44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 28, 2022 11:00AM
- Feb/28/22 12:38:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the circumstances of the Emergencies Act have certainly been one of the more significant debates in which I have participated in this place. I welcomed the Emergencies Act, and one of the reasons I felt comfortable voting yes for it was that the parliamentary oversight process was rigorous, in the sense that there will be a committee and there will also be an inquiry.
I would put forward this notion to the hon. government House leader. One of the worst things that has happened to Canadian democracy has been the emergence of people believing in “alternative facts”, as the Trump White House used to say. If we think that one set of people in this place have already made up their minds so firmly that they cannot be reliable in investigating, I think that is a wrong supposition. Obviously Conservatives are part of the committee, but I would make the point that the hon. member for Kitchener Centre and I are also an opposition party in this place. We respect each other a lot, but we did not vote the same way, and I respect my colleagues across the way who did not vote the same way.
If a committee of all people in this place, including the Green Party, was able to come to a report and give it to Canadians, could we then stop having different sets of facts, really explore what happened, and get past that idea? I get emails from constituents who say that nobody assaulted the workers or the homeless at Shepherds of Good Hope, yet I know it happened. How do we get to an agreed statement of facts if we decide that one set of people in this place are not really open-minded?
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- Feb/28/22 3:20:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I have been unable to say yes, because as far as I can find in the records of what was sent to my caucus team, we were unaware of this motion. I cannot see any reason we would object except, of course, that the Conservatives may object to any unanimous consent motion we might put forward. However, in the spirit of good graces—
An hon. member: Oh, come on.
Ms. Elizabeth May: “Oh, come on”? Excuse me, I have been in the House for nearly 11 years, and it is only recently that every request for unanimous consent put forward—
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Madam Speaker, I will keep it brief. The hon. parliamentary secretary touched on this. We have become increasingly alarmed by disinformation sites and, of course, as we are horrified by Russia's aggression against Ukraine, we realize that Russian disinformation was authorized by the CRTC. I think we were outraged to find that Russia Today was being broadcast to millions of Canadians.
To my hon. colleague, this is not within Bill C-11, but can we be sure that this sort of disinformation will never be licensed again?
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Madam Speaker, is the hon. member for Haldimand—Norfolk aware that the bill consistently says that it is within the meaning of the protections of freedom of expression and the charter, both in the original Broadcasting Act and in these amendments?
I do not see, though I am very suspicious of the government, any way that the government is trying to control what we think or say under Bill C-11.
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Madam Speaker, certainly I am pleased with Bill C-11 so far, but there are things that trouble me within it, for instance what happened in amendments to Bill C-10, in the last Parliament, to Canadian ownership of our Canadian broadcasting. That seems to be a little bit more wobbly. There is a lack of clear support for smaller producers and smaller creators, but there is this other piece of work that we need to do on broadcasting, and that is what I will ask my question about.
When will we see the government provide a comprehensive framework legislation and funding to get the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation back to what it should be doing? Ever since it put Wheel of Fortune on air and competed with private broadcasters, I have felt that the CBC, as it should be, was slipping between our fingers.
When we talk of this country not being unified, I think of Peter Gzowski, who has passed away. He and Morningside used to hold us together in the same way that watching the news with Knowlton Nash held us together. Something has gone wrong with the CBC. I am a big fan, but I feel as though competing with private broadcasters has not been the way to go, and we need to get back to a CBC that is more like the BBC.
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- Feb/28/22 7:06:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, would the hon. Leader of the Opposition and her party consider adding to the list of actions we should take? Looking across Canada, we see the assets in this country bought by Russian oligarchs, the millions of dollars in real estate. Could we move fast to seize those assets to send a message to Putin and his cronies?
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- Feb/28/22 7:24:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. leader of the Bloc Québécois. I completely agree with him and I appreciate him having the courage to clearly say that we have no reason to support fossil fuels.
Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, published a new report stating quite clearly how close we are to the tipping point of a major planetary disaster. We are facing security threats and planetary threats.
I found a quote by Svitlana Krakovska, head of the Ukrainian delegation at the IPCC negotiations. She said:
She said, “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them,” and “We will not surrender in Ukraine, and we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate resilient future”.
I would like my colleague's comments on that, please.
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- Feb/28/22 8:29:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is an evening of remarkable consensus on all sides of the House in our support for Ukraine, its people and its brave and inspiring president.
I hate to find one small part of the member's speech to take up and ask him to rethink, but there was a notion, which he may not have meant to sound as strong as it did, that the government has spent too much time looking at things like climate change and needs to focus more on national security and the economy. Those are the same things: The climate crisis threatens national security and the economy, as a report that just came out today from the IPCC will further inform him.
I want to put to the member some words, which I think make it hard to say there is too much attention on climate change. They come from Dr. Svitlana Krakowska, who was the head at the IPCC delegation from Ukraine. Today she said, “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them.” She continued, “We will not surrender in Ukraine, and we hope that the world will not surrender in building a climate resilient future.” These are consistent and convergent goals, not competing ones.
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- Feb/28/22 10:12:38 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I asked this earlier but I would like the opinion of the hon. parliamentary secretary. Will the government be considering going after the personal assets of the Russian oligarchs, including massive homes and mansions and yachts?
I know where one mansion is. It is in my riding and I would like it to be seized.
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- Feb/28/22 10:33:54 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I have a quick question for my colleague in the Bloc Québécois.
Does he agree that a world war broke out between dictators and true democracies as a result of the disinformation that my colleague from Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan was talking about?
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- Feb/28/22 10:43:58 p.m.
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Madam Chair, a lot of proposals have been put forward on top of the very good actions the government has already taken. One that I think came up earlier today relates to Canadian pension funds that are invested in Russian operations. We would have to amend the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act.
Would the hon. member agree with me that we should do so, and quickly, to divest of Russian investments?
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- Feb/28/22 11:04:01 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I am going to leave aside the wisdom of wanting to send natural gas or any other fossil fuels to Europe, but ask if, on reflection, anything can be done quickly, given that with all the supports in the world, the Trans Mountain pipeline, which was originally booked for a $4.5-billion cost is now estimated to be a $21.4-billion cost and will be years behind schedule.
It is not a viable solution, is it?
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- Feb/28/22 11:12:43 p.m.
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Madam Chair, it is kind of a personal reflection from another context that has not been mentioned tonight, but I find it so extraordinary that President Zelensky is also a Jewish leader in a country that has been known in the past for anti-Semitism. I wonder if the hon. colleague would have any reflections on that.
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- Feb/28/22 11:23:25 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I echo the comments of the hon. member for Kildonan—St. Paul. It is certainly a wonderful thing when we can come together and unify around a common cause, which is to defend the people of Ukraine against an aggressor, which I do not think is the nation of Russia, but increasingly seems to be its leader. He is unconcerned with the fate of his own people as well as the people of Ukraine.
I ask our hon. colleague if he has any thoughts on how we can reach out to the people of Russia who are bravely standing up in peace marches to encourage them to fight against Putin.
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- Feb/28/22 11:25:20 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I rise tonight in a debate that is of historical importance because the world has changed. I know that is an overused phrase, but we are not in the same place we were a week ago, because Vladimir Putin is even threatening the use of nuclear weapons after an illegal, appalling, aggressive assault on a democracy that did not threaten him.
One can look back and ask what we should have done at different points in the history of the relationship of the former Soviet Union with the west. When the Soviet Union fell, I remember wondering in that moment, “Where is the Marshall Plan? What are we going to do for the former states that were once the USSR, Russia and its neighbours?”
Clearly they needed help. We did not offer. We were in a triumphal mood of western capitalist hegemony and we just abandoned the people of Russia. We essentially abandoned them to organized crime. Capitalism maybe, democracy not much, but there was a lot of plutocracy in natural resources. The people of Russia had reduced life expectancy in this time, and still do to this day. Their quality of life after they got rid of the USSR went down. That should never have happened. We should have been wishing for the peace dividend. We have been waiting for the peace dividend. We stopped putting so much money into budgets in the United States and all around the world for the military-industrial complex because we did not need it any more. There was no more USSR—but no, we found other enemies. We decided we did not need a peace dividend. We kept investing in war and we missed the chance.
This is probably the biggest chance we missed, because Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan started down the path of global nuclear disarmament, and here we stand as Canada: We have a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, and Canada is not even a signatory. We need to pay attention to this, but we thought that nuclear weapons were in our rear-view mirror. They are not. They are in stockpiles and in missiles, and we need to pay attention again to the threat of nuclear war.
In tonight's debate, which has been mostly very much on the same theme, I need to address the more than occasional misplaced notions that now we need to build more pipelines and that Europe needs more fossil fuels. If we listen to what the leaders in Europe and in Ukraine are saying, we do not hear these calls. In fact, the Energy Commissioner for the European Union, Kadri Simson, said this: The crisis in Russia means that we have to “boost renewables and energy efficiency as fast as technically possible.”
What is Germany saying? Germany just axed its biggest carbon project with Russia. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been cancelled, and what did Robert Habeck, the economy and climate minister, who happens to be a Green Party co-leader, say in Scholz's government? He said, “Now is the time to accelerate” and shift to renewables. It's being a petrostate and having dictators of petrostates that makes the world less safe.
Some of the big oil companies are saying they have to get out of Russia. Shell and BP have pulled their projects out of Russia, but look at Exxon. It is still in there. Let us ask Exxon in every way we can why it is still invested in Russian oil and gas. The French company, TotalEnergies, is also still invested in Russia.
The most compelling information about what should we do about fossil fuels in this crisis is to listen to the head of the IPCC Ukraine delegate, the scientist Dr. Svitlana Krakovska, who said while bombs were falling near Kyiv, “We will not surrender in Ukraine and we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate resilient future.” She added, “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them.”
I want to thank our Deputy Prime Minister. We are unique in the world that our Deputy Prime Minister happens to be an expert on Russia. She wrote the book Sale of the Century about the plutocracy and organized crime that took over the former USSR. I know that her background and the unique honour of being personally banned from Russia by Vladimir Putin equips her well to lead the fight to get the SWIFT financial resources taken away from Russia.
My time is up. I look forward to questions.
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- Feb/28/22 11:31:13 p.m.
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Madam Chair, to my hon. colleague for South Okanagan—West Kootenay, if President Zelensky was saying “Canada, send your oil”, and I have a really had time saying that, as I do not think I could say no to President Zelensky for anything I am so inspired by him, but that is not what he is saying.
It is not what Germany is saying. It is not what the EU is saying. It is what Alberta is saying, and I think taking advantage of a crisis to promote one's own product is not a good look.
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- Feb/28/22 11:32:37 p.m.
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Madam Chair, all of the commentary I have been looking up today on the German discussion about what to do now that it is cutting off Russian natural gas is discussions about the fact that natural gas that comes from fracking has the same carbon footprint as coal, so they are actually discussing whether in the short term they should use a bit of coal as a bridge until they get to renewables, which is the only reason they were going to use natural gas.
Obviously, the propaganda around natural gas has been very effective, because I know a lot of people honestly think that it is a low-carbon fuel, but when we look at the whole upstream, fracking and massive releases of methane, it is a climate killer.
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- Feb/28/22 11:33:51 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I thank my hon. colleague.
I think that is a good idea. The government has said that all options are on the table.
However, perhaps the government wants to keep the lines of communication open. The only reason to protect Russian diplomats in Canada is that they might be sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause. If not, they should all be sent home.
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- Feb/28/22 11:35:04 p.m.
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Madam Chair, there is what is realistic and what is necessary. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report just today reinforces that we do not have a choice. If humanity wants to survive within a climate that sustains our lives and human civilization, we do not have a choice. We have to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and the governments of Europe seem to see that this is an opportunity to move faster towards renewables, not to back into the fossil era.
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