Melissa Lantsman
Thornhill, Ontario · Conservative · Canada
“Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the secretary of state confirmed what many Canadians already feared. A foreign government is funding and directing attacks on synagogues, businesses and the U.S. Consulate, and now the murder of a Toronto police officer. This government has known for years; they did nothing.”
“Mr. Speaker, one thing is clear, which is that the families of those police officers deserve better answers than that. The Liberals are in government. They have been there for 11 years. They are not bystanders in any of this. They let terrorists flood our country. They built a catch-and-release bail system.”
“I think this bill deserves to be debated and the House should give it that. Instead, the Liberals have rammed it through with what is called the programming motion to sweep this away right before they take their summer break. Let us go back to the member for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong .”
“That has never been done in this place except with Bill C-9 , the last bill the government passed through the House. My colleague mentioned that she had never seen that happen in her 15 years in this place, which is longer than I have been here.”
“In a previous life, she sat on this side of the House as the Conservative shadow minister for civil liberties. She participated in nearly every civil liberties debate in this chamber. Every single time, she told Canadians the truth, which was that the government could not be trusted with privacy.”
“Let me say this to anybody watching at home at this late hour: The Liberals' argument in this debate is completely disingenuous, and they know it. I appreciate the police chief of York Regional Police. We have an enormously good relationship, a great one. I have also met with the commissioner of the OPP and with the Toronto police chief.”
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“Rather than creating more prosperity, we lost half a billion dollars in foreign investment, investment per worker dropped by 10.8% and our labour productivity sunk. All the while, he said anybody who questioned any of this was talking down Canada and called them racist and alarmist, saying the planet would burn down. He called them every name in the book just for calling out the facts. When Canadians were finally freed of the high-tax, high-spend Justin Trudeau regime earlier this year, they breathed a short sigh of relief because the new guy was supposed to be different and better. He said he was an economist who knew how markets worked. He said he would cut back on reckless spending and make it easier to create investment here in Canada. He said that he would do things differently.”
“According to the Trudeau school of economics, proudly located at the university of unicorns and fairy dust in a land of make-believe, spending ourselves deep into the red, lighting endless amounts of taxpayer money on fire and calling it “investment in spending” somehow makes us all richer. Ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the most expensive and costly experiment in Canadian history has ended, and everyone with even an iota of common sense could have predicted what would happen. We did not get the promised utopia where everybody gets a job, nobody has to work and nobody thinks about monetary policy. Instead, the Liberals doubled the debt to give us higher inflation, higher taxes and smaller paycheques. That is true today. Our living standard, as measured by economists, has stagnated and is getting worse.”
“Unlike the scoreboard at the Rogers Centre, which we have been seeing go up and up, the only numbers going up in Ottawa, unfortunately, are deficits, unemployment and net investment flowing southbound rather than here. I am going to tell a story, or, rather, a cautionary tale. Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, in the year 2015, a trust-fund millionaire living in Liberal la-la land decided to run a radical experiment. He decided to spend billions of dollars of people's money to figure out whether budgets could truly balance themselves. Never mind that anybody with a background in finance or accounting or any part of the real world told him that it was not possible, Justin Trudeau was not going to be deterred.”
“She said: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to move this motion. I will be splitting my time with my friend from Calgary Crowfoot . I am going to start with a sidebar and give a hometown shout-out that stretches right across the country, a big hype for the Toronto Blue Jays, which took down the Yankees last night and lifted the whole country with them. Canada's team is flying to the ALCS, and as a big fan, this team gives me all of the feels. I know that is true for everyone across the country. I congratulate them. Unfortunately, members are not going to like the next part. Just like the Jays proving what teamwork and discipline can do on the field, imagine what Canada could achieve if the government showed the same focus.”
“moved: Motion That, given that, (i) in 2015 the Liberals promised that deficit spending would fuel investment, yet investment per worker fell by 10.8%, (ii) Liberal deficits fueled inflation and drove up interest rates, while Canada had the worst economic growth per capita in the G7, (iii) the current Liberal Prime Minister is following the same plan and is already yielding the same results, with 86,000 net job losses, the second highest unemployment rate in the G7, food inflation doubled the Bank of Canada's target and $53.9 billion in net investment leaving the country, (iv) every dollar that leaves the country means lower wages and lost jobs for workers, (v) every dollar the government spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians, the House call on the Liberal government to stop plagiarizing Justin Trudeau's failed policies and recognize that deficits drive investment and jobs down and the cost of living up.”
“Mr. Speaker, with that kind of answer, if someone who measures their wealth by a stock index, that is their guy, but if it comes from a paycheque, they are his sacrifice. Canadians trusted the Prime Minister to fight for their jobs and to fight for their paycheques. Months after he vowed to get a deal, there is still none. There are 86,000 fewer Canadians working. He doubled the deficit at home; $54 billion of investment fled south, with the promise to make it a trillion. In what world is a trillion-dollar gift to Donald Trump considered a win?”
“Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister assured Canadians that he would secure a victory, but there is none. The tariffs he said he would get rid of have actually doubled. He is now promising to ship a trillion dollars of investment to the U.S. with nothing in return. That is not a strategy. It is a clearance sale on Canadian jobs, paper mills in B.C. closing while Washington state cuts the ribbon, factories in Ontario going dark while Michigan lights up. Why did the Prime Minister trade away Canadian paycheques for an applause line in Washington?”
“Mr. Speaker, none of that is working, because 86,000 Canadians are out of a job today. The Liberals must know that this is not about politics; it is about people, people who believed the Prime Minister when he said he would stand up for them. He danced around with his elbows in the sky, and he promised every Canadian that he would fight. This is about workers who have seen their shifts cut, their costs rise and their hope fade, all because there is a trillion dollars southbound instead of being invested here in Canada. All they wanted was for the Prime Minister to keep his word. Why will he not do it?”
“Mr. Speaker, this is the news coming out of the White House today for many Canadians. Canadians put their faith in the Prime Minister because they believed that he would fight for them, for their jobs, for their paycheques and for their families. However, these were false promises. Months after he promised a deal, we still have no deal. Instead, we have the fastest-shrinking G7 economy, we have 86,000 more people out of work, and now a trillion dollars is flowing out of Canada, with tariffs that are higher, not lower. Does the Prime Minister realize that his broken promises have real consequences for Canadians?”
“Mr. Speaker, it is the Liberal member who in 2015 promised that massive deficits were investments, but it was all a bait and switch, because investment collapsed while debt went through the roof. However, instead of sobering up from the debt binge that they have been on, the Liberals are just going to keep spending more money in a forever hangover. That means higher taxes and higher inflation for every Canadian. The first step in fighting addiction is admitting one has a problem, so when will the minister stand up and finally admit that his reckless spending is sending us over the cliff?”
“Mr. Speaker, every dollar that the Prime Minister spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians in Liberal taxes and inflation. The Prime Minister should know this. He calls himself a great economist, but he is going to spend over 60% more than even Justin Trudeau did. Parliament's independent fiscal watchdog says it is “alarming”, it is “stupefying”, it is “shocking” and it is “unsustainable”. He says something is going to break and that we are on the edge of a fiscal cliff. Why is the Prime Minister going to drive us off that cliff at full speed?”
“Mr. Speaker, for once in this place, we can all agree on something. Congratulations to the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays for clinching the division. They stand tall as champions of the American league. Clinching the division is not just baseball. It is also a public service. Now the rest of Canada can stop doing playoff math like deranged accountants in the most stressful reality show there is. The Jays have rocked the dome, they have made this country proud and they have given us permission to believe that this is our year. On behalf of Canadians from coast to coast to coast, I wish them best of luck in the playoffs. May the bullpen stay steady and the bats stay hot because, this year, we want it all. Fly all the way south to the World Series, boys. October is for the birds.”
“Mr. Speaker, that is a lot of bravado, and we are hearing the exact opposite when he thinks nobody is listening. The minister got caught in a scandal of his own making, and it is so painful for everyone here to watch him pretend like everything is fine. He is going to go ahead and spend $750 million on a confiscation program that he admitted no one will participate in and will not work. That is fewer cops on the streets, fewer scanners in our ports and less money for a leaky border, where the guns are coming in. I have one question for the Prime Minister : Why is he keeping this guy around?”
“Mr. Speaker, what do we call a person who says one thing in public but admits the exact opposite in private? Most Canadians have their own word for it, but around here in this place, we just call them a Liberal. The public safety minister admits that his government's gun buyback is a politically motivated scam that will not work. Those are his words. He is letting convicted criminals roam the streets and shoot up our neighbourhoods so he can play politics and pretend that he is actually doing something about it. Everyone behind him is also wondering this: When is he getting fired?”
“Mr. Speaker, the minister voted for all the things to break our system. The now public safety minister actually said during the election that bail was not a problem, and the justice minister who just answered my question ridiculed Canadians with his Twitter hot takes. After years of headlines about violent offenders released again and again in our streets, the Liberals are obstructing a real solution, right now, to fixing bail. On Monday, they have a chance to vote for the “three strikes and you're out” law to end repeat violent offenders being churned out onto the streets. Do the Liberals really think Canadians should wait for the next murder, the next assault or the next victim? They should act now.”
“Mr. Speaker, after 10 years of Liberal soft-on-crime policy, violent crime is up 50%, sexual assault is up 75%, and gun crime is up 116%. Just about everybody in this country is demanding bail reform, yet the Liberals block it at every turn. Every single day that they delay, more rapists, gangsters and repeat offenders are dumped back on our streets to victimize innocent Canadians. Why are the Liberals obstructing fixing the broken bail system and choosing to shield dangerous criminals rather than protecting Canadian families? Why do they not do something about it today?”
“Mr. Speaker, only in Liberal land do we solve the housing crisis by blowing $13 billion on a fourth bureaucracy after the first three already failed. Those numbers are right. Who is leading the master plan? It is the former mayor of Vancouver. He doubled rents and jacked up home prices by 150%. Just to make the circus more complete, he handed a key role to his buddy from Toronto, the same person who slapped a 700% hike on development charges and oversaw home prices double when she was there. Is this really the definition of success for the minister?”
“Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister promised Canadians that he would build 500,000 homes a year, doubling housing starts. Instead, housing starts are down 16%, and his $13-billion brand new bureaucracy might someday, maybe, build a grand total of 4,000 homes. That is 1.6% of what we already build. It is a rounding error. Is this really the government's housing strategy: to hope that Canadians do not know basic math?”
“Madam Speaker, the member well knows, and I am sure it would not be news to the members on the other side, that provincial judges interpret federal laws right out of the Criminal Code. That is how it works. However, today we are talking about the very fact that the Liberals have let crime, chaos, drugs, disorder, a crisis in our immigration system, a crisis in our housing system and a crisis in the cost of living get out of control. Do they believe that they are the ones to fix it? I am not—”
“Madam Speaker, I welcome the member back for his second term. He should know that the federal Criminal Code is administered out of this place, and that is what we are talking about. We are talking about things like Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 , which take the onerous provision out and allow weak bail. We are talking about this in light of Bill C-2 , because they have allowed chaos in our streets. We will continue talking about crime every single day of the week when the Liberals are trying to convince Canadians that they are the ones trying to fix it.”
“Madam Speaker, my colleague comes from the community where Mr. Farooqi was from. He stood with Conservatives during a press conference, calling for the very things that the Liberals have broken. This has gone on far too long for far too many families. They do not have to directly be a victim of violent crime. It changes the way that people live. It changes their behaviour. It changes the fact that they have fear of living in their once-safe community. If the Liberals do not understand that and they make fun of Canadians for calling it the wild west, then I do not know what we are doing here.”
“Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question, but police agencies right across the country have been asking the government for bail reform, when the government has destroyed the justice system. The minister was in the last government, which did exactly that. The Liberals have heard from police associations and from mayors across the country, and they did nothing. They say that it is coming tomorrow, but how many more people have to be victimized in their community before tomorrow comes? That is the point that the minister should answer in the House during this debate.”
“I hope we spare all Canadians from that going on for a very long time. To get to what is at the core of the Liberal government is that they put the same people who broke everything in charge of fixing it. The way they fix it is by bringing forward a bill; they tell us they have good intentions in the bill, yet it is a power grab. It is a power grab to look at our mail, to ban cash, to do things they never had the power to do before, all under the guise of protecting Canadians and protecting our border. Everybody should take that very seriously. Everybody should look at their intentions with the bill very seriously. They say they are going to do one thing, but they do the exact opposite, and there are no results ever for this.”
“The government is coming here to talk a big game about the bill, but once again, the actions do not match the words. The public safety minister should probably have a conversation with the justice minister . He does not seem to think there is a problem with crime at all. He mocked Canadians who are fed up with what is going on in their communities, in their neighbourhoods, in their homes, in their businesses. He might not think Canada is the Wild West, but when people are being shot in their own homes, when cars are getting carjacked at random, when people are being mugged in the streets, it is a lot closer to the Wild West than we should ever be comfortable with here. This is a guy who broke the housing market, who broke the long-held consensus on our immigration system. Now he is putting his talents to use at the justice department.”
“They can patrol the entire Canadian border properly, not in an Ottawa office but on the ground. We should have people in uniforms who would enforce the laws that are there. Let us install scanners at major ports to stop the flow of guns and stolen cars in and out of our country. Maybe we should actually keep track of who is coming in and who is leaving this country so that we do not have another situation where the government actually loses count of everybody it has let in. We should end the soft-on-crime provisions in Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 and put criminals in jail, restoring the rule of law in our country, rather than letting them out on bail minutes, hours or days after they commit a crime. While we are at it, let us stop handing out lethal drugs for free, paid for by the taxpayers, and put people in actual treatment.”
“Now, it is burying conditions in the back of the bill that have nothing to do with border security and clearly show Canadians that it wants more power. This is not just overblown rhetoric. Bill C-2 will let Ottawa open people's mail without oversight, force Internet companies to hand over private information and allow them to search without a warrant in certain scenarios. This is not fixing our borders. It is not protecting Canadians. It is a government power grab, plain and simple, and it should make everybody very uncomfortable. Canadians did not give the Prime Minister a blank cheque to take more power away from Canadians and infringe on their rights. Instead of that, what we should do in the bill is hire more border agents, the ones who are on the front lines, as was done in the past.”
“(1725) Instead, seniors and small businesses are the ones who will be unfairly punished by this massive overreach in government power. It even goes farther, with massive new powers of the federal government that threaten Canadian civil liberties. We know this. We have seen this movie before. It is what the Liberals do every single time. They find a problem, but they do not solve the actual problem; then they massively expand their power to take more rights away from Canadians. We have seen how this happens. There is no limit to the government's hunger for power. It tried to give itself unlimited spending power during COVID. Just two months ago, it sneakily removed privacy provisions from the online streaming bill and called it an accident.”
“He was shot to death in his living room, but the legislation would not guarantee that his killers or any other people terrorizing our communities would actually be behind bars. We are told to wait, that it is going to happen. The same people who created the crisis cannot be trusted to fix it. Even worse, it still allows house arrest for even the most serious offences. A person can commit grand theft auto and still be in their living room playing the video game. At the same time, Bill C-2 puts new limits on the use of cash in our economy, ostensibly to target gangs and criminals. Do we really believe that gangs and criminals, the ones pushing fentanyl, the ones running guns and laundering money, are suddenly going to start following the law? Of course not. We make those assertions, and we make criminals out of law-abiding citizens.”
“They have cooked up legislation that keeps a broken border and immigration regime in place while also punishing law-abiding citizens with massive expansions in federal power. Bill C-2 keeps in place the catch-and-release for criminals who traffic fentanyl and firearms and takes advantage of the weak laws that hurt Canadians. It does not add mandatory prison time for fentanyl traffickers. It does not add mandatory prison time for gangsters who use guns to commit crimes. There have been several shootings in my community in Vaughan. In just three weeks, there have been seven. An innocent man literally gave his life to save his family from a random violent home invasion.”
“This is the reality of the system that the Liberals designed. They actually designed this. They thought about it and thought these were good changes, which then resulted in chaos. Apparently, no one on that side saw this coming, not even from a mile away or from their work from home set-ups. We flash forward to right now, a few months later, and what do we see? Once again, we see that the Liberal government is showing up with a bill that does not actually deliver on what Canadians want, what they have asked for and what they are screaming about in the streets. It is a bill that claims to fix a problem but instead proposes things that no Canadian would ever sign off on.”
“This is all topped off with a broken federal bureaucracy that has ballooned; it is so weak and so detached from reality that literal terrorist organizations, in some cases, can fundraise, recruit and operate with impunity here in Canada from coast to coast to coast. Some of them have charitable numbers even still. It does not take a genius to realize that all of these ingredients would set us up for a ginormous, if that is a word, border security and crime crisis in the country. We get stories like those of Raj Kumar Mehmi, who was convicted of smuggling 80 kilos of cocaine in 2023, sentenced to 15 years and released. He escaped, hopped on a plane and is now gone forever. Arjun Sahnan, a 19-year-old, was arrested for drive-by shootings and extortion. He got bail, booked a flight and is now gone too.”
“They prefer giving rights to criminals over law-abiding Canadians. Pieces of legislation such as Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 codify this ideology and let convicted criminals roam free through a revolving-door justice system of bail with no punishments and no accountability whatsoever. We see it every single day with every story on the news, story one, two, three, four, five, particularly in my region of the GTA. Piled on that are weak immigration policies that deliver outcomes such as a 632% increase in people trying to cross into the country illegally from the U.S. Sprinkled on that is a healthy dose of free drugs, courtesy of the taxpayer, available to anyone, anywhere, even when we know these drugs end up in the streets or in our schools and, frankly, make the plight of addiction much worse and not better.”
“Mr. Speaker, we are back today, again, to do something we do a lot of in this place, which is cleaning up yet another mess that the Liberal government, the government for the last 10 years, has created. This time we are tackling a broken border security regime that lets guns, drugs and criminals flow across the border with absolutely no consequences. When we tie that together with an equally broken criminal justice system that provides no accountability for the offenders and no safety for innocent Canadians, we get a disaster and crisis-level mess. How did we get here? That is pretty simple. We will walk everyone right through it. For everybody watching, for those who might listen this time around, we will start with Justin Trudeau and his ministers. By the way, they are still there on the front bench.”
“If the member is really serious about fixing what her government already broke, and I will give her the opportunity now since the Minister will not answer the question, would she agree to take GST off all homes up to $1.3 million, get rid of the capital gains tax and actually incentivize municipalities? She can answer that question right now.”
“Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary admitted one thing that I agree with, which is that Canada is facing a housing crisis, which her colleagues and the Minister she is here for actually juiced with 141% more taxes. They talk and talk, and there is no action, which is exactly what happened before. I am not sure what it is about a technocratic central banker that always has them building a new bureaucracy, trying to convince people that more steps or more offices or more appointments are going to somehow speed things up and do them more cheaply.”
“A person needs to make $46 an hour just to rent an apartment in Vancouver, and $42 an hour in Toronto. We know most jobs are not like that and do not pay that. This means half of young Canadians will now spend over 50% of their income on housing. It means 27% of homeless Canadians are now over the age of 50. What all of that means is that nobody is immune to the 10 years of housing hell that the Liberal government has created. I really hope the parliamentary secretary was in training camp this summer because it is going to take a lot of flexibility and verbal gymnastics to explain why this failure was so big and why it is getting bigger.”
“The minister is rewarding the municipalities following in the footsteps of generous handouts for cities that refuse to get new housing built. We have seen a continuation of that over the summer, and he is preserving the high-tax red tape bureaucracy in Ottawa that stops progress and keeps prices high. In fact, what the government is doing since I have asked this question is building a $13-billion corporation led by a former NIMBY deputy mayor from Toronto who was responsible for keeping the private sector out of the tendering process in that city. At the very same time, the immigration minister is opening the doors to this country, pulling out a rubber stamp and adding about 20% more to the cost of a home. Let us break down what this all means and why I asked my question, which was not answered. Forget owning a home.”
“If someone wants to own a home in Vancouver right now, it is going to cost them an average of 13.5 times their income. In Toronto, it is 10 times their income. At the same time, housing construction is down. It is down by 50% in the GTA, and it is down 13% right across the country. This is a government that promised us the most ambitious housing plan since World War II, but it is going to miss its targets this year by 50%. It is easy to see how all of this is happening. The lofty rhetoric we hear is not really lining up with what the government is actually doing. The person put in charge of housing in this country raised home building taxes by 141% while he was in Vancouver as mayor, and he let home prices skyrocket by 149%. That was my question.”
“Mr. Speaker, we are back in the House after what seems to be a long summer vacation for the Liberal government. We still have a youth unemployment crisis, which got worse. We have chaos in our immigration system, which got worse. We have crime and lawlessness in our streets, which got worse. The Prime Minister promised Canadians a new direction, a change in leadership, whatever it was. Instead, they got the same ideas from the same old ministers and the same predictable platitudes, which are, frankly, coming up short on results. Before the Liberals took the summer off, I asked a question about Canadian housing. I am going to talk about the market for a second, as we saw what was going on over the summer: Buyers cannot buy and sellers cannot sell. That should be indicative of a massive policy failure.”
“Mr. Speaker, the minister cannot ignore the problem of millions of Canadians using a food bank every single month. That has not changed. It happened under the Liberal government's watch. Now the Liberals are making excuses or changing the subject entirely. Canadians are getting fleeced at the grocery store, and it is only going to get worse, because next year their bill will be $700 higher per family. That is another Liberal broken promise, another Liberal bait and switch by another Liberal Prime Minister . Is that the experience that he is now promising Canadians?”
“Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister told Canadians that they should judge him by the prices they pay at the grocery store, but food inflation is 70% above target. The grocery prices are up 40% in less than a decade, and all of those years, the Liberals were in power. The cost of food has risen overall more than inflation every single month that the Prime Minister has been here. Canadians should judge the Prime Minister by his words; that is only fair. Is it that the Prime Minister never shops for food, or is it that he thinks inflation is something that happens to other people?”
“Mr. Speaker, the Iranian regime is collapsing and its thugs are already eyeing Canada. After 10 years of weak Liberal national security laws, this country has become a safe haven for IRGC terrorists. Hundreds live here. They operate here, they fundraise here, they intimidate Canadians here and they do it all without consequence. I will ask the minister this: How many more terrorists have to come to Canada before the Liberals introduce the foreign registry they put into law last year?”
“Mr. Speaker, the hon. member knows that the answer is no, of course. The question has, frankly, nothing to do with what we are talking about here. The very idea that we could have a targeted approach for those who claim to be Canadian citizens, who have no connection or substantial connection to this place, and who are adults who want to enjoy the responsibility of Canadian citizenship, is what we are talking about. The member opposite ought to know that.”
“Mr. Speaker, I think that my hon. colleague from this side has spent exponentially more time looking at the immigration minister 's website than the actual Minister of Immigration, who does not know the numbers and does not know the issues. The very fact that the Liberals have had seven ministers in 10 years should tell us everything we need to know about how seriously the government takes the issue of immigration. For Canadians to have a system that is so deeply broken, after having one that was the envy of the world for so many years, is a travesty.”
“Mr. Speaker, first and foremost, it would be giving Canadians the confidence of an immigration minister who can answer a single question in the House, who knows a single thing about her portfolio or who has even read the bill that she has presented in the House. That would be the first thing to engender confidence in an immigration system that the government has broken over the last 10 years. We used to have the best system in the world. It brought the best and the brightest to the country. That is no longer the case. Members do not have to hear it from me. We could go ask 10 Canadians on the street if they think the system is broken, and they would tell us, 10 out of 10 times, yes.”
“Mr. Speaker, I thought that we were going to have a serious conversation about the bill. Maybe the member has not read it. I assure members that Pierre Poilievre will seek the support and trust of the people of Battle River—Crowfoot, a place where he grew up, a place where he was born and a place where he was raised. I look forward to his bashing down that member when he is back in September.”
“We have a bill without its amendments and the provisions the government currently has with the minister , who knows nothing about the bill, who has presented it in the House. I want to see those changed. I look forward to having that conversation, but I look forward more to the Liberals accepting those amendments.”
“We cannot do that if we look out onto our streets today and see what is happening, while we are saying no to security vetting, to any kind of interview or to making sure that criminal record checks are conducted. We cannot possibly stand up today in this country and say that is not necessary. I look forward to hearing what the Liberals' thoughts are on an amendment that would ensure security and vetting are taken seriously, something that the Liberals have not done in our immigration system. It is something that has played out on our streets here in Canada, something that has been shown in case after case of people being charged before they committed a terrorist act in this country. I want to see a government take this responsibly, and I want to see citizenship mean something in this country.”
“We have heard a lot of conversation about this, and I am glad to hear that the members opposite, the Liberals, are open to amendments to changing that, to substantiating it into a test that makes sense. They are not required to have substantial ties. Again, the vague substantial connection test allows multi-generational foreign residents to claim citizenship with minimal presence in Canada. That devalues the citizenship. It devalues not only the rights that are afforded to every other citizen but also the responsibility that citizens have in making sure that they are citizens. I want to make Canada's immigration system the envy of the world. We cannot do that if Canadians do not believe in the integrity of the system.”
“If there are elements and specific cases where it did not, we could find ways to do it with a very targeted approach. We supported fixing the lost Canadians via the targeted bill that we saw from the other place, Bill S-245 , but Bill C-3 goes too far. Bill C-3 actually weakens Canadian citizenship. It would devalue Canadian citizenship for everyone else. It would open the door by eliminating the ties to Canada as a requirement, or at least the strength of the ties to Canada as a requirement. It would eliminate the first-generation limit. It would grant citizenship to those born abroad with one parent who has spent 1,095 consecutive days here.”