William Stevenson

If they ask for 2,000, you have to make a choice, or somebody has to make a choice. I just want to know, how and where is that choice being made?

I had a recent conversation with an RCMP officer on the ground. In one of my local areas, there are two indigenous reserves, and they were allocated, for their offices, two officers per reserve. Previously, in the spring, we had a report that said indigenous policing was chronically understaffed. Can you tell me where that number of...or how there are only two per...allocated? I believe they had [more]

I'll go to a slightly different question. Albertans are looking to increase their number of sheriffs. You're to renew—I think in 2030 or 2031—the RCMP part of it. What kind of sales pitch are you going to have to say, “You need to keep the RCMP in Alberta”? There are a lot of rural areas that are not necessarily going to say this is what they need.

This was in the report we've seen.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to our witnesses for attending. I always enjoy having Ms. Hogan and her team here, but I'm going to focus my questions on the RCMP. To start, I'll go down a similar path of questioning to Ms. Tesser Derksen's and ask about some of the training. The auditor's report said that the number of recruits you were going to train was determined by your capacity to train them [more]

You had the funds, but you didn't have the trainers, apparently, to get them trained. Is that not correct?

When an officer is trained, who decides where that officer is going to be stationed? How do you prioritize to say, “Twenty of them are going to Alberta; 16 are going to Saskatchewan”? How does that determination get made?

Would you say this was a local request to allocate 13 for the one detachment, and it was four for the two reserves?

Mr. Speaker, come October, Trevor, from my hometown of Carstairs, will be out of a job. Trevor has worked for Kaytec for 26 years. He was recently given a layoff notice because this siding company is closing shop. Slow housing starts and tariffs mean that the work simply is not there, and Trevor is not alone. I am hearing from Canadians from coast to coast to coast who are worried about how they [more]

Mr. Speaker, as Conservatives, we are proud of the role we played in securing this win. I feel like this is a win on the Conservative side. We have never stopped fighting, and we will not stop fighting, for more affordability measures. We pushed for this at the beginning, and we actually achieved what we wanted back in April. That part of it has been very beneficial. Yes, the Liberals are [more]

Mr. Speaker, could my hon. colleague comment on whether he thinks that if we actually followed the Conservative plan and reduced all of the taxes it would actually benefit the citizens of Canada far more than the 25¢ a litre, so they could afford to get out, go to work and buy their groceries? Does the member think that would be better for the overall economy than this half-measure that the [more]

Mr. Speaker, I did not catch all of the member opposite's comments, but he talked about a lot of the programs the Liberals were spending money on. Would he not agree that it is better for the individual taxpayer, the consumer out there, to actually take less from the consumer and not tax them like the government does with this excise tax? Would it not be better to just not have the money taken [more]

Mr. Speaker, I have made that mistake many a time tonight, I know, and eventually I will break that habit, I am sure. The Conservatives will continue to scrutinize measures and continue to raise the concerns we have heard from Albertans and Canadians, who continue to ask the government where their temporary reliefs are. Comparing ourselves to many of the other countries is quite difficult when [more]

C-38 Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Billand to the very real issue at the heart of this legislation, which is affordability. For more than a generation, tax policy has been designed to effect social policy. Taxes have been designed to curb our citizens' behaviour, not to benefit taxpayers. Tax policy has not been developed for what is best for the long-term future of [more]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was recently in your riding and saw some of the issues that you talked about—

Mr. Speaker, I am a little confused by the NDP member's comments about rounding the math. I do not want to criticize him for going off topic so much, because I will probably do a bit of that in three hours when I have to speak, but in some of his comments, he said that taking this tax off would somehow subsidize the oil companies. I do not see how he can say that when it is going to help take [more]

finance minister Mr. Speaker, I appreciated my colleague's remarks when she said how good this measure is. Earlier today, thesaid that when they took it off for a while, they saw immediate results and it was benefiting the economy. Can you tell me why they would not want to have long-lasting results and eliminate this issue altogether going forward?

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my colleague's wonderful speech, and I would like her to expand a bit on something. She said that a lot of what government does is control what it can control, which has a big effect. The Liberals have a $78-billion deficit and had an extra $6-billion-plus in spending after they came out with the budget, so they have controlled a lot of what they are going to spend. [more]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the hon. member's statement, and I agreed with everything he had to say there. My question to him would be this. Does he think it would be better if the Liberals actually had a long-term plan rather than making short-term, interim adjustments and things that are not going to necessarily last for the economy and for Canadian citizens?