44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 15, 2023 10:00AM
- Jun/15/23 2:58:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, an unsealed justice department indictment in U.S. court revealed that a Canadian in Vancouver was coerced back to the PRC. It has been eight months since the first reports about Beijing's illegal police service stations. Beijing brazenly admitted to five of these stations, and another two have been identified. These stations are being used to coerce people back to the PRC.
The minister has indicated these stations were shut down, but they have not been. When will they be?
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- Jun/15/23 2:59:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that same indictment also revealed that in New York City last summer, PRC agents tried to coerce someone in New York City to come to Toronto for more intensive interrogations. The implication is that Beijing is comfortable using Canada as its foreign interference playground. Maybe that is because two months ago those same PRC agents were arrested, yet here north of the border there is nothing: no arrests, no new legislation.
When will the Prime Minister replace the minister with someone who will get the job done?
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- Jun/15/23 6:31:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Barrie—Innisfil.
This House is struggling to fulfill its constitutional role. It is struggling to hold the government accountable. Over the last several years, the House has tried to hold the government accountable on various matters where it has clearly failed in the discharge of its responsibilities. I would like to give a couple of examples to illustrate my point.
Four years ago, on July 5, 2019, two government scientists were escorted out of the government's microbiology lab in Winnipeg by the RCMP. They were reportedly walked out of the lab because of national security breaches, but what exact breaches occurred were not known. When that story broke, this House tried to do its job and find out exactly what happened.
A committee of this House began to investigate, asked for documents from the government and put in place measures to ensure that those documents would be held under lock and key to prevent anything injurious to national security from being released. However, instead of giving documents to this House, the government thumbed its nose at the committee. It refused to hand over the documents, so the committee escalated its request and issued an order to the government for the documents. The government defied the order of the committee for the documents.
Ultimately, this House and its committee issued four orders ordering the government to hand over the documents concerning the national security breaches at the Winnipeg lab. Not only did the government defy those four orders, it took the Speaker to court. The Speaker stood up to defend the rights of members in this House and indicated that the Speaker was going to fight the government in court, but before any of that could take place, the Prime Minister advised the dissolution of this place and, along with that, the four orders of this House were dissolved.
Now we have an extra-parliamentary committee, a committee that sits outside of this place, which is reviewing these documents. Members like me have no access to that process or those documents. Having initiated an inquiry in this House, this House has been unable to get to the bottom of what happened at the Winnipeg lab and, therefore, has been unable to hold the government accountable.
More recently, a similar situation occurred. When the story broke last November 7 that the government knew for years that Beijing was conducting foreign interference operations targeting our elections and involving this democratic institution, this House and its committees began to uphold their constitutional role. They began to ask questions in this House and to conduct studies in committees to find out exactly what happened.
Despite the passage of eight months, we have found out little. All we have received are heavily redacted documents, scraps of information here and there and nothing that will lead us to a definitive conclusion. Most of the information we have received has come from outside Parliament, from media reports. Most of what we have gotten from the government is a mountain of process outside Parliament; NSICOP, NSIRA and the special rapporteur, all of which are appointed by and accountable to the Prime Minister.
We have gotten so desperate that we are willing to support the establishment of an independent public inquiry outside of Parliament so that we can get answers as to what happened. While this inquiry would stand outside of Parliament, at least it would be independent and would have all the powers that this House supposedly has to call for witnesses, to order the production of documents and to get to the bottom of who knew what and when. At least a public inquiry would hold the government accountable. We should aspire to a Parliament that can do the work we are punting to a public inquiry, and that leads me to the motion in front of the House today.
The House of Commons is the only national democratic institution there is in Canada. The introduction of this motion will diminish a place that is already struggling to fulfill its constitutional role: to hold the government accountable. Hybrid Parliament has made this House and its committees less efficient. Our output has declined. Here is one example. Votes in this place before hybrid Parliament used to take eight minutes. They now take at least 10 minutes and, in many cases, 12 minutes. At 12 minutes, votes take fully 50% more time than they did before hybrid Parliament.
I have counted and last year we had 227 votes. If we multiply that by four minutes per vote, it is 15 hours of lost time, almost two days of sittings. In 2019, the first full day before the pandemic, we had 403 votes. If we multiply that by four minutes lost per vote, it is 26 hours of lost time. That is three or four sitting days of this House.
This is but one example of the inefficiencies a hybrid Parliament is creating. Others are time lost because of microphone checks, technology failures and the cancellation of committee meetings due to a lack of technology resources.
All of these things have led to a less efficient Parliament and a reduction in the work we do here.
The Canada-China committee has been cancelled three times in the past four weeks because of the technology limitations of a hybrid Parliament. It is one of the most important committees of this House, which is doing work on the relationship between Canada and the People's Republic of China.
More important than all of that is the loss of the magnificence of this place and its committees when we meet in person, when all eyes are on the other, watching the cut and thrust of debate, watching government officials testifying in person at committee and watching how Canadians' representatives are standing up for the things they believe in. That is why we are investing $5 billion in the buildings of this place. That is why the fathers of Confederation spent vast sums of money they did not have building Parliament Hill; they understood the importance of meeting in person. They could have built much more modest buildings than they did, out of wood or fieldstone, but they did not. They understood the importance of interacting with others in person.
The tyranny of technology is to turn us all virtual. We must resist. We are the only major western democracy that still has a hybrid Parliament and now the government is proposing to make it permanent. The U.K. House of Commons ended hybrid sittings on July 22, 2021, two years ago. The U.S. House of Representatives ended hybrid sittings on January 9 of this year. The Australian Parliament ended hybrid sittings on July 25 of last year. Only the current government is proposing to make hybrid sittings permanent.
The French National Assembly never had hybrid sittings. In fact, in April of 2021, the French Constitutional Council declared a proposal from the assembly unconstitutional because the measures were not precise enough. That proposal would have modified the assembly's rules of procedure in order to allow for remote participation in plenary and committee meetings under exceptional circumstances.
In our Constitution, the Constitution Act, 1867, section 48 requires the presence of a certain number of members in this place for this House to meet. The framers of our Constitution thought it so important that a certain number of members be present in person for this House to meet that they put it into the Constitution. They did not allow members to “mail it in”, as one could do in those days, to allow this House to meet.
I will finish by saying this. We already sit far less than national legislatures in other western democracies. The U.S. House of Representatives typically sits between 164 and 192 days a year. The U.K. House of Commons typically sits between 146 and 162 days a year. We only sit 129 days a year.
We also sit far less than we used to. We used to sit 160 to 170 days a year during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. During the Pearson era, when Parliament was so effective in dealing with framework legislation on major initiatives like the Canada pension plan, our public health care system and the national flag, the House sat 160 to 170 days a year, eight weeks longer than the 26 weeks we sit today.
The motion in front of us today will further weaken and diminish this place. Therefore, I urge all members to vote against this motion.
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- Jun/15/23 6:42:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the voting app is actually driving people out of this place.
If there are two votes to take place in this chamber, they take at least 20 to 24 minutes. If one is using the voting app, one can literally take about 30 seconds of those 24 minutes to vote. If one sits in the chamber, one actually cannot do certain things while the voting takes place, across those two votes. One cannot, for example, be on a phone call with somebody else. One cannot be doing something other than what one is permitted to do in the House.
The voting app, perversely, is actually driving members out of the chamber. This is why these sorts of measures need to be ended and sunsetted, as has been done in other western democracies.
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- Jun/15/23 6:44:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question and for sharing his perspective with us. This is a very important point.
To this point, generally speaking, permanent changes to the Standing Orders of this chamber have been done on a consensual basis, involving support among all the parties of the House. There have been exceptions to that rule, but they were rare.
I think the government is setting a dangerous precedent here in proposing this change without the consent of the second-largest party in this place, the official opposition. I think it is a very dangerous precedent that does not bode well for future changes to this place.
For that reason, I do not think the change should be made permanent. I think that there would be a consensus among all recognized parties in the House to have hybrid Parliament go on but to have a sunset clause, where it would expire at the end of this Parliament.
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- Jun/15/23 6:46:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as a lifelong Conservative, I supported Speaker Milliken's rulings regarding the right of this place to order the production of documents, with respect to the Afghan detainee issue, as well as a committee of the House demanding information about the cost of the justice reforms that have been proposed by the government and the cost of the new F-35 jets. I supported them then and I support them now.
Today, as a Conservative, I support the continuation of this House in a way that does not diminish its efficacy, in a way that ends hybrid Parliament at some point, as all other western democracies have already done.
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