44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 2, 2022 02:00PM
- Feb/2/22 3:30:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if you will indulge me, I want to begin by thanking the member for Durham for his excellent and ongoing service to this place.
I have a number of petitions to present on international human rights issues.
The first petition is particularly important to reflect on this week in light of the opening of the Beijing Olympics. The petitioners are highlighting the ongoing genocide facing Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in China. The petition notes a campaign of coordinated violence against Uighurs and calls on the government to act, to recognize that Uighurs in China have been and are being subject to genocide and to use the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, the Magnitsky act, to sanction those who are responsible for the heinous crimes being committed against the Uighur people.
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- Feb/2/22 3:33:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am going to limit myself to a mere four petitions today. I will try to do better tomorrow.
The final petition I am tabling is with respect to the situation in Afghanistan. There continue to be significant concerns about the human rights and humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. In particular, the petitioners are highlighting the situation of the Hazara minority community. They seek recognition from the government and Parliament of the past genocides committed against the Hazara people, the designation of September 25 as Hazara genocide memorial day, and policies that allow development assistance to get to vulnerable people and that ensure development assistance is consistent with our commitment to advancing peace and security.
Of course, the situation for the Hazara people has significantly deteriorated since the Taliban takeover, and much work needs to be done to stand up for minority communities and religious and ethnic minorities in Afghanistan and around the world.
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- Feb/2/22 3:33:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition I am tabling highlights ongoing human rights concerns in Ethiopia, particularly in the Tigray region. Some of the asks in the petition are a bit dated now. For instance, it references election monitoring in the elections that have already taken place. However, I think many of the asks are still relevant in terms of seeking peace and reconciliation, and independent investigations of crimes with respect to human rights.
The petition is calling on the Government of Canada to be engaged in an ongoing way with the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments with respect to the situation in Tigray.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition also deals with a human rights issue in the People's Republic of China. It is in support of Bill S-223, a bill I tabled in this place that would make it a criminal offence for a Canadian to go abroad and receive an organ taken without consent.
This bill has now passed three times unanimously in the Senate. It has passed this House unanimously in the same form in a previous Parliament. I know this bill is supported by many members on all sides, and I think it is supported by all members. We need to make sure that we actually get it passed into law to protect people who continue to be victims of forced organ harvesting and trafficking.
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- Feb/2/22 3:46:29 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on a comment the minister made with respect to vaccine mandates.
One of the concerns I am hearing from my constituents is particularly around how the government's vaccine mandates are affecting services and the access that people have to them, whether or not they are vaccinated.
We have the truckers' mandate that is in place, and of course we know that most truckers are vaccinated, but removing those truckers from the road who are not vaccinated creates a significant strain in terms of goods. We recognize that they work alone and that they have to abide by other public health measures when they visit restaurants, etc.
We could talk about the public service mandate that is impacting my constituents' ability to access government services. We are seeing significant backlogs in terms of immigration and other services that people need to access from government. Constituents of mine need those services. It does not matter whether they are vaccinated or unvaccinated, they are impacted by these mandates because the impacts on supply chains and the impacts on access to government services are very significant.
Recognizing that the vast majority of Canadians have gotten vaccinated, but that these mandates are still having a significant impact on the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, could the minister comment to my constituents on why he thinks these mandates, and their impacts on Canadians, my constituents and his, are justified?
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- Feb/2/22 4:35:36 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I apologize but I am going to speak in English. I am a little rusty right now and will try next time.
The member was speaking about federal and provincial jurisdiction. One thing that has frustrated me during the pandemic is that there has been a lot of pointing of fingers. The federal government has been telling provincial governments what it thinks they should or should not be doing with policies, rather than stepping up in the federal area of jurisdiction.
We had a federal minister telling provinces they should bring in mandatory vaccinations. Aside from thinking that is a terrible policy, I think the federal government should be focusing on areas of its own competence where we have seen problems, such as a lack of procuring rapid tests earlier on and the disaster that is being created as a result of the truckers' mandate.
Would the member agree with me that rather than sticking its nose into provincial jurisdiction, the federal government should focus on doing its job better? It is a tough question.
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- Feb/2/22 6:09:16 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today, as at any time, and to address another bill from the government that deals with the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. I will get to some of the specific provisions of Bill C-8, but I do want to start by talking broadly about the some of the issues that are very live in debates around the circumstances of the pandemic right now.
Two of the big areas of discussion we have are about the relationship between science and policy-making as well as questions about freedom and the importance we attach to freedom and how we define that concept in the country. I want to talk about those two concepts to set the stage for the rest of my remarks.
By most accounts, the history of modern science starts with that great figure of Galileo, who tragically ended his life under house arrest, persecuted for championing the simple idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Galileo's story is often presented as a clash between scientific rationalism and religious dogmatism, but I think the truth is not quite so simple. Galileo was a person of serious faith and Copernicus, whose heliocentric theory Galileo defended, was actually a priest as well as a scientist.
While having plenty of religious supporters, Galileo also had many scientific detractors. In many cases his critics opposed him on scientific grounds, arguing that his theories constituted bad science and should be suppressed because they involved misinformation. Regardless of their deeper motivation, both sides in the argument over heliocentrism claimed to have science on their side.
A better way of understanding the conflict between Galileo and his detractors is as a dispute within science and about the appropriate method of scientific inquiry. Galileo championed free scientific inquiry while his persecutors emphasized trust in established scientific authority and conclusion. Galileo was presenting new data and advancing new ideas, ideas that challenged an existing scientific paradigm and establishment.
He believed, rightly in my view, that the progress of science requires constant empirically grounded questioning. He did not believe that efforts to preserve public trust in established science justified the rejection or suppression of emerging empirical data. It was a dispute between empiricism on the one hand and the demand for trust in the cultural, religious and scientific authorities on the other.
As a student growing up and hearing the story, it was very easy to feel superior to Galileo's establishment-perpetuating persecutors. However, in the context of the current pandemic, it may be a bit easier to understand why some people thought that the propagation of scientific ideas outside of the scientific consensus was dangerous. The questioning of scientific authority in any time can lead to distrust, confusion, unrest and the drawing of erroneous conclusions. Galileo's ideas could have turned out to be wrong, but despite its risk, this process of reasoned and empirically grounded questioning of received wisdom has always allowed the society to draw new conclusions and soar to new heights, figuratively and literally. Our commitment to questioning old ideas and seeking new discoveries has the potential to push ourselves still further, despite the friction that we may experience along the way.
During this pandemic, the public has been encouraged to trust the science, but in practice this has generally meant trusting the established public health authorities, rather than holding public health authorities accountable through rigorous empirical critique. Public health authorities deserve our thanks for their incredible efforts during immensely challenging times, but they have also gotten some things wrong and given health advice that has been contradicted later or was being contradicted by public health authorities in other jurisdictions.
Points of dissidence have generally been explained on the basis that the science has changed. In many cases though, such as with masking at the beginning, public health advice changed quite independently from new empirical evidence. Public health advice on masking seemed to be much more a function of the available supply of masks than it did of actual new evidence on mask effectiveness.
Even so, science can only ever move forward if it is first questioned and put to the test. The process of inquiry of advancing hypotheses that are initially regarded with skepticism is not anti-science, rather it is fundamental to science. There would never be any scientific progress if people were not willing to question established ideas or patterns of thinking.
There are many potential examples of the seeming disconnect between official scientific advice and emerging empirical evidence. Many people are asking why the scientific advice in different jurisdictions around the appropriateness of lockdowns is very different from public health authorities in other countries, looking at the science or coming to very different conclusions than some public health authorities in Canada.
I have spoken in the past about some of the evidence around the relationship between low vitamin D and COVID-19. A systematic review of scientific literature published in January 2021 found the following:
Most of the articles demonstrated that vitamin D status in the blood can determine the chances of catching coronavirus, coronavirus severity, and mortality. Therefore, keeping appropriate blood levels of vitamin D through supplementation or through sunshine exposure is recommended for the public to be able to cope with the pandemic.
About half a dozen meta-analyses conducted since have come to the same conclusion.
This is an interesting example, because in response to a question about vitamin D asked here on April 22, the former health minister described recommendations for vitamin D supplementation as emerging from “the myriad of fake news articles that are circulating around the Internet”. While the former health minister I am sure would like to be thought of as being proscience, her approach to new empirical information has many of the hallmarks of the Inquisition, that is, an approach that defends conventional wisdom even when that conventional wisdom is contradicted by emerging empirical evidence that is clear throughout the scientific literature. If we falsely equate a proscience position with a proestablishment position, we are then undermining the process of questioning an analysis that is vitally necessary for any kind of scientific process.
I encourage this kind of open-minded re-evaluation to be applied to all aspects of COVID-19 policy. This applies not just in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences. Our policy responses to COVID-19 need to continually grow and change in response to new evidence. We will not be able to grow and change if the necessary process of challenging pre-existing conclusions with emerging evidence is suppressed.
On the subject of freedom as such, we can see how what is true for science is also true for other domains of human action, including the freedom and the capacity to ask questions, to present unpopular opinions and to live according to one's sincerely held beliefs while respecting the rights of others to do the same. The ability and the character competency required to do this are what make the process of human progress possible.
On these issues, John Stuart Mill points the way for us. Mill did not argue that freedom was necessarily natural or that freedom was some a priori human right. He did not need to make those arguments because he was able to show that freedom is good because it is useful. This seminal thinker of what we used to call liberalism argued persuasively that when people are able to challenging existing norms and practices and to live in different ways, society is furnished with empirical data that helps others understand what actually leads to human happiness.
If I live my life in one way and the Speaker lives her life in another, then others are able to see the degree to which these modes of behaviour contribute to human flourishing or not, and are therefore able to shape their lives, at least partially, in response to that information. Mill used the term “experiments in living” to describe this process of learning from the choices of others and their consequences. That applies to experiments in science and also applies to experiments in living. Greater variation and a willingness to buck established trends help to furnish a broader range of data points from which we can then draw useful conclusions.
Unfortunately, modern progressivism deviates from liberalism in its lack of humility. Modern progressives assume they know the right path and therefore can impose it. They assume that an inevitable trajectory of history makes every step they take necessarily right and good, so they easily justify any action that moves things along toward their chosen ends.
Concretely, the government's agenda includes highly coercive policies. For instance, it is imposing vaccination on the unwilling. We can also talk about draconian new Internet regulations and a planned new values test for charities. That is just what we know so far.
True liberalism is about saying that people should not go to jail, should not be penalized and should not lose their jobs just because they hold views or want to make choices that I personally do not agree with. A person can be anticoercion while still being provaccination. A person can be for free speech without liking everything that gets said as a result.
We see clearly from its agenda that the government is not a liberal government in the classic sense. It is an illiberal government. It is a government that has turned its back on classic liberalism and is instead embracing an authoritarian progressivism. It is a government that values being woke over being free. We need to re-engage, in our response to the pandemic, with classic wisdom around the importance of honest scientific inquiry and the importance of human freedom.
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- Feb/2/22 6:20:24 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, the member had a very confrontational tone in the process of posing the question. I am not sure if we actually disagree, very much, on what the process of science is. What I said is what I think he said at the end, which was that the process of scientific inquiry requires asking questions, challenging received wisdom, experimenting and putting forward hypotheses, and then that empirically grounded process of questioning leads to new conclusions.
I made a point in my remarks about the importance of that process and of legitimate empirical questioning of received authority. At the time the member refers to, I was looking at the science on masks. I took a bit of a risk as a member of Parliament by saying that I thought our public health authorities were wrong in their advice not to wear masks. I said that at the time, which was maybe a bit of a risk, but I read the empirical evidence and I thought that it was an important thing to say. It turned out that the thing I said was correct. It shows the value of empirically grounded questioning.
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- Feb/2/22 6:22:25 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, there were many things I could respond to in that question, but I probably will not have time for them.
The member was sort of saying that freedom is used in a lot of different ways these days, and that freedom could be used in this way and that way. My point is that there is this space for human freedom that should go beyond the things that I like. I might say that people should get vaccinated, but that does not mean that I should force that view on other people. That does not mean that I should try to coerce people by saying they should be fired, for example.
There is a legitimate space for individuals to say that, for whatever reason or through whatever process, they have come to a different conclusion. I believe we have to retain the idea of classic liberalism that individuals should be able to make choices about themselves and their own private spheres without being threatened with job losses or other consequences for coming to different conclusions.
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- Feb/2/22 6:24:13 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her kind words. I look forward to hopefully being able to see her in Ottawa at some point soon and to continue that conversation.
I have also launched a great new podcast called Resuming Debate, which is entirely dedicated to this idea of civil conversations, substantively with other members about issues. I encourage everybody to download it.
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