44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 25, 2021 10:00AM
- Nov/25/21 10:14:44 a.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, if I understood the government House leader's argument yesterday, it was that in spite of rules around vaccination, around masking, around social distancing, as well as the possibility of testing, we still could not have an in-person Parliament because of the possibility that some members were immunocompromised.
I wonder if the government House leader or another government minister is willing to tell us how many ministers are immunocompromised and whether ministers who are able to be in the House will be in the House.
88 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/25/21 10:33:14 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the government House leader just suggested that the rules of the House are being broken, in terms of members accessing the chamber in violation of the rules. If he has information about that, the chair—
38 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/25/21 5:23:08 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the member spoke about hybrid sittings having been done in the past and being done at other levels. It is important to underline that there are two things about the context that are particularly different now. One aspect of the context is that we have multiple strategies now that we were not aware of at the beginning for keeping ourselves safe. We have vaccination, but we also have testing, and the government has not put forward proposals, for instance, to have members regularly tested. I would support a measure to have all members regularly tested, regardless of vaccination status, but the government has not done that. We have tools available that we did not have a year and a half ago.
One other aspect of the context that is a different and particular to this chamber is that Liberal cabinet ministers have simply refused to show up. We have been in a context where the chamber, on that side of the House, has been virtually empty. One member would here, yet there there would be ministers giving speeches on government legislation from their offices in this building. They cannot even come down the elevator to speak in an empty chamber.
Would the member not agree that is an abuse of these provisions, which helps explain why the opposition is particularly concerned about the government wanting to position itself to repeat those abuses again?
235 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/25/21 6:19:53 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the member tried to dress this up as a temporary measure, but the last three speakers, two NDP and one Liberal, really tipped the hand of the agenda of this new coalition. They want a permanent hybrid Parliament. They see it as a tool for advancing what they see as family-friendly to permanently replace Parliament with a Zoom call.
I speak as a member with four young children. I have a fifth on the way. My wife works as a physician, and our due date for the fifth is when Parliament is sitting, so I understand the sacrifice that families have to make. Obviously, virtual Parliament would be easier for me personally, but it was worse for this institution.
When I ran for office, I understood that personal sacrifice. My family understood that family sacrifices were required for us to be able to do the kind of jobs that we needed to do to be here. I will also say that members have the option of bringing their families to Ottawa. They receive good support in terms of a housing allowance to do it. Certainly there were many Liberal ministers, in fact all of them, who consistently did their work outside of this House, not coming here to be accountable.
I do not understand how, if we are family-friendly for ministers with no children, they are communicating from their parliamentary offices instead of being on the floor in the House of Commons.
246 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/25/21 7:56:31 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, this is my first speech in the 44th Parliament, so I want to start by briefly thanking my constituents and my family, and recognizing that the riding I represent is on Treaty 6 territory. I will share more about the rich history, present vitality and bright future of my riding very soon.
Today, we are addressing a very striking matter of parliamentary business. The fact that the first motion the government has put before the House, Motion No. 1, ironically is about undermining the effectiveness and functioning of Parliament itself. The Liberals' first act in this Parliament is to attack Parliament itself. Rather than moving one of the many pressing challenges facing Canadians, inflation, lack of economic growth, mental health challenges and attacks on fundamental freedoms, instead of addressing these issues, the government is starting this Parliament by moving to neuter the tools that people have put in place for making their voices heard.
We, as Conservatives, are committed to standing up for Parliament, because Parliament is the only means by which the challenges facing Canada can be effectively heard and adjudicated.
During the speech I gave at my swearing in, I committed to my constituents that I would fight to make Parliament work again. Sadly, since the beginning of this pandemic, we have seen a clear decline in the effective functioning of Parliament as a result of the wearing down of this institution by the government. This decline has had profound consequences for the people we are supposed to serve.
On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded western Europe. On the same day, Winston Churchill became prime minister. He would go on to inspire a nation and lead the free world to victory against the odds.
Our struggle against COVID-19 has been compared by many to a war, but while the Liberal government has chosen to malign, marginalize and ignore Parliament, Winston Churchill understood that in the face of a great struggle facing his country, it was right and necessary to go to Parliament, to go to Parliament to explain the steps that he was about to take and to seek its support.
On May 13, three days after ascending to the highest office in the land, in the middle of the Second World War, Churchill addressed Parliament in person and asked for its confidence. He told the House that day:
To form an administration of this scale and complexity is a serious undertaking in itself. But we are in the preliminary phase of one of the greatest battles in history... I hope that any of my friends and colleagues or former colleagues who are affected by the political reconstruction will make all allowances for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act.
I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
Winston Churchill took three days to go to Parliament. Our Prime Minister, who was after all not a new prime minister, took over two months to summon Parliament. Moreover, in previous sessions, the Prime Minister has always sought to actively minimize the role of Parliament, proroguing to shut down important committee work investigating his own ethical scandals; expediting complex omnibus bills through draconian programming motions; preventing Parliament from sitting at all during the early phases of the pandemic; and refusing to hand over documents ordered by Parliament, in defiance of all convention and in defiance of the Speaker's clear ruling.
Make no mistake that this is a government that is trying to manage the decline of our Parliament, because Parliament seeks to constrain the government's arbitrary exercise of power.
Today, again, we have before us a motion designed to allow ministers to avoid Parliament at will. In well-functioning parliamentary democracies, ministers must take to the floor and defend themselves, extemporaneously and on their feet, from the substantive challenges of all comers.
However, the Liberal government has devised a scheme by which ministers can instead participate remotely, often from their own parliamentary offices just a short elevator ride away, and thus mute and ignore Parliament, while reading pre-crafted talking points off a screen. We cannot replace Parliament with a Zoom call and expect it to fulfill the same functions. I believe the Prime Minister understands this, but he also perceives how the decline of effective parliamentary government advances his strategic interests by reducing avenues for ministers to be effectively held accountable.
The government has noticed, correctly, that a strong, effective Parliament with members elected by all Canadians can rhetorically and procedurally constrain the exercise of power by a government elected by less than one-third of Canadians. As a result, the Liberals want less Parliament and they want Zoom calls instead.
During his remarks yesterday on this matter, the government House leader defaulted to a well-worn logical fallacy; that is, he used the exceptional case to defend a rule that would apply to all. Exceptional cases can be accommodated through exceptions, but general rules overall should be applied in response to general circumstances.
The Liberal House leader says that members who are immunocompromised should be able to make the choice to join by Zoom, but in practice we saw that during a hybrid Parliament, 100% of Liberal ministers participated remotely in order to avoid meaningful accountability.
He says that it is statistically improbable that more than one Conservative MP has a legitimate vaccine exemption. Of course, he has no idea whether the number of Conservative MPs who have vaccine exemptions is zero, one or some other number because the advice that members receive from their doctors is none of his business. However, I might suggest, in light of the failure of any Liberal minister to attend question period last spring, that it is quite statistically improbable that 100% of Liberal ministers are immunocompromised.
If individual members have to miss votes in the House, there is a well-established parliamentary convention of pairing, whereby two members of Parliament from opposite sides agree to mutually absent themselves to ensure that one member's unavoidable absence does not upset the balance of the vote. Other targeted accommodations could—
1037 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/25/21 8:04:47 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is a bit ironic that in the midst of a speech about declining respect for Parliament we would have such flagrant disregard for the authority of the Chair from NDP members.
As I was saying, we are also in a different position today from where we were a year and a half ago. Large public events are taking place now. People are travelling. Most workplaces are up and running. A year and a half ago, we did not fully understand the kinds of strategies that could be deployed to protect people from this virus.
However, today we have the knowledge and the tools to deploy multiple strategies at once for maximum assurance. Members can get vaccinated, wear masks and socially distance, while also taking periodic rapid tests. For greater certainty, I would be very supportive of a system that asked MPs to take regular rapid antigen tests, regardless of vaccine status.
The government should also start recommending vitamin D as another tool for combatting this virus. People generally get vitamin D through sunlight exposure, and many recent studies suggest that those with higher levels of vitamin D exposure have reduced severe outcomes from COVID-19. Increasing the awareness about this is especially important as we head into winter, when Canadians are ordinarily less likely to spend time outside.
Increasing vitamin D is not an alternative to other methods of responding to the virus but the benefits of higher vitamin D levels are increasingly evident in the scientific literature and are well established in general, regardless of the particulars of the impact on COVID-19.
No single method for managing this issue is the magic bullet on its own, but if members are deploying a broad range of strategies simultaneously, then we are certainly in a much different position than we were a year and a half ago. If this was really about the safety of a small number of immunocompromised parliamentarians, the government House leader would have proposed special accommodations, mechanisms for distancing or new testing requirements.
Ironically, we have not even heard the word “testing” from the government during this debate. It is like the government has forgotten it exists as one of the important strategies for managing our response to this virus. It is sad to see the government trying to shut down in-person Parliament when it is not even deploying all of the tools available to make it safe.
Based on the inaction of the government on many fronts, we can see clearly that this motion is not, and never was, about making Parliament safe. This motion is about making Parliament weak. It is about allowing the vast majority of ministers, who probably are not immunocompromised, to continue to read their talking points while sitting in their parliamentary offices. It is about the Prime Minister's desire to replace Parliament with a Zoom call.
I began this speech talking about Winston Churchill. Why was it important for Churchill to meaningfully engage Parliament during a national crisis? It was because he understood the role of Parliament as the deliberate assembly of the entire nation. If a nation is going to go to war together, then Parliament must be fully engaged so as to ensure that the approach taken reflects the best judgment of the nation, and so as to ensure that the nation as a whole can confront the challenge together.
When the Prime Minister speaks, he speaks for one third of Canadians, but when Parliament speaks, we speak for all Canadians. A parliamentary response to a national crisis is more likely to be effective, and a parliamentary response to a national crisis builds national unity. Winston Churchill understood this. He was able to unite and lead a national response to a national crisis because he came to Parliament.
Canadians want us to respond to the challenges they face: COVID-19, inflation, threats to our freedom. We can only respond effectively to these challenges if Parliament is working. It is not from arbitrary attachment or nostalgia that Conservatives defend tradition, rather we defend tradition because tradition is the means by which we draw on the wisdom of history to solve the practical problems of everyday people.
We defend Parliament, parliamentary democracy and parliamentary traditions not because we are concerned about our own privileges but because we understand that a great nation must have a great Parliament. No nation can succeed in the long run unless it has an effective national deliberative assembly which asks the right questions, analyzes critical issues from all angles, and which holds the powerful to account.
Canadians can count on Conservatives to stand up for Parliament at every opportunity.
781 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
