Mr. Speaker, before I get into the meat of my response, I just want to thank the 19,605 people from Terra Nova—The Peninsulas who voted to have me here today to bring their voices here to Ottawa. I am a proud Newfoundlander, with an entangled heritage with the Rock. While there are many things to be proud of, the thing that makes me the most proud is that I am part of a community that truly cares for one another.

A great example of this is when eight-year-old Adalyn Skinner went missing in the woods and the whole community banded together to make sure she came home safe. I am proud to stand here today to say that she was found safe and sound. This story does not just bring us together; it also shows who we are, because when something like this happens, politics do not matter and status does not matter. What matters is looking out for one another, no matter the cost. That is the spirit of a Newfoundlander, that is the spirit I was raised with and that is the spirit I bring to the House.

We know that success is not measured by what we accumulate for ourselves but by how we show up for the people around us. That is why I have grown to hold this motto: “Success is helping other people succeed.”

“One day the sun will shine and have-not will be no more” were the famous words of our premier, Brian Peckford. The sun did shine. Under the last Conservative government, our province was thriving. For the first time in history, we had an economy we could be proud of, but during the lost Liberal decade, our province has been spiralling into poverty.

Almost every aspect of our life has been in decay. Our hospitals are closing, and the ones that remain have closed departments with no emergency services. Patients with life-threatening issues are having to drive over deplorable roads. Just to give an idea of how deplorable the roads are, after my only 36-day campaign, I had to replace all the suspension in my pickup truck. The MHAs in my province would love nothing more than to be here and announce more hospital funding and repave every inch of our eroded roads. Unfortunately, our province is in a dire financial situation and is running major deficits due to the Liberal government's failed economic policies.

My district of Terra Nova—The Peninsulas touches five bays, and we have more small craft harbours than any other district in Canada. Whether off Point May or St. Bride's in the south, or New-Wes-Valley, Bonavista or Bay de Verde in the north, fishing needs to continue to thrive in these regions.

When I travel from wharf to wharf, it is no trouble to tell that the fishermen are at their wits' end with the Liberal government and its policies that are hurting the fishermen's industry, yet the worst is yet to come. With the government planning to allocate 30% of our ocean as marine protected areas by 2030 and 50% by 2050, these targets will once again be a major blow to Newfoundlanders' livelihoods. Can members imagine the uproar if Ottawa decided to take 30% of farmland from farmers?

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are not putting up with it. We will come here week after week and fight for our constituents and for our province.

Despite having the most small craft harbours in Canada, my district's top employer is construction. Places like Marystown, Green's Harbour and many more towns in our district have a long history of construction and boat building. On the Burin Peninsula, companies have built boats for World War II, ferries and even the top sides of oil rigs, but under the Liberal government, there are not one but two state-of-the-art, multi-million-dollar shipyards sitting idle, and this is not the only thing sitting idle.

The Bull Arm Fabrication Site cost half a billion dollars to construct in the nineties and is probably worth billions of dollars today. It has built multiple oil rigs, including the Hibernia and the Hebron, which was the fifth-largest in the world. To give an idea of the magnitude and size of this facility, I wanted to inform everyone that it has the second-largest doors in the world, second only to NASA's facility.

My father, my mother and I all worked at another oil rig construction site in Argentia. It was more than a job; it was a legacy. Three members of the same family came together to build something that would stand tall in the North Atlantic, something we could be proud of, but just like so many other sites across Newfoundland and Labrador, this site too will be idle within a few months, now that the project is coming to completion. It is another facility, another opportunity, sitting idle. What is even more frustrating is that there is no plan to fill the void, just silence where there should be progress.

We have an oil refinery as well. It produces 135,000 barrels of oil a day. Oh, wait, it used to produce 135,000 barrels a day. That is the kind of capacity that built middle-class families and allowed young people to stay at home to work. Then the Liberal government invested 89 million taxpayer dollars, not to improve it and not to modernize it but to incentivize the company to reduce its throughput to 14,000 barrels of biodiesel. We should think about that; it is a 90% reduction.

This was not a market-driven decision but a politically manufactured one. Now we see the media publishing stories saying that the refinery is struggling and its future is uncertain. In fact, just yesterday it had layoffs. I ask the government what it expected. It suppressed the whole business with regulations and industrial carbon tax, poured millions of dollars into shrinking its output and now acts all surprised that it is on the brink of collapse.

Speaking of collapsing industries, Newfoundland's mining industry is hitting rock bottom. I have been in the pits, seen the blasts and stood shoulder to shoulder with the hardest-working men and women in this country. Mining is not just a job in Newfoundland; it is one of our economic foundations. That foundation is crumbling. Within six months, four mines closed on our island, one of which was in my riding. That is not a coincidence; that is a crisis. These were not exhausted sites or failed ventures; these were viable operations that had to close down rather than keep going down. They closed down due to the government's embarrassing policies, policies that are chasing investors away and eliminating our competitive edge.

Let me be clear: The prices of gold and of minerals are global prices. We do not control them. What we control is how competitive we are as a country. Now, the artificial costs, like the industrial carbon tax and the inefficient bureaucracy, eliminate our competitive edge. The minerals are still in the ground, but the wrong leaders are still in government.

The throne speech talks a lot about giving Canadians a tax break, which is great, but we cannot tax someone if they are not working. Right now, we have the highest unemployment rate in the country, at nearly 10%. That is not because our people do not want to work but because there are no jobs, and that makes me frustrated. What frustrates me the most is that we are sitting on a gold mine of oil facilities, an untapped potential that the Liberal government keeps suppressing. We have the resources, the infrastructure and the workers, but instead of building, it is blocking. Instead of digging, it is diverting.

Where shall my constituents find work? I can tell the House that they will not find work in Ottawa, since most of them have not learned French in our rural schools. It is no fault of their own but a failure of the system, a system that forgets about rural Canada until it is election time. Now young people are being disqualified from federal opportunities because of it.

I do not think they would find much work building a pipeline either. While the Prime Minister tells one side of the country he is building pipelines, he tells the other side a different story. Perhaps they could get a visa and work in other parts of the world where he has invested in building pipelines, but unfortunately that is not here at home.

With the production caps and emissions caps, I do not think they would have very much luck getting a job in the oil sands either. I have my doubts they would be working on the nationwide energy corridor, because I do not think the Liberal government has the guts to do what it takes to put it through Quebec into Labrador, where it could build enough hydroelectricity to make it the green energy superpower that we want it to be. The power is there and the people are ready.

Let us not forget that the topic affecting every Canadian is the high cost of living due to inflation. This inflation did not magically appear out of nowhere. No, it is as a direct result of reckless overspending and economic mismanagement. It is because the Prime Minister, the very one who now leads us, was advising the former prime minister to waste tax dollars, saying that budgets would balance themselves. Now he does not even have a budget at all. Not only are single mothers struggling now, but we also have double-income parents who are struggling to provide for their kids. Food bank usage is up, and there is no sign of its slowing down.

I have gone to houses in my district where seniors have the upstairs of their home tarped off and are sleeping on the couch because they cannot afford the heat. There are seniors wandering shopping malls trying to stay warm in the winter. I have even heard of seniors who are eating pet food because they cannot afford the skyrocketing grocery bills. Imagine that, Mr. Speaker. After a lifetime of paying into the system, this is the dignity we afford them. These seniors are the very people who voted for the current government. They supported it. They voted for it to fight Donald Trump with tariffs and have a plan for Canada's economy, not to drop the tariffs and have no budget.

Furthermore, the throne speech completely turns its back on seniors and offers no help to survive the economic storm these Liberals have created. “One day the sun will shine and have-not will be—

Jonathan Rowe

Transcript

Speech from the Throne

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