44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 16, 2022 10:00AM
- Jun/16/22 10:16:31 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise today to present a petition on the climate emergency.
It states:
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C clearly communicates that the future of humanity is at risk without “rapid and far-reaching” changes...
We are almost exactly three years from the point when this place passed the motion, on June 18, 2019, that we were in a climate emergency.
The petitioners point out that any actions to suggest we understand this is an emergency cannot be detected from the current government response. In fact, the petitioners point out, Canada is on course to significantly overshoot the targets and to miss any chance of holding to 1.5°C. They call on all of us in Parliament and the Government of Canada to prioritize the elimination of fossil fuel emissions and to preserve a healthy environment. They call on us to eliminate single-use plastics and to commit to a rapid elimination of fossil fuels from our economy.
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- Jun/16/22 10:18:22 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the second petition deals with the subject of our electoral system.
Canada's electoral system has been unfair and difficult from its very inception. It is a first-past-the-post system. Under this system, our democracy is under threat.
The petitioners ask us to consider immediately putting in place a proportional representation system so Canadians will have a reason to know they can vote because every vote will count.
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- Jun/16/22 10:50:31 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. parliamentary secretary for setting out so clearly the legislation before us. It has obviously been delayed, and we obviously need to update the Canadian Judicial Council. I hope he will not mind if I stray from what the bill would do and ask if the government would be prepared to expand it to what judges do after they retire.
I am personally very concerned that Supreme Court of Canada judges, upon retirement, are available for hire to private sector lobby interests, and that the advice they provide is bought and paid for. I think of those who have worked for SNC-Lavalin, as an example. They really should be precluded from taking private sector work after leaving the bench.
I wonder if the hon. parliamentary secretary has heard of any current discussions of whether that might be a good idea.
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- Jun/16/22 11:17:33 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I appreciated my colleague's review of what he sees in Bill C-9, but I want to take this opportunity to ask him more about victims' rights. I was very much honoured to work with our former ombudsman for victims' rights, Sue O'Sullivan. We worked together in this place to try to improve the victims' rights bill. It fell short then. Not only do I think we need to appoint a new ombudsman for victims' rights, but we need to look at what we can do to make our own victims' rights code more robust.
I wonder if the hon. member for Fundy Royal has studied what they did in California with what is called Marsy's Law, which includes the kind of provisions we need here in Canada to protect victims.
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- Jun/16/22 11:22:40 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I have already agreed with my colleague from Fundy Royal that we need to deal more expeditiously with the vacancy for the ombudsman for victims' rights. However, in looking at this legislation, one must remember that of course judges in this country do not solely judge criminal cases. Obviously, the areas of law that end up before a judiciary are everything from contract law, environmental law and crimes that involve actual violence to property law, intellectual property rights and trade law. We could go on forever. These disputes go into many different areas of the life of a country.
Therefore, I would ask the member how he feels about these improvements and modernization of the Canadian Judicial Council.
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- Jun/16/22 12:15:06 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I am very grateful to my hon. colleague and neighbour, the hon. member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, for giving us the full background and history on how long it has taken for this bill to come before us. I also agree with him that there are urgent priorities in other areas of criminal justice.
There is one area of judicial conduct that I would love to know his opinion on, and it is a growing concern. Retired Supreme Court of Canada judges and other judges from high levels carry with them an enormous amount of clout. If they say something it must be true. After all, they are former Supreme Court of Canada judges.
I am sure my hon. friend will recall that two former Supreme Court judges were hired by SNC-Lavalin and were used to undermine the opinions and work of the very hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould when she was our attorney general and minister of justice. There has been some discussion, including from Wayne MacKay, a professor emeritus at Dalhousie law school, which I was privileged to attend, that we should consider ensuring that when judges retire they remain constrained by the same ethical rules of conduct that applied when they were practising judges. I wonder if he has any views on that.
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- Jun/16/22 12:31:26 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, the last member asked the question that was on my mind.
In the course of the debate this morning, I certainly heard the hon. member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke say out loud that we should get this bill passed quickly.
As we approach the end of a session, I do not know why we hold the whip over ourselves as though we do not get summer vacation and it would be so bad if we stayed and worked. That is something we are supposed to do, stay and work. Let us use the end of June momentum to suggest that Bill C-9 should get unanimous consent to pass it expeditiously this week.
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- Jun/16/22 1:12:50 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I normally do not want to see bills rushed through this place. The hon. member for Peace River—Westlock may know that I supported the Conservative vote on not rushing Bill C-11 through in the way that it was rushed through earlier this week.
However, in this case, this bill has had an unusual course. In the last Parliament, it actually started on the Senate side, so it has already been studied in the Senate. On top of that, of course, there were deep consultations with the Canadian Bar Association and others in developing the legislation. On many issues, Canadians are inadequately consulted, but maybe if it does come forward, I would hope that we do find a way to move it quickly, because it should have been passed probably about five years ago, if not 15 years ago.
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- Jun/16/22 3:10:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, regarding government financing of the TMX pipeline, in written answers to Questions on the Order Paper, the government is claiming that BMO and TD reviews make this project financially viable, but due to commercial confidentiality it will not release them. Previous TD reports on TMX were public. Why hide them now? It is entirely likely that the government plans to write off financial risks and debt and leave us financially exposed. If it is so commercially viable, why can we not see the reports?
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- Jun/16/22 3:35:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to add our thanks to Mr. Dufresne and also say that I share all the sentiments of the other members of this place in thanking Mr. Dufresne for his extraordinary service as our law clerk.
I also want to say that in the future, we know he will face enormous challenges. The new technologies pose such threats to our privacy. This is not a retirement but the beginning of a new and challenging future and we wish him all the best. Privacy rights are precious and we trust in him to protect them for us.
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- Jun/16/22 3:52:18 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I think we are enjoying today, in this debate on Bill C-9, a remarkable degree of unanimity. To the extent that there is hesitation, it is not unreasonable, obviously. This is a piece of legislation that many of us have not studied before, but it is not contentious. It is updating a system that has been overdue for an update, to streamline it and make it more effective. I think my hon. colleague will agree that there are many areas that we want to see streamlined in this country. Let us get at one of them.
My question is more of a comment. If we do get the opportunity for unanimous consent to get Bill C-9 out of here and done, we know how much that will help us get on to other issues, like the urgent opioid crisis, the urgent climate crisis and many other issues. Let us get Bill C-9 passed, if we possibly can. If it comes forward for unanimous consent, I urge the hon. member to consider just saying “okay”.
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- Jun/16/22 5:00:14 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise here today on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Nation. Meegwetch.
I really had hoped to be allowed to ask the member for South Surrey—White Rock a question, and I will tell members why, because I think they might enjoy this.
The hon. member for South Surrey—White Rock mentioned that she used to practise law, and I used to practise law. However, the member was actually part of the governing party when we were both first elected in 2011 when she helped me with a family law case. I just wanted to put that out there.
One of my constituents had a grandchild pretty much kidnapped by a non-custodial father who took the toddler to New Hampshire. I was going crazy, as were the mother and other members of the family, trying to figure out how to get the baby back. Speaking of judges I do not like, I would mention the family court judge in New Hampshire who thought that a court order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia for full custody of the little girl was something out of a Cracker Jack box that the judge was free to ignore. It was quite the case. The hon. member for South Surrey—White Rock gave me some very good advice, which helped me get the baby back. She is now 16 and living with her proper family, and so it all came out quite well.
I want to talk about Bill C-9, which would reform the Canadian Judicial Council.
As I was speaking of a U.S. judge, it reminded me of this whole experience when I was at Dalhousie law school. We had one professor who challenged us on a case one day. We spent hours trying to figure out the rationale for the judge's decision. It made no sense to us. Obviously, the judge had ruled it, and so we had to figure out the legal reasoning, because there must be legal reasoning. It was a contract case and it made no sense. After about an hour of us tearing our hair out and putting forward solutions, our professor asked, “Is it permissible to ask if the judge was bribed?” The judge was, which is why the decision made no sense, and he was thrown off the bench for it.
This was an episode for us in real-life judicial reasoning. Sometimes the judge is bribed. Now, I do not know if this has happened in Canada, but it might happen sometime, and this is why we need a judicial review process. This particular process has been in place since 1971, and there are good and real reasons that it needs to be fixed.
There is another real-life case that I found explanatory. For the general public who may be watching this debate today, it has been a little dry, so I figured I would give a real-life example, which some members may know.
The judge is from the Quebec Superior Court, Michel Girouard who, I think 13 days before being elevated to a being a judge, was caught on video buying cocaine. This is similar to a Netflix true-crime story. Judge Girouard was challenged in 2010 when there was a complaint to the Canadian Judicial Council.
It is pretty clear that when a judge is caught on video buying cocaine from one of his clients who was then before the courts that we really do not want that particular gentleman on the court. If we want to talk about something that brings the justice system into disrepute, that would be it.
The case started in 2012 and did not end until 2021, when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear Judge Girouard's appeal. At that point, he had managed to use every possible legal avenue to fight the finding that he was not qualified to be a member of the judiciary. He fought it, and for those of us who are trained in law can imagine, there are many ways to be creative and litigious, and this gentleman was very litigious. Not only that, under the previous law that we had, the people of the province, the taxpayers, had to pay all of his legal fees, because he was a judge and it was under the judicial complaints process.
I will point out one thing that Bill C-9 would do. We obviously learned a lot from that experience, and we do not want to have someone who is challenged dead to right who should not be a member of the bench, able to keep exploiting every possible appeal and then charge the taxpayer for the legal fees. Also, there should be a way of limiting how many accesses to judicial review through the federal courts someone in this situation should have.
Bill C-9 would do something quite straightforward that I have not mentioned yet today. If a judge going through this process wants to find ways to appeal, they are all in Bill C-9. The only court that a judge who is being challenged in this way can get to is the Supreme Court of Canada, at the very end of the process. The judge cannot keep finding a judge somewhere to hear some aspect of a complaint the judge is fighting.
Just to make it clear, under this legislation, there would be complaints, a screening officer, a reviewing member, and they can create certain kinds of review panels and hearing panels together, but they are not clogging up the regular court system. The judge that is the subject of the complaint is precluded from going to any other court, but at the very end, has the right to an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The law also gets rid of the idea that the people have to pay for the legal costs of a judge. The opportunity to appeal to the courts under the new process, proposed section 158 of Bill C-9, specifically bars any legal challenges or other forms of judicial review. This is a very helpful change.
Everything about the way the bill has been constructed has been the subject of a great deal of consultation due to cases, and there have not been a lot of cases. Let us face it, in the 40 years since the Canadian Judicial Council was created, as far as I could find, and it was the same figure that the hon. member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke used, which means it is probably right, was that there were only 14 reviews in the last 40 years. This speaks to a very high level of ethics and integrity within our judiciary.
However, if someone does have a problem, there are very large stakes in getting this right. We do not want frivolous complaints from, for instance, people who have lost cases in front a judge and that disaffected previous litigant having the right to make a judge's life hell, to pursue them and subject them, in social media or wherever, to unfair charges. The judge subject to a complaint clearly has rights and has to be treated fairly. That side of getting the balance right is well reflected in Bill C-9.
The other aspect is we do not want public confidence in our justice system to be shaken by having someone serving as a judge who clearly does not meet the standards of ethical conduct, the way it is expressed in this new bill. The ones that used to be there are infirmity, misconduct, failure of due execution and, this is the new one that is relatively traditional, the judge is in a position that a reasonable, fair-minded and informed observer would consider to be incompatible with the due execution of judicial office.
In the time remaining, I want to mention that all of us here should think about the benefits of this new approach. The system we are currently under really has a binary choice: The judge is off the bench or the judge is on the bench. This new system says that maybe the judge needs some training, some counselling or a warning. There is a different approach here, again something short of the kind of misconduct that says the judge must leave the bench altogether, that allows for help.
One can imagine these are stressful positions. Mental health issues affect everyone in every profession, so there could be conduct that is questionable, but, on the other hand, overall the person is a good judge. Bill C-9 would allow that judge in that circumstance to be treated fairly, but it also protects the public and the taxpayer from judges who would do absolutely anything to stay on the bench, even if, as in the case I cited, they have been caught on video buying cocaine.
With that, I hope we can expedite the passage of this bill. It has been around even longer than some members have mentioned, because it was Bill S-5 in the last Parliament in the Senate and died on the Order Paper when the last election was called. Let us get this bill passed.
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- Jun/16/22 5:11:20 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, we have a responsibility to look at every piece of legislation, but we are spending an entire day on a piece of legislation that nobody can oppose and on which nobody can suggest the need to get it to committee for amendments.
This is a bill that was essentially drafted by the Canadian Bar Association after numerous studies looking at the Canadian Judicial Council and with the full engagement of the existing Canadian Judicial Council, so it is an excellent piece of legislation that has been well drafted.
I agree with the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith. It has been almost three years to the day since this Parliament passed, on June 18, 2019, the motion declaring that we are in a climate emergency. We have yet to act as though we understand that we are in an emergency, and I think the more we talk about anything else, the closer we go to a place that is a point of no return for our own children.
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- Jun/16/22 5:13:02 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I completely agree. It is a good bill. It is well drafted and clear. It is the result of a decade or more of study and reflection. I think we have a duty to do whatever we can to adopt this bill as soon as possible.
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- Jun/16/22 5:14:56 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, it is clear that we need to have a system that gives each and every Canadian and Quebecker confidence that the system is fair and free of racism. We currently live in a society where systemic racism is found in every institution, group, and province, because racism is built into the system, even though not everyone is racist.
That is why we need to do more.
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- Jun/16/22 7:02:46 p.m.
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Madam Chair, we have complex crises and emergencies: the climate crisis, the pandemic, an energy crisis, the war. All of them are affecting food insecurity. When so many complex systems present themselves in crises, there is more we can do than provide food aid, as his department can do. How do we think strategically to actually confront these multiple crises?
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- Jun/16/22 7:18:07 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I really appreciate the work of my hon. friend from Foothills in making sure people understand how important it is to have fertilizer for our farmers who grow our food here. We also know that the silos in Ukraine are still full because they have been unable to off-load them. If they are able to grow anything, they need places to store it.
In terms of the complexity here, and I know we may not see eye to eye on this, but it needs to be said, the climate crisis has exacerbated the food crisis. To pull back on climate action in Canada when our own efforts are so inadequate to what is needed will worsen the food security problem and worsen our military threats. I put to the member the words of one of Ukraine's leading scientists, Dr. Svitlana Krakovska, who said that the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis have the same root cause, which fossil fuels and our inability to move away from them.
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- Jun/16/22 10:02:50 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I totally agree that the climate crisis and the food crisis are connected, but not in the way that I think my friend believes.
The more we ignore the urgency of the climate crisis and the more we perpetuate some role in our future for the use of fossil fuels, the more we exacerbate a growing climate crisis that drives increasing drought. It means that the U.S. prairies and Canadian prairies will face drought. South Saharan Africa will face drought. This drives more food insecurity and drives more geopolitical instability, which drives more migration.
We have to find solutions that work for all the crises we face and drive for solutions that work for them all at once. We cannot pick one over the other.
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- Jun/16/22 10:14:04 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I want to start by thanking the hon. member for Vancouver Granville for sharing his time with me.
I recognize that we stand on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
This debate has been encouraging in that we recognize that there is a looming food crisis and food instability globally, but also dispiriting in that we seem to think we can bite off little chunks of it as an incremental set of issues within one silo called “food”. We are, in fact, facing multiple crises that influence each other and must be dealt with together.
I just pulled some clippings I have. I remember when the pandemic was first getting up and running and I flipped this article I found in The Guardian to the person who was then our Minister of International Development. She was also on it, saying she was getting to the World Food Programme. The article is from The Guardian, April 2020, and the headline is “Coronavirus pandemic 'will cause famine of biblical proportions'”. It quoted at length from David Beasley of the World Food Programme. That is where we started from: the pandemic causing huge risk of global food insecurity.
Then, of course, the climate crisis made all those issues worse, as it has from the beginning. I mean, the Arab Spring was caused by the geopolitical instability that created the wars in Syria and Libya. That came from prolonged drought, which meant that there were food breakdowns. There was a food insecurity crisis, and it created war. Now we have climate change galloping and galloping, and persistent droughts. Just this last season, we saw droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, droughts through the U.S. prairies, droughts through the Canadian prairies, and now we have an overlay of war.
I want to stop for a moment and say something about David Beasley, because I think it is really interesting. I got to know him through the U.S. presidential prayer breakfast. He is a Republican. He is a former Republican governor from the state of South Carolina. He lost his seat as governor of the state of South Carolina when he changed his position on the question of whether the Confederate flag should fly above the capitol. When he took down the Confederate flag, he lost his seat. As I may have mentioned, as a very dedicated Christian, he has put his talents where they are of most use, that being as the head of the UN World Food Programme. He knows what he is doing.
It is urgent that we save lives, and we do not save lives through dribs and drabs. Canada must commit at least the $600 billion that the World Food Programme says we need.
However, I will turn to another source right now. The question is, how do we, as humanity or as politicians, deal with more than one scary thing at a time? Are we capable of doing it? The word I want to use is “polycrisis”. It comes from Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, who now runs a program called Cascade Institute in collaboration with scientists around the world. I just want to read something from the Cascade Institute website, because I think it helps us:
Humanity faces an array of grave, long-term challenges, now often labeled “global systemic risks.” They include climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, widening economic inequalities, financial system instability, ideological extremism, pernicious social impacts of digitalization [such as cyber-attacks], mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced migrations, and an escalating danger of nuclear war. Compared to humanity’s situation even two decades ago, most of these risks appear to be increasing in severity and at a faster rate....
With one minute left, how do we address polycrises? I suggest that we do not address them as if it is normal business. It is not status quo. This requires that when the G7 meets later this month, when NATO meets, or whenever world governments meet together, they stop thinking that we are going to get out of this with incremental in-the-box thinking. We have to get way out of our boxes. We have to treat the global food insecurity crisis as an emergency and try to save tens of millions of lives while we can. We have to address it as part of the attack on Ukraine and defend Ukraine, but also ask Ukraine to take the mines out of the harbour in Odessa and tell Russia to take away its blockades because grain must move across borders.
We have to treat this as a geopolitical emergency and as a crisis of the human family. We can only do it all together.
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- Jun/16/22 10:19:36 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I often find that my friend from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa is more aware of what happens on the land in the place where he is rooted than on that of other members. We cannot separate them. The global warming crisis, the climate emergency, drives the water crisis. They are inextricably linked.
We have to set a date and start moving away from fossil fuels. It will be hard. It was hard for Quebec to shut down the asbestos industry, but if we do not plan to shut down the fossil fuel industry in the near term, we will not be able to protect our water, we will not be able to preserve the possibility that farmers can plant crops that have a chance of surviving and we will create mega-droughts.
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