MP Kurek hosts town halls within constituency

Leslie Cholowsky Staff Reporter

Battle River-Crowfoot

MP Damien Kurek was in Sedgewick on Wednesday at one of three Town Hall meetings he was holding that day.

Meeting at The Hive, Kurek hosted a small but engaged crowd, as he talked about the current issues before Parliament. He says he is trying this format of Town Hall, holding three per day, to try and work within as many people’s schedules as possible.

Kurek says, “I do like to emphasize, one of the things an elected official does, we are your voice in government. I do not work for the government. Government, constitutionally, is a function of Parliament, and Parliament is made up of 338 Members of Parliament. My job, very clearly, is to represent the people.”

He added that his office is always available to help those seeking assistance federal government services and programs. “There’s a whole host of things we can try to help with; know that you can reach out.” He says that his office has been able to help hundreds of people with passports, for example.

Kurek says Parliament is coming into an intense 10-week period of sitting five days a week that he expects will be a marathon. “The Liberals know full well that there’s a lot that they have promised and have accomplished very little.”

He mentioned the carbon tax, massive spending that’s driving cost of living, and in particular, Bill C-11 as some of his major concerns. He described C-11 as a bill that will allow the CRTC to decide what people can post online. “We are now moving into a point where we need Canadians to know what we are dealing with.” He said a recent discovery of a Conservative Member was that Liberal Minister’s offices have already been asking social media to remove certain news articles that are not friendly to them from the internet. “The ‘just trust us’ isn’t working; it hasn’t been working for a while for this Prime Minister.”

Kurek spoke briefly about the budget, saying it lacked substance, citing the overall debt as a concern. He said Canada has been in a per capita recession since COVID.

“A big part of the reason for that is that our population is increasing, but our GDP is not keeping up.”

He talked about a 30 per cent increase in the size of public service over the past eight years.

“Why? is a great question,” he added, “when the metrics of government service delivery have declined.

Canadians are paying more, paying more people, and getting less service.”

Kurek talked about the hearings over potential election interference by the People’s Republic of China, saying that the Liberals conducted one of the longest filibusters in Canadian history to delay the prime minister’s chief of staff from testifying. “Our message to the Liberals then was ‘what are you trying to hide?’”

He said he was looking forward to getting back to work, and working with Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre to get answers to some key questions; “We are going to see a ton of pushing for answers, and making sure Canadians know about it.”

Kurek opened the floor for questions, saying, “The conversation doesn’t start when I come in the door, and it doesn’t end when I leave.”

The first question was about C-11, which he called “The Liberal censorship bill.” Kurek added, “It is sneaky. It doesn’t say that the government will mandate or control what you can say - it doesn’t say that. What C-11 does is it allows a government entity, the CRTC, responsible for regulation of traditional media; it allows them to dictate what you see online. It doesn’t stop what you are posting.

“It is a bill that expands the role of government over what Canadians can see online. It basically allows the CRTC to determine what ends up in your feed, under the guise of ‘Canadian content,’ which the Liberals have not even provided a definition of.

“We have this circumstance where we are seeing an attempt to expand the role of the state. And the government is saying ‘Just trust us, we won’t do that. We won’t censor your political opinions; we won’t freeze your bank accounts; we won’t crack down on protestors; we will never spend more than the debt to GDP ratio, we will never do all of these.

“It’s a laundry list of broken promises.”

Kurek said Bill C-11 recently went back to the Senate for approval, but he thinks likely the bill will pass.

“But every day that we continue fighting the process the public has an opportunity to ask, ‘Why does the government feel the need to control what, for instance, goes on your Instagram feed?’”

Kurek said that Poilievre recently had a great speech in response to a Liberal parliamentary secretary regarding the whole ‘cat video’ response. He recommended another speech from the Conservative leader called ‘The [Extra]Ordinary.’

Kurek fielded a question on how the bill could be made to be more effective where needed, as in the case of election interference by foreign entities. He said the Conservatives tried to introduce a bill where foreign entities needed to be registered, so that they could be identified as a representative of a specific foreign concern.

He told a story of a Chinese-Canadian MP who was the subject of a foreign smear campaign, who discovered things being said about him on a social media platform while out campaigning that Kurek said had a direct impact on his reputation with his voters.

“Quite often hostile foreign states want to sow chaos in a desire to remove certain

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