44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 16, 2023 11:00AM
- Oct/16/23 1:23:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are learning to work together in the House of Commons and it is in that spirit I am rising today to discuss not only the matter of privilege raised by the member for Calgary Nose Hill on Thursday, October 5, but also to raise concerns about how the matter has been handled since it was originally raised.
As you know, Mr. Speaker, the member's question of privilege was on the subject of responses to written questions provided to her by the government. This is an area of jurisprudence that has often been raised by members and has been ruled on by many previous Speakers. What made this situation unique was the fact the responses were signed off by the Speaker in the Speaker's previous role as parliamentary secretary.
It is not uncommon for unusual or complex questions to require additional resources. The House may recall that, at the time, I indicated that I wanted an opportunity to intervene at a later date. The member for Winnipeg North did exactly the same thing. We intervened in the House to say that we wanted to intervene once the research had been done. It is essential that such interventions take place before a decision is made. That is the tradition here in the House. The next day, my office confirmed that my intervention would take place after the break week, which just ended. At no time were we informed that a decision might be imminent.
However, during the break week, I was informed, by way of a CC in an email from the member for Calgary Nose Hill, and subsequently confirmed by the Speaker's office, that the Speaker had made a decision to recuse himself from deliberating on this matter. This decision was confirmed in the ruling this morning.
I do believe this recusal was the right decision, but I was nonetheless very surprised to hear that a decision was made without waiting for input that had been very clearly indicated from at least two parties in the House.
When important precedent-setting decisions on how the House operates are made, they are traditionally made following interventions from interested parties. That could not take place here.
I was also surprised at the way in which the decision was made public. Communicating a decision directly to the member involved amounts to saying that the Speaker's responsibility is to that member rather than to the House as a whole.
The fact that a member of the media, in this case an unverified blogger, received confirmation of the decision before the House or even the House leaders were informed is even more frustrating.
As House of Commons Procedure and Practice states:
The Speaker is the servant, neither of any part of the House nor of any majority in the House, but of the entire institution....
The responsibility of the Speaker is to the institution of Parliament and to the House of Commons as a whole, not to an individual member who raises a point and not to reporters who may be interested in the decisions taken by the Speaker. Providing more information to the media than to Parliament on matters that are fundamentally parliamentary in nature is really not acceptable.
In discussing how Speakers' rulings are delivered, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, our bible, further states:
Sometimes, a ruling is delivered quickly and with a minimum of explanation. At other times, circumstances do not permit an immediate ruling. The Speaker may allow discussion of the point of order before he or she comes to a decision. The Speaker might also reserve his or her decision on a matter, returning to the House at a later time to deliver the ruling
It is clear that rulings are meant to be made in the House. There is no precedent for a Speaker doing otherwise, and the rule book does not contemplate otherwise.
I humbly request that, in future, these matters be treated appropriately and in accordance with House practices.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to talk about clean energy and Bill C-49.
I have to say that the government has a very poor record when it comes to clean energy and when it comes to ensuring that Canada meets its obligations related to all the challenges associated with climate change. At least the government is taking a step forward with this bill to support the investments needed for Canada to create a clean energy economy and to create critically important jobs.
We support this bill. We want it to be studied and improved in committee. That way, we will have a bill that is even more robust.
What I do not understand, and I have been listening to the debate throughout the course of the day, is why Conservatives are so adamantly opposed to renewable energy.
I will start off by saying that I am one of the few people in this House who has actually worked in the energy industry. I have been ankle deep in oil as a former refinery worker at the Shellburn oil refinery in Burnaby, B.C., which was closed under the Conservatives, as they did so many times during that dismal decade of the Harper regime. They closed manufacturing jobs across Canada, and, of course, the Shellburn oil refinery was one of the victims of that.
I do not believe there is a single Conservative who has been ankle deep in oil. In that sense, the Conservative caucus is all hat and no cattle. During their dismal regime, the Conservatives provided billions and billions of dollars of support to corporate CEOs in the oil and gas industry but no support for the workers. We have seen this. As energy workers have been laid off across Alberta, there has not been a peep from the Conservative MPs to say that these energy workers are being laid off while we are pumping billions of dollars in subsidies to support oil and gas CEOs.
It is a real puzzlement to me that, given the Conservative track record, we have seen the appalling decisions made in Alberta by Conservatives, such as shutting down renewable energy projects. The NDP has a great track record on that, and I will come back to that in a moment. For Danielle Smith to say, “No, we're going to stop all those renewable energy projects, throw those workers out of work and shut down the renewable energy sector” is unbelievably irresponsible and incompetent, yet we have not had a single Conservative MP stand in this House to condemn Danielle Smith and the Conservatives in Alberta for taking such a woefully irresponsible action. Not a single one. They just have gone into hiding as Albertans are being thrown out of work. One would think that a Conservative MP who represents Alberta would be willing to speak up, but that has not been the case, sadly.
In that sense, I guess they are being somewhat congruent in opposing renewable energy projects in Atlantic Canada as well. If they oppose renewable energy projects in Alberta, if they are opposing renewable energy generally and if they deny that climate change even exists, I guess there is a certain coherency to them saying they are going to oppose this bill because it is going to create too many renewable energy jobs and help Canada too much by ensuring that we have the clean energy economy of tomorrow. In that sense, for once Conservatives are being consistent.
The reality is that climate change does exist, and we have been hit by it repeatedly in the last few years. I can speak as a British Columbian for what we have lived through over the last few years.
The heat dome killed 600 people in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. Sixty of them at the epicentre of that heat dome, that intense heat that killed people in their apartments, were in my riding of New Westminster—Burnaby. We cannot tell people in my riding that climate change does not exist. We cannot tell people in my riding that somehow renewable energy is a bad thing and that we need to cut any possibility of providing supports for renewable energy. We have to just continue to hand money, as Conservative governments have done, to the bankers, billionaires and oil and gas CEOs. We saw with the heat dome the intense impacts of climate change.
Then the atmospheric rivers happened just a few months later, and they cut off the Lower Mainland of British Columbia from the rest of the country. The rock slides, the loss of life, the cutting of rail lines and roads and the flooding of the Fraser Valley all indicate the profound impact of climate change in British Columbia.
The Conservatives say that we do not need renewable energy, that climate change does not exist. The reason British Columbians are so highly opposed to Conservatives and that kind of discourse is that we have seen first-hand what the reality of climate change is.
That is why the government needs to act on these things. The NDP and its leader, the member for Burnaby South, have said repeatedly that things need to change, that the government has to start to walk the talk. The massive oil and gas subsidies going to corporate CEOs have to end and we need to make investments. This is a step forward, but it is by no means the only thing that the government should be doing. There is a whole range of other things that can make a difference, such as creating the kinds of clean energy jobs that help our economy prosper and other economies prosper. These are things that the government needs to be doing.
Just a few years ago, I went to the region of Samsø in Denmark. Samsø is a region that was economically deprived. It lost all its major industries. What the people of Samsø did, in working with the Danish government, is decided that they would retrain the workers in that area in clean energy jobs, and that is what they did. They got support from the national government of Denmark, and the Samsø region then went through a training program. As a result of that and their own investments from the people of the region of Samsø, they decided to build a first onshore wind farm.
These are the people of the islands, an incredibly innovative and entrepreneurial group. That wind farm was so prosperous that they decided to build an offshore wind farm, which was the largest in Europe at the time. It was incredibly prosperous. They then moved from there to biomass. They also moved from there to solar. They have transformed their transportation sector. They transformed their heating sector as well. The entire region is now a fossil fuel-free zone as a result of those investments by the people themselves.
This is where we are seeing other regions of this world and other countries going. They are making the investments in clean energy that have led to untold prosperity. Samsø today is more prosperous than it has ever been because of those investments.
I said at the beginning that I would talk a bit about the NDP record on this. We simply have to look at NDP provincial governments. In Nova Scotia, it was the NDP provincial government that made the investments in tidal power, which is now top of mind. In terms of innovations in tidal power, that NDP government made a huge difference.
In Manitoba, we have just seen the election of Wab Kinew as premier. This is an exciting development because when the Manitoba NDP was in power, it led the country in geothermal investments. We will see Manitoba rise again after the years of the terrible Conservative government there and the hateful campaign that it ran. The Conservatives in Manitoba were thrown out, and now there is an opportunity not only for real development in education and health care, but also for a thriving economy because of the kinds of investments we have seen in the past from the Manitoba NDP, which will come back.
In Saskatchewan, the NDP invested in solar power. In Alberta, it invested in wind power under Rachel Notley, and, of course, in British Columbia it was hydro power. When we look at all the forms of renewable energy, it is NDP administrations that have made the difference. The NDP makes a difference. We will do it nationally too, but in the meantime, we will support this bill and push the government to do better on ensuring a renewable energy future.
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Madam Speaker, that is a valid question that has to be addressed at the committee stage, which is why we want to move the legislation forward so the committee can examine it. That being said, while I have a lot of respect for my colleague, who has been here a long time, not a single Conservative MP, after the incredible debacle we saw with the abandoned oil and gas wells, stood up and said that oil and gas CEOs should not have abandoned those tens of thousands of wells and all that toxic metal. We have never had a Conservative MP stand in this House and say that is wrong. The Harper regime pumped tens of billions of dollars at oil and gas CEOs, and they were never asked to do the reclamation that is so important. I am hoping that finally Conservatives understand that what they did was wrong, and I hope they apologize to Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, in my part of the country, British Columbia, we have a government that invests heavily in clean energy. There are huge investments coming from the B.C. government.
Premier David Eby and his cabinet are national leaders in clean energy investment. That is important. In addition, investments really need to be made at the community and regional level.
As I mentioned earlier, when we look at all the NDP provincial governments, whether it is in Nova Scotia in the past, Manitoba now with a new government, Saskatchewan, Alberta or British Columbia, there has always been unprecedented investment in clean energy and the green economy.
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Madam Speaker, I have said this before. There are two blocs in the House of Commons: There is the Bloc Québécois and there is the block everything party.
The Conservatives have blocked everything in this House. Whether it is clean energy, dental care, support for seniors or support for families, every single piece of legislation is blocked by the Conservatives. I do not think that is in the national interest. It is certainly not in the interests of Canadians.
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- Oct/16/23 8:22:28 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, this is a sad evening. Last week, we witnessed attacks by Hamas that cost brothers, sisters, parents and children their lives. What these families are going through is so sad and horrible. As the member just said, we know that collective punishment is not an option. Even today, tonight, we saw bombings in Gaza, a collective punishment that is causing the deaths of brothers, sisters, parents and children. My colleague spoke on the importance of a ceasefire, of a corridor for humanitarian assistance, and of insisting that all hostages be freed.
Can my colleague tell us how critical it is for Canada to speak with such a voice to ensure that there are no more victims after the many grim events of recent days?
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- Oct/16/23 9:07:37 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, I welcome the member to the House.
There is no doubt that Hamas is the enemy of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The human rights violations have been widespread. The killing of 1,400 innocent people attests to that. They are brothers, sisters, parents and children who died. I know if any member in this House could have done anything to stop the deaths of 1,400 people, they would have stepped forward.
That is the point the member for Edmonton Strathcona and the leader of the NDP made. At this sombre occasion, there is the collective punishment that is taking place and the bombing in Gaza right now. The death toll is rising to 3,000 people. There are 1,000 children dead so far and 10,000 wounded.
The question is if we could stop the killing of those innocent lives, those brothers, sisters, parents and children, through this bombing, would we not step up to do that? Is that not what is behind the important call for a ceasefire, to have that humanitarian corridor so that food and water can get to the people who have no food, no medicine and no water? Ensuring that the hostages are released is absolutely fundamental as well.
Is that not our role? Should it be Canada's role to ensure there is no further loss of life?
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