promotes the very ministers responsible for these scandals into his own cabinet: the Minister of Foreign Affairs , the Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade and the Minister of Jobs as well. If the Prime Minister is rewarding the failed ministers, how can Canadians expect to receive a penny of the money back?”
“That is half a trillion dollars more of inflationary spending with no budget. On behalf of the 1.6 million Canadians who are unemployed, when will the Liberals get serious and table a spring budget, so Canadians can get back to work?”
“Madam Speaker, the latest job numbers are out, and they are bad. Unemployment is up 7%. It increased to 14% from just one year ago and is the highest it has been in a decade, outside of COVID. There has been virtually no growth in employment in 2025. One in every five students is unemployed and looking for work. Stats Canada itself confirmed just how bad things have gotten in our economy: “People are facing greater difficulties...in the current labour market.” This is the result of 10 years of the same Liberal inflationary and job-killing policies. The Prime Minister wants to double down on the same failed approach that got us into this mess in the first place. He promised to cap spending at 2%, but the first spending bill that he tabled increased it by a whopping 8%.”