44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 27, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, we are less than an hour into debate on this important government bill on Afghanistan, debate that is, in my view, a year and a half too late. It shows the partisan political approach of the Liberals to immediately try to throw this important debate about Afghanistan over the side and shift to something else.
Beyond that, I would challenge the member to actually be aware of what is happening in the foreign affairs committee. The study that allegedly I have been filibustering has actually finished now. We have been through four hearings at the foreign affairs committee on that study, and I would invite the member to listen to some of the very thoughtful and insightful witnesses. We heard some witnesses from western NGOs. We also heard witnesses from throughout the developing world who shared their particular perspective on these issues.
I would welcome the member to actually come to the committee, as I have never seen her there before, to review the blues, listen to the witnesses and maybe be aware of what is actually happening at committee before she tries to divert an important debate on Afghanistan with something else.
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Madam Speaker, I have been waiting for this day for more than a year. We are finally debating a bill that should have been introduced a long time ago. Last year, I had the honour of sitting on the Special Committee on Afghanistan with my colleagues from different parties, some of whom are with me today. I was one of the vice-chairs.
It was at the meeting on February 7, 2022, already more than a year ago, that I had the honour of asking the witnesses one of my first questions. This is the first time I have done this, but I am going to quote myself, because I think it is important. This is what I said: “They said that the Criminal Code might need to be amended so that NGOs on the ground could operate in Afghanistan without fear of being accused of funding terrorism. In my opinion, this is a very important subject that we need to address. What are your thoughts on this...?”
I said that on February 7, 2022. Since then, I have asked that question every chance I get. I even introduced a unanimous consent motion in the House on February 22, 2022, to allow non-governmental organizations to do their work on the ground. That was over a year ago. The motion was defeated by the Liberals, and now we find ourselves debating this bill in March.
I put that question to the organizations themselves and to the various ministers who appeared before the committee. Surprisingly, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship all replied that they agreed with me. That was in meetings of the Special Committee on Afghanistan.
One year later, we can finally debate a topic that everyone agreed on over a year ago. Democracy is great, but sometimes it takes a while.
It will come as no surprise, then, that I was quite happy to hear that such a bill was finally being introduced and to hear the government announce that it was going to amend Canada's Criminal Code to allow humanitarian aid to flow again and to allow NGOs to do their work without fear of prosecution. I hope that is what happens.
This bill is further proof that the opposition can spur action in Quebec, Canada and around the world. After applying pressure to the government together with my friends from the Conservative Party and the NDP, I am delighted with this huge victory. The Bloc Québécois is always pleased to help. I believe that all my colleagues from the other parties are also pleased to help. That is the reason we ran for office in the first place.
Now, we must expedite the process because it has already taken too long. The Bloc Québécois can be counted on to fast-track this bill because the people of Afghanistan need help now. I say “now”, but they have needed our help since last winter when we were debating this issue. This is a useful bill that will help us make progress in the area of humanitarian aid.
The caveat is that we need to work quickly, but not too quickly. We have three hours to debate this bill, which will then be sent to committee. There are things we can discuss and on which we can agree in order to improve the bill. I will first touch on the more technical aspects. The government tabled Bill C‑41, an act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other acts, on March 9, 2023.
Currently the bill is at second reading. As it is currently written, the Criminal Code does not include any exemptions to facilitate the delivery of these essential activities in regions dealing with terrorist groups. As I mentioned earlier, this bill amends one of the Criminal Code's anti-terrorist financing offences to facilitate the delivery of much-needed international assistance, immigration activities, and other assistance in geographic areas controlled by terrorist groups. In other words, these amendments would create a new authorization scheme that would allow those that provide humanitarian or other critical assistance, to apply for an authorization that would shield them from the risk of criminal liability if the terms and conditions of the authorization are respected.
We have to understand that the Taliban, as the current de facto authority in Afghanistan, is likely to receive revenue from any payments needed to support humanitarian aid.
Under the Criminal Code, any Canadian or person in Canada making or authorizing such payments would risk contravening the Criminal Code's counter-terrorist financing provision. That is what we have now.
Despite the uncertainty, most organizations have continued to respond to crises around the world, but problems have grown exponentially since the Taliban, a listed terrorist entity, took control of Afghanistan in August 2021. In that regard, the scale of the humanitarian and economic crisis that the Afghan people are now facing cannot be overstated.
On paper, Bill C-41 rectifies this inability to make exceptions for organizations that are trying to deliver humanitarian aid on the ground. The bill is the proposed solution, and some aid groups support it.
However, what is wrong with this approach is that there are already many legal provisions that the government could strengthen rather than imposing a whole new set of legal hoops for humanitarian organizations to jump through. There is also the fact that humanitarian aid workers have said that the current amendments create more red tape for them, as my colleague said earlier.
For the sake of clarity, here is what is in this bill. Under this regime, the following people would have the power to grant an authorization to NGOs: the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, the Minister of Public Safety, and delegates with the power to grant authorizations. That is a lot of people.
These authorizations will shield applicants from criminal liability in the course of certain activities, including the delivery of humanitarian aid, when they would otherwise be at risk of violating the Criminal Code. It is really about time.
When deciding whether or not to grant an authorization, the Minister of Public Safety will examine applications referred by the Department of Foreign Affairs or the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship and will take into account their assessment of the application.
In other words, the goal is to determine whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages in terms of the risk of financing terrorism. This is done through a system of information sharing between departments to conduct the security review that must be done prior to granting authorization. However, all this remains to be seen, because it does not mean that the authorization will be granted.
What happens if the authorization is not granted? Let us look at that together. Under this authorization regime, in the event of a negative response from the Government of Canada, the bill provides for the possibility of judicial review if authorization is not granted.
There is legal precedent in Canada that supports the assertion that because of the life-saving purpose of humanitarian aid, it cannot be considered criminal to provide such aid, even if a terrorist group may in some way benefit from it.
This does not mean that humanitarian organizations are shielded from anti-terrorism legislation. It means that they should not be presumed to be violating the Criminal Code simply because they operate in places like Afghanistan.
The problem is that Bill C-41 turns that presumption on its head. It uses an approach based on mistrust, one that requires humanitarian organizations to prove their abilities before they are allowed to respond to emergencies, and no one knows how long that process will take. One thing we do know, however, is that approval would involve at least two departments and up to nine security or regulatory agencies.
I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I myself have had numerous opportunities during my time in the House to see how slowly the Canadian government bureaucracy moves. Bill C‑41 provides for applications for authorization to be processed by the Government of Canada within a reasonable time. That does not necessarily instill much confidence.
Despite the positive advances in this bill, what worries me is the number of interventions required between departments and the impact that such a bill could have on humanitarian organizations. It is no secret that, when it comes to processing times, I get the impression that the federal government does not spend much time checking the clock.
The situation for the NGOs and above all the Afghan people, the men, women and children who are suffering, is deteriorating before our eyes. Time is running out.
When the time came to create this committee, a Conservative motion proposed that the Special Committee on Afghanistan be created. It was not going to be adopted because there was no consensus in the House. If the Conservative motion had been presented as worded, it would have been defeated.
The Bloc Québécois came up with a possible amendment to the proposal to create the Special Committee on Afghanistan, adding a requirement that the committee focus not only on the fall of Kabul, the federal government's failure to support the Afghan people and what happened before the Taliban took power, but also on what we could do now and in the near future.
We entered into a dialogue with our Conservative friends about this amendment and we managed to get everyone in the House to support it. Then the opposition parties voted for the motion to create the Special Committee on Afghanistan. It is important to highlight this, because the committee's mission is to find out what is being done now and how we are helping people who are experiencing suffering that we in the House will never experience. Things are horrible there. Women and parents are being forced to sell one of their daughters in order to feed their other children. These are the kinds of horrors we heard about in meetings of the Special Committee on Afghanistan. That is why we wanted to create it, to come up with recommendations and to help the Afghan people as quickly as possible.
We have known about this problem for over a year, but today the government comes along and tells me that it was complicated to draft. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Public Safety, the Minister of Immigration, everyone in the Liberal Party agreed that there is a problem and that we need to do something about it, but they said it takes time. The Minister of International Development also got involved, saying that we need to do it, but that it will take time, so we need to give them time. We are being told it is normal for this to take so much time.
There is a question I ask myself when I get up in the morning. As I often mention, I have a Post-it note on my bedside table that says, “Who do you work for?” When I open my eyes, that is the first thing I see. I work for Quebeckers and the people of Lac-Saint-Jean, but I also work for everyone who needs help around the world. It is part of my files, but I am also fundamentally human and I am a representative of the people. We have a duty and a responsibility toward people who are suffering.
Now the government is telling me that it was too complicated and that it is understandable that it took so much time. I will give an example. When the pandemic hit the entire country, I think the government acted fairly quickly to implement special aid programs. It only took the government two weeks to create the Canada emergency response benefit and subsidies for businesses when people were losing their jobs. Now, however, the government says it is understandable for this to take a year and a half, even though children are dying in Afghanistan, women are selling their children and Canada is unable to deliver humanitarian aid because of the Criminal Code. Come on.
I am rather appalled by that. I understand that I have plenty of Liberal colleagues who are acting in good faith, who want to help and who agree with us on this subject, but I think there is a problem somewhere in the machine. It is not right for the government to be able to create aid programs really quickly when people are losing their jobs in Canada but not when children are dying in Afghanistan. I think that is unfathomable and disgraceful.
I am going to end with that because I do not want to get too wound up, and this is still good news, after all. However, now that we have wasted so much time, we need to get Bill C‑41 in place. How likely is that that the bill is well written and we can all agree on the amendments coming from the humanitarian NGO community, all together and not in committee?
What I am asking is that the parties come to agreement through informal conversations before sitting in committee and that everyone agrees quickly. I am hoping that there will be no debate in committee and that the amendments that are agreed upon are voted on quickly. Let us not waste any more time; we have wasted far too much over the last year.
I will say it again. The first question I asked with respect to this issue was on February 7, 2022, in the Special Committee on Afghanistan. The motion received unanimous consent, so I tabled it on February 22, 2022. What day is it now? It is March and April is coming. There was snow in the Parc des Laurentides, but it is sunny here. It is spring. It should not have taken this long.
Let us make sure that from now on it moves as quickly as it can and that this bill is as well crafted as possible to allow our NGOs to do the work on the ground, to help women, men, children and the Afghan people through one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet.
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Mr. Speaker, there were 80 witnesses who came before committee to testify in regard to this piece of legislation. That is 80 witnesses, yet the only one Conservatives will quote is Michael Geist. Could this member quote one of the other 79 witnesses, please, just to entertain us?
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Mr. Speaker, again, this is the problem, which is that they are not listening to those witnesses. How many of those—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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Mr. Speaker, this is the frustrating thing about this bill: No one is listening to the witnesses who gave testimony. If there were 80 of them, how many said that this is a rock-solid bill and we should approve it? Why would the government not then bring it forward for unanimous consent? This bill doing is dividing Canada, not bringing us together.
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Madam Speaker, it is extremely concerning. This bill spent a lot of time in the Senate, and a lot of senators had real concerns. They brought forth an incredible number of amendments to the government, of which the government did not accept all, so here we are today. The government is not listening to witnesses who have testified at committees both in the House of Commons and in the Senate. It is not listening to senators and it is not listening to Canadians.
We have to wonder what truly are the Liberals' objectives. They are wanting to give incredible authority to the CRTC, and we do not even know what that authority would be and what the criteria would be. All of this is extremely concerning.
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