On Parliament Hill

Kinder-Morgan Pipeline & Canada Summer Jobs:

It’s been another bad week for Justin Trudeau. He continues to fail at securing an agreement between the Alberta and B.C. Governments over the building of a controversial oil pipeline.

This past week he also failed to convince Kinder-Morgan (the company building the pipeline) that their investment in Canada was secure which resulted in the company pulling their funding from the project. The loss of this project will cost Canadians $80 billion and more than one hundred thousand jobs. Despite these failures, Mr. Trudeau declared “this pipeline will be built.” Unfortunately he left off the end of that sentence: with your tax dollars.

Then it was discovered that the Liberals had given Canada Summer Jobs grants to an environmentalist group called Dogwood B.C. The job posting was for an assistant to “help our organizing network stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker project.” When asked why the Federal Government was funding a group that was actively working, not only against the national interest, but against his own government’s policy Mr. Trudeau replied: “We believe in free speech and we believe in advocacy on this side of the House.” Mr. Trudeau went on to state “We will not remove funding from advocacy organizations because we as a government happen to disagree with them.”

Really? That’s exactly what the Liberals have been doing for months to faith-based organizations. Some 1500 faith-based charities have been rejected for Canada Summer Job Funding because they could not in good conscience sign an attestation forcing them to agree with Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party values. Not only does this show how little the Liberals care about getting this vital pipeline built, it is also further proof of their utter hypocrisy.

Illegal Border Crossings

It’s official. After more than a year of verbal gymnastics, Justin Trudeau has finally admitted that crossing the border illegally is indeed illegal.

Last week I stood up in the House of Commons and asked the Prime Minister the following question: “Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister misled many would be migrants to illegally cross the border. In response to a problem of his own making, the Prime Minister is throwing Canadian tax dollars at a problem with no concrete plan. And yesterday the Prime Minister refused to even commit to a plan. Can the Prime Minister tell this House: Does he believe it is wrong to illegally cross the border and jump the queue?”

The Prime Minister responded: “Mr. Speaker not only have I answered that question today, I’ve answered it many times over the past months: Crossing a border between official border crossings is illegal.”

That came as news to everyone since the Prime Minister has stubbornly refused to call illegal border crossings illegal since the crisis started, referring to them instead as “irregular”.

We are more than a year into this crisis – with some 20,000 illegal migrants already here, overloading our immigration, social and education services – and the Prime Minister finally took step one – admitting that it is illegal. Step two would be to admit that the illegal entries are actually a problem. Step three would be to come up with a plan to solve the problem.

Step one and two should have been done within days, and Conservatives have been asking the Liberal Government to come up with a plan ever since this crisis began. But at the speed with which he is dealing with this issue, it could be years before we make any headway whatsoever.