Andrew Lawton
Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, Ontario · Conservative · Canada
“They will claim full coverage, as we see across southwestern Ontario in particular, when everyone who lives there knows that is just a joke. I thank my colleague across the aisle from Compton—Stanstead for introducing this very important discussion. I have actually spent some time in her riding in the past, and I know it is very rural.”
“I want to see us identify ways to ensure accuracy in telecom coverage maps in rural Canada, but I also want to see us fix and expand those areas where we know the coverage is not there.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege, as always, to rise and speak on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. It is a particular privilege to speak to a bill such as this one, which speaks directly to one of the most persistent concerns I hear from people in the rural communities in my riding, scattered across Elgin County…”
“We still have the same problem, which is that we have people looking to a new technology, but that not solving the problem, which is applicable to not just the farmers in my riding, but all the people who live in these rural communities who want to work in these communities, want to study in these communities and, as my colleague for Aval…”
“As technology evolves, we see farmers incorporating more and more technology into their work that requires cellular connectivity, especially if they are out in the field, far from the Wi-Fi routers they may have in their homes or, increasingly, in their barns.”
“Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present today. It is with great pride and pleasure that I present a petition on behalf of representatives of the Elgin County Drowning Prevention Coalition, including Briar McCaw, Linda King and Nathan MacIntyre of the RIP Current Information Project.”
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“Mr. Speaker, the only thing worse than seeing left-wing activists in the media denigrate this country and its heroes is knowing that we Canadians had to foot the bill for it. The Liberals have heaped $1.5 billion on the CBC, and what is the CBC doing with this money? It is producing a show that lies, deceives and entraps Canadians who dare to disagree with the Liberals and dare to stand up for Sir John A. Macdonald and his legacy. Also, we have learned that this show, called Northland Tales , more like northland fails, entrapped brave men and women who have served this country in the RCMP, luring them into a CBC studio to berate and shame them for their service to this country. The CBC has said it is pausing the production, but that is not enough.”
“Organizations serve the people. We serve the organizations.” Harvest Hands is tackling food insecurity with compassion, dedication and action. I thank the Collins family and every volunteer for making this possible.”
“Mr. Speaker, food affordability remains a serious challenge for families in my community and across the country. Today, I want to recognize some of the unsung heroes who are meeting that challenge head-on. Founded just six years ago by Jim and Jacintha Collins, Harvest Hands in St. Thomas has rescued more than 45 million dollars' worth of surplus food, nearly $20 million last year alone. What started in a small church space is now a major distribution centre with a fleet of trucks and nearly 300 volunteers. Harvest Hands rescues unsold and surplus food from farms and producers and then sorts and ships it out to more than 380 partner organizations, including food banks and shelters. To quote Harvest Hands, “We are the trucks, the warehouse, the volunteers, the cold storage, the sorting tables, and the systems that move food at scale.”
“Mr. Speaker, we also have a new record: the most hot air from a transport minister. The Liberals rejected Conservative calls to axe all federal taxes on fuel and save Canadians 25¢ a litre at the pumps. Let us look at what the Liberals do have money for: $200 million for a gravel pit, or, sorry, a launch pad, when the only thing the Liberals are sending into the stratosphere is the national debt. When will the Prime Minister let real Canadians get ahead instead of just Liberal cronies?”
“Mr. Speaker, once again the Prime Minister is padding the pockets of consultants, insiders and elites while Canadians pay the price for his costly credit card budget. The Liberals blew $300 million on PrescribeIT with nothing to show for it. They said they were going to axe the fax, but instead they just embraced the waste. Now we learn that the health minister paid the Liberal-appointed head of the program $900,000 per year. No wonder they shut down a committee investigation into it. When will the Prime Minister cut the waste, cut the corruption and look out for ordinary Canadians for a change?”
“Mr. Speaker, I wish that member were laser-focused on answering a question for once. This budget proves that nothing has changed: the same Liberal excuses, the same Liberal spending addiction, the same Liberal credit card, just with a much higher limit. Canadians are paying more for groceries, more for rent, more in taxes, while this Prime Minister doubles down on the same failed borrow-and-spend policies that gave Canada the worst inflation in 40 years. I have a simple question: Why should Canadians be forced to make the credit card payments for this Prime Minister 's reckless spending?”
“Mr. Speaker, the Liberals say this is a new government, but the only things that have changed are the colour of the Prime Minister 's socks and the size of the deficit. This Liberal Prime Minister has doubled Justin Trudeau's deficit, maxing out the country's credit card and forcing Canadians to pay more to bankers and bondholders rather than roads and hospitals. Even The Globe and Mail sees through this, saying, “it's clear that the Liberals have no intention of changing their high-spending ways.” Maybe that is why the Liberals are sending more money to the media in their fiscal update. Why is the costly Liberal government pretending that “new” means “improved”?”
“Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague and I disagree on a great many things, but if I extract the essence from it, which is that the Liberal government cannot be trusted, I think he and I are probably in alignment here. My question for my hon. colleague, though, stems from the fact that many of the problems he describes from the last several years of the Liberal government have been because the NDP offered the Liberals a blank cheque. When the NDP leader in the House gets up and talks about the Liberals' failure to deliver pharmacare, for example, how is that not a failing of the NDP, given that this was supposedly one of their concessions, to offer that support? Even last night, the NDP voted with the Liberal government to stack parliamentary committees, to give it, once again, carte blanche to run the parliamentary table.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is not just about amendments, as the member indicates; it is also about the agendas for committees. There are a number of committees that engage in studies that want to invite ministers to appear. As we have seen in the case of the ethics committee, the Liberals have staged a massive filibuster to block the finance minister from having to testify about his clear conflicts of interest on the $90‑billion Alto boondoggle. It is not just about amendments; it is about avoiding ministerial accountability at the committee level, where members get the chance, not just in a 35‑second question period slot but in a real substantive way, to question ministers who right now desperately need the accountability and scrutiny.”
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague is right. I think that my colleagues from the Bloc Québécois asked some valid questions about the formula the Liberals are using, but I also think that it is important to look at how this majority came about. We have never seen a government use defections as a tactic to secure a majority that Canadians did not elect. Canadians do not want the Liberals to have complete control over the parliamentary agenda in committee.”
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague opposite likes to say that the Liberals are interested in working with all parties. Interestingly enough, the new Liberal member of Parliament for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong had a very different story to say. In fact, she said that she was trying to get federal attention and investment in her riding, but did not get so much as a response until she crossed the floor to the Liberals. She said, and this was after she crossed the floor, “It went really nowhere, until I crossed the floor. This is what I'm hoping will be the result.” These Liberals are only interested in working for Liberals.”
“They said they wanted monumental, sweeping authority to approve major projects. We said we would love to see major projects. We gave them permission to do this and the framework to do it. No major projects have materialized. Here we are a year later: The Liberal government has promised much and has delivered little. The one mechanism that could be preserved to ensure that Parliament remains in keeping with what Canadians elected was a committee structure that would force members of Parliament and would force government members to do what the Liberals claim they have wanted this whole time, which is collaboration. No, they are laying their demands bare today with the motion. They do not want collaboration. They do not want co-operation. All they want is capitulation. We say no.”
“That is precisely what we are looking at here: a government that does not wish to engage in Parliament, a Prime Minister who holds this institution in contempt and a government that does not want to engage in something so seemingly beneath it as seeking and preserving the will of the Canadian people to enact its legislative agenda. The motion that we have before us today, which I will be opposing, does not strengthen Parliament. It sidelines it. That is something that every member of the House should reject. I go back to the comment I made earlier about when the Liberals try to invoke obstruction as a narrative. We have given them much of what they asked for when they sought permission to do things that will build the country up. Bill C-5 is a great example of this.”
“As evidence that these Liberals are uninterested in accountability and collaboration, one need only look at how they rejected our modest amendment to the very motion we are debating today, which would have preserved the status quo on oversight committees such as ethics, government operations and estimates, among others, committees that are not responsible for reviewing legislation but are tasked with being a watchdog on the government. Why the Liberals do not want to cede control on a committee overseeing ethics, I think, is becoming more apparent by the day.”
“They are seeking to not have a check on their power and to not have scrutiny of their legislation but rather to have a rubber stamp on anything they want to do. I am reminded of a quote from John Diefenbaker. In April 1957, he was speaking at Massey Hall in Toronto, and he said, “The sovereignty of the people is delegated to Parliament, not to the Executive.” The Prime Minister could learn a great many things from John Diefenbaker. One of the lessons is that government is about accountability, not control. Another lesson is that parliamentary scrutiny should be welcomed and not scorned.”
“I say illegitimate majority because it was crafted not by the democratic will of Canadians but by the Prime Minister sending out his cabinet ministers to peel away the unscrupulous and the shameless opposition MPs who hold the will of the Canadian people in as little esteem as the Liberals do. This morally illegitimate majority is the consequence of that which they now seek to ratify by stacking the deck on committees. Committees are not the property of the government. They are creatures of Parliament. In many ways, they are where the real work happens, where scrutiny can happen, where amendments can happen and where real vigorous debates on the merits or lack thereof of legislation happen. If the government can manufacture a majority at will, scrutiny is merely choreography.”
“I have seen votes in which Bloc and Conservative support was enough to pass a motion against the will of the Liberals. I have seen Liberal and Bloc members pass motions against the will of Conservatives. On a rare occasion, I might have even seen Liberals and Conservatives vote together, with the Bloc being the odd party out. (1710) Even when we have lost a vote, frustrating as that may be, I can take comfort in the knowledge that the Liberals were forced to co-operate with someone. They had a check, however modest, on their power. Today, the Liberals would enshrine their desire for a legislative blank cheque, stacking parliamentary committees to reflect their morally illegitimate majority.”
“However, what we have seen over the last year is that when the Liberals do not get their way, they scream obstruction. Opposition is not obstruction. We have seen this in a minority Parliament. I recall when Stephen Harper and the Conservatives had one just a few years ago. A minority Parliament requires the government to find dance partners, so to speak, to find collaboration and earn collaboration from opposition parties. The idea of holding opposition parties hostage to support bad legislation, which is what the Liberal government has tried to do, is not what a minority Parliament is supposed to be. We have seen under this arrangement, specifically at committees, a situation in which the Bloc has held the balance of power.”
“However, while they were prepared to give the Liberals a fourth term, Canadians wanted their power to be checked by a strong, robust opposition. Now, my Conservative colleagues and I have held up our end of the bargain as His Majesty's loyal opposition. We supported and improved legislation such as Bill C-5 , Bill C-14 and Bill C-16 , which is before the justice committee right now. We opposed dangerous bills, such as Bill C-2 and Bill C-9 , which the Liberals wanted to wave through without scrutiny and accountability. We worked collaboratively across party lines. We represented the will of Canadians, who elected MPs to champion, for those of us on the Conservative side of the aisle, the values of liberty, personal responsibility and, yes, fiscal discipline.”
“However, we see in the motion before us today that the government does not believe it can win the game, so to speak, so it is changing the rules. It is changing the rules to suit its political ambitions, irrespective of the will of the Canadian people and irrespective of the norms, conventions and traditions of this place. It should be known to everyone here that Canadians do not, in fact, elect a government; they elect a Parliament. Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary since Canadians elected me, alongside all of my colleagues from all parties. Canadians elected a minority Parliament. The message Canadians sent in doing that was that they were prepared to give the Liberals a fourth term. I question why they would do that.”
“We have seen the ignorance in this place: the fact that the Prime Minister has a question period attendance rating that is a fraction of that of his predecessors; the fact that he loves “showboating”, to use a word he is fond of, with fake executive orders that have no legal standing in our country; and the fact that he has been doing everything but governing in this place, governing in this chamber. To govern in this chamber is to be held accountable to Parliament as the collective body representing the will of the Canadian people. Parliament is a body comprising fellow custodians of this chamber, who are sent here with very similar mandates from each of their respective constituencies and constituents.”
“I loved taking the opportunity to learn more. Perhaps it is why I have never been reprimanded for not addressing my comments through the chair or not doing some of those other conventions: I have been a student of parliamentary history. It was an honour the first day I walked into this chamber, and it remains the honour of a lifetime to be here. It has been saddening in that same vein to see how, for the Liberal government and specifically the Prime Minister , Parliament is a mere annoyance.”
“Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Grande Prairie . I said in my maiden speech, when I got to this august chamber, that this seat does not belong to me. Indeed, it belongs to the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. I am a mere custodian of it. I say that to make the point that Parliament itself, this House of Commons, these institutions, are bigger than any of us as individuals. They are bigger than all of us even as a collective. These institutions matter more. This place matters more than the political ambitions, motivations and decisions of the people who get to come here every election. I have always venerated this institution. Indeed, I have always been fascinated by it. Even going back to when I was a university student involved in politics, I loved partaking in model parliament.”
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague spoke about a voter in his riding who understands that the Liberals are not here to defend the interests of ordinary Canadians and Quebeckers. I would like to ask my colleague the following question. How do his voters feel about the fact that, even though Canadians elected a minority government and a strong opposition, the Liberals want to take control of committees so they do not have to co-operate with any other parties anymore?”
“Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, during Statements by Members, I could not help but notice that the Minister of Finance took a photograph on his phone of the Secretary of State for Rural Development , which as you and the minister should know is very much against the rules of this House. I am hoping you could direct the deletion of that photo.”
“However, entrepreneurs back home do not walk alone. My office is a proud member of the St. Thomas and District Chamber of Commerce. In Ottawa today from the chamber are Maria Fiallos, Paul Jenkins and Christy Hunking. They are here representing our community. They are making sure small businesses can succeed, and I thank them for their efforts.”
“Mr. Speaker, small businesses are the backbone of the Canadian economy, and that is truer than ever in St. Thomas, Elgin and London. Our small business owners are an incredible testament to the resilience, grit and innovativeness of our community. Some of our amazing entrepreneurs and professionals were recognized Friday at the St. Thomas and District Chamber of Commerce Impact Awards. I hope this House will join me in congratulating this year's Impact Award winners: real estate agent Ainslee Tracey; the delicious Taco House Co.; Dr. Joseph Mai of Central Community Health Centre; Our Place Respite; Element5; Yarmouth Group; and the Business of the Year Award winner, Evelyn's Sausage Kitchen. They and all the nominees represent the best of our community. They create jobs, opportunity and vitality for St. Thomas and Elgin.”
“Mr. Speaker, I have some good news and bad news. The good news is the Liberals have finally recognized once again that the Conservatives had the answer when it comes to rising gas prices. The bad news is they are not really implementing the whole thing. Once again, it is a half-measure. Actually, it is less than that. They are taking one-third of the taxes off gas for only a third of the year. Our Conservative proposal would have cut the fuel excise tax, the GST on fuel and the Liberal clean fuel standard, but these Liberals are only giving Canadians a modicum of relief, a small break that pales in comparison to what Canadians need, especially in my riding, where driving is not a luxury; it is a choice. Gas prices today in St. Thomas are $1.63 a litre.”
“Mr. Speaker, I support any initiative that seeks to strengthen our democracy and our electoral system. We agree on the importance of providing a framework for the longest ballot committee by ensuring that an official agent may represent only one candidate per election. However, is there a risk that some people may act as a fake official agent on paper in order to circumvent this rule?”
“Mr. Speaker, if my car ran on hot air, I would not care about the tax cut after that answer. However, most Canadians do not have the ability to do what these Liberal insiders are doing and weather all of this. The Liberals blame Iran, neglecting the fact that 25¢ a litre goes directly into government coffers. This is a very real suggestion. People in Elgin, St. Thomas and London do not view driving as a luxury. They know it is a necessity to get around, to get to work, to drive the kids to school. Why will the Liberal government not take these concerns seriously and drop 25¢ a litre right now?”
“Mr. Speaker, as always, the Liberals are claiming collaboration but delivering obfuscation. They are accepting the Conservative argument that the gas prices in this country are too high, but, as always, they give a half measure, not even half, delivering a third of the proposed tax cut the Conservatives have offered, and for a third of the year. If the Liberal government is serious about affordability, why not do what the Conservatives have been proposing to save Canadians 25¢ a litre on gas, $1,200 a year, cut the GST on fuel, cut the fuel excise tax and cut the Liberal fuel standard?”
“I am wondering what my colleague, who has been around here a lot longer than I have, thinks of this, what we can do to stop it and help Canadians for real.”
“Mr. Speaker, I have been soaking in the words of my colleague's brilliant speech on this, and I want to ask him about the strange pattern we have seen. Certainly ever since I became a member of Parliament, almost a year ago, the Liberals rail against a Conservative proposal. They will call it reckless and say all sorts of things about it. Then they will say that they are adopting it as their own, but not go all the way. We saw this with the carbon tax for years. They were prepared to lose an election on the carbon tax with their previous leader, but then only repealed a part of it. We now see that they are taking a Conservative proposal, but instead of cutting the 25¢ a litre that our plan would put forward, they are only giving Canadians a 10¢ break and for a shorter period of time.”
“Mr. Speaker, it means we need to truly read every single line and provide, as lawmakers, the necessary scrutiny and, yes, skepticism on bills that even touch charter rights and freedoms. That is what we will do with respect to Bill C-22 . It is what we have done and will continue to do with respect to other bills.”
“I am committed to getting that, which is why I will continue to consult not just with civil liberties advocates but also with the law enforcement agencies that want the ability to go after the bad guys effectively.”
“Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Windsor West, not just for his great question but also for his service to the people of Windsor and Canada. As with all law enforcement agencies, I cannot stress enough that I support them and want them to have the tools they need to do the work of keeping Canadians safe, but why it is so important, as my colleague touched on here, is that no one is protected by unconstitutional laws. No one is protected by a framework that does not withstand legal and judicial scrutiny. That is why my view, wholeheartedly, is that we have to get this right. If the Liberals are so dismissive of civil liberty concerns, is that self-revealing? That is why I want to make sure we strike that balance.”
“Mr. Speaker, I have no interest in standing up for the rights of criminals or terrorists, which is why I am not crossing the floor. What I would point out to my hon. colleague is that when we look at the government, which claims that everyone is protected by the charter, it neglects the fact that it has a demonstrable record of not doing that. Therefore, the question I have for my colleague would be this: If the Liberals are so convinced that Canadians are protected by the charter, would he apologize for the government's having invoked the Emergencies Act and call on the Prime Minister to drop the appeal to the Supreme Court?”
“Mr. Speaker, I want to make sure that law enforcement officers have the tools they need to do their job. However, we cannot accept violations of Canadians' right to privacy by the government, which has refused to respect basic civil liberties. That is why Canadians have responded to this bill and others with a lot of skepticism, and why it is important to examine and study it in detail.”
“Ministerial authority does not mean giving power to law enforcement or tools to law enforcement that are subject to judicial oversight. It is quite the contrary: It means arbitrary ministerial capabilities. We have seen the record: In Bill C-2 , Bill C-8 and now potentially Bill C-22 , there are these poison pills hidden that detract, in our view, from the overall objective of the bill. That is what we are being very mindful of and ensuring that we do not support, but I absolutely stand with law enforcement.”
“Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his tremendous work on this and on Bill C-8 as our shadow minister for public safety. In fact, as soon as Bill C-22 was tabled, I printed it off and started going through it with a highlighter. I then made time to ask law enforcement officials in my riding about the very real situation they face now, what they think would be improved or not by Bill C-22 , and what else they would like to see that is not in the bill. The fact that my first calls were to law enforcement officials affected by this, I think, to my colleague's point, speaks to the fact that we take law enforcement's concerns very seriously. The point I have raised is that the government has given itself power.”
“Mr. Speaker, I never said I was voting against it. In fact, I acknowledged the parts of the bill that law enforcement officials want while cautioning the problem with not acknowledging the civil liberties concerns raised by the bill. Again, if there is the urgency to this that the member suggests, I would question why this bill is numbered Bill C-22 . The government could have presented the bill at any point in the last year, so the idea that we are holding it up when the Liberal government waited so long to introduce it is a weird accusation that I do not think holds water.”
“If the Liberals want to know why people are so skeptical of lawful access regimes coming from the government, they need to look in the mirror and see why Canadians do not trust them to not abuse power, abuse authority and violate the rights of Canadians. We will always stand firmly behind that. We will support law enforcement, but not at the expense of the charter, as the Liberals have a record of doing.”
“I was trying to actually come up with a way to provide them a window into why the work we do here matters to them, and I brought up two things. I brought up employment. I asked how many of them were having trouble getting a job, and every hand went up. Then I asked them how many of them feel safe walking around downtown, and they all laughed. They all laughed, truly. To them, safe streets are a punchline, and that is the record of Liberal so-called justice laws over the last 11 years. If we are going to listen to law enforcement, let us actually listen to law enforcement and let us start opening up the door to undoing the harmful reforms that have gotten us to where we are.”
“I actually have a meeting coming up with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which as timing worked out, I wish I had done before I had the opportunity to speak today, but it did not work out that way. However, I will listen to law enforcement, not just on lawful access, but on the whole suite of reforms to fix the last 11 years of Liberal justice legislation, which the police have been demanding, to make communities safer. I will just end on why this is so important. I was speaking to a grade 10 class a few weeks ago about my job and about the work that we all do in Ottawa, and like anyone else speaking to a group of grade 10 students, it is not always as engaging to talk about politics. I choose to believe it was politics that was boring them and not me, but nevertheless, I was trying to make politics relatable to them.”
“We saw this recently with Bill C-9 , where a flawed bill went into committee and an outright dangerous one came out, so we have to be very mindful of whether the Liberals have signalled an intention that goes beyond the text of the bill. That is why we cannot look at Bill C-22 without looking at things that the Liberals failed to advance in Bill C-8 and Bill C-2 . Those have actually been pretty good indicators of where the Liberals want to go, where they think they can go and perhaps, if they have unchecked majority power in this House of Commons, where they are likely to go. I go back to the comments I have made about law enforcement and how I am fully committed to listening to the perspectives of frontline officers and the perspectives of police leadership.”
“I believe we must all come to an agreement on where we go forward, because we are being told by the Liberals that this is all fine and to just pass the bill through. We have been down that road before, and again, I do support, if the bill gets to committee, vigorously scrutinizing it, debating it, calling witnesses, looking at the ins and outs and going through it line by line, but there is a very real challenge, especially if I situate my remarks today in the broader political context of our time, in that bills can go into committee and come out worse than they went in. The government can expand its power.”
“I do not want my colleagues on the left to be concerned about how a theoretical Conservative government would abuse civil liberties, which is certainly not the Conservative governments that we are putting forward for Canadians to choose, but how another government might use it. (1655) That is why we must always constrain government power to protect the vital privacy rights and autonomy of individual citizens, and the lack of oversight remains a very key problem in Bill C-22 . It would enable secret ministerial orders to any digital service Canadians rely on, with no public registry, no parliamentary approval and no right for Canadians to even know it is happening. That is the architecture of a surveillance state. That is something that we must always protect against.”
“That is where accessing someone's electronic information is truly accessing a window into their lives, their most intimate experiences, thoughts, conversations and photos. Therefore, we cannot afford to not get this right. I would much rather see a cohesive definition of what that category would be, not something that could be redefined based on the whims of not just the current government but future governments. As we well know, if we are talking about any legislated power for government, for cabinet, for law enforcement, we have to imagine what that power will look like in the hands of another government that comes beyond. This is not a partisan issue. It is where I look beyond the left versus right on this.”
“The Court of Justice of the European Union has declared that blanket retention of metadata is incompatible with the fundamental rights that Europeans have, especially when it comes to privacy. When we look at electronic service providers, specifically the applications in part 2 of the bill, we do not have a definition of what a service provider is. We only have the expectation that the government will come up with a definition down the road. This category could actually include email providers. It could include messaging apps. It could include other cloud services and storage systems. It is not just about whether one has a Telus account or a Rogers account. It could extend to the accounts that have content.”
“When the Liberals bring forward bills that touch on these issues, they should not dismiss these very real and, I would say, good-faith concerns that people across this country are making because of that lack of distrust that I was talking about. When we look at some of the details, there is a blanket retention of metadata, but so much of our personal information is captured and so much of what is in metadata is not as anonymized as people may think. For example, in comparing this to other jurisdictions, in the United States, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act allows for preservation of metadata on demand, but it does not require blanket retention. It does not even allow blanket retention.”