44th Parl. 1st Sess.

February 19, 2022 07:00AM

Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)

Feb/19/22 9:09:34 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Hamilton Centre. I am always proud to stand in the House. I am certainly not proud of where we are today as a nation, but I am proud to be here, because when we are facing a crisis of this nature, it is incumbent upon all of us to step up and address it so people can live in safety and the rule of law in maintained. How did we get here? Canada, with its traditional social solidarity, had among the lowest COVID deaths in the world, but when omicron hit us, and it hit us like a baseball bat, I think it threw us all. It caused us all a lot of psychological damage, yet in our region, I saw people lining up for boosters and vaccines. I saw volunteers and incredible social solidarity. How did it fall apart so quickly? We are at a time when restaurants are reopening, when children are back in school, and when my dear mother and daughter can plan to go off to some warm climate, which is something I have never done as I am not a warm-climate guy, but they could because our country is opening back up again. We are coming through one of the hardest moments of this pandemic because of our social solidarity, yet we have seen a total fracturing. As a New Democrat, I am willing to agree to measures to make this city safe, but New Democrats want a full public inquiry. We want an inquiry into the failure of the Ottawa police, the police board and the actions of the mayor to keep people safe, because we should never have been put in this situation. We need an inquiry to understand how it was that the Ambassador Bridge, a vital link to our nation, could be shut because people believe vaccine conspiracy theories. We also need an inquiry to look at the damage that was done to our economy. If we talk anyone in the auto sector, they will tell us that this damage will be long term. There needs to be inquiry. Just prior to this situation, I met with six people from the Attawapiskat first nation who came to give a peace message to the government. Security was on them in a second, yet these guys out front were able to set up their bouncy castles and block all the major intersections, and there was no effort to stop them. That is why we need an inquiry. We need answers, and Canadians need answers. In January, Canada's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre said that there were “likely” extremists involved and that there was a “trigger point and opportunity for potential lone actor attackers to conduct a terrorism attack” out of this convey, which is not say that the people who were standing on the bridges were part of that. However, Canada's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre recognized a danger of lone actors, so how was it that the people who came in with the trucks were invited right up onto Parliament Hill and allowed to park? Was that a security failure or was that collusion? I can tell members that there are trucks and other vehicles out there that just showed up for a protest and never thought they would ever get down here, yet they were put in a place outside of the Prime Minister's office. That needs to be assessed. We know that the U.S. Congress is demanding Facebook to now explain the mass rise of fake overseas accounts that were promoting the convoy and Russian disinformation. We will never hear about that from the Conservatives. How is it that we can fail in our country on basic issues of security? We need to assess these things, and this is why we need an inquiry. People need to know whether this response was an overreach or not. We need to know how it was possible that so much money, foreign money, was being funnelled through a right-wing account that was used in the January 6 attack. Any day of the week, I will say as a Canadian that I will stand up and make sure that dark money does not come into our country, and we need a law in place to make sure that accounts in the Cayman Islands are not directing political activities in the nation. That is not being partisan. That is our duty as politicians. I know some Conservatives find that very upsetting, but there is enough blame to go around. I blame the Prime Minister and his failure to stand up to give us a vision when we needed a vision. I blame Doug Ford, who was off snowmobiling and kept missing key security briefings. There is a lot of blame to go around, but I certainly blame the Conservatives, who seem to think there is a political advantage to promoting extremists. They are telling the Prime Minister of our country to meet with the leadership, a leadership that came to this capital with an MOU calling for the overthrow of a democratically elected government. How is it possible that we are at a point where it considered okay to go out and meet with people who want to overthrow the government? Who were those people, the people that the interim leader said we need to make this sustained and be a problem? Chris Barber, a vicious racist, likes truckers as long as they are white. He is one of those the interim leader said we were stigmatizing. Pat King singled me out for having the temerity to speak, as is my right, in the House. He is a man who talks about shooting the Prime Minister and shooting cops. Another one who the interim leader thought our Prime Minister should go out and meet is Tamara Lich, a woman dedicated to breaking up our country. No, I will not negotiate with people like that. They belong in the crowbar hotel. We need the rule of law. What I have seen over the last three weeks has been shameful. We should never have needed these tools. These tools should have been used by the city of Ottawa to do ticketing. They should have been used in a proper manner, as the city of Quebec did, as the city of Toronto did, but we are in a situation now where this has been allowed to metastasize. If the occupiers took over Thunder Bay or Red Deer, that would absolutely be local and provincial jurisdiction, but this is the nation's capital. We cannot be made to look like a failed state to the world, yet we cannot even manage to contain this. I talked earlier about my frustration with the failure of Ottawa police, but I look at the role the police have played over the last few days, and what we saw yesterday was policing at its best in this country. I know police officers who have come down from the north. I know friends from the Quebec side, from the Sûreté du Québec, who are here. This is a terrible situation. It is a national embarrassment that we are here, but we have to have an assurance that people can travel in this city. That buddy who has a big truck and has decided he is going to block a major intersection for three solid weeks has more rights than someone who works at Metropolitain, a restaurant that has been shut down, or the young women I know who was harassed and insulted. They say it is all peaceful. It is all peaceful for a white guy with an upside down Canadian flag on their back, but it is not for someone who is a resident of Centretown being harassed in the grocery store for wearing a mask, or being insulted and told to go back where they came from. I have seen this. Again, I blame the Ottawa police for not doing their job when they were supposed to, and I blame the mayor. It is our responsibility as legislators to say enough is enough. I want that inquiry. I want to know why the committee has not been struck. I want answers. I want to know that these tools will never be used against legitimate protests. We have to have answers. I hold the government to account for that. I hold the provincial government to account. As a legislator, I am ready to do my job to say the rule of law and the right of people to be safe in their own city has to be a sacrosanct responsibility for all of us.

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