44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 21, 2022 07:00AM
- Feb/21/22 11:15:33 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour anytime to rise on my feet in this House. It is unfortunate that we are rising today to debate the Emergencies Act. It is an act whose use is not merited right now. I will outline my reasoning for voting against this tonight and why I hope that the NDP will join with us, stay relevant and hopefully support our position that it is not needed right now.
To get understanding, we need to ask ourselves how and why: How are we here and why are we here debating this, and why did we have protesters on the streets of Ottawa? It goes to the function of parliamentarians, which is to listen. We may not agree with the protesters and we may not agree with all views in Canada, but we listen, hopefully to have a better understanding of our fellow Canadians. That is what has been unfortunately lacking in this place.
We have gone through two years of this pandemic with these difficulties. Everyone is tired. Everyone wants this to be over. The good news is that in Canada it is slowly becoming very apparent that the pandemic is coming to an end. Mandates are being lifted across Canada. Freedom is on the move again. We are able to take back our lives. The Super Bowl was just played in California, with 85,000 people in that stadium, and we did not see a spike of COVID cases afterward. Why is that? Part of it is that vaccines have helped.
We are one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world. We have therapeutic options now available. Also, the variant that is dominant right now is milder. In the past, this is how pandemics have ended, with the dominant strain becoming a mild virus that would go through our population and we would have natural immunity layered on top of all the other measures that I have outlined. That is why we are coming to the end of it. We are at the tail end of this. Province after province is lifting its restrictions. Countries, significant western world countries, are removing the mandates. We are so close to being in that spot.
Why would the Liberal government in January, last month, at the end of this pandemic, after claiming that truck drivers were frontline heroes, the people who literally fed us and delivered the goods that sustained us for these last two years, who called them heroes for the first two years, at the waning end of this pandemic, move them from heroes to zeros? At the stroke of a pen, the Prime Minister decided that at the tail end we are going to have this mandate imposed when they cross the border. That was a month ago. We are talking about a small portion of the Canadian population who, for the most part, are vaccinated and by themselves for 22 hours of the day, and the Liberals targeted those people. Worse than targeting them, they insulted them. They divided us.
As this convoy was getting started, the Prime Minister called out that the people in this freedom convoy were separatist, nothing more than people who want to tear our country apart. They got to Ottawa, and I have never seen as many Canadian flags in a group on Parliament Hill. These are not separatists; they are patriots. They were called sexist and racist. I would hope that the Liberal members who are here had the opportunity to meet with some of these fellow Canadians and hear their stories. They would hear and notice that they are from every nationality, that every corner of the world is represented by those truckers and the people who joined them. They were not racist. They were not sexist. They were not separatists.
We had the Prime Minister piling on, for what purpose? One would only surmise that it is for his political benefit, and that is wrong. A lot of wrong things happened in the last two years, but in the last two weeks or the last month there have been profound changes in the way I view our institution and the way Canadians view this place and their government, and it is not for the better.
We are in a different spot. The Queen, at 95 years old, caught COVID. With all the precautions that are out there, the bubble-wrapped Queen, at her age, caught COVID, and she is working through it. We are definitely in a new phase of this pandemic. We are coming to the end, so why pile on these mandates that only divide Canadians, not unify us?
The powers that the Emergencies Act gives the government are profoundly wrong, and we know this to be true. In a free society, we do not freeze bank accounts. That is the most horrendous thing that failed regimes around the world do. In their dying days, they print money, they remove civil liberties and they freeze bank accounts.
It is not that difficult to view what is going on in Canada through a lens of mistrust. We need leadership to bring healing once we are through this pandemic. When all the mandates are removed, and I believe we are weeks or less away from that, we are going to have huge divisions that need to be mended. Invoking the Emergencies Act only divides Canadians that much more at a time we should not be divided.
That is a little bit about why we are here, but how are we here? How was it that a protest would go on for as many days as it did? When the inquiry takes place, one of the questions and one of the things to analyze is what happened at the start. For weeks, or days at least, we would turn on the news and see the news of this convoy coming to Ottawa. People were lining the highways in the cold just to wave at the convoy.
Even if someone does not agree with convoy's message, they must take a step back and understand what it must take for people to give up all they had in their lives to get on the road and come to Ottawa to fight for what they believe in and to have their message heard by the government. The reports that they were coming to Ottawa were no secret.
When the convoy got here, they were directed or welcomed by the City of Ottawa's electronic signs that said “convoy turn here”, and they headed downtown. When they got to the downtown core of Ottawa, what were they told? “Go ahead, park on Wellington. You have to leave on Sunday, but you are free to come and break this law. You can set up shop and you can protest.”
In Canada, we have the right to protest. It is still a right. We need to provide a space for people to protest, to disagree with their government and to let their message be heard. I believe that when the inquiry looks at what the first mistakes were, they will turn out to be it was the Liberal Prime Minister's pressure that led the Liberal mayor of Ottawa to invite them down to set up shop on Wellington Street. That was the message they heard when they got to Ottawa.
People are now second-guessing themselves and saying we needed intelligence reports because we did not know what was coming. Turn on the news: The whole country knew where they were going and why they were going there. Their livelihoods were threatened. We were at the tail end of a pandemic, a pandemic in which they were treated like heroes for the first two years for delivering goods, crossing the border and putting their lives at risk.
In the dying days of this pandemic, as mandates were being lifted across Canada, what did our Prime Minister decide to do? He decided to divide Canadians, just like he did in the last election. Leading into that election, he said, “No, we do not need mandates.” He must have received some polling information that showed otherwise, and he decided to use this divisive weapon against his own people to divide Canadians for his political gain.
I will be voting against this motion because it is not right. It is not right to freeze people's bank accounts and it is not right to insult the hard-working Canadians who make up that convoy.
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- Feb/21/22 11:26:29 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will correct the member opposite. The restrictions on crossing the border were first introduced by Ottawa. A week later, America retaliated.
With regard to having these restrictions removed, one side has to move first, and it should be Canada. I suspect the U.S. might actually move first and force us to rescind the restrictions, because it makes no sense to have these restrictions on people who sit in their cab for 22 hours of the day by themselves. While they have been crossing the border all through the last two years, they were being called heroes, and now you call them racists and you call them separatists and you call them sexist people. This is wrong.
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- Feb/21/22 11:28:23 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have had protests in Canada for over 150 years. Every protest that I have seen was able to be stopped with the current laws on the books. We had massive protests in major cities across Canada, protests in which buildings were being burnt, cars were being set on fire and people were getting killed. For three weeks, we had none of that on the streets of Ottawa. It was the lack of leadership from the Prime Minister that facilitated this protest getting to the place that it got to.
I am against blockades. I am against any illegal activity. Canadians still have the right to protest. They still have the right to have their message heard. These measures are not needed, because in the history of our country we have been able to put down all protests that we have had in the past up until now. Why is that? I believe it is because this act is being used for political reasons, not for law and order, which I am a big believer in.
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- Feb/21/22 11:30:00 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we need healing. We need a leader who will listen, a leader who will not divide us for his own benefit. We need to come together like never before because of what we have been through in the last two years. We talk about the traumatic scenes that some people witnessed in Ottawa. They could not go to work, could not see loved ones and could not get around. Well, that is what our country has been like for the last two years.
We need a leader who will bring freedom back to Canada and remember “God keep our land glorious and free”.
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