Mr. Speaker, I am grateful to the people in my hometown of Kitchener South—Hespeler who gave me this opportunity to make a maiden speech today in Canada's House of Commons. May I never forget that this is their seat, and may I faithfully serve them so long as they see fit to keep me in it.

There is no chance I could stand before you today without the love and support of my wife, Simone. She is a brilliant physician and scientist who has now given me the greatest possible gifts: our children, Penelope and Felix. Six months before this election, she nearly died delivering Felix to us. She spent a couple of days in the ICU on life support and today is at home in Hespeler being just the best mom in the world to our two kids. I should be at home with them. They are the best part of my life.

Also, it has been a pleasure and an honour to be a physician serving my community for the last 13 years. When I went door knocking, I knocked on thousands of doors, and one of the most common questions I received was a question I asked myself: Why the heck am I doing this? Why would I go into politics? Do I not like being a doctor and do we not need doctors? The answer is yes, I like being a doctor, and yes, we need doctors, but to fully explain why I had to do this will take about 10 minutes. It has to do with who I am and what Kitchener is, so here I go.

My family's story is typical in Kitchener. My dad's family came to the region when it was still called Berlin, Ontario. They came from present-day Germany before it was called Germany. One hundred years later, when war with Germany broke out, my Grandpa Strauss, like so many other Kitchener Germans, enlisted with the Scots Fusiliers because one's last name and mother tongue were not of much matter when it was time to stand on guard for our true north, strong and free. We only have a Canada today because Canadians from all over the world put Canada first in this way. They staked their lives for Canadian values, which are enshrined in our anthem as truth, strength and freedom.

Conversely, my mom came as a Romanian refugee from Communist Yugoslavia in the 1960s. When my dad was away with the air force, we would speak Romanian in the house. I grew up hearing from my grandparents, in that language, that they were poor back home, but I had no idea how poor until about 10 years ago, when I travelled with my grandfather to his tiny village, now on the border between Serbia and Romania. Fully half of the homes there were boarded up. It was overrun by stray dogs and weeds. We went to the house my mom was born in. It had two rooms and dirt floors and was about 400 square feet. There was a bedroom with four beds in it and a kitchen with two beds in it. Nine people slept in those six beds. As I stood in what I am sorry to call a shack, the enormity of what Canada had given my family hit me like a ton of bricks.

My grandfather is one of the smartest, hardest-working people I have ever met. When he came to Canada, he spoke zero English, had a grade 6 education and had two small daughters with him. After six months of working in a factory for $1.09 an hour, he was able to buy a five-bedroom house in downtown Kitchener for $20,000. That house is now worth $1 million. I do not have to say that that opportunity no longer exists in our country today.

My 28-year-old brother-in-law recently graduated from the University of Waterloo in mechatronics engineering. He has no hope of buying that house on his engineer's salary. Where did that opportunity go? I do believe that my grandfather has the answer to that question. He had to do three years of military service in Yugoslavia, and he always told me he loved the army life. It did not strike me until a couple of years ago to sit down and ask him, if he loved the army so much, why did he go back to farming in the village? He said, “Because, Matthew, you cannot get promoted unless you join the party”, which was the Communist Party. I said, “Well, you were an ambitious man, Grandfather. Why didn't you join the party?” He replied, “Because, Matthew, if you are in the party and they say this is black”, pointing to the white tablecloth, “then you have to say it is black, even though it is white.”

English is my grandfather's fifth language. I promise he has never read George Orwell's 1984, but this is exactly the “two plus two equals five” scene. I think about this scene a lot when I am told that men can get pregnant. When the truth becomes illegal, everything breaks. If one cannot say what is wrong with the tractor or the levee or the hospital or the passport office, one can never fix it, and it will stay broken. Not willing to give up speaking the truth, my grandfather went back to the village. After a few years, though, the farms were all socialized, and eventually the starvation got so bad that they had to make a break for it.

I have stories of our health care system in universities going back 13 years ago and all the way up to last fall, when my bleeding, postpartum wife spent six hours cradling a two-day-old baby in the emergency room while not being seen by a physician. When I told the triage nurse I was going to take my wife to another hospital in the next town over, he said, “That would be great. Thank you. There is no place for her here.” If people go to one of our ERs and are treated like cattle, like my wife was at that time, they have no recourse. They would be really delighted if people took their business elsewhere.

When farming is socialized, we get bread lines, and people died of starvation while standing in Soviet bread lines. When health care is socialized, we get lines in the ER, and I promise that people have died and are dying in waiting rooms and emergency rooms across this country right now.

One may think that I am being overwrought and seeing the ghost of communism where it does not exist. However, I would note that we just spent 10 years with a prime minister who, when asked which government in the world he most admired, stated it was the basic dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party; a prime minister who released a statement lionizing brutal communist dictator Fidel Castro when he died; a prime minister whose answer to every social problem, dental care, child care, pharmacare, school lunch, climate change, etc., was always more socialism, more central planning, more top-down pronouncements and less freedom to make choices for ourselves and our families.

The zenith of all this top-down control came during the pandemic. The members opposite went full communism. They locked Canadians down in their homes. They ruined weddings, funerals, Easters, proms and Christmases. They closed the borders. They kept mothers from children and brothers from sisters. They deprived this House of its ancient rights, spent $600 billion of taxpayer money with no budget and doubled our national debt to pay healthy 16-year-olds to sit in their basements. Then, as now, they did all of this in the name of crisis management.

Physicians, professors and journalists who spoke out against these abuses were hunted down. They had their licences and their jobs threatened. I know this because it happened to me at Queen's University, where I taught. Jane Philpott herself, one of the only two cabinet ministers to speak truth to Justin Trudeau's power, informed me in her dean's office that the reason the administration had to harass me was that I “criticized the government”. That is a direct quote.

Of course, Prime Minister Trudeau and his commissars were immune from all of this. He could attend gatherings of greater than five if it suited his political purposes, like a George Floyd protest in Ottawa, and he did. The Liberals claimed unto themselves the power to censor the news, to violate free speech in the name of fighting misinformation, while they promoted misinformation. They gave luxurious contracts to their friends in academia to promote their misinformation and gave hundreds of millions of dollars to mainstream media to promote government narratives. These three institutions, government, media and the academy, have important roles in society to regulate each other. However, under the federal government's bribery scheme, they have ended up, like the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker out to sea, stewing in each other's bathwater.

When ordinary, everyday Canadians came here to Ottawa complaining that their charter rights to bodily autonomy, assembly and free movement were being violated, every member of the Liberal caucus voted to trample their rights further. They violated section 2 and section 8 of the charter in imposing the Emergencies Act. It is not me saying that, but Justice Mosley of the federal court. They trampled on the charter rights they claimed to revere, and then they laughed about it. The current Minister of Transport, in particular, laughed about it.

If we cannot speak truth to the Liberals' power, everything will continue to break. That is why I had to come here; I refuse to be a cog in their broken machine. I hope it is the case that this darkness left with the former prime minister, and I beseech the new Prime Minister to turn to the light, to defend those values enshrined in our anthem: truth, strength and freedom. I read his book. It is called Values, and freedom, I am sorry to say, is not among those therein discussed.

The repackaging of the Liberals' socialist plans in banker socks might fool some of the people some of the time, but it is not fooling the multicultural communities in Kitchener South—Hespeler. The Romanians, Albanians, Polish, Ukrainians, Serbians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Venezuelans, Chinese, Somalis and Ethiopians with lived experience of socialism, and who know what they are seeing, do not like it and sent me here. They came here for freedom, and not just any freedom but our specific, embodied Canadian freedoms.

These freedoms are ours, but they are not merely ours, and they are certainly not ours to discard. They were fought for at Runnymede and encoded in the Magna Carta. They were fought for in the English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution and enshrined in the Declaration of Rights. They were fought for in the world wars and enacted in Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights. They were fought for by both my grandfathers, by all of our grandparents, and embodied in all of us here.

The answer to the question of why I came here is that I am here to speak truth to power on behalf of the people of Kitchener South—Hespeler. I will be happy to go back to being a physician and professor once I can practise in truth and freedom again and once we can all live in truth and freedom again. May God keep our land glorious and free.

Matt Strauss

Transcript

Speech from the Throne

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