44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 19, 2022 07:00AM
- Feb/19/22 6:41:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, given that the Deputy Prime Minister, the prime minister-in-waiting, has opined that she would like to make aspects of the Emergencies Act permanent, such as the expansion of FINTRAC over more control of people's bank accounts and transactions, and given that the thresholds were not met to invoke the Emergencies Act, does the hon. member think, perhaps, the reason for invoking the act was to acquire some expanded, broadened powers permanently and that was the true goal of casting the country into this situation?
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- Feb/19/22 6:57:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I too was at the Summit of the Americas, but it was quite a different situation. There were thousands of people storming the perimeter fence, the crowd was launching projectiles into the fence and there were imported black balaclava-clad professional protesters on hand. We saw none of that here. It was very peaceful. People were welcoming everyone. I certainly felt no potential violence when I was walking back and forth.
The member also agrees that the thresholds were not met to invoke this act. Why does the member think the Emergencies Act was invoked, given that there was no rationale?
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- Feb/19/22 8:07:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I wonder. The parliamentary secretary said that these people in the streets were violent, but she has not walked through these streets herself. She quoted a very vulgar phone message using her vulgar language and said that it was one of those protesters.
If she has not walked through the crowd to see the demeanour of the people there, how does she know it was one of them who left a message on her phone?
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- Feb/19/22 9:01:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the demonstrators started out as a demonstration over the mandate for truckers to have to be vaccinated in order to go back and forth across the border.
Why is it okay for truckers who have had their COVID shots but who are bringing medical devices and other pandemic supplies across the border to not have to be quarantined or tested, but the other truckers who have not had their COVID shots are put into quarantine? Is one more dangerous than the other or are either dangerous at all?
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- Feb/19/22 9:22:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of very concerned constituents in the freedom-loving riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.
The Prime Minister’s emergency decree has struck terror into the hearts of millions of Canadians. They do not understand why this unprecedented and un-Canadian action is being taken. They are wondering if they are going to have their bank accounts frozen for supporting the wrong political party. They want to know if they are going to lose their children for the simple fact of waving a Canadian flag.
I wish I could tell them it would never happen in Canada, but it is happening. I wish I could tell them this was not the Prime Minister’s plan all along.
Ever since the government announced it was suspending the trucker vaccine mandate, only to reverse course 24 hours later, every action taken by the government and the Prime Minister has been to escalate and inflame. These actions were either calculations or incompetence. Either way, Canadians have lost all confidence in the Prime Minister.
The question is how long it will take for Liberal members to find the confidence to speak truth to power. Here is the truth: The only emergency is the Prime Minister’s plummeting poll numbers. The government is pushing conspiracy theories full of more hot air than the bouncy castles on Wellington Street. To justify its fake emergency, it must ratchet up the rhetoric.
Are Canadians supposed to believe our democracy was under threat from dance parties and hot tubs? The only thing under threat is the credibility of the government. The Prime Minister has become the boy who cried racist insurrectionist. Canadians can see this clearly, and they are judging the Prime Minister harshly. Even Liberals are openly wondering what has become of the Prime Minister.
Two years ago to the day, the Prime Minister said this about a group of Canadians who were blockading critical infrastructure and calling on the Governor General to circumvent the elected government, “Our responsibility is to continue working on a peaceful and lasting solution to this troubling situation.” Two years ago, the Prime Minister pleaded with Canadians for patience. He sent his minister to negotiate with the protesters. Once the political issue had been resolved, the OPP moved in and peacefully removed the blockades.
Canadians have the right to ask why this situation is different. Why is the government treating one group of protesters differently from another group of protesters? The one and only answer is politics. The government and its urban elite supporters despise rural Canadians unless they are indigenous, in which case they patronize them.
Where were the denunciations of the vigilante mob waving a Soviet flag that attacked motorists? There were none, because the mob was made up of six-figure salaried public sector union leaders and university professors, which are also known as the Liberal donor base. When wealthy, privileged Canadians wave flags of genocidal states, the media holds them up as the heroes who survived the “Battle of Billings Bridge”.
When rural, blue-collar workers show up holding signs calling the government Nazis, the media paints them as barbarians at a tiki torch rally. Now the media cheers on the doxing of Canadians, while the justice minister threatens to freeze the bank accounts of people who voted for the wrong presidential candidate.
The minister’s comments to CTV Wednesday demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the government cannot be trusted with emergency powers. When asked if people who donated to the convoy would have their bank accounts frozen, the justice minister said, “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating...to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried.”
I do hope the minister can come before the House and explain which other so-called unacceptable views will determine if accounts are frozen. Sadly, we do not need the minister to explain. The media and the other radical activists that the government funds are already hard at work coming up with a progressive enemies list.
Wednesday saw the seemingly coordinated effort by the Liberal-funded CBC and the Liberal-funded anti-Canadian hate network to simultaneously publish stories about Christians supporting the convoy. Last week, op-eds in Liberal media explained how the Canadian flag has been tainted because it was waved by the wrong kind of Canadians.
The left-wing media and government-funded activists have certainly painted a clear picture of the type of people they believe hold unacceptable views. Christians, patriotic Canadians, even classic small-l liberals have made the urban socialists’ enemies list. The media like to call this a culture war. We have an urban culture that is very conservative when it comes to lifting pandemic policies. We have a rural culture comprised of people who made the decision to trade the benefits of urban living for the benefits of rural freedoms. The mistake is in thinking that this is a war.
This has always been a rural David versus urban Goliath but with the slingshots banned by orders in council. This used to be a free country. The people in my riding elected a Liberal member of Parliament for most of the last century. That was until the Liberal Party began to turn its backs on rural Canadians with the long-gun registry. Since then, the Liberals have always chosen to support urban interests over rural interests, but it was only when the current Prime Minister and his woke McGuinty minions arrived that the game changed. Rather than just picking sides, they are seeking a total cultural domination.
Tolerance used to mean accepting people, especially when we disagreed with them. The socialists have redefined tolerance to mean the complete submission to radical ideology. This is why the media are trying to recast the word “freedom” as “dog whistle”. That is why they attack the flag. It was a Liberal prime minister who said “freedom is our nationality”. Canada and freedom used to be synonymous, but freedom means dissent is okay. Democracy means not everybody is going to agree and even when 90% of us agree, we must protect the right of the 10% to dissent. When the predecessor party to the NDP voted against the War Measures Act during an actual war fighting actual Nazis, nobody accused them of supporting Hitler. Dissent is the canary in the coal mine of democracy. This emergency decree strikes right at the heart of dissent.
With a stroke of his pen, the Prime Minister outlawed protesting on Parliament Hill for 30 days, to start. We are not talking about the streets of Ottawa. We are talking about the lawn. If Ukrainian Canadians want to demonstrate or rally on Parliament Hill in opposition to Russian aggression, they cannot because it is illegal now. The Prime Minister said the order would respect the charter. The charter is not worth the paper it is printed on if people cannot protest the declaration of an emergency order on Parliament Hill.
The government claims it needs extraordinary power to stop an imminent insurrection that is a threat to democracy. I know the Prime Minister does not like to spend time in the House and was off in his bunker at the start, but Parliament has been meeting, debating and voting the whole time the trucks were here. When people in other countries hear the word “insurrection“, they imagine military coups or communist takeovers. What they do not imagine is a small group of protesters asking the Liberal-appointed Governor General to form a government with the Liberal-appointed Senate amounting to a dangerous insurrection. Their latest plan to overthrow the government is to politely ask the Governor General to replace the Liberal Prime Minister with a different Liberal member. The Governor General has declined this request. If this is an insurrection, it is the most polite, non-violent, typically Canadian insurrection in history.
Protesters in Ottawa politely asked the government to overthrow itself and the government said no, so they threw a weeks-long block party. This bouncy castle insurrection is what the government needed to declare a national emergency for? This would be sad and pathetic were the precedent not so dangerous. It has invoked the Emergencies Act without sufficient grounds. Now it has trapped itself and to justify the power grab, it has to ratchet up the rhetoric further and further. To justify the government’s rhetoric, its media allies encouraged boycotts and vigilante mobs.
Two years ago the Prime Minister called for patience and now he is calling everybody Nazis while he sends in the storm troopers to break up the bouncy castles. This has to stop.
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- Feb/19/22 9:33:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what is a tragedy and painful are the millions of jobs that were lost as a consequence of the pandemic, the declaration, the restrictions, the lockdowns and keeping us in Canada and requiring many things that had no basis in science. The John Hopkins University study declared that all of the non-medical interventions had no effect on lowering the death or infection rates.
Just as it was an exaggeration to hold people down and make them lose their jobs, so too is it an exaggeration to invoke the Emergencies Act.
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- Feb/19/22 9:35:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a great disappointment that my colleague agrees on the principle of it being unnecessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. The Conservative Party is more united and stronger than ever. We are growing in unity and numbers, and one day very soon, we are going to form government.
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- Feb/19/22 9:36:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I must tell you about my residents. When the convoy was going through on the Trans-Canada Highway, people waited for four, six and eight hours to cheer on the trucks going from Deux-Rivières all the way through to the end of Arnprior. They were so happy that somebody was going to go to Ottawa and fight for their freedom.
They have the Conservatives in Parliament, people all over the country and now the world who understand that democracy and freedom are under attack in Canada.
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