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House Hansard - 126

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 14, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 126 - Nov/14/22
Mr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC)
  • Nov/14/22 6:40:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as we have heard many times in the House, the public safety minister claims that the government's use of the Emergencies Act was done at the request of law enforcement. What we have heard from this side of the House and what we have heard from the police of jurisdiction is that the police did not ask the government to invoke the Emergencies Act. We have heard today that CSIS director David Vigneault has said that at no point did the service assess that the protests in Ottawa or elsewhere constituted a threat to the security of Canada. Cabinet was fully briefed on all of these details, that police had not asked them to invoke the act and that there had not been deemed a threat to national security. However, the minister continues to mislead Canadians, spreading disinformation. It is incredibly troubling that the government, ministers of the Crown, would use an emergency for political gain. That is what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was an emergency situation. There was a new virus, and people did not know what was happening. One of the first things the government tried to do, in an unprecedented move, was to give itself the power to raise taxes and to spend money without parliamentary oversight for a period spanning two years. That is what it did in the face of an actual emergency. When we had an unprecedented situation, where Canadians had taken to the streets and the Prime Minister disagreed with what those protesters were saying, the government claimed that was an emergency and invoked never before used powers, claiming that it was done on the advice of law enforcement. However, whether it was the Ottawa police, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the military police, no one, no police service asked the minister or the government to invoke the Emergencies Act. The rest of the information around the discussions and the decisions were not the subject of the question I asked the minister. He claimed police asked him to invoke the act. We know that is not true. We have a convention of ministerial accountability. When a minister is misleading or untruthful, there is a convention that the minister resigns. Why has the minister not done that?
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