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Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Development, Lib.)

Feb/7/22 11:35:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mount Royal. I never thought that I would be in the House having an emergency debate like this with our city of Ottawa under siege and in a state of emergency. We have heard so much today from many members, in particular the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, my good friend, who talked about what is happening just metres away from the House of Commons. He talked about what is happening to the citizens and the desecration of our national monuments, including the National War Memorial. He talked about the incessant noise and how it is impacting children, children with autism, people with dementia and people who have to live in the residential districts around downtown. We have heard about the assaults, the verbal assaults, the threats and the way in which people wearing masks and the people working downtown are being treated. We have heard that all evening. I would like to talk today about the impact on my constituents. My riding is only 15 minutes from downtown, and many of my constituents work downtown. Many of them have not been able to go to work, whether on Bank Street or at the Rideau Centre. They have not been able to collect a pay cheque for the last 10 days, and those who have had the opportunity to go to work are terrified. They are being threatened and harassed. I had a man write to me to tell me that he works at a church and this weekend, while at work inside a church, he had to call the police because he was that threatened. I have mothers whose daughters live downtown who have said that their daughters and their friends are facing threats of murder and threats of sexual assault. This is not something that we should be living in the capital city of our country. I was heartbroken when I heard from Jewish mothers in my riding who were asking how they would explain to their children about the people who are wearing the yellow star and the people who are flying the swastika. What do they say to their children? This is at a moment when, in one of the neighbourhoods in my riding where we have a large Jewish population, there were trucks driving around with vile symbols. This is what is happening in our city right now. When trucks were going down Carling Avenue for hours honking their horns, a mother whose child has autism said that she was taking him to the emergency, because there was no other way to get away from the noise. Yes, it is having an impact. I have a coffee hour with my constituents every Friday, which is virtual now, and there was a young racialized man who said to me that he did not understand. It is almost a loss of innocence. How can it be that he cannot go downtown in his own city because of the colour of his skin? What was really important about that coffee hour was that people were listening to each other. We actually had some people who were at the protest attend the coffee hour and hear the impact that it is having on some of the racialized, LGBT and other members of our society. I think that people need to listen to one another more and be decent again, because what is happening out there right now is not decent. It is not peaceful. When violence is threatened, it is not peaceful. The impact goes even beyond what is happening downtown. The Queensway Carleton Hospital in my riding has not been able to get their nurses and the frontline health care workers from Gatineau on the other side of the bridge to come to work. People in my constituency are not able to get help when they are sick. Worse yet, the children's hospital, CHEO, is having trouble. This is the impact that the protest is having. It is not about political speech anymore. Maybe it started out to be about that, but now it is about mob rule. It is about intimidation. It is about bullying, and it has absolutely no place in our city or in our country. To anybody who is saying that this is a peaceful protest or that it is somehow about expressing political opinions, that is not what this is. Anybody who has seen the impact on people, how this is hurting people and how it is unleashing hate, should not be out there posing for pictures and giving out coffee. I have worked in parts of the world where politicians thought they could draw that line, that they could toy with these forces of hatred and somehow use them for political gain, and we have seen what happened. I have worked in Sarajevo, Kosovo and the Congo. We cannot put those forces back in. We have to denounce them. We have to denounce them every single time. We cannot stop those forces once they are unleashed. We cannot control them anymore. People ask why we are not talking to them. I do not think we want to tell other Canadians that if they were to come with large trucks, make lots of noise, threaten people, cause the kind of terror that has been caused to people in Ottawa and scare people, they can be rewarded, heard and listened to. Who are they? They are not the truckers, because 90% of the truckers are vaccinated and most of them are doing their job. All of us are tired of COVID. We are all tired of the measures and the lockdowns. However, it is not even about that anymore. There are people a few feet from the House of Commons calling for the overthrow of our government and for harm to come to members of Parliament. That is an attack on the institutions of our democracy, and they want people to lose faith in our institutions. That is something we absolutely cannot condone. People have asked what we are doing about it. The federal government has met every single request from the City of Ottawa. We have 300 RCMP officers, tactical and logistical support, joint intelligence and operations teams and community liaison teams, and we are coordinating among all levels of law enforcement. However, politicians do not direct the police. This weekend and prior, I have been talking to other levels of government. I have been communicating with the mayor and the MPP. The Prime Minister has been doing that, as well as the public safety minister, from the beginning. We have also talked to parliamentarians about solutions to this. Maybe we need to be looking at the financing of these movements. We need to ban symbols like the swastika and the Confederate flag. The member for Hull—Aylmer articulated perfectly the impact that the flag has on Black Canadians. We need to look at social media and how it propagates hate speech. We need to support the businesses and workers who have not been able to go to work this week. As I come to my final words, I want to leave with one thing: Most people are good. Canadians are not as divided as people think they are. The fact is that 90% of Canadians are wearing masks, getting vaccinated and making sure they are protecting their neighbours. As we have seen this week, the Shepherds of Good Hope, which is the homeless shelter where protesters were trying to get food, and some of the women's shelters are getting more donations than they have ever gotten, as are the Legion and the Terry Fox Foundation. There are people living in the neighbourhood around the hospital who are saying that workers who cannot get home and back safely can stay in their spare rooms. There are truckers who continue to deliver goods. These are the good people. These are decent, good people. Living through and seeing all of this starts to affect us and makes us wonder about humanity. However, we need to see that the vast majority of Canadians are good. I will conclude with a quote from the doctors and nurses in Ottawa, who wrote a statement. They said, “We will not cower. We will not hide. We will wear our scrubs in public, without fear, knowing that you—Canadians—have our backs.” That is exactly what we have.

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Context: House Hansard - 25 - Feb/7/22

Ms. Anita Vandenbeld

Feb/7/22 11:45:14 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think we all share that same sentiment. The nurses, doctors and frontline health care workers are there every single day caring for us. Whether we take their medical advice or not about getting vaccinated, they are there and going to work. They say they are not heroes, but we know they are the people we need to support. It is why we have made it illegal for anybody to harass health care workers on their way into a hospital. That is happening right now in Ottawa. I want to applaud, along with all members here, the courage and incredible sacrifice of those workers.

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Context: House Hansard - 25 - Feb/7/22

Ms. Anita Vandenbeld

Feb/7/22 11:47:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in fact, we just announced today that we are going to have a trilateral meeting among the different levels of government. We know that people do not want to hear us say that it is about jurisdiction, but the fact is that politicians do not direct the police. What we need to be doing, as politicians and the federal government, is providing all the resources so that the police, who have jurisdiction, have everything they need to uphold the law and to be able to do their jobs. I would say that from the very start, before the time that the convoy reached Ottawa, we have been having that coordination. We have been talking with law enforcement. At every single level, political leaders have been talking. As I mentioned, when the convoy was being routed through residential neighbourhoods in my constituency, I talked to the mayor and the provincial MPP to make sure that the convoy was not being welcomed and sent down Woodroffe Avenue. Every single day, these conversations are happening. They have been happening with the municipal councillors right up to the Prime Minister. We need to keep doing that. After this is over, I believe we will have lessons to learn. We will need to sit back and—

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Context: House Hansard - 25 - Feb/7/22

Ms. Anita Vandenbeld

Feb/7/22 11:49:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, just this month we have actually procured 140 million rapid tests. However, these are not the truckers. The trucking associations signed a joint statement with the minister saying that they supported the vaccine mandate, and 90% of truckers are vaccinated. That is not who is out there on the lawn right now.

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