On Parliament Hill

This week the 44th Parliament of Canada resumes sitting. This session will look very similar to previous sessions. The same Liberal Ministers making the same excuses for the same failures, and presenting the same government-focused “solutions” that have led to the current state of affairs.

As our leader, the Hon. Pierre Poilievre eloquently and clearly laid out last week, Canada just feels broken these days. Government services have declined steadily. Canadians are not getting value for money for their tax dollars, and every time the government tries to “fix” the problem it only serves to make it worse.

It gets worse because the Liberal/NDP Government’s solution to the issues facing Canadians – issues that (in most cases) government has caused – always seems to be more government. More bureaucrats, more web portals, more forms, more hoops, and red tape. Above all, more money.

Government has grown by 30% under Justin Trudeau and the Liberals.

Every time government grows, the cost of government goes up.

Every time government grows, and new laws are passed, Canadians lose another piece of their freedom.

There is also a tendency to provide “solutions” that make lives easier for those in government, not the everyday Canadians they exist to serve.

Let me offer a couple of examples.

My office does a lot of work with newcomers to Canada. My staff are regularly in touch with Immigration Canada (IRCC). Like most government departments, Immigration Canada sent their employees home for three months at the beginning of COVID. Somehow, that three months (and the transition to “working from home”) put the department about nine months behind (I’ll leave it to others to try to explain that math). Struggling to catch up, the department deleted applications received prior to December of 2021. That was their solution, but that still left a backlog of some 2.4 million applications. They next tried to solve the backlog by hiring hundreds of new bureaucrats but at the same time they put in place a new system that dragged out the approvals and inquiry process even further. Prior to COVID my staff could make regular calls to IRCC on behalf of constituents. That was then limited to five inquiries per day. That was then further reduced to a system whereby limited appointments had to be made weeks in advance to discuss any given file. None of this worked to reduce the backlog which is why IRCC is now proposing giving up and throwing open the floodgates (see my column from last week).

This is not dissimilar to the BC Government’s mad decision to decriminalize certain illegal drugs (Adults in B.C. are not subject to criminal charges for the personal possession of small amounts of certain illegal drugs.) – a policy disaster many in the federal Liberal Government support. Or the Trudeau Government’s ongoing attempt to convince Canadians they will be safer if the government goes after law-abiding firearms owners rather than illegal guns and criminals. That making it easier for violent criminals to get bail will somehow make our streets safer. Or that we can borrow, print, and spend our way out of debt and into prosperity. The list goes on and on.

It all sounds so non-sensical, yet those are the kind of “solutions” the Liberal Government is producing. Needless to say, the results speak for themselves.

That’s why Conservatives are so focused on removing government gatekeepers, shrinking the size of government overall, and giving Canadians back control of their lives.

Government plays an important role, but a lot of the time we’d all be better off if government would just get out of the way and let people live their lives. That’s the kind of commonsense and brighter future Canada’s Conservatives are working hard to offer.