44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 2, 2022 11:00AM
- May/2/22 12:13:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I, too, am disappointed. However, I am disappointed in the behaviour that is being shown by the Conservative Party in this House, obstructing, at every single turn, every single piece of legislation. We are doing this in order to facilitate debate, in order to allow the hon. members the time in which to speak.
We spent 12 days debating Bill C-8. Among the things the bill would do is to help farmers get their tax credit on the carbon tax, the price on pollution. There would be billions of dollars for rapid tests. There would be ventilation for our schools. We all know a lot of parents who are concerned because their kids are going to school in the pandemic context and they want better ventilation for their schools. We had 12 days of debating a fall economic statement that includes measures to aid the lives of human beings. Can they imagine what will happen when we get to the budget? We are doing this to facilitate debate because of the obstructionist tacts by the Conservative Party.
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- May/2/22 12:19:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is an example of the Liberal-NDP marriage, the NDP in the corner, carrying the water for the government, when it should be debating and acting as the opposition, fighting the government.
We are prepared to work, and we have been working. What the minister has set up as holding up debate on this is actually debating, doing our job as a democracy, speaking against bills when we think we should be against bills. Canadians are expecting us to be against this terrible budget, yet the government says that is obstructing Parliament. It is called debate. That is our job. This is from the Minister of Justice. It just baffles me that he would come with that as the foundation of his argument.
I would ask him one simple question. This is going to have major effects on committees. How many committee meetings is he planning to stop with Motion No. 11?
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- May/2/22 1:28:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, once again, it gives me pleasure to rise and speak to government Motion No. 11.
However, before I get into the specifics of it, let me just address a couple of issues that came up during the closure debate earlier. It was a very vigorous debate. I want to address one issue. There were several claims, both from the government side and the NDP side, which is the same side, about members of the opposition not wanting or being willing to work. Let me state unequivocally that Conservatives are here to do the business of the nation. We want to work. I have no problem with extending the hours. I really do not.
My profound concern, and I stated this in my interaction on Friday, is about the staff. We have seen, over the course of the last couple of years, that staff have been tested. The measure of the staff has been certainly tested around this place. We have heard about the interpreters, about the health challenges that have gone on. We have seen an increase in occupational injury risk for the interpreters. We are concerned about that work-life balance.
For two parties that espouse and say they are for the working class, they are not showing any empathy or compassion for what families are going to have to deal with, with respect to this motion, specifically the timeline for the extension of those sitting hours. It is causing me, as I said the other day, tremendous concern that with just one minute's notice, the government can come, with the NDP's help, and say they want to extend the hours. What is that going to mean for the staffing around this place? What is that going to mean to committees, when we start transferring resources to deal with some of these late-night sittings?
My staff in the House leader's office just informed me before I got up to speak that two committees already today are going to be cancelled: the Afghanistan committee and the medical assistance in dying committee. The meetings that were scheduled for today are going to be cancelled because they are going to have to allocate or transfer resources from those committees to the extension of the House sitting hours.
The government has said, and I heard the justice minister say, that this happens all the time. This happens, actually, once the agreed schedule is applied. All of the House leaders get together and we discuss. In fact, we are in the process of discussing the schedule for next year. Within the last two weeks, there are asterisks in the schedule. Those asterisks indicate there will be an extension of hours. It is agreed to. It is understood. However, what this does is basically give the government last-minute appeal. It can impose late sittings when it wants to.
We saw some news coverage over the weekend of the government saying that this was not what it was going to do and that it was going to give enough notice. If it is going to give enough notice, why would it put it specifically in this motion that it could do it up until 6:30 p.m. of any given day? I would suggest that this is the intent of what the government is going to do.
Cynically, I can think of only one reason this would happen: to keep the opposition parties, both the Conservatives and the Bloc, on their toes. This means that every day and every night, we are going to have to carry debate. We are prepared to do that. This is not a rubber stamp factory where multiple billions of dollars and pieces of legislation are debated and proposed, and where amendments are proposed at committee. We are already seeing the committee work being affected, but this is not a rubber stamp factory. There is a constitutional obligation on the part of the opposition to hold the government to account. That is our constitutional obligation.
With this motion, the Liberal Party and its Prime Minister are getting exactly what they have always wanted, with the help of the NDP. I will talk about the NDP in a second. With the help of the NDP, the government and the Prime Minister are going to get an audience, not an opposition. That is what he has been hoping for over the past six and a half years, and now with the NDP in the government's hip pocket, they have it.
Going back to the debate before, I just cannot believe the hypocrisy of the House leader of the NDP. For six and a half years, I have sat in this place and we have all sat in this place, those members who were elected in 2015, and how many times did the opposition House leader of the NDP talk about the fact that the Prime Minister was worse than Stephen Harper when it came to time allocation? He said it many times, and yet, the hypocrisy is that he stands here today and blames Conservatives for obstructing. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They talk about Bill C-8 as their benchmark piece of legislation that they look at. Bill C-8 was introduced on December 16. The House rose shortly thereafter. We sat in our constituencies and worked there for six weeks. We did not come back until January 29. It received second reading on March 1, went to committee and came back on April 1. There was a time allocation motion that was put in on April 4, and the NDP refused to support the government on time allocation. For them to sit here and blame Conservatives for obstructing that bill is disingenuous and, I would suggest, misleading the House, because maybe someone should hold the NDP House leader to account as to why he did not agree to that.
Here is the problem. When we look at the motion and we look at all the things that are in the motion, as I said earlier, it gives the Prime Minister exactly what he wants: an audience, not an opposition.
I appreciate the ruling of the Speaker this morning, but the reality is that, in previous circumstances, the issue of quorum was let go for non-votable matters. It was agreed to by the House leaders. Anything to do with take-note debates or emergency debates, we would allow quorum not to be called as part of an agreement. What the government is doing with this is basically imposing a sledgehammer to say that the Liberals are not even required to show up. The NDP is not even required to show up. In theory, what we could have is opposition-side members debating themselves on pieces of legislation that the government is proposing, asking ourselves questions and comments when the Liberals are not even required to be here.
As I said the other day in question period, they can effectively be sitting at home in their PJs and their fuzzy slippers watching reruns of This Is Us and those socialist documentaries that they covet so much. That is what they could effectively be doing without the constitutional obligation of having a quorum call in the House.
Who does not want to show up to work? Why are they putting that in this motion? Conservatives will be here; I can guarantee that. With this motion and no quorum call, it means that the government and the NDP do not even have to show up to debate their own legislation. How ridiculous is that?
I talked about the “without notice...to adjourn the House”. This is egregious, in the sense that what the government is proposing with this particular part of this motion is that it can prorogue Parliament without proroguing.
I will take us back, as I said earlier, to the WE Charity scandal. When the heat got really hot on the Prime Minister, he did the very thing he said he was not going to do in 2015, and that was to prorogue Parliament.
Let us picture this scenario. There is a situation where we have a scandal brewing. We have the RCMP potentially deciding to investigate the Prime Minister on whether he granted himself permission for that vacation to that luxurious island that cost over $200,000. What if, with regard to the Winnipeg lab document scandal, we were able, through committee or some other means, to have those documents produced and they show that the government did something? What if we had another SNC-Lavalin scandal or any other scandal that gets too hot for the Prime Minister to handle? One minister of the Crown, just one, can decide to shut this place down. Can members imagine that?
It is stunts like these that cause further erosion in Canadians' respect for our democratic institutions and the faith they have in our democratic institutions.
When a government of the day, with a fourth party in its hip pocket, can decide that it is going to seize control of this place and do whatever it wants, how can Canadians not be cynical of the institution? How can they not be cynical of our Parliament? How can they not be cynical when they are witnessing right in front of them, as we all are, a decline in our democracy? There are measurements used that determine that decline. We have seen that over the course of the last six and a half years, and we are further seeing an erosion in the decline of our democracy as a result of stunts like this by the government. It can shut it down with one minister of the Crown proposing it. Yes, it will come to a vote. Surprise, surprise: I wonder what that vote will be when it has the NDP in its hip pocket. There is a lot to be concerned about in this.
What we are seeing, and perhaps Motion No. 11 is further evidence of this, is the shady, backroom deals that are going on here. The government House leader does not even give me the courtesy, nor does he give the Bloc Québécois House leader the courtesy, of saying what is going on. What do the Liberals do now? They do not go to the official opposition or the third party in this place. They do an end-around to the fourth party, say what they are going to do and ask if it will support them. There are shady, backroom deals: exactly the thing that further diminishes the confidence that Canadians have in our democracy.
As far as the standing order changes, I am really appreciative of the ruling that the Speaker made earlier in having a separate vote for that. What the government was doing, with the help of its NDP partner, again led to this cynicism and further erosion. The Liberals were putting a poison pill in the motion to force the opposition to vote against it. I stood here the other day and said very clearly that Conservatives unequivocally supported call to action 80 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to make sure that we had a stand-alone day for truth and reconciliation. I was very glad for the Speaker's wisdom in that decision. The Speaker saw right through what the government was trying to do: putting in this poison pill, probably under the suggestion of its partner in the NDP, to force the Conservative Party to vote against it as an omnibus procedural motion. I am glad the Speaker did that, because we will be supporting that particular part of the motion when it is carved out of this omnibus motion and will vote in favour of national day for truth and reconciliation.
Of course we all know the history of the Prime Minister on this one. Last year, what did he do? He did not get involved. He went surfing in Tofino. The schedule for the Prime Minister even said he was having private meetings. It did not give a true indication of what was happening. What was happening was that, on the most important day in this nation, he went surfing in Tofino. How dare the Liberals use this poison pill for political purposes to further wedge, further stigmatize and further divide Canadians, especially those who supported the Conservative Party in the last election and who understand the importance of truth and reconciliation, because it was Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper who started that commission from which those recommendations came.
I am obviously profoundly disappointed. I am really concerned about where this place goes from here. I really am. The government was elected with a minority. The NDP was the fourth party in the last election and now, between the two of them, they are going to be able to control every aspect of this place. What about those voices who elected a minority government? What about those people who said they wanted the government to be held in check? They wanted the government to be held to account, they wanted transparency from the government, they wanted to make sure that multi-billion dollar bills that the government proposes, these big-money appropriation bills, deserve the level of scrutiny that they should. What about those voices? That is not going to happen anymore because of this alliance, this coalition, between the NDP and the Liberals.
I said earlier the impact this was going to have on committees. What about the finance committee? What about the ethics committee?
What about other committees, such as important committees on Afghanistan and the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act? How are they going to be impacted? The resources of the House will now go towards evening sessions, further putting in jeopardy the ability not just of those committees but of parliamentarians on the opposition side and Canadians in general to get to the bottom of what they are looking for. When I go back to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, we have already seen that the government is not going to allow cabinet confidentiality. What other documents are not going to be available to the committee because the committee is not going to be able to sit?
This is a government that ran in 2015 on the principle of being accountable and transparent by default. How times have fallen. The hypocrisy of those words is being shown by the government. This is a government that is anything but transparent and accountable. This is a government that has undermined the very role of this institution of Parliament: the constitutional obligation of the opposition parties to hold the government to account, not to basically ram legislation through when it sees fit.
This is not a rubber stamp factory. This is a place for vigorous debate. It is a place where the government is held to account. It is not a place where, as much as the Prime Minister wants it to be, he gets an audience. This is a place where he gets an opposition. Conservatives will work as long and as tirelessly as we need to in order to hold the government to account. We are going to expose this coalition unholy alliance, and these backroom shady deals that are being made by the NDP-Liberal government.
We are going to work as hard as we can to make sure it is held to account, that there is transparency and there is accountability on behalf of every single Canadian who did not vote for them, but voted for a minority government in this Parliament.
With the little time I have left, the opposition party is proposing what we consider to be reasonable amendments. Again, I thank you, Mr. Speaker for your judicious, intelligent ruling this morning to carve out those pieces that are poison pills meant to obstruct the opposition and in fact make the opposition vote against something that none of us would ever consider voting for. I do appreciate that. I am going to move the following amendments.
I move:
That the motion be amended
(a) in paragraph (a),
(i) by replacing the words “a minister of the Crown may, with the agreement of the House leader of another recognized party” with the words “a House leader of a recognized party may, with the agreement of the House leaders of two other recognized parties”,
(ii) by replacing the words “but no later than 6:30 p.m., and request that the ordinary hour of daily adjournment for the current sitting or” with the words “request, with at least two sitting days' notice, that the ordinary hour of daily adjournment for”,
(iii) by adding, after the words “a subsequent sitting”, the words “, other than a Friday,”, and
(iv) by adding, after the words “a day when a debate pursuant to Standing Order 52 or 53.1 is to take place”, the words “or a day appointed for the consideration of business under Standing Order 81(4)(a)”;
(b) in paragraph (b),
(i) by deleting subparagraph (i),
(ii) by deleting, in subparagraph (ii), the words “quorum calls or”, and
(iii) by deleting, in subparagraph (iii), all the words after the word “Crown”; and
(c) in paragraph (c),
(i) by replacing, in subparagraph (ii), the word “35th” with the word “15th”, and
(ii) by deleting subparagraph (iv).
He said: Mr. Speaker, I am hopeful for these reasonable amendments I am proposing, which take into account not just how this place functions and how properly it should function but also take into account, as I said at the onset, the concern that we have for the lives of the people who work here, and how they are going to be impacted.
I am not specifically referring to members of Parliament, but to the work-life balance of the staff who make this place operate, whether it is the clerks, the administration, the bus drivers, the security officers, the food services branch or any others, and not least the translators, who have seen tremendous injury and impact. I do not understand why the government would want to expose them to that.
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- May/2/22 3:44:20 p.m.
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moved that the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented on Thursday, March 31, 2022, be concurred in.
He said: Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an honour to be able to stand in this place and enter into debate on such important subjects.
Let me first state that I will be splitting my time with the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman.
Once again, we find ourselves in this place, debating what has become the trend of the Liberal government, the trend of corruption, lack of ethics and failure on the front of integrity time and time again.
I rise today not to talk about ancient history, as the Liberals would often like to suggest the Conservatives want to talk about. I rise today not to talk about something that does not have direct impact on Canadians. I rise not to simply have character assassinations as in question period we heard the Liberals suggest is all Conservatives were worried about. I rise today to talk about the integrity and the trust that Canadians need to be able to have in their institutions.
When it comes to the report and the amendment that has been brought forward by my hon. colleague, we have an opportunity as parliamentarians to once again discuss the fact that there has been a significant erosion of trust in our public institutions within the country. I would suggest, and the reason I make this suggestion is that I hear it each and every day from constituents, that there has been a significant erosion of trust in our democracy within the country.
I rise today to speak to what is known as the question of conflict of interest and lobbying in relation to pandemic spending, something that most Canadians would know as the WE Charity scandal, where the Prime Minister awarded a massive contract to his friends.
I had the honour during the first session of the last Parliament to sit on the ethics committee in the midst of what was an unprecedented time in Canadian history, certainly, and in the world, facing a pandemic, and the fact that supports were needed. Conservatives did support, contrary to what the Liberals would like to suggest, some of those supports that Canadians needed so much.
What we saw transpire over the year 2020 was that there was an unprecedented level of, obviously, lobbying that resulted in a massive contract being awarded to an organization with very close ties to the Prime Minister and his family and other central members of the government.
What was supposed to be $800 million to go toward students finding summer employment during what was a very challenging year for all Canadians ended up being bogged down in scandal. Not only is there the question of ethics and integrity, but certainly, I would suggest, the government met the definition of corruption. I would suggest today in this place that it did show itself to have an unprecedented level of corruption, whether in this program or the many other scandals that we have seen from it.
We saw that Canadians suffered. We saw students not getting the supports and resources that they need. We saw the fact that, as I mentioned before, questions were being asked, with more Canadians questioning each and every day the fact that they do not know if they can trust our institutions. They do not know if they can trust our democracy. On and on it went.
There was a prorogation, even though the Liberal Prime Minister promised to never prorogue Parliament. Well, he broke that promise. We all know what that means. He broke that promise. The timeline for breaking that promise, I might add, and I know this authoritatively because I was on the committee, was within a number of days of when documents that very well may have been very revealing of the Prime Minister's relationship with this organization were supposed to have been submitted.
The Prime Minister participated in a hundreds of millions of dollars coverup. The Liberals' defence quite often was that it was not $800 million, that it would have only been about a $400-million scandal. Well, $400 million is beyond the imagination of most people, the number of dollars that have been wasted by the government in terms of corruption.
Let me first thank the committee. It did get back to work. I was involved in the first session of that Parliament. Something the Liberal government certainly does not like is the fact that it does not have a majority, although it seems to have bought one here more recently. It was faced with the fact that the committee did decide to do good work. The Liberals filibustered that committee for countless hours. I know because I participated in many of those hours of filibuster. They tried to teach committee members Latin. They had a whole litany of excuses. It will go down as one of the most unprecedented coverups in Canadian history.
We saw that the committee did good work. It brought forward 23 recommendations. A number of months ago, I moved the motion in the ethics committee, which I now have the honour of sitting in again in this Parliament, to retable the report, the good work that the committee did, along with those 23 recommendations, the significant research and testimony and even the admissions of contempt. In a parliamentary democracy, contempt is a significant allegation, but there were admissions of contempt on the part of the Prime Minister.
Last year, at the end of the summer of 2021, we saw something which unfortunately is not that uncommon. We saw the Prime Minister flip-flop. He misled Canadians on a whole host of issues. He stood in this place, with his integrity being shown and then a few months later called an election. He promised not to do that. The definition of the word for that is not allowed to be said in this place, but Canadians know what it is.
It is an absolute shame that we find ourselves in this situation once again. Now we have seen over the past couple of weeks that once again the integrity of our Prime Minister is showing. This time it is not simply a contract being given to friends of the Prime Minister, but the possibility of criminal charges.
I do not know if the Prime Minister simply goofed up when he admitted to the fact that he did not give himself permission to absolve himself of criminal charges, but that is a big deal. The fact is that we have a Prime Minister in this place that seems to have admitted to criminality.
In the last couple of minutes of my speech, I'll mention that I hear from Canadians often. They ask questions. They ask how he can get away with this. They ask how we can have a government with the litany of scandals that litter the path of our Prime Minister as he jet-sets from coast to coast to coast. It could be for surfing vacations or for friends to get lucrative government contracts or the fact that during a pandemic there was significant evidence of sole-source contracts for ventilators, as one example, that were never delivered. There are serious questions that Canadians need answers to.
Canadians need answers to these questions because there has been a significant erosion of trust, not to mention all of the political and policy differences. Coming from a rural east central Alberta riding, I can say there are a lot of policy differences. I could go on and on about those things.
At the heart of it, it should not be about politics when it comes to the integrity of our democracy. Over the course of the next number of hours, I hope we get to once again seek clarity for Canadians, but not for political interests or so-called character assassinations as the Liberals simply like to pivot to when they are afraid to answer questions.
All of us have the responsibility to ask the questions when it comes to ensuring that tough questions are asked of our elected officials, in this case the government and the Prime Minister as the leader of that government, that the answers are given and that accountability can be brought back to this country, because I am fearful that the damage that is being done to our democracy is putting it in great peril.
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- May/2/22 5:04:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, to the hon. House leader of the official opposition, I am torn about the debate. This happens to be, by the way, for everybody else who was elected May 2, 2011, our 11th anniversary. We have had a lot of late nights in June. This is the first time we have faced the prospect of staying until midnight in May and in June. We do good work that way, but it is not the best.
Does my hon. colleague from the Conservative Party agree with me that it would be far preferable if we adopted the rules we have that prohibit members from reading speeches? Then we would have fewer people prepared to keep debating forever and ever on a point—
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- May/2/22 6:03:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we know in particular when it comes to bills like Bill C-8 that members of the Conservative Party want to talk a lot, that they have a lot to say.
Can the member possibly understand why the Conservative Party would be against this, when this would just give those members even more opportunity to speak to very important pieces of legislation? Would he not think, given the number of speeches the Conservatives have given and the interest and passion they have in debating in this place, that they would not welcome with open arms the opportunity to debate even longer?
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- May/2/22 6:04:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, one of the things that really impressed me when I had the opportunity to tour the Scottish Parliament was that they said they could speak any language that they want in the Scottish Parliament. It does not have to be a language of Scotland. They can speak any language from anywhere in the world in the Parliament of Scotland. Part of the reason they are able to do that is they decide as a parliament months in advance what bill they are going to be debating and on what day. They get together and the parties talk about how many people from their respective caucuses want to address a bill, and then they develop a schedule that allows members to speak to the things they want to speak to and it allows for decisions to happen.
We are so far away from a culture where we can sit down in good faith with parties that disagree on things and come up with a professional way of doing business on the floor of the House of Commons that we are going to continue to be in these kinds of debates again and again. What we need to see is a little more goodwill on all sides, so that we can develop an appropriate and professional culture of decision-making in this place.
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- May/2/22 6:28:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, he asked about the government not being able to bring forward the important pieces of legislation. Why can we not bring them forward? It is because we have been debating Bill C-8 for 12 days. Fifty-one Conservatives have spoken to it, along with five Bloc members, two Greens, two NDP members and three Liberals. The Conservatives are clearly stopping at nothing to make sure that legislation cannot get through. That is why this is important.
I would encourage that member, who shares an opposition lobby with the Conservatives, to walk over to his colleagues and ask why those guys are holding up the fall economic statement. It is May of 2022, and this is the economic statement that was to provide support for Canadians from the fall of last year.
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- May/2/22 6:30:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, at stake immediately in Bill C-8 are the teachers, who have supports in the bill that should have been passed months ago so they could realize those supports. They cannot because the Conservatives are literally holding up this piece of legislation as long as they possibly can. They will go on and on.
What is at stake are some of the other pieces of legislation that we need to move forward on, such as modernizing the criminal justice system to remove mandatory minimums. I realize that is something the Conservatives are against, but the point is that this government has an interest in debating that. They will have their time to do that. Other pieces would be on modernizing the Broadcasting Act and the Official Languages Act. These are all very important pieces of legislation that we know we want to discuss and get passed in some form or another by the end of this session in June.
Now we are just saying that this is fine. If the Conservatives want to talk endlessly, we will give them more opportunity to do that. That is what this is all about.
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- May/2/22 6:32:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I really enjoyed the member for Kingston and the Islands' speech because he highlighted a lot of the hypocrisy that we have seen in this House. My question to him is about the fact that the Conservatives claim they want more time. They complain about closure motions. They say they want more time to speak, yet we are debating a motion that would allow them to have as many speakers as they need to have on any given issue.
Perhaps the member for Kingston and the Islands could comment about the fact that this motion provides more opportunities in this place for democratic debate to happen and why he thinks the Conservatives are so afraid of that.
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- May/2/22 6:34:20 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to use the first quote the member made in my next householder just so the folks back in my riding know that the Conservatives appreciate how much I love debating. In all seriousness, I appreciate the comment. That last bit was in jest.
Of course we do not want to restrict or prevent debate. That is what this is about. I do not understand where the member is getting this notion from, because the previous question he asked me was very similar to this: it was about restricting debate or somehow preventing debate from happening. Somebody has to explain to me where the Conservatives are getting this notion. This motion is about extending the opportunity by working later into the evening, giving more opportunity to speak so more people can get up and more people can ask questions. I do not understand where the member is getting this from.
I appreciate his comment about my love for healthy debate. I certainly do enjoy it. I also enjoy hearing what members from across the way say. That is what this entire process is about. I enjoy being a part of it.
To the member’s question specifically, I do not think this is limiting debate. I think it is providing more.
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- May/2/22 6:47:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague across the way, as much as I try to have respect for what he has to say, is actually completely wrong. He is not only misleading Canadians who are watching this, but this has never been done. This type of motion, the removal of quorum and the autopilot on government legislation has never happened in the 16 years I have been an MP.
As I said in my speech, these kinds of things happen on motions before this House that do not have a question being put, like an emergency debate, a take-note debate or autopilot on other procedures where there is no vote, no money being spent and no bills being passed.
The difference now is that the government is so afraid of not only dealing with and debating with the Conservatives, but obviously it is afraid of its own backbench if it is not even sure it can muster quorum and keep 20 people here to listen to what Canadians have to say.
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