44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2022 11:00AM
- Nov/28/22 2:37:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government is still not being transparent about its decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.
CSIS told us that the convoy was not a threat to national security. We know the convoy did not fit the definition of a national emergency in the act.
The government claims to have based its decision on one single document, an obscure legal opinion that the Minister of Justice is hiding. As a lawyer, the minister might be bound by solicitor-client privilege, but his client, the government, is not.
Are we honestly supposed to believe the government would hide a legal opinion that provided ample justification for invoking the act?
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- Nov/28/22 2:39:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if the legal opinion fully vindicated the Liberals, they would have printed out hundreds of copies and distributed them to the media.
The Liberals saw those legal opinions. They read the act, they saw that they did not meet the threshold to invoke the act, but they invoked it anyway.
It was precisely to prevent this kind of thing that there was a shift from the old War Measures Act to the Emergencies Act. It was supposed to prevent any government from saying, “Just watch me”, and arbitrarily suspending individual freedoms.
Does the government realize that, in doing so, it has set a dangerous precedent?
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- Nov/28/22 2:39:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will describe the precedent we have set. It is a precedent of transparency, a precedent of rigour, a precedent that protected Canadians' lives and the Canadian economy during a difficult time.
Yes, we invoked the Emergencies Act in a focused, balanced manner for nine days. It addressed a situation involving a national emergency that threatened Canadians from coast to coast to coast, and we are proud of the decision we made as a government.
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- Nov/28/22 3:05:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the reality is that in the previous Conservative government, its members actually created a playbook to show how one could divide Canadians and committees, and play the kinds of games he is talking about.
What we saw at the Emergencies Act commission, which I believe is what the hon. member was referring to, was a government that faced a critical challenge in the country, where infrastructure was besieged and where Ottawas faced an illegal blockade. While the Conservatives were going and getting Tim Hortons and donuts for those people who were illegally protesting and blocking critical infrastructure, we were doing the hard work of keeping Canadians safe.
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- Nov/28/22 6:31:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the last time we visited this topic, we were talking, of course, about the Minister of Public Safety's claim that police had asked for him and his government to invoke the Emergencies Act.
We know now that this was not true. This is pretty consistent with the government. It is part of a pattern, a pattern of disinformation and a lack of transparency.
Since the minister made that false claim, we have heard the stories of the ArriveCAN app. We have more than $54 million spent on this app, which wrongly sent thousands of Canadians into quarantine. It could have been built for many orders of magnitude less, some say hundreds of thousands of dollars, some say, at most, $1 million, certainly not $54 million.
We cannot get the details. The Liberals will not even tell us who did the work. They will not even tell us who the subcontractors are.
While we wait for the government to slowly produce invoices for us, and as parliamentarians and Canadians pore over that data, I will note one of the hard-working staff members who has been on my team for years. He is tireless in his pursuit of the truth and answers and accountability, a great Canadian, Jordan Johnston from Victoria-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island. Everyone back home should be really proud of the work Jordan does. He was poring through the information the government gives us in drip, drip, drips.
We see a lack of transparency from the government at every opportunity. It promised in 2015 that it would be open by default, but it is anything but that, whether it is with the minister's false claims on the police requesting that the government invoke the Emergencies Act, which was really just used as a way for the government to punish people it disagreed with, or with the ArriveCAN app. It does not want to tell us which Liberal insiders got these contracts. It does not want to tell us who got rich on the arrive scam.
We are going to keep asking the government for answers. We are going to keep demanding accountability. It looks like it is going to keep misleading Canadians and providing disinformation to throw us off the trail of whose pockets are being lined and who is getting rich on these contracts.
My question to the government is very straightforward. It goes back to the promise it made in 2015. It speaks to the times we have heard the Prime Minister say that the story in The Globe and Mail was false, or the stories in the newspaper of late about what the Prime Minister said about having been briefed about foreign interference in our elections, when he will not tell us which 11 candidates were receiving cash from communist China. He will not tell us. He says those stories in the media are false.
The Liberals are not being straightforward with Canadians. We want transparency. Canadians deserve it. Conservatives demand it. When will the government finally be transparent with Canadians?
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