44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 30, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, if my colleague agrees with that, he has a weird way of showing it. I see the Conservatives attacking the New Democrats because they come here trying to make a difference. On some things we collaborate; on others we do not and we disagree, which is fine. However, to the Conservatives the word “collaboration” makes no sense. What they prefer to do is jam things, filibuster, listen to each other and clap for each other all the time. They think it is a good thing to shut down democracy like they are doing now. It is totally wrong.
We have to move forward. This bill has to move forward. This bill will go to committee and will have hours of discussion and witnesses. I will go there and speak about the importance of it and how it allows collective bargaining to help smaller media news outlets and regional news outlets. I will talk about how this will translate into fair agreements between the tech giants and media outlets across the country. I will talk about the importance of the press. I will talk about the importance of the press for our democracy and the importance of a strong, free and independent press, because that is what bill C-18 is all about. That is it.
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Madam Speaker, when I was in opposition in the third party, I indicated that there is a time when governments need to use time allocation as a tool to pass legislation. We have before us today, and have witnessed for a number of months now, an official opposition that has absolutely no intention to allow legislation to pass. It does not take very much for an opposition party to prevent legislation from passing. As I said when I was in opposition, at times the government has to use time allocation as a tool.
Would my colleague not agree that, given the strategy of the Conservative Party not to pass legislation and to even filibuster legislation that it supports, the only way we can pass this legislation is if we use time allocation, something the Conservative Party used to vote for extensively?
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Mr. Speaker, being inspired, I would ask if there would be unanimous support to see this legislation go through, given the fact that all political parties supported the principle of the legislation and supporting the principle would only see it go to committee stage. I would encourage that sort of enthusiasm for support on Bill C-18.
The point I was trying to get at is that Bill C-18 is important legislation that would have a profoundly positive impact. The minister has done an incredible job, through the ministry, of gathering and sharing thoughts and ideas and getting the information necessary to bring forward legislation that would make a difference and would be a true reflection of what Canadians wanted back in September of last year.
We also need to recognize there is the expectation that the government will bring forward legislation and that opposition parties will participate and be engaged. We often see that, especially from members of the New Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Bloc. At times we will see it from the Conservatives. It is not too often, but maybe at times.
The bottom line is that what we have witnessed in recent months is a great filibuster on whatever the legislation might be. That is the reason we needed to bring in time allocation on this legislation. The best example I could probably give would be Bill C-8. Members might remember Bill C-8 as the fall economic statement legislation that was just recently passed. That is an excellent example of the manner in which the Conservative Party will go out of its way to stop legislation from passing.
Bill C-8 was all about supporting Canadians through the pandemic. Bill C-18 is all about protecting a critical industry here in Canada. It is an industry that needs legislation of this nature. Canada is not alone. There are other countries that have moved in this direction and recognized the need for national governments to bring forward legislation. In fact, the official opposition recognized and seemed to support what was taking place in Australia on this issue. It has made reference to that.
I believe Bill C-18 is—
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Mr. Speaker, I am sure I will be given the time back.
At the end of the day, I believe we have better legislation than Australia. I understand the Conservative Party supports what is taking place in Australia. There is more transparency in Bill C-18, so one wonders why the Conservative Party would not see the value of it and not only support the legislation but allow it to ultimately pass as opposed to continue to put up some form of a filibuster.
At the end—
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Madam Speaker, to be very clear to the residents of Regina—Lewvan, the Conservatives do not want to pass Bill C-18. They would like to put up as many speakers as they can in order to filibuster the bill virtually endlessly.
The government brought in time allocation this morning, and when the minister stood up, we saw a number of Conservatives stand in their place to say they wanted to have more debate time on Bill C-18 and to ask why we were preventing them from having more debate time. Then when they were provided more debate time on the bill, which we are supposed to be debating right now, what did they do? They prevented debate knowing full well that it will be coming to a vote because time allocation was brought in.
The Conservatives really need to understand what they are doing. I do not think they understand it. If they want more debate time and the government provides more debate time by sitting later in the evening, why not be happy with it and accept it? Why not allow for orderly proceedings? House leaders could sit down and opposition members could say they understand we have to pass legislation. Then we could have some time for this debate, maybe an extra few hours in the evening, and work it out in negotiations by talking about it, while acknowledging that there is a responsibility for the government to pass legislation and a responsibility for the official opposition to contribute to the debate in a positive, constructive way.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to this concurrence motion. Those watching at home might be wondering what a concurrence motion is. A report has been tabled by a committee in the House. Very rarely would there be a concurrence motion like this to vote on a report. It is, in my opinion and as the member for Winnipeg North indicated earlier, nothing more than a tactic by the Conservatives to jam up more House time.
What makes this particular concurrence motion even more remarkable is this. We start off with the rarity by which reports are dealt with in a concurrence motion, but this one is not even a report from the current ethics committee. This is actually a report from the previous committee. I am sorry, I should not say that. All of the work was done by the previous committee. It developed the report, put together the report, studied it, questioned the witnesses and put it forward. All the current ethics committee that exists in this Parliament did was retable that report.
We start from a place where it is very rare to have a motion like this on a report. To make it even more bizarre, it is not even a report that the current ethics committee dealt with. It did not interview the witnesses. It did not ask questions or form the recommendations. It is going off of work that was done before. People might ask themselves why it is doing this or they might become skeptical when we accuse the Conservatives of using this as just another political opportunity. It is very clear, when we look at the games they are playing, that they are willing to go to any lengths to make sure that we cannot get government legislation through.
For those watching, what we otherwise would have been discussing right now is Bill C-18. Bill C-18 is a bill that the Conservatives, at least in their election platform, support. It is a bill that would provide supports to news outlets throughout our country to make sure they can continue to be independent. Rather than doing their job and following through on commitments they made during the election campaign to Canadians, they see no political win or political gain out of this particular bill because the vast majority of members in the House, if not all, already support it. They are looking for blood, quite frankly, and they do not see any here. That is why they say, “Rather than spend time talking about Bill C-18, a concept that we agree with, why not go after something that we can actually attack Liberals and individual Liberal members on?” That is exactly what we are seeing here with the introduction of this concurrence motion on this report that has been tabled by the committee.
One of the comments that I found very interesting, and I was surprised to hear from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, of all people, was when she questioned the member for Winnipeg North as to why he was using time to debate this. That criticism or question might hold water if nobody else in the room was speaking to it, but Conservatives are. They are using the time, burning the day, by debating and talking about this particular motion. The question then becomes: Why would we not use our designated slots to speak to this and to tell Canadians what is going on?
I find it quite interesting that we would be accused of wanting to speak to this just because we do not want to talk to it. That is like saying that we should not be speaking to it because we do not want to be talking about this anyway. Of course we do not want to be talking about this. We want to be talking about Bill C-18, but the reality of the situation is that through their political games the Conservatives have put us in the position of having to debate this right now. We are clearly going to use that opportunity to debate it and show Canadians what is going on right now. I would expect, to be completely honest, that question to come, in a very cynical way, from my colleagues across the way, but I was surprised to hear it from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. Maybe she has had an opportunity to reflect on it and thinks differently of it now.
I would like to talk about this report specifically. I realize there are 23 recommendations in this report that were put forward by the previous Parliament's ethics committee. It put forward these recommendations. When one starts to read the recommendations, it becomes very clear how incredibly focused they are on individuals: the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's wife and people who work in the Prime Minister's Office.
We heard a Conservative member talk earlier about wanting to get certain staff to come before the committee. One of the deep criticisms was that the government would not allow staff to go before the committee to testify. Instead, the President of the Treasury Board, if I remember correctly, offered to go to the committee to speak, but the Conservatives, the opposition, were not interested in that. They wanted actual staffers to go there.
I find that very concerning. I realize that Conservatives have no issue with attacking individual people. For the slightest bit of political gain, they will take down somebody's career. We already know that. They did, after all, for the first time in over 100 years, drag someone before the House, to the bar of the House. It had not happened in 100 years, and it had never happened to somebody who was outside of the government. The Conservatives dragged before the bar the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada. That demonstrates how willing they are to take down anybody if they think they will get the slightest political gain out of it, and that is exactly what we are seeing happen here today.
When the minister who is responsible for these staffers says they are the leader, they will take responsibility, they will go before committee and they will answer the questions, that shows what a leader does. Was that enough blood for the Conservatives? No, of course it was not. They wanted to go after the staffers, the individuals who are employed by the minister responsible, which, coming from the ethics committee of all places, is extremely unethical.
In any organization, there is always somebody who is going to take responsibility for those decisions, somebody who will be the accountable one. The minister wanted to do that. Were the Conservatives and other opposition parties interested in that in at committee? No, they were not. They wanted staff. They wanted individuals who do not have the same power to defend themselves, who do not have a voice in this place and who do not have a voice in the public to be the ones to go in and be berated for two hours.
The minister was not interested in doing that, which should not come as a surprise to anybody in this House. It certainly should not come as a surprise to Canadians, especially when Canadians witnessed the Conservative Party, propped up by the Bloc and the NDP, drag before the House of Commons a public service individual, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada. Never in the history of this Parliament had that happened, and when it was done before that, it was never an individual in his position.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, they are heckling me now. I can always tell when I hit a nerve. I can always tell when the truth is starting to sink in. When someone is calling them out, we can tell, because that is when they start to heckle, and that is exactly what they are doing right now.
When it comes back to this particular report and the committee work that was done, Liberals did participate in this committee at the time. They participated in the committee. They helped studies with the witnesses. They helped to create their own recommendations. I know that three recommendations that came from the Liberal benches, which I do not see in the same form in the report, were never adopted. I would like to read out what those recommendations were.
The recommendations from the Liberal members do not mention individuals' names or look to berate people. They look to set and develop policy. The recommendations, which were in the dissenting report, were that the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics conduct, at an earliest opportunity, a full statutory review of the Conflict of Interest Act with appropriate recommendations.
It seems like a legitimate thing to do. It seems like a legitimate thing to do from a policy perspective if we are is generally interested in trying to fix perceived flaws in our system. That is what we would do, not talk about all these recommendations that they have in here referencing the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's wife and various other people, as well as how certain information needs to be turned over immediately. The reason I say that is that colleagues will recall that the Ethics Commissioner was already doing his own study on this issue.
Everything that the committee was demanding in the form of recommendations through this study was for no purpose other than to grandstand and put all the dirty laundry of everybody out in public, regardless of what their involvement was. They are attempts to do that. That is all this was. We know that is because the Ethics Commissioner is not going to do this to the same degree as the official opposition wanted the committee to do it. That is all they are interested in.
The Ethics Commissioner was already investigating this, and it was as if the committee said, “No, no; we're better at this. We should do all this work instead of the individual who has been hired to do this in a fair, non-partisan, unbiased way.” That is exactly why this report has been tabled again.
As I mentioned previously, this is not a report generated by this particular Parliament at the ethics committee that sits now, but one from the previous Parliament. They basically just grabbed the report and retabled it so that the Conservatives could continually do this over and over and over.
The second recommendation that the Liberals put forward in that dissenting report was that the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics conduct at the earliest opportunity a full statutory review of the Lobbying Act, with appropriate recommendations.
Again looking at it from a policy perspective, the Liberals were saying that they recognize there is concern out there, that it is possible there are flaws out there, and that this is how they would address it. They would look at the Conflict of Interest Act and look at the Lobbying Act and at ways to make them better and strengthen them. That is what proper policy from a committee should look like, not these arbitrary demands that are being made by the opposition for no purpose other than to try to shame individuals and try to keep a scandal going as long as they possibly can. That is all they were interested in.
The third and final recommendation made by the Liberal members in the dissenting report was that the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics refrain from conducting parallel investigations with any independent office into the conduct of members of Parliament, either directly or by proxy.
That last recommendation was the Liberal members saying, “Hold on a second, as this ethics investigation is already ongoing by the individual who has been appointed to look into this stuff. Maybe it is not a good idea that we do this at the same time.” It would be the equivalent of a judge reviewing a case in court while a parliamentary committee is trying to do the exact same thing on the side. They are trying to influence it. They are trying to highlight and bring everything possible to the surface so that they can try to attack individuals and personalities. They do this time after time.
This brings me back to where I started in the five minutes I have remaining. What we are seeing here today is part of a pattern. It is part of a pattern that has been developed lately by the Conservative Party of Canada, a pattern of continually trying to put up any possible roadblocks. They are moving concurrence on a report that a committee in this Parliament did not even write. They are not even doing the work before trying to move the motion here. They are just grabbing a report from the last Parliament and retabling it here so that they can move concurrence on it. We are seeing this time and time again.
As indicated by the member for Winnipeg North on a number of occasions, the Conservatives have complained, saying they want debate, that they want to debate the issue. They say, “Why won't you let us debate these very important pieces of legislation?”
Then the government says, “Good point. Maybe we do need some more time to debate.” Motion No. 11 comes along, basically saying, “Let us sit later into the evening.” What did the Conservatives do? They tried to filibuster that. We had to move closure on that motion, the motion to try to set our work schedule. That is how incredibly obstructionist they have been.
Earlier today we saw a Conservative member stand up and move an amendment to the concurrence motion. He was just trying to create another vote. He was trying to burn more time. That is what is happening over and over in here. This is not about actually debating policy.
If Conservatives wanted to debate policy today and had a genuine interest in advancing the objectives of Canadians, they would be debating Bill C-18, something we know they care about because it was in their platform, and something they had said they are pushing forward on.
However, it appears as though the Conservatives are only interested in moving it forward if they form government. As we saw, they put it in their election platform and they ran on it. We get here and say, “Let us bring this idea forward.” It should be a fairly easy one to get through, because we know the Conservatives support it, but every single time we bring it up in this House, they put up a roadblock like this to prevent us from actually talking about it.
The Conservatives are only interested in delivering for Canadians if they can be in the driver's seat. That is not how democracy works. Democracy works, in Canada at least, with people being elected from 338 parts of the country, coming together and figuring out the best way forward. If we cannot do it through consensus, which by default we rarely ever could, then we vote on it. Then we move on. We recognize that we played our role in that democratic process, that we helped advance the lives of Canadians for the better. We accept the roles that we have been given in the House.
Canadians will notice that the Liberal Party said that we accept the role we have been given in this House. We accept the role of being a minority government. What did we do? We looked to other parties. We went to the NDP to see if it wanted to work with us to advance issues for Canadians. The NDP accepted its role. It said yes. It had an interest in advancing issues for Canadians and wanted to get together and work together. That is how we got a supply and confidence agreement.
We know what the Bloc's objective is. It is interested in being its own country. I guess, by default, it is going to be a lot harder to work with them for the interest of all Canadians, but at least we know exactly what its position is. We know exactly where it is coming from. The Conservatives, however, are literally rudderless right now. Who is driving the ship over there? I would absolutely love to know. There is no way that they can continue to operate in this way. They do not even know what their role in this House is.
I have no problem voting against this concurrence motion and I have given my reasons. I have referenced the report, but this is not what we should have been talking about today. We should have been talking about Bill C-18, an issue that would genuinely advance the interests of Canadians and make our country more independently focused for news organizations and outlets throughout the world. Unfortunately, we are not there, because the Conservatives are once again playing games.
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