Local MP Earl Dreeshen is ready to head back to Ottawa for the fall session of Parliament.
Dreeshen, the MP for the Red Deer riding which includes Innisfail, spoke at a meeting of the Innisfail Rotary Club on Aug. 30.
He was presented with a letter from the club encouraging Canada's continuing participation in eradicating polio. He also gave an update on his recent activities and what he's expecting to do in the fall session.
“Things were a lot different,” Dreeshen said of Conservatives having a majority government instead of minority. That meant the party could start work on legislation it's been promising for years, he said.
This fall, that legislation work will include justice and agriculture updates, committee work and a study on privacy and social media for the party and Dreeshen specifically.
He's sitting on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts and the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
Dreeshen is also getting a private member's bill back on the floor. The bill would affect the Criminal Code by making impersonating a police officer while committing a crime an aggravating factor in sentencing.
He explained the bill almost made it through a previous session of Parliament but got killed when the 2011 election was called.
In recent months, Dreeshen sat in on budget implementation talks, giving him an understanding of the budget implementation bill. The Tories were attacked by opposition parties for the wide-ranging contents of the budget implementation bill, something Dreeshen said was made possible because none of the parties had to help prop up the government this time.
“When it became a situation where all of them could say we were evil, they cranked the rhetoric up,” he said to the Rotary members.
Dreeshen was part of a trip to Fort McMurray. He said 35 MPs and some senators were taken on a tour to “see what this business is all about.”
He travelled to Kindersley, Sask., to be part of “market-freedom day,” which ended the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly during the summer break as well.
The first day of the fall session of Parliament is Sept. 17.
