44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 1, 2022 10:00AM
- Dec/1/22 10:12:08 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the first petition I am presenting is from Canadians from across the country who are concerned about the Liberal Party of Canada's promise in their last election platform to revoke the charitable status of pro-life organizations, such as pregnancy care centres, which counsel women and save countless lives every year.
Revoking the charitable status of pro-life organizations is the first step to the politicization of charitable status in Canada. This would mean that churches, summer camps and other great organizations, like the Mustard Seed in Calgary, may have their charitable status put at risk. Therefore, the folks who have signed this petition are calling on the Government of Canada and this Parliament to protect the charitable status of pro-life organizations and to ensure that charitable status is not politicized.
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- Dec/1/22 10:16:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition I have to present comes from Canadians from across the country who are still concerned about the imposition of COVID-19 mandates.
They continue to talk about the restrictions that they have at the border. They are calling on the Government of Canada to work with the United States to increase cross-border travel. They are also calling on the Prime Minister to quit politicizing the use of vaccines and insulting Canadians who disagree with him. They are also calling on the government to protect the sacred duty of the Government of Canada to guard against discrimination and guarantee the freedoms of all Canadians.
Therefore, the folks who have signed this petition are calling on the Government of Canada to immediately end all vaccine mandates for truckers and travellers, and they call for a complete and total end, not just a suspension, of these mandates.
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- Dec/1/22 10:16:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the final petition I have to present today is from Canadians from across the country who are concerned about the recent announcements around changes to the chaplaincy service in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Folks note that there have been reports of slander even in the mainstream Canadian media against religious communities. The folks who have signed these petitions are calling on the Canadian Armed Forces to reject the recommendations in the final report of the Minister of National Defence's advisory panel, and they are calling on the Canadian government to affirm the rights of all Canadians, including Canadians in the armed forces, to chaplaincy and to freedom of religion.
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- Dec/1/22 10:16:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition I have to present is from Canadians from across Canada. They are concerned about the fact that Canada is the only G6 nation that prohibits the use of a health and safety device.
Given the highly damaging noise levels that come from firearm use, these folks are calling on the Government of Canada to allow these sound moderators. These are universally recognized health and safety devices that are criminally prohibited in Canada. The petitioners would note that sound moderators reduce noise pollution near shooting ranges in rural and farming communities and in areas used for recreational activities. The use of sound moderators facilitate increased humane husbandry of game animals, livestock and pets that are hunting companions. The hearing damage that does happen from these firearms is significant for many and is a public health issue costing Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars annually.
The petitioners are calling on the Government of Canada to empower Canadians to be responsible for their own health and safety by removing the prohibition on sound moderators here in Canada, and allowing the legal acquisition and possession of sound moderators in Canada. They call on the provinces and territories to amend provincial and territorial prohibitions as well.
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Mr. Speaker, I am frustrated with this bill given the fact that it does not lay out a lot of specifics. It states that there is a problem, and I think we all agree with that, but the government's solution to that problem is to hand the minister a lot of power so the minister can do amazing things. Is the member not concerned that the bill does not have the details we need to prevent some of the very things he was talking about?
I think about Ski-Doos and Bombardier, which is an iconic Canadian company. It has been the victim of one of these targeted cyber-attacks. I do not think there is anything in the bill that would have prevented that or held the people who perpetrated it to account.
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Mr. Speaker, I share a number of the hon. member's concerns, but I want to ask him about some of the major threats we have seen in cybersecurity. I am frustrated because the government has a lot of the tools already at its disposal to go after people who are threatening our cybersecurity. We have seen the shutdown of pipelines and major companies across this country. Rogers Communications was shut down.
Is the member not at all concerned about the lack of ability of law enforcement to chase down the bad actors that are pursuing some of this stuff?
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, a good friend of mine.
Today I get to address Bill C-26, and right off the top I will say that I think this is dumb legislation. Why do I say that? I say that because I do not think that it has attempted to do what it has stated it would do. Generally I find that this is another piece of legislation, probably the third or fourth that I have spoken on in this session of Parliament, where I am frustrated with the government in that it does not seem to do the hard work of governing.
Governing is a matter of balancing the interests and coming up with a statement or something that is clear. On the rule of law, we would anticipate the public and anticipate what the rules ought to be and then look at the law, read the law somewhere and say, “Oh, that is what we are supposed to be doing.”
Again, here we have a piece of legislation where there is a clear, identifiable problem. Canadians have seen a number of issues around the country and around the world where cybersecurity is under threat. Canadians are asking the government to govern, to set some parameters and guidelines as to what the expectations are around who gets to participate in cyberspace and how we ought to operate in cyberspace.
We see in this piece of legislation the classic attitude of “We're the government. We're here to help. Trust us. We got this.” We do not trust the government. Particularly, the Conservatives do not trust the government to do the things it needs to do. We have seen it try to hand out billions of dollars to its friends. I mentioned the WE scandal. We have seen it hand out money to its friends over at Baylis Medical. We have ample evidence of why we should not trust the government.
When it comes to cybersecurity, it is also an area where I do not trust the government. The government has been in power for seven years, and we have watched it drag its feet with an inability to come to a decision, for a whole host of reasons, around the Huawei situation. Was a particular company allowed to participate in the building of the infrastructure of our Internet architecture?
This is a major issue. We told the government that we don't think this Chinese Communist Party government-controlled company should be able to participate in the Canadian Internet infrastructure. We called on the government to ban the use of Huawei technology in our Internet infrastructure, yet it could not do it. It took the government years of dragging its feet, wringing its hands and doing a whole host of things. When the Liberals come forward with a bill like Bill C-26 and say to trust the minister and that they will get this right, I am sorry, but we do not trust the minister to get this right.
We have seen a number of security threats challenging our basic infrastructure. One we should really take note of, which was fairly recent, is the shutdown of a particular pipeline. We saw a dramatic spike in fuel prices across North America because the cybersecurity of a particular piece of pipeline infrastructure was not to the state that it should have been. This, again, comes to the fact around trusting the government to do its job, particularly this government.
One of the key roles of government in Canada and anywhere is the maintaining of peace and security, and we have a military, a police force and a judicial system for that. A growing area where we need to be concerned about peace and security is in cyberspace.
We should be able to feel that our property should not go missing. We should be able to own property, and it should be able to be maintained by us, all of these kinds of things. We expect the government to put forward registries so we can register our property, so that, if it goes missing, the government has a registry of it and we can use that to get our property back. It cannot just be expropriated from us, all of these kinds of things.
In the same way, that is increasingly a part of cybersecurity. The ownership of things in cyberspace, the ownership of websites and the ownership of even our own Twitter handles, for example, are increasingly things that are deemed to be cybersecurity.
The government seems to be lacking in the ability to protect Canadians' cybersecurity.
There is an iconic Canadian company, Ski-Doo. I do not know if people are snowmobilers, but I do enjoy snowmobiling, and Ski-Doo is an iconic Canadian company.
I do not know if people know this but, recently, Ski-Doo has been the victim of a cyber-attack and has lost control of its entire dealership network. Its own computer system has gone down. It has not been able to get it back. Somebody else has control of it now and it has not been able to get it back.
These are the types of things that I think are crucial. When one is going to bring in a bill that talks about cybersecurity, these are the kinds of things the government should be trying to keep secure. This is Canadian property. These are Canadian identities. These are Canadian brands. These are the things we need to ensure we can prosecute, that we can track these people down who are doing this kind of thing and that we can ensure cybersecurity.
I guess that is where I get a little frustrated with a bill like this. It says a lot of nice things at the top of it. The government comes here with a blanket statement around how it is going to defend cybersecurity, how cybersecurity is important and how we should all vote in favour of this particular bill. I imagine that we will.
However, the bill does not necessarily tell us what we are going to do. The banning of Huawei is not necessarily laid out in this. There are no criteria as to what the expectations are for companies to operate in this space, in terms of what they can be tied to and what they should not be tied to. It is just, “Trust us. We are the government and we are here to help.”
In addition, we have seen over the last number of years the opportunities for the government to put resources into law enforcement's ability to track some of this down. We can see changes to the Criminal Code, to ensure that some of these malware attacks or ransomware attacks could be tracked down and prosecuted here in Canada. This is a major concern for companies looking at investing in the world. They look at a country's ability to protect them from a cyber-attack but then also to prosecute those cyber-attacks.
I have a friend who works for the Calgary city police. He works in cybercrimes. He often works with police forces from around the world to track down folks who are using ransomware on Canadian companies.
He tells me they rarely, if ever, prosecute in Canada because our laws are so non-distinct around this that it is impossible to prosecute. Because these are multi-jurisdictional crimes, they will often take the prosecution of this to a jurisdiction that has better laws. He says he will work with 23 law enforcement organizations and they will bring a case in Europe, in eastern Europe or in Israel, because those places have much better laws to protect cybersecurity.
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Madam Speaker, I am hopeful that this bill would get us in line with other countries from around the world because, increasingly, Canada is left out of the discussions around cybersecurity.
We are no longer invited to some of the many important forums that do take place in battling this. If that is what this bill is attempting to do, to bring us in line with some of these other countries, I hope that is the case. However, I would note, I was talking to my friend with the Calgary Police Service who said that Canada is increasingly not the jurisdiction where they pursue these prosecutions because we are so lacking in good legislation to protect our cybersecurity.
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Madam Speaker, that is another prime example among many of why Canadians do not trust the Liberal government, whether it this particular case of accepting interesting money for an approval; the Huawei decision that needed to be made; the WE Charity scandal, where the Prime Minister was trying to give an organization $1 billion, an organization that had funded nearly half a million dollars to his personal family; or the sweetheart deal with Baylis Medical.
Over and over again, we see that the government is not trustworthy. When it comes forward with bills that do not have a lot of details and that just give blanket permission to cabinet ministers, I am sorry, but we do not trust it.
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Madam Speaker, yes, that is for sure the case. We are in support of more oversight. We would like to see a detailed bill, not a bill that just says that it would give the minister broad powers to do all the things.
That is not governing. That is not providing legislation. That is basically saying, “We love puppies. You should support us because we love puppies.”
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- Dec/1/22 3:05:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' malevolent spending is causing Canadians' lives to get more and more expensive. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has recently raised the alarms about costs going up and said that the massive spending plans have no transparency. We know that the Liberal government has tried to funnel funds to its friends at WE Charity in the past while the Prime Minister's own family was receiving almost half a million dollars.
On what date will the Liberals stop their malevolent inflationary spending?
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