44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 21, 2022 07:00AM
- Feb/21/22 8:50:06 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Tobique—Mactaquac.
Canadians across the country are gravely concerned. The Prime Minister is invoking the Emergencies Act for a crisis that he created. He is attempting to use a tool at the government's disposal that was created with the intention of rarely if ever being used. The Prime Minister is using this last resort tool to clean up a crisis of his own creation.
The Emergency Measures Act gives extraordinary powers to government, powers that should only be used when every other effort has been exhausted. Enacting these measures should not be the first or the second thing the Liberal government does to resolve a crisis. We have not seen any action by the Prime Minister to avoid jumping to this extreme measure.
As a former police chief, I have had enough thorough experience in dealing with crisis situations and the de-escalation of such crises. The first step in de-escalation is not to bring in a sledgehammer. The Prime Minister could not even take the first step everyone should use in de-escalation. That step would be listening. The Prime Minister refused to meet with the protesters to listen to their concerns. These are his fellow Canadian citizens, whether he agrees with their opinions or not. He is the Prime Minister of Canada and a good leader listens to his fellow countrymen.
The Emergencies Act specifically states part of the criteria for enactment is that all other measures have been exhausted in attempting to resolve the crisis. How can we possibly vote in favour of this act when the Prime Minister has not even attempted to use the most basic measure of resolving any crisis. Instead, the Prime Minister has inflamed the situation, almost as if he wanted to get to this point. It is quite evident the Prime Minister is not capable of first steps in any crisis he faces. It is in his ideological identity to squash anyone who does not agree with him and unfortunately Canadians from all walks of life know this all too well.
Earlier this week my Conservative colleagues proposed a possible step to end the crisis. We proposed the government provide Canadians with its plan for ending the various federal COVID-19-related mandates and restrictions. This is an example of one of the many actions that was available to the government before deciding on this drastic measure. Providing Canadians with an end plan is not a controversial decision. Many of the provincial governments have already done the same. Many Canadians including many participating in the various protests would have welcomed this action as a sign the government is hearing the wishes of Canadians or some direction or evidence of an end plan. Instead, the government jumped to ignore this measured action and is all too eager to get to this extreme point that we see ourselves in today.
While the Prime Minister has failed to present enough evidence to support the use of the act, I can think of numerous examples when this country has faced a crisis and managed to come out of it without implementing the act. Just last week we saw these protests at several Canadian-U.S. border crossings. These protests created grave economic consequences for the country, including my riding of Oxford. As Oxford has strong ties to the automotive manufacturing section, I had a first-hand account of the consequences of the protest in Windsor. Many automotive manufacturing plants had to slow down or completely shut off production.
My office received numerous messages from constituents who were being laid off due to these shutdowns. The Windsor border blockade was a crisis for many of my constituents. What did not cross my mind or theirs was that the Emergencies Act would need to be invoked to solve the crisis, and in fact it was not. We saw officers peacefully remove the blockades to allow the border to reopen. They did this without the use of the Emergencies Act.
A similar situation occurred in Coutts, Alberta. Again, RCMP officers were able to clear the blockade without any tools from the Emergencies Act. There have been numerous examples throughout Canadian history when a crisis such as this one, or I may say worse than this one, have arose, many of them being of a much more dangerous nature than the current situation.
Another that comes to mind is the crisis we all saw with 2010 G20 riots in Toronto. Some members of the government would be very familiar with this crisis, the Minister of Emergency Preparedness especially as he was the Toronto police chief at the time. Maybe some forget what we saw during that crisis. We saw a bank just down the street from parliament being firebombed. We saw police cars in flames in downtown Toronto. We saw hundreds of businesses damaged by protesters. The Emergencies Act was available to our government at the time. It was not used in that crisis. Why? It did not meet the criteria outlined in the Emergencies Act.
Flaming vehicles and destroyed businesses are what the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, the acting Toronto police chief, was facing at the time. If flaming banks and police cars do not constitute a reason for using the Emergencies Act, I find it very hard to see how road hockey games and bouncy castles do. The Minister of Emergency Preparedness knows very well that the police officers we have here have all the tools necessary to defuse this situation if needed. The Emergencies Act was not needed in Windsor and Coutts, Alberta.
Instead, the Minister of Emergency Preparedness said he was proud to invoke this act. I find it extremely disappointing to hear this coming from a fellow former police chief. No one in this House should be proud to use this act. However, it seems the Prime Minister is all too eager to use it.
Another similar crisis, again during the Minister of Emergency Preparedness’s time as police chief, occurred a year before the G20 summit. In 2009, we saw many Tamil Canadians upset with what they were seeing happening in the Sri Lankan civil war. Canadians shut down northbound and southbound lanes of University Avenue in Toronto for four days. They blocked the U.S. consulate in Toronto and illegally blocked traffic on the Gardiner Expressway. Again, it was not necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. In fact, use of force by police officers was not necessary. The Toronto police chief, the current Minister of Emergency Preparedness, used his training in community policing to help facilitate a peaceful end to the crisis. The police chief even received an award from the Tamil Canadian community for his leadership during the protests.
Again, I fail to see why the government sees it necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act now when it was not necessary in 2010 or even last week. Why were we able to see those crises resolved without such extreme measures? We have several precedents for why this Emergencies Act should not be invoked and we have no reasons for why it should be, yet here we are in this debate.
Let us talk about a time when the government had to react to a similar crisis. It was during the October crisis in 1970. While the War Measures Act was a different act, it did possess many similarities to the one being used today. It is important to compare the crisis of that time to what we are seeing now. In the lead-up to the October crisis, we saw a terrorist organization robbing and bombing several institutions in Quebec. That crisis reached a climax with several kidnappings and the eventual horrendous murder of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte.
That was the context of the last time a Canadian government used such drastic actions to restore order. It does not take much effort to realize that while we may be experiencing a crisis of our own, it pales in comparison to what the government of the day faced the last time an emergency act was implemented.
Invoking the Emergencies Act now, for the purpose of trying to cover up the mismanagement and poor leadership of the Liberal government, would be creating a dangerous precedent for any future crisis the government may face. What is to stop the government from implementing this act every time it has a group of fellow Canadians who disagrees. We have heard members of the government tell us that this Emergencies Act is necessary to dismantle these illegal protests and blockades. I again ask how it was possible that the illegal protests and blockades in Windsor and Coutts were dismantled if they did not possess the required tools.
Furthermore, the act states that the nature of the emergency is one that seriously endangers the lives of Canadians. If we are in such grave danger from these protesters such as those in Ottawa, why would members of the House even have been allowed to convene in the House? The threshold for this act has not been met.
We have heard the Minister of Justice brag about how the mere mention of using the Emergencies Act resulted in protesters in Coutts, Alberta, dispersing from their blockade. The minister was bragging about using the most powerful tool available to the government. He should be ashamed that it has come to this point. He should be ashamed because it means the government has failed miserably.
All Canadians should be ashamed that the Prime Minister has failed them.
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- Feb/21/22 9:00:52 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad that the member's son-in-law found a great place to live with a good member of Parliament.
Having said that, I am concerned that the Liberals are using this act as a sledgehammer. I have worked with police officers across this country. I know that in Windsor, for instance, they were able to clear that blockade with the help of the RCMP and the OPP, and they existed before this act came in.
In Alberta and across the country we are seeing that Canadians are thoroughly upset with the Prime Minister. He does not listen and just does not pay attention.
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- Feb/21/22 9:02:22 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it would take a lot longer than the time I have to tell him what I think about it. That being said, for years and years police departments and police officers have worked in a coordinated fashion in a whole variety of things. This was all brought about through poor planning by a variety of agencies, which I am sure we will hear about as this debate goes on, but more importantly, this act did not need to be invoked. All of the things that people are taking credit for could have been done with the civil law that we already have.
As for seizing bank accounts, I have already heard from people who gave minimal amounts of money to what they believed were legal entities, and they have now had their bank accounts seized. That just does not seem right in Canada.
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- Feb/21/22 9:03:36 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have not read that part of the act or I could not repeat it back, but there are so many things in the act that are dangerous to law-abiding Canadians who have now run afoul of the law.
When I heard the parliamentary secretary from Sudbury say that he supported them when they were in his community and before it became an unlawful situation, I could only hope that he did not have his bank account seized too.
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