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@strauss_matt - Matt Strauss
I gave my maiden speech in Canada's House of Commons: The Liberals trampled on the Charter rights of Canadians. I see no indication the leopard can change it's spots. I am here to speak truth to their power. https://t.co/tkmLgZilH0
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker expresses gratitude to his constituents and family, particularly his wife, a physician who faced a near-fatal childbirth. He explains his transition from medicine to politics stems from a desire to preserve Canadian values of truth, strength, and freedom.
His family's history, with his father's side of German descent and his mother a Romanian refugee, informs his perspective. He contrasts his grandfather's ability to achieve homeownership with the current struggles of young Canadians, despite advanced degrees. He equates the loss of truth with communism, referencing his grandfather's experience in communist Yugoslavia where conformity was enforced. He criticizes the current Canadian government, claiming its pandemic policies and social programs mirror communist control, citing lockdowns, censorship, and the trampling of charter rights.
He accuses the previous prime minister of admiring communist regimes and implementing socialist policies. He asserts that multicultural communities with experience of socialism recognize these patterns and reject them. He concludes by stating his commitment to speaking truth to power and defending Canadian freedoms.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Resuming debate, may I please state the above, the member for Kitchener South Thank
Speaker 1: you, mister speaker. I'm grateful to the people in my hometown in Kitchener South Hesper who give 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 I they see fit to keep me in it. Mister speaker, 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 days in the ICU on life support and Today is at home in Hesper 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 honor to be a physician serving my community for the last thirteen years.
So when I went outdoor knocking and I knocked on thousands of doors, 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? Don't I like being a doctor and don't we 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 ten minutes. It has to do with who I am and what Kitchener is. So here we go. Mister speaker, my family 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 your last name and your mother tongue is not a 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 stake their lives for Canadian values, which are enshrined in our anthem as truth, strength, freedom.
Conversely, my mom came as a Romanian refugee from communist Yugoslavia in the nineteen sixties. When my dad was away with the air force, we'd 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 ten years ago. I traveled with my grandfather to his tiny village now on the border between Serbia and Romania. Fully half the homes there are boarded up.
It is overrun by stray dogs and weeds. We went to the house my mom was born in. It had two rooms, dirt floors, 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'm sorry to call a shack, the enormity of what Canada had given my family hit me like a ton of bricks. My my grandfather is one of the smartest, hardworking people I've ever met. But when he came to Canada, he spoke zero English, he had a grade six education, and 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 a million dollars.
Mister speaker, I don't have to tell you that that opportunity no longer exists in our country today. My 28 year old brother-in-law recently graduated from the University of Waterloo for mechatronics engineering. He has no hope of buying that house on his engineer salary. Where did that opportunity go? I do believe that my grandfather has the answer to that question.
He always tell he had to do three years of mandatory serve military service in Yugoslavia, and he always told me that he loved the army life. It didn't strike me until a couple 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? Because, Matthew, you cannot get promoted unless you join the party. That is the communist party. Well, then you were an ambitious man, grandfather.
Why didn't you join the party? Because, Matthew, if you are in the party and they say this is black, he was pointing at his 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 nineteen eighty four, 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 you can't say what's wrong with the tractor or the levy or the hospital or the passport office, you can never fix it and it will stay broken. So not willing to give up on 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 they had to make a break for it. Now I have stories of our health care system and universities going back thirteen years ago and going up all the way 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 you go to one of our ERs and get treated like cattle, like my wife was at that time, you have no recourse. They would be really delighted if you took your business elsewhere.
When farming is socialized, get bread lines and people died of starvation while standing in Soviet bread lines. When health care is socialized, you get lines in the ER, and I promise you people have died and are dying in waiting rooms, in emergency rooms across this country right now. You might think that I'm being overwrought in seeing the ghost of communism where it does not exist. However, I would note we just spent ten years with the prime minister who, when asked which government in the world he most admired, stated the basic dictatorship of the communist Chinese 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, childcare, pharma care, school lunch, climate change, what have you, was always more socialism, more central planning, more top down pronouncements, less freedom to make choices for yourself and your family. 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, Christmas Christmases.
They closed the borders. They kept mothers from children and brothers from sisters. They deprived this house of its ancient rights. They spent $600,000,000,000 of taxpayer money with no budget, doubled our national debt to pay healthy 16 year olds to sit in their basement. Then as now, they did all this in the name of crisis management.
Physicians, professors, and journalists who spoke out against these abuses were hunted down. They had their licenses and their jobs threatened. I know this because it happened to me. At Queen's University where I taught, Jane Philpot 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, the prime minister and his commissars were immune from all of this. He could attend gatherings of greater of greater than five if it suited his political purposes like a George Floyd protest in Ottawa, and he did. Mister speaker, the liberals claimed onto themselves the power to censor the news to violate free speech in the name of fighting misinformation while they themselves promoted misinformation. They gave luxurious contracts to their friends in academia to promote their misinformation. They 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. But under the federal government 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 two and section eight of the charter in imposing the Emergencies Measures 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, mister speaker. If we cannot speak truth to their power, everything will continue to break, and that is why I had to come here, mister speaker. 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 I read his book, mister speaker. The book was called values and freedom, I'm sorry to say, is not among those there in disgust. The repackaging of their socialist pan plans in banker's socks might fool some of the people some of the time, but I will tell you who it does is not fooling. It is not fooling the multicultural communities in Kitchener South Hesper, the Romanians, Albanians, Polish, Ukrainians, Serbians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Venezuelans, Chinese, Somalis, and Ethiopians with lived experience of socialism who know what they are seeing and don't like it and sent me here. They came here for freedom, 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, the glorious revolution, and enshrined in the declaration of right. They were fought for in the world wars and enacted in Dieffenbaker's bill of rights. They were fought for by both my grandfathers, by all of our grandparents, and embodied in all of us here.
So the answer to the question of why I came here, I'm here to speak truth to power on behalf of the people of Kitchener South Hessler. I will be happy to go back to being a physician and professor once I can practice in truth and freedom again, once we can all live in truth and freedom again. Thank you, mister speaker, and may god keep our land glorious and free.