MP Michael Ma

I attended the 18th Anniversary Celebration of the Canada Pingtan Association back in March – it was jointly the Inauguration Ceremony of the Association’s fifth Board of Directors. The evening saw over 500 community members and distinguished guests gather at the Century Banquet Restaurant, in Markham, to celebrate the group’s achievements.

Since 2008, the Canada Pingtan Association has been bringing together Canadians who originate from Pingtan Island, Fuzhou, with the goal of promoting cultural exchange and social connections within the community. Now, more than ever, we must come together to work towards solutions that benefit both our lands.

Drilling down to the Ceremony itself, I want to stress how important it is for community organizations to take their Board management seriously – the simple of act of celebrating a new suite of Directors shows that the roles are being valued. The Board sets the guiding mission, lays down the top-level strategy, and stewards both the fundraising and fund management operations; when we honour and empower our Boards, we entrench visionary governance that can extend beyond quarterly happenstance.

Thank you for organizing this event and congratulations to all those who were inaugurated as part of the fifth Board of Directors – specifically, Lin Hua as President, Weng Xiaobin as Chairman of the Board, and Lin Hongfang as Secretary General. May this mark the beginning of a new chapter for the Association.

Reflecting on the month of March, I had the opportunity to attend the 2026 Carefirst “Young at Heart” Charity Gala as a Guest of Honour; together, we celebrated 50 years of Carefirst's service to the community.

Since 1976, Carefirst has been providing high-quality, culturally responsive health and social services for seniors, families, and individuals across the Greater Toronto Area – a legacy of contribution that they continue to uphold. The centrepiece of the Gala was a fundraising opportunity for a new $73M “Campus of Care” facility in Richmond Hill.

A recent work by Goodhart broadly categorizes the field of human endeavour into three functional streams: Head, Hand, and Heart, where Heart is the category of care-work. The care economy – embodied and self-effacing work, so ever undervalued in our current Head-dominated paradigm – finds one major expression in elderly care, a domain that grows increasingly in importance as our society rapidly ages. Once we grasp the demographic lay of the land, Carefist’s venture into this campus model reveals not only deep foresight but a true commitment to their craft: domain mastery operationalized with care.

Thank you to everyone who attended the Charity Gala – your presence contributed to continuing the services that so many in our community rely on. It was truly a wonderful evening.

It was an honour to represent the Hon. Gregor Robertson, Minister of Housing and Infrastructure, last month during the re-opening of Main Street Unionville. This civic milestone was made possible through the support of the Government of Canada – we contributed over $8.5 million to this project from the Community Stream of our Building Communities Strong Fund.

With a heritage that goes back over 200 years, Main Street Unionville is a vital part of my community, attracting visitors and tourists alike. The government’s investment into this anchor heritage site was allocated towards infrastructure and streetscaping improvements: elevating safety, visibility, and comfort while preserving Main Street Unionville’s vintage aesthetics.

Infrastructure is the foundation of communities that are healthy and prosperous; we can only build Canada strong when our communities are strong. Infrastructure investments are mission critical because – as we see with Main Street Unionville – they create safe community gathering spaces that are the bedrock of a thriving democracy. Our government is committed to investing in transformative infrastructure projects that grow our economy, shape resilient communities, and build a prosperous and sustainable future for all Canadians.

When I witness what has been achieved during the re-opening of Main Street Unionville, I am confident in an emerging trajectory: things are looking great for Markham-Unionville!

The building and construction sector serves as the backbone of our local communities. This is why I was delighted to be a guest of honour at the Association of Chinese Canadian Builders & Constructors (ACCC) Gala in late May. It was a night where we gathered to recognize the immense achievements of Chinese Canadians in this foundational sector; with so much talent brought together in a single room, I wanted to remind them of the national challenge Canada is facing.

It is no secret that far too many Canadians are in a housing crisis. Our government takes this issue extremely seriously, which is why we launched Build Canada Homes with the goal of building affordable housing quickly, and at scale. This goal can only be achieved when we combine the hard work and talent of the building and construction sector with a program of incentives facilitated by the government. Where the government brings federal lands, faster approvals, and flexible financial incentives to the table, the private sector brings supply chains, private capital, and construction capacity enhanced by modern methods. Together, we can help Canada solve the Missing Middle gap in our housing supply through modular designs that can be funded and built at scale.

Congratulations to the industry leaders who won the highest honours – you deserve it. And thank you to the 800 guests who attended and showed their support towards building .

Last month, I had the chance to drop by a Vesak Celebration at the Buddha Meditation Centre in my riding of Markham-Unionville, alongside over 3,000 attendees. The celebration featured many delicacies that truly represent the vibrant cultural diversity of my riding – fried rice, kottu, and coconut roti, among others – which I greatly enjoyed.

Vesak, also known as Buddha Jayanti, is a holiday that commemorates the birth, enlightenment and death of Siddhartha Gautama. It is a time for spiritual reflection; it is a time for practicing generosity and compassion for others. Markham has a small, but blossoming, Buddhist community of 13,500 strong and I am proud to stand alongside them as their MP.

Thank you to the BMC for the invitation and warm welcome!

It was an honour to have attended the Toronto Asian Art Museum’s Asian Heritage & Multicultural Celebration this past May. TAAM is dedicated to preserving and sharing Asian art and cultural heritage through exhibitions and community programming; with their recent move to Markham, from North York, I'm sure TAAM has found a warmly receptive community to their vision and mission.

People of Asian origin and their communities have had immense contributions in shaping our national heritage and identity, leading to a dynamic and prosperous Canada. Their ancestry traces back to nearly 50 different countries, each with their own unique cultural fabrics; each thread, when woven into our national whole, has enriched our country, and has made it more vibrant and inclusive. Through the TAAM’s curated artifact exhibition, interactive workshops, and traditional cultural performances, our community was able to immerse themselves, as participants, in an ongoing cultural dialogue.

The Government of Canada is proud to contribute to the promotion of Asian heritage, and to support celebrations organized across the country in honour of the diverse Asian communities that help shape Canadian identity. Thank you to the Toronto Asian Art Museum for organizing this amazing event!

I would like to thank the Varley Art Gallery for inviting me to the Opening Reception of their Summer Exhibition on May 23rd. Having stood in their venue, dedicated to one of the esteemed Group of Seven painters, their mission resonated clearly to me. What I witnessed was not just a gathering place for the exchange of ideas through art. No, what I entered and immersed myself in was a collective committed to the foundational themes that are important to Canadian art and society. Truly, what a better way to extend these conversations on Canada than this exhibition, thematically framed around “What Holds Us Together”.

As the municipal art gallery for our city, I was truly delighted to see Varley highlight work crafted with the shared context of living and working in York Region. The cultural mosaic of Greater Toronto is vast and the patch that we occupy in this quilt is very unique: our patch deserves to have its own stories shared and elevated.

Piece after piece, I was granted the opportunity to explore the memories, relationships, and events that our featured artists embodied in their art. I stood at the shores of their canvases, and I beheld the ocean of their identities expressed in singular drops – lifetimes of experience compressed into singular vignettes.

Congratulations to the artists and to all those who were involved in the curation of this lovely exhibition.

Today, I sponsored Petition E-7523, which calls on the House of Commons to officially designate February as Canadian Chinese Heritage Month in honour of the contributions of Chinese Canadians, the hardships that they have faced, and Canada’s constitutional contributions to multiculturalism.

Establishing a Canadian Chinese Heritage Month is long overdue on a national level. With recognition of this initiative throughout numerous municipalities across Canada – Markham included – and reaching provincial legislatures – Ontario among the first – it is time to take the most reasonable next step at the federal level. We are working to ensure that the Canadian Chinese community is celebrated and recognized across the country.

The petition is open until August 15, 2026. Thank you to Marvin Rotrand, Director General of United Against Hate, for reaching out and initiating this petition!

To see the full text and sign the petition, please visit the following URL:

https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7523

Back in April, I had the incredible honour of attending the York Region GRACE Lions Club 3rd Anniversary Celebration and Charity Singing Night at Auric King. We gathered to support and celebrate the Lions Foundation of Canada Dog Guides.

The event raised over $10,000, reaffirming our community’s support for Canadians with disabilities. Events like these are rungs on a ladder that pull us ever towards more accessible and inclusive communities: communities that aspire towards full participation. Sometimes we achieve this state of full participation through the elimination of barriers; however, other times we rise through the barriers with a little help from our friends along the way, as the guide dogs at the centre of April’s event.

The simple truth is that narratives can change; every paradigm shift begins with a reframe as we start to see existing occurrences in a new light. As we took the time to celebrate the contributions of disabled Canadians and to recognize the ongoing efforts of those working to remove barriers and promote inclusion in April, we contributed to such a reframe. By honouring a theme with an evening of pause, space is given to step outside the old frame as we imbue the selected theme with more weight – the scales shift and a new way of seeing the world is born among the participants.

Thank you to everyone who supported this event, so that we could see the value of guide dogs, with eyes renewed.