William Stevenson

Mr. Speaker, in the same vein, I had technical difficulties yesterday. If I could also have my vote included, I will be voting yea.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition on behalf of the residents of Grand Cache, in my wonderful riding of Yellowhead. People are calling on the government to do one thing: restore fairness to the community. It is a remote and isolated town where everything costs more. While these are exactly the kinds of challenges the northern residents deduction is meant to address, a line on the [more]

Mr. Speaker, “I'll always be worried [the government will] come looking for something...I can never trust the information l get from them”. These are the words of a public servant who is afraid to retire because of a broken pay system the Liberal government refuses to fix. There are 133,000 employees in the same situation. The Auditor General has confirmed that billions have been spent with no [more]

Can I get a little more detail on that and how they came up with that number? In the report, it says it costs $247,000 to recruit and train an RCMP officer, but we had a discussion earlier about how there are fixed costs and there's a per-member cost. When they're doing these calculations, it would be much more efficient if they had their full training targets, because then the per-recruit costs [more]

I was just going to ask about the bottleneck in the application process. That needs to be improved the most.

They said that their maximum per year that they could probably do is 1,600, but they have significantly fewer than that. You said in your earlier—

I believe there's a bit of a romantic feeling towards our RCMP among the general public, but I don't think they necessarily agree with all of our bureaucratic problems that we might have going forward. At the back of your report, there are a lot of recommendations, and then there are responses from the RCMP. Almost every single one of them says that they agree and they're going to do something [more]

Mr. Speaker, I recently attended the Alberta Beef Industry Conference, and I want to send a shout-out to the cattle farmers facing today's challenges. Attendees learned about the issues of the day, but it was not all doom and gloom. One inspiring session was presented by James Lawrence, an Alberta boy, born and raised in Calgary, known as the “Iron Cowboy”. He ran Ironman triathlons, breaking [more]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the member opposite on how bureaucracy does not build any homes and how the government has to have a mechanism to do that. However, he said that the process was going to allow us to use unused lands in the different parts of the departments. Could he tell me where in the bill there are any limits, goals or numbers for departments to say what is possible [more]

Mr. Speaker, as a follow-up, I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary if he could tell me if he has any information or any statistics on this mythical unicorn of a first-time homebuyer who is spending $1 million to get $50,000 off their taxes. I have never actually seen a first-time homebuyer buy a brand new home. This GST that you are supposedly giving back to them is only for their very [more]

Mr. Speaker, at a time when Canadians are feeling economic pressure, it is more important than ever that all levels of government work together. Municipalities are under growing strain. The cost of building and maintaining infrastructure continues to rise, while local councils are still expected to deliver essential services and support the growth of their communities at the levels residents [more]

That wouldn't necessarily—