44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 17, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/17/22 10:13:38 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this place to present a petition primarily from residents of Ottawa who are very concerned about what might seem at first to my colleagues in this place to be a local issue, but it is not. It is the destruction of Queen Juliana Park, which was established to honour the Canadian soldiers who fought for the liberation of the Netherlands, 7,600 of whom died in that conflict. The establishment of Queen Juliana Park was in honour of the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers and of the close relationship that exists between the people of the Netherlands and Canada.
The decision to remove 750 mature canopy trees flies in the face of everything we hear about trying to create urban places with green spaces. Being able to escape to a green space restores our souls, especially in a time of pandemic. Those trees will be cut down to make room for a new hospital expansion, even though the National Capital Commission, which is federal, had already told the City of Ottawa the better location was Tunney's Pasture.
These citizens of Ottawa call for the National Capital Commission's original recommendation to be reinstated to preserve Queen Juliana Park and indeed the entire Central Experimental Farm as green spaces, and they support the request for a public inquiry at the federal level.
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- Feb/17/22 11:14:12 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am raising a point that I have heard the hon. member's leader, the official leader of the opposition, raise as a hypothetical, and I want to address it now. It is the notion that the Prime Minister “hid”.
I am not going to defend all of the Prime Minister's actions by any means, but at the moment this convoy started, the Prime Minister had been diagnosed positive with COVID. I think we forget that if the Prime Minister had gone to meet with people who were unvaccinated and had any of them sickened and died, he could have been charged with manslaughter.
Does that occur to people on the other side as—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Feb/17/22 11:15:10 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know that this is a difficult time for everyone, but I think that this hypothetical and the use of the word "hid" is, again, inflaming divisions that we should not have in this place.
If someone tests positive for COVID, they should not be meeting with anyone and they certainly should not be threatening the health and safety of people who have chosen not to get vaccinated.
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- Feb/17/22 11:31:35 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. leader of the Bloc Québécois.
I would like to ask him a question because I am worried about the enforcement of emergency measures and the related geographic issues. In the order before us, there is no clear mention of a geographic region. Yesterday, the Prime Minister and the other ministers stated that the use of the Emergencies Act would have a geographic limit, but I do not see it here.
If the government changed the order to include geographic limits that did not comprise the Province of Quebec, might the leader of the Bloc Québécois think that it is needed to resolve the situation here in Ottawa?
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- Feb/17/22 1:01:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I found the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle's speech disturbing at many levels. There were more dog whistles to a rabid base of Trump supporters in one short speech than I have ever heard in this place.
I would like to correct the record and ask the hon. member to consider that when the Government of Canada sent a delegation, it was because the Wet'suwet'en heredity chiefs have the Supreme Court of Canada on their side in that they have a continuity of leadership and territorial responsibility that goes back to our Constitution. From the Supreme Court of Canada, for the Wet'suwet'en heredity chiefs, it was required that both British Columbia and the Government of Canada, in the honour of the Crown, sent representatives to discuss the situation with them. They were not protesters. They were chiefs.
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- Feb/17/22 1:26:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, to the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, I would like to retain the honour of being the only member of Parliament currently serving as a member of Parliament when I faced arrest non-violently, surrendering immediately and accepting the consequences, unlike our friends outside.
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- Feb/17/22 4:05:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there are a number of things that have constituted global emergencies. By the way, I should say to the hon. member, because I do not think I have put it on the record yet, that I am still trying to decide how to vote on this. There are pros and cons to the act's use. We had a collapse of police here in Ottawa. The chain of command broke somewhere, and we are in a very different situation now than if we had acted based on the information that, it now appears, we should have had about the security threat that was implicit in the convoy.
The examples the hon. member used of when we did not use the Emergencies Act were exterior to Canada. Goodness knows that Canadians, and particularly those in Halifax and Newfoundland, reacted so brilliantly and generously when 9/11 happened in taking care of people who were completely stranded. However, that does not rise to an emergency in Canada; I do not even think it is plausible. In the Wet'suwet'en protests, I was arrested in a non-violent civil disobedience protest, and on many similar occasions, Kinder Morgan never even called the police. Those are not emergencies that would rise to the level that is anything like this.
I ask the hon. member to reflect on the differences in each of the examples he put forward.
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- Feb/17/22 6:26:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I apologize for not rising. I am still working on my new knees.
I am honoured to rise tonight in one of the most important debates we have had in this place in the time I have been a member of Parliament, and I am on the horns of a dilemma.
I want to acknowledge that I am standing on the traditional territory of the people of the Algonquin nation. Their patience and tolerance with us is indeed generous, and I say meegwetch.
This is a very difficult debate, and it is difficult for many reasons. One reason for me is that I have not yet decided how I will vote, neither has my parliamentary colleague for Kitchener Centre. We are looking deeply at the Emergencies Act and its implications, including the downsides, which are evident, and the need for it, which remains a question.
This speech will be more legalistic than usual. I am essentially going to go through an exercise of statutory interpretation, compare it with the facts and see where we are. I am actually grappling with two questions tonight: How do we vote, and how do we analyze the legal questions?
In this debate today, and from 7 a.m. until midnight tomorrow, as well as the day after, the day after, and part of Monday too, we are going to hear debate not grounded in statutory interpretation, but filled with a lot of emotion. A lot of charges and countercharges will be heard. Both sides have already generously festooned this debate with wedge issues and red herrings. However, I certainly think Canadians, the citizens of this country, need to know what we are talking about, and I will do my best to bring it home.
The first question is this: What is the Emergencies Act?
It is very important to say it is not the War Measures Act. The War Measures Act, as used by the current Prime Minister's father, Pierre Trudeau, in the FLQ crisis, was an egregious violation of rights and freedoms right across the country. It was a suspension of civil liberties everywhere all at once. It was directed against people of Quebec, and even people with no connection whatsoever to anything radical, who were merely political opponents of the government of the day, were rounded up.
There was an official apology in the last session of Parliament. By the way, when the War Measures Act was invoked in the 1970s, police in Vancouver rode into peace camps and started beating people up, because civil liberties were gone right across Canada, and they did not need to have a reason. This is not that.
The Emergencies Act is the work, which I have to say impresses me, of reflective parliamentarians who gathered in the 1980s, when they had no imminent emergency to which they had to respond. They looked at public welfare, such as a pandemic, and how we would respond to that. Would we need the Emergencies Act, and what kind of emergencies would it be for? They looked at war. They looked at natural disasters, and they looked at the situation the government has now invoked, the declaration we are debating tonight, which is of the public order emergency category.
However, when they did that work, those parliamentarians made it clear that this act, by its very language, meant the military could not be called in. By its very language, it says the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will be honoured, and unlike the War Measures Act, it created parliamentary oversight, part of which we are doing here tonight. For any government using this declaration for an emergency, Parliament must debate the matter and vote within seven sitting days. As well, Parliament will have a committee to continue to oversee what takes place under the Emergencies Act to make sure it conforms to the law. As well, 20 members of Parliament and 10 senators, at any time during the 30-day life of this emergency declaration, can gather and request that we debate it again and vote again.
So, in a minority Parliament, this does suggest that the executive, in others words the cabinet and the Prime Minister, do not have the power to call the Emergencies Act. Obviously, they have done the declaration and it is in effect right now, but there is parliamentary oversight, something that was not present under the War Measures Act.
This is described as a public order emergency. Under the Emergencies Act, that is “an emergency that arises from threats to the security of Canada and that is so serious as to be a national emergency”.
In analyzing this definition, it turns out that the words “threats to the security of Canada” might not mean what one might take as a plain meaning when we think to ourselves what a threat to security is. No, it is specifically described as being the meaning that we would find in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act. We go to another act to find the definition for threats to the security of Canada.
This is fascinating. I think I may be the first one to mention it. Threats to the security of Canada in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act is defined with four points to describe it. I will read only (b) because that is the one that most applies in this circumstance. According to the act, threats to the security of Canada include:
(b) foreign influenced activities within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive or involve a threat to any person,
The second part of that definition that we get from the Emergencies Act itself says that not only must it be a threat to the security of Canada, such as the one I just read out in definitions from the Security Intelligence Service Act, it must also be so serious as to be a national emergency.
For the national emergency definition, as others have referenced in the House, we go back to the Emergency Act:
3. For the purposes of this Act, a national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that
(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada
I question whether that test been met, whether that threshold been met. That takes further interpretation based on the facts. I personally, and I found this in the declaration itself, so the government is also troubled by this, am troubled by the foreign influence aspect of what we are seeing across Canada.
The declaration which we are debating tonight includes the point that the protests “have become a rallying point for anti-government and anti-authority, anti-vaccination, conspiracy theory and white supremacist groups throughout Canada and other Western countries.” It says, “The protesters have varying ideological grievances, with demands ranging from an end to all public health restrictions to the overthrow of the elected government”.
That does seem very consistent with our first question about whether this is a threat to the security of Canada, under the meaning in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, when foreign influenced activities within or related to Canada are detrimental to the interests of Canada, such as blocking access to trade, blocking communities and shutting down communities. Also, are they clandestine or deceptive? Yes they are, if the money is coming from overseas, people are using anonymous email addresses and they are sending money into Canada for the purpose of disrupting our nation.
What is that purpose? Where do we find further evidence of what foreign influence might be attempting to visit on Canada, but also on other political regimes? This is from yesterday's Associated Press: “How American cash for Canada protests could sway US politics”. In this article, a series of journalists working for Associated Press makes the case that this convoy and the various protests across Canada under the banner of “freedom convoy” is “really aimed at energizing conservative politics in the U.S. [and elsewhere].Republicans think standing with protesters up north will galvanize fundraising and voter turnout”.
No wonder we have luminaries of the far right south of the border such as Texan Republican Ted Cruz and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene calling the protesters in Canada heroes and patriots. They are the darlings of Fox News right now. Senator Rand Paul said that he hopes the truckers come to the United States and “clog up cities”. In other words, one aspect of what raises this to the level of national emergency is that it also has tentacles. The longer it goes on here, the more it is intended to inspire disruptions in other economies, including our number one trading partner. Does it rise to the level of a national emergency?
This is a harder one for me. Does it rise to the level of a national emergency? We have seen blockades being removed. They were geographically easier. There were fewer people. The logistics of the Ambassador Bridge is not the same as what is going on right now outside this place, and I disagree with colleagues in this place who have said that, if we are here in Parliament, it means it is safe. That is not the case.
Friends of mine in this place and members of their staff have had feces thrown at them as they go back and forth to work. We have had people yell at us and abuse us, as we try to go through the streets. Be that at the moment I am someone with a disability, I cannot get here at all without Parliamentary Protective Service protection and assistance. No, it is not our usual Parliament Hill. We do not feel safe here.
Going to the next point of evidence that I want to bring before us, I am very concerned about the nature of our safety and security here. We are not just any city in Canada. We are the national capital. We have attracted a certain type, and I am not going to put a broad brush on everybody who showed up in Ottawa to support the convey. Clearly there are people there thinking it is sort of like a street party. There are people there who are not politically radicalized, but the thread that runs through all of this is a radicalization with an inherent threat of violence.
That came forward more clearly than anything in the Guardian today, in a very chilling article by a Canadian reporter, who I must say I have known for years. My goodness, Justin Ling is distinguishing himself in this crisis as someone who actually goes out, does reporting and digs up information. Today, in the Guardian, the headline was, “Canada was warned before protests that violent extremists infiltrated convoy”.
The hon. member for Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner made a point earlier today to excuse the protest. He said, it is not their fault, they were infiltrated. Exactly. According to the article in the Guardian today by Canadian journalist Justin Ling, assessments from Canada's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, known as ITAC, which is part of Security Intelligence Service Canada, or CSIS, reported before the convoy got near Ottawa that the convoy organizers “advocated civil war”.
Convoy organizers hold up the U.S. January 6 insurrection against a fair democratic election promoting the lie that the election was Trump's and it was stolen from him. They hold that up as their model. According to Justin Ling, CSIS and ITAC warned the City of Ottawa police that this was the nature of what was coming to Ottawa.
It was not a secret. They left with great fanfare to drive across the country. When this is all over, we will have to find out what happened within the chain of command in the Ottawa police to ignore these warnings. Some officers, not all necessarily, all but welcomed the convoy. There are reports from local Ottawa journalists that when they interviewed truck drivers, they said that they only planned to stay a little while but then the police told them they could go park on Wellington, and they would not have to leave for a very long time.
Had those truckers not been truckers, but indigenous people coming to assert rights on indigenous territory, they would not have been allowed to get a single stick into the ground to construct a single thing before being arrested quite quickly, or had they been people of colour, or environmentalists. My goodness, look at how we treat camps of homeless people, moving in brutally. The Emergencies Act has not been needed to knock over lots of homeless people in lots of brutal police takedowns.
We know right now that there is an intention on the part of many of these convoy participants to not leave. I do not want to worry about every social media crank that puts things up on Twitter, but I know that freedom convoy social media is saying to get downtown to Victoria to take the Legislature, and they are not going to leave until all the mandates are gone. Forget public health advice. They are going to demand that the government goes, that the mandates goes. Who knows?
It was also reported in this article about warnings from ITAC that it thought the use of vehicles, trucks and fuel could present a real significant threat of violence.
All too often, those of us here in Parliament have wondered and asked security forces whether anyone knows what is in all those trucks. We do not know, so I think we have, clearly, a situation that has been allowed to become intolerable and dangerous, but I am still not comfortable voting for the motion, and I will tell members why.
The emergency measures regulations, as described, are overly broad. When the Prime Minister said this was coming forward, he said it would be geographically circumscribed to the specific areas where we see that normal lines of authority and protections for public life and health are missing. We have an emergency. That is clear. This was promised to be very limited and specific, but the emergency measures regulations define infrastructure as basically everything and then say it applies right across Canada. The designation of protected places under section 6 of the regulations is far too broad and applies to all of Canada.
That is a concern I have. I also know I have heard many people ask for clarity. At what level of financial donation, or financial support of illegal activities, does one's bank account get seized? I highly doubt the Government of Canada plans to seize the bank account of anyone who made a $20 donation on GoFundMe to the “freedom convoy”. I doubt it. I think we are looking for proximate connection: the kind that will exert the pressure that makes the convoy go away.
Where are the pressure points? They are insurance, finances, registration and the chance to make a living as a trucker when this is all over. I do not think the Liberals intend to go after a $20 bank account donation, but I have not heard them say that. I am not comfortable voting until I see more clarity that circumscribes the overly broad reach of the regulations.
I will also say I hear from many people, virtually all the time, asking how we know this will not establish a precedent that allows a crackdown on civil liberties. I want to read one more section into the record very specifically. This is from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, in the definition that has been transplanted into the motion we are debating tonight. It addresses what is a threat to the security of Canada, and it says, at the bottom of the paragraph of which I have only read subsection (b), it “does not include lawful advocacy, protest or dissent, unless carried on in conjunction with any of the activities referred to above.”
I feel quite secure. I do not plan to get arrested again. It was not fun. It was way outside of my comfort zone and the judge hated me, so I got a much more significant fine than my friend, who is now the mayor of Vancouver. I do not plan to go out and get arrested again, but I believe that non-violent civil disobedience is a vital part of our democracy. It traces its roots all the way back to Henry David Thoreau in the 1800s. It was then picked up by the exemplar of non-violent civil disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi, and then taken up by Martin Luther King, Jr.
There are reasons why in a democracy we must have peaceful protest and the right and ability to break the law, if we believe that law to be unjust, but that does not include the right to destroy other people's lives and livelihoods in the process. That does not include a right to refuse to take the consequences of one's own actions or to say, “I will go quietly with you, officer.” That is the essence of what I did when I performed non-violent civil disobedience and what my colleague, the hon. Minister of Environment and Climate Change, did before he was in office. He also believed that something as important as the survival of life on earth and the climate crisis was worth giving up his own sense of safety for, by submitting himself to arrest.
These are complicated matters and complicated questions, and I would beg of all of us that we must listen to each other. I am so concerned that so many of my constituents believe it is actually a peaceful protest out there. They think it is. There is nothing peaceful about hunks of metal taking over a city. Trucks do not have charter rights. Honking a horn, as the judge said in granting the injunction, is not an expression of free speech. These trucks should have been stopped before they got anywhere near the centre of our national capital. They were not. That is what constitutes the emergency, but I need the government to show me that the regulations will be tightened up before I can vote for this.
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- Feb/17/22 6:47:50 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would say to my hon. colleague, the parliamentary secretary, that he should read the emergency measures regulations. There is no certainty in here. There is no precision. It is far too broad. I could read into the record critical infrastructure and how it is defined to include ports, piers, lighthouses, canals, tramways and bus stations. However, this is not in any way specific to the circumstance we are in right now, and that is what makes me have a good deal of resistance to voting yes, while I do think we need to do more because we have a current emergency.
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- Feb/17/22 6:49:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the fact is that we will have the opportunity over the next four or five days to find what is wrong here. Members of Parliament understand that something must be done about what has currently happened. Where we are now is not about the city police not having the original jurisdiction, which could have prevented this. It is an entrenched, well-funded, well-supported effort that is not only successfully shutting down the centre of Ottawa, but I feel successfully menacing the parliamentary procedures in this place.
We have an opportunity through this debate for government members to come forward to clarify that they are not, in the order in council, giving themselves a blank cheque. One of the Quebec members from the NDP made the point that this is not a blank cheque, but I think it could be tightened up so we actually know the limits of what we are about to approve, which should be geographically confined, as well as specific to the circumstances.
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- Feb/17/22 6:51:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague. I agree that the debate is emotionally charged on both sides. This does not help our society find a solution that will bring our country, our provinces, together. I am disappointed in the level of discourse and the demonizing of those with different opinions. We must have a minimum level of respect for each other in all of our debates in Canada. That is essential. That is one of the things that defines Canada. We are not a country that gets divided over dog whistles.
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- Feb/17/22 6:55:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I made that point earlier today to the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, who was trying to say that somehow it was hypocritical that the government did not crack down on Wet'suwet'en people, who he referred to as protesters. Those were Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs with legal rights derived from the Constitution of this country and Supreme Court of Canada decisions. I could not agree more with what she said, and I will add nothing to it except to thank her for making those points.
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- Feb/17/22 6:56:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I feel as though the city of Ottawa and many Canadians are in the situation of a battered wife, where the police ask if her husband has used a gun on her or hurt her yet. We are menaced by an occupation, and we do not want to wait any longer to have this problem solved. We found guns in Coutts. We know that this group has been infiltrated by the alt-right global network, which the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre referred to earlier.
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- Feb/17/22 9:05:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Standing Order 16 and Standing Order 18 are being violated. I cannot hear the minister trying to ask a question because of the heckling from the people she is trying to ask the question of.
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- Feb/17/22 9:26:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, following up on the question from the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre, I also heard anti-indigenous racism, as did most indigenous people in those areas. It is not right to burn down the churches, but the quote from the Prime Minister was absolutely appropriate to the circumstances of the pain of discovering the bodies being found of the children who were stolen from their homes who never came home, as the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre just said. I do think the hon. member could have expressed himself more clearly to show some sign that he understands the pain of the communities that are going through this now. It is retraumatizing people across this country in our indigenous communities.
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- Feb/17/22 10:11:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member put her finger on something very important, which is what she described as silos of information. There seem to be echo chambers of information.
I have constituents who have written to me pleading that it is a terrible lie that convoy protesters went into the Shepherds of Good Hope, accosted staff, demanded to be fed, assaulted a security guard and assaulted a homeless person. They firmly believe this is a lie.
This organization is supported by my church when I am in Ottawa, St. Bartholomew. I have a lot of friends at Shepherds of Good Hope. This was witnessed and this happened, yet the spinning around this from the convoy supporters is extraordinary.
Can the hon. member confirm that she accepts that some convoy protesters have committed assault in this community and terrorized community members?
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- Feb/17/22 10:42:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to echo what the member just said about the member for Mount Royal. The tone of the member's comments was, as ever, extremely helpful.
We need to lower the temperature in this place and be honest with Canadians about the difficulties we face and why it is important to distinguish between what the War Measures Act was and what the Emergencies Act is. The Mulroney government repealed the War Measures Act and put in place a far more thoughtful piece of legislation that does not in any way suspend civil liberties. However, I still have concerns about it.
I ask the hon member for Mount Royal if he believes that in the course of this debate we might even see some changes from the government in terms of the regulations, to be very specific.
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- Feb/17/22 11:10:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as my hon. colleague from Battle River—Crowfoot summed up the number of parties in this place, he forgot the Green Party, which he would probably like to forget, but the reality is that we are the caucus that has not yet declared how we plan to vote. I would encourage him to give me some reasons to decide to ignore the horrific language and heckling that has taken place all day from those benches and encourage me to vote with them.
What specific arguments does he think he could muster that would say that this was a time for the Greens to vote with Conservatives?
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