- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 62%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- Feb/15/24 12:49:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to follow up on something my colleague pointed out that people in Canada really need to understand.
Because the federal government failed to challenge the Truchon decision, the legislation came back to the House. Parliament went through it, and it was to be approved in the Senate, yet unaccountable, unelected people in the Senate who did no due diligence decided arbitrarily that they would expand MAID to include people who were desperate, isolated and alone with mental illness. They threw it back to the House without any work being done, and the Liberals accepted it. Now we are scrambling, 30 days away from the deadline.
I would ask my hon. colleague what it says about the fundamental failings of democracy that unelected, unaccountable people in the Senate, who cannot even be fired, could make such a profound change in legislation that would affect so many lives without any oversight, due to a failure of the government to say they are way over the line, this is not their purview and this is the work that Parliament does.
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- Feb/15/24 11:55:00 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in this House, as I have done many times over the past 20 years. I mention the 20-year mark because I have always been a great political optimist, a great believer in Canada and a believer in our fundamental goodness when it comes to working things out.
However, we are in a very dark time for democracy. We see the rise of disinformation and social conflicts in all aspects of life. On the international stage, we see the uncertainty coming out of Putin's aggression and the mass killing of innocent people in Palestine. I do not feel that the House of Commons is rising to what Canadians expect us to be. Too often, we are dealing with very profound issues through glib press releases or slogans and bumper sticker politics.
Every now and then we are confronted with legislation that forces us to go deeper, and this is certainly such a moment. There is nothing more profound in the human community than birth and death. How we address the rights of people as they are dying, as well as the supports that need to be in place, not only defines who we are as a society but also goes right down to who we are as families, as neighbours, as spouses, as parents and as children.
We are in a very unfortunate moment in terms of the failure to put the guardrails in place to protect people at this most profound moment. The issue of MAID is very personal, and it is of societal importance that we get this right.
I have certainly struggled with this issue. I wanted to make sure that what we did was done for the benefit of all, in the best interest of the human community, considering the right not only of the individual but also of the people who love them to be part of something special.
I am coming up on the anniversary of my sister Kathleen's passing. Nobody blew through our family more like a summer storm than Kathleen, and I have never seen anybody suffer greater pain. She was fearless right until the very end. Kathleen was always wanting one more gathering, song or story. She would never have accepted MAID, because her will to live was so powerful even as she knew she was not going to live.
I am not saying that her death was any more profound than anyone else's. How she went was her choice, as well as our choice. My mother said the rosary; I sang Danny Boy. That is how we do things in our family. We had one of those great Celtic wakes afterward. There were people there who had never even met my sister, but they all told stories about her. That is the way we do things in the Celtic tradition.
I have also had friends, who had cancers they could not beat, phone me to say goodbye. MAID allowed them the opportunity to choose, with their family and their community, a dignified way to go. I respect that. It is a very profound choice.
When Parliament was confronted with the need, because of the Supreme Court ruling, to put a regime in place, we did so and then said that there would be a review. We needed a review because we were going to a place we had never been to as a society. The review would happen after we saw how MAID was working. Was it working as it was supposed to? Were there abuses? Were the rigours that Parliament said had to be put in place not paid attention to?
Then we had the Quebec Superior Court decision, the Truchon decision. I felt at that time that it was the obligation of the federal government to appeal. I am not going to argue the merits of the Truchon decision, but the obligation of the federal government was to make sure that, if we were to apply this at the national level, we had really done all the due diligence. That was not done.
The Liberals moved a change to MAID before the review that was supposed to happen. Suddenly, things were already changing from what we had agreed on. Then it went to our colleagues in the Senate. I will never say much that is positive about the Senate, but today I will certainly say how dismal and appalling the attitudes of the senators were.
Stan Kutcher, whom I had to sit with on the special committee, showed disrespect and arrogance. Senators, who are not elected, who have no accountability, who do not have to go back to their communities when they are dealing with a suicide crisis like I and other people have to, said that they wanted an arbitrary date to extend MAID to people suffering from mental illness and depression. That was an extraordinarily outrageous and poorly thought out overreach, and it was the job of the Parliament of Canada to simply say, no. All the other provisions of MAID would have stayed in place, but that did not happen. What happened was the Liberals agreed, and then it dawned on them that we were going down a very dangerous road and things had not been thought out.
There is my colleague from Abbotsford, whom I have sat with on many committees. We probably disagree on a lot in politics, but we share the same integrity of coming to the House to do the right thing, bringing what we can bring to bear. He brought forward legislation to deal with this provision, and it was voted down. Therefore, we are now some 30 days from a profound change in legislation that would change Canada forever, and we are scrambling on a question of life, death and body autonomy. This is not how we should be dealing with these issues.
I used the words “body autonomy”, because it is one of the profound human rights, the right to control one's body and the right to make a decision, but it is not an absolute right. There are societal factors that go into that right. When people are deeply depressed, when they are suffering mental illness and feel alone, their body autonomy has been compromised as has their ability to make decisions.
It is really important for us to always remember that nobody dies alone. They may die in grief. They may die in isolation. They may die in the blackest hole of their personal pain, but the impacts of that death affect family, neighbours and people beyond what the poor person who suffered that dark moment could ever understand. If people have ever sat down and worked with people whose loved ones were lost to suicide, they want to say, again and again, “If only they had known how much they were loved.”
In the northern communities I work in, children as young as 10 years old are giving up and killing themselves. What kind of nation sits back and lets children give up hope at age 10?
I would have thought that when we had those kinds of suicide crises at Cross Lake, Attawapiskat, Pikangikum, and Wapekeka, and we cannot even mention how many of those communities have suffered, that there would have been a national consensus to look at what we needed to put in place, but that did not happen.
When I sat on that special committee and heard some of the medical experts say that they were really pleased that the Liberal government had put in place all the steps necessary to help this through, it made me think that we were putting resources in place to push ahead the ability of people, who are severely depressed, to make a decision to die without getting a second opinion from their loved ones, their families or their spouses, even. The government would do that, but it would not put in place the broader supports we need for mental illness.
This is not a whataboutism issue; this is about the crisis we are facing, with 4,000 suicide deaths a year. The mental health crisis is extreme. In 2016, I brought forward the national palliative care strategy, because it is not applied fairly across the country. When we cannot die in dignity, it is a terrible thing.
We have talked with doctors and nurses across the country about the palliative care approach. The federal government agreed and said it would put a strategy in place, that it would work with the provinces and territories, yet nothing was done. In 2019, I brought Motion No. 174 on a national suicide prevention plan, which was based on the incredible work that was done in Nunavut. We know that Quebec put a suicide prevention plan in place and cut the suicide rate by 50%.
Once one starts to map it out, these factors are not difficult to find, the patterns of where those suicide clusters form, with respect to areas of age and economic crisis. That was part of what the suicide action plan would be. Parliament would provide the resources so we could to start to map out where these crises occurred and put the mental health services in place.
We need to be doing that as a Parliament instead of scrambling at the eleventh hour to come up with a fix, a temporary fix, another temporary fix on a temporary fix, on a decision that was put forward by a non-elected, unaccountable Senate, which had no backing, no credibility and no support, other than the fact that a couple of arrogant senators, who have never been elected and have no accountability, decided that Parliament would go along with this, and the government put up with that.
It was an absolute failure of public policy, to unelected senators like Pamela Wallin and Stan Kutcher dictate health policy for people in crisis. We would never allow that for anything else, yet here we are, 30 days from the deadline.
We have had letters telling us not to do this. Seven out of 10 provinces say to not do this. We had the medical community saying that it had no way to even properly assess and not do this. We have had really profound, thoughtful witnesses come forward to talk about the complexities of the issues of mental illness. Who is one to say whether it is irredeemable? Who is one to say that this suffering is so bad that it warrants death, when there are options?
We also have the issue of people in increasingly desperate situations, who feel alone. It tells us who we are as a society when we say that it is really too bad that one is homeless. It is really too bad that one is suffering the nightmare of addiction. It is really too bad that there are young people in a northern indigenous community and they have never, ever been able to get proper medical attention. However, if they want to die, we will set up a process.
MAID was not meant for that. MAID was meant to deal with people who could make the choice, an informed adult choice as they suffered pain that would not go away, with their loved ones and their families.
I remember when my good friend Liz from Vancouver Island called me. We were good friends. She used to drive me around Vancouver Island in this old Jaguar with wood panelling that she got for $4,000. I kept saying, “Liz, if this car breaks down on the mountains, I'm not going to have to get out to push it to the other side am I?”
Liz played blues music for me in the car. She talked about the Catholic saints and about queer politics. She was her own person, and she smoked. As she was dying, she called me and said that this was the moment, that she was taking the moment because this was the last one she may have to make that decision. It was a very profound way to go. MAID is for that.
MAID is not for people who feel they have no hope, without a back-up, without a robust, multidisciplinary team to walk the issues through with them. It is not something they can make a second choice.
I think of Dr. Valorie Masuda, a palliative care physician, who said to the committee:
If this special joint committee on MAID recommends proceeding with allowing access to MAID for chronic mental conditions, I would recommend that there be a robust, multidisciplinary review process involving physicians, psychiatrists, social workers and ethicists involved in a patient's MAID application, and that there be a transparent review of MAID cases shared between health authorities and provincial and federal oversight so that we ensure we are not treating social problems with euthanasia.
Imagine if someone with mental illness and depression were able to get a multidisciplinary team of physicians, psychiatrists, social workers and ethicists, we would not have a mental health crisis. Those people are not there. Those teams are not there.
The government made a commitment to transfer $4.5 billion for mental health to the provinces to deal with the crisis that is unfolding before us, but it has not done that.
Therefore, again, we are in a situation where we are being asked to vote. The bill that the Liberals have brought forward is gutless, because it will punt this down the road for three years, and we will be back at it in three years.
We had punted it down the road for a year over the fundamental failure of the former attorney general who simply let it pass. However, the Senate made a completely unreasonable, undemocratic and unwise pronouncement that overrode the work of the democratically-elected House, a House whose members, as dismal as we are sometimes, dumbed-down, sloganeering and fighting over the stupidest things, have to go back to our constituents and talk to them. We have had to go the funerals of people who have died from suicide because of depression. We bring that experience into the House.
We can disagree on the extent of MAID, we can disagree on many things, but we have a democratic right and a duty to do the right thing here. The Senate has no democratic accountability to anyone. Therefore, the fact that we are having to pick up the pieces from its arrogance and the failure of the Liberal government to hold it to account is concerning. We need to reflect on that. I would urge the members in the other chamber to not play games with this.
On March 17, the deadline changes, the law of Canada changes, and the amount of people who could die without proper support would change. It would change forever the legal framework of Canada. My message to those unelected senators is not to play games with the work we are doing. We are picking up the pieces. We are trying to fix the damage they did, and we need to do so this, because a bigger principle is at stake, the stake of human dignity in a country.
We have to also extend this conversation to our ongoing failure as a nation on mental health; our ongoing failure to offer young people a better future; and our ongoing failure to recognize that if the weakest people in our society are allowed to kill themselves because there is no hope, then we have failed, and we are failing.
I would like to think that we can come together across party lines to say that there has to be guardrails that protect the autonomy of the individual, and also places individuals who are in mental crisis and depression within the context of their family, their loved ones and their society. When one dies alone and in darkness, the effects are felt for years and years after.
Going into some communities after a suicide crisis is like walking into shockwaves of grief that play out for years and years to come, and it takes so much work to come back from that for a community, for a family. Here we are as a society making that decision. Therefore, let us do this right and let us do this with respect for the people who expect us to do the right thing.
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- Nov/2/23 12:34:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a great honour to rise here in the House on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay at a time when public confidence in public institutions and democracy is at an all-time low. We certainly know that trust in democracy is under very frightening pressures all over the world.
In Canada, recent polls show that over 75% of the Canadian people believe that Parliament and the behaviour of parliamentarians have become “dishonest” and “useless.” At a time of growing difficulty in our country and growing difficulty and very dark times around the world, it is incumbent upon us to be able to show that democracy can work and that parliamentarians can work together.
That is why I am very concerned about today's debate, which seems to be one between an absolute failure of vision on the one hand and an absolute failure of leadership on the other. What we are debating really reflects a political race to the bottom that is leading and feeding this growing public alienation and rage farming. As elected representatives, we all have a sacred duty to adjudicate the very difficult economic, environmental, political and international issues that confront us as a nation.
This means that we must occasionally climb out of our partisan trenches and put forward a bigger vision for the nation. Doing this means that sometimes we are going to need to stand up on unpopular issues. If we are going to build a long-term future for our children, sometimes it is incumbent upon the leadership of this generation to say that tough choices have to be made.
However, that is not what we are debating here. We are debating the realm of gotcha politics and rage-farm politics in response to a very desperate and cynical gerrymandering of public policy that was clearly seen, in the public's eyes, as a desperate attempt to shore up Liberal MPs in certain parts of the country. The result was to pit region against region and to raise fundamental questions about a signature piece of the government's climate action plan, which is carbon pricing. It has now been thrown into doubt.
We need to find a way, as Canadians, to address this. It would have been very fair in the fall economic statement, for example, for the Prime Minister to step forward and say that we are dealing with two very major crises in our country right now. We have an unprecedented climate catastrophe unfolding, which is something the Conservatives pretend does not exist. This climate catastrophe dislocated over 200,000 people this summer alone. It is a climate catastrophe that has now impacted over 60% of Canadian small businesses. People are frightened about what the future holds, and they want to know that a burning planet can be addressed through policies that force down the use of fossil fuel emissions. They expect that from us.
Instead, from the Conservatives, they get a party platform of climate denial. They are told not to worry that the planet is burning; Conservatives are going to make fossil fuel burning free for everybody. As the city of Kelowna was burning, we had the MP for that region not standing up for the people but standing up for this myth that burning carbon fuels was somehow going to be good for everybody. That is a failure of leadership and of our responsibility to tell people the truth of what we are facing right now in an unprecedented climate catastrophe. It is also a failure to the planet.
It could have been perfectly fair, in the fall economic statement, for the Prime Minister to say that we are dealing with an unprecedented climate catastrophe, and we need to make sure the policies we have in place work. One of the policies Liberals sold the country is carbon pricing.
It would have been equally fair for the Prime Minister to say that we are dealing with an unprecedented crisis. Liberals call it “affordability”, but as my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley pointed out, it is a much deeper and more troubling crisis, a crisis of people unable to heat their homes and feed their families.
The Prime Minister could have said that we are going to find a way across this country to take some pressure off. To do that, it would have been a reasonable suggestion to say that we are going to take the GST-HST off home heating. Why? It is not a luxury to heat one's home in Canada, particularly in regions like mine that go to -45°C and sometimes -50°C. It is not a luxury. This is not wasteful spending on behalf of citizens. This is about keeping families alive.
To take the GST off would have affected people across the country and it would have been fair, but the Liberal government did not do that. It opted to focus on home heating oil, which certainly is a very problematic fuel that we need to address. It also is a fuel that tends to be used by people in more rural and poor regions who cannot afford to switch.
The way it was laid out was so cynical. It was about defending beleaguered Liberal MPs in Atlantic Canada. It sent a very clear message that the Prime Minister's focus was on keeping his MPs above the water line and not responding to the needs of Canadians, so it was not a credible plan. It has pitted region against region. It has raised serious questions about whether the Prime Minister has an environmental plan to deal with the climate crisis. It also raises questions about the whole pitch of carbon pricing.
Canadians were told that this was going to be a fundamental feature. New Democrats have argued with the government on carbon pricing over the years. We have said that we need to make the big polluters pay, the people who are actually damaging the planet and destroying our kids' future. They are the ones who should be paying. Senior citizens who have to heat their homes in rural northern Ontario are not responsible for the climate crisis.
There needs to be a balance. The across-the-board imposition raised real questions about fairness. What we ended up having in this situation is that one group of people is being exempted. We are hearing all kinds of positive reasons for it, but the fundamental issue it is coming down to is they were being exempted because they are in regions represented by Liberals who are afraid about their future. That is not good enough.
We have said all along that it should have been the GST from the get-go. We know the Conservatives voted against our attempt to take off the GST from heating because that would have covered people across the country.
What the Conservatives have brought to us today is another way of dividing region against region, because they know that if we just take the carbon tax off, it is not going to mean anything for people in British Columbia who are still paying heating bills. They are not covered by the carbon tax because they are under cap and trade, and neither are people in Quebec because Quebec is under cap and trade. One part of the country will have taxes taken off their heating and another part of the country will not.
If we are going to talk about the climate crisis and affordability, we have to put in place measures that are not ad hoc or gotcha moments, but measures that address the difficulties we are facing across the board.
To that, New Democrats have said time and time again that the people who are making the pollution have to be the ones paying. Rich Kruger, the CEO of Suncor, said there is a sense of urgency right now, as our planet is burning, for the big oil industry to make as much money as possible, as they are firing workers, as they are moving to automation and as they are doing stock buybacks. They could be paying the greater share for carbon pricing. We can take efforts to make sure that this is across the board and fair.
If we are going to stop pitting region against region, I would like to move the following amendment: “That, the motion be amended by adding after the words 'all forms of home heating', the following: 'and to eliminate the GST on home heating in provinces where no federal carbon tax is in place'.”
That would be fair across the board.
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- Jun/13/23 9:15:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am so honoured, as always, to speak in the House and to speak to the nature of our democracy. I have been here for 19 years. I think I always took our democracy for granted, but I realize that our democracy is under threat. Democracies around the world are under threat, and I think we have to frame the fragility of democracy within the debates we have here. Our obligation in taking on government and in taking on legislation cannot be about undermining the fundamental principles of what Parliament has done and what Parliament stands for.
I mention that because I was here in 2014 at the time of the horrific killing of Corporal Nathan Cirillo. I was here during the shootings on Parliament Hill. I remember the lockdown and I remember the trauma. I remember, early the next morning, feeling that I needed to go to the War Memorial just to be there and seeing people from all over the city of Ottawa who felt the need to be there at the site of that horrific killing.
I have to say how shocked I was that I was told Parliament was going to meet that day, after the shooting, after the trauma. People were grieving and nobody had slept that night. I remember asking our whip why we were holding Parliament that day. He said to me that we had to show nothing would stop Parliament from working. We went there that day, and that was a really profound moment, one of the most profound moments I have had as a parliamentarian.
In March 2020, we were hit by COVID. I remember sitting in the seats as we were starting to learn about COVID and the fear of COVID and not knowing what was going to happen. Suddenly there was a global shutdown. What did it mean when we all had to go back to our communities? The fact that the technical teams of Parliament put together a hybrid Parliament that made it possible to vote and meet so that we met every single day throughout that time, to me, was a really profound moment. I think that all of us as parliamentarians need to say that this was one of the highlights of what we are as a democracy, that even though we were facing the biggest medical crisis in 100 years and people could not be together, democracy was going to keep going.
That was a game-changer for me. Out of the hybrid Parliament that we created, incredible tools were fashioned that made it possible to vote and made it possible to hold hearings, things that we did not think we could possibly do just three or four months before or even a month before. The fact that our civil service rose up and managed to get CERB together was an unprecedented victory. I know many civil servants who worked through that Easter weekend in 2020 to make that a reality so that people did not lose their incomes, did not lose their homes.
Regardless of our political battles with the government, as parliamentarians we need to say that at times of national crisis, we come together. At times of insurmountable odds, we rise above them. Then we can go back to throwing rocks at each other and kicking sand in each other's faces. However, there are moments when we need to say there are fundamental things that we accomplish.
We accomplished the ability, in a country as vast as ours, to hold democracy together. Do we sell that at the side of the road along with a bunch of old hubcaps and old Elvis paintings and say that we are going to have a yard sale, or do we ask how we keep this going?
I have been here long enough to remember what it was like when I was first elected. There was a real bravado and machismo culture. We always talk about Parliament being family friendly. It is not family friendly. There is nothing about it that has ever been family friendly. We always said that we wanted to be more inclusive. There was nothing inclusive about it. When I was elected, the stories I heard were about marriage breakups and alcoholism, because people left their homes and people were never back in their communities. When my sister died, I was on the road the next day doing my parliamentary work. I never got to grieve because that was just the way it was. We sucked it up and we did that.
What we learned out of COVID was that we all had to see the world in a different light. I want to really stress that what we are discussing tonight is not about us. I know my Conservative colleagues keep talking about people being able to phone it in and sitting at home on their computer. We are talking about the fundamental change that happened after March 2020 and the way all of us had to relate to the world. All of us began to reassess relationships and what we do.
From Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, we have what is called the “Lucretius problem”, which is that no one could ever imagine a river larger than what one had seen. None of us could imagine COVID. I remember talking to my staff when COVID hit, saying that we could not keep the office closed for a week, that it was impossible. We never thought we would be two years into it and doing work virtually. We adapted. In that adaptation, in my office, the staff rule was that we keep those phones running no matter what happens. If people called, we would answer them. We were there for them. I remember saying to my staff many times, if they were feeling burned out, to just take the day, go for a drive, do anything, but that we were there to help people.
Out of that reality that we lived through, we began to see life in a different way. Many of us realized that some people were way more effective working the phones than having people in the office all the time. This hybrid model was something people got used to. People began to think about their families, about the life they had not had, and said they were not willing to go back to the old way of commuting, sitting in traffic for hours and sitting in their little cubicles. People were demanding an alternate way of doing things to be more effective. I certainly see that with the offices I run. I have a riding that is bigger than the United Kingdom, and I have been noticing how some of my staff have been way more effective with this hybrid model of being able to do some of their intense case work at home and some days going into the office, and that people have also changed how we deal with that.
In terms of what we do politically, I think the issue of accountability is hugely important. The ability of an MP to talk to a minister without having to worry about staff is a fundamental of how we do our job. It was really difficult during COVID to be able to resolve issues, because we could not go over and just sit and talk, and do those one-on-one negotiations. It was really difficult at times to do committee work when we could not talk to each other, but we can do that now.
At the same time, that does not preclude the ability of people to do their job in a region and a nation where it is 5,000 kilometres for some people to get here to go to work. There is the ability of people to be in their ridings during the fires and emergencies and still be able to vote. The ability of people dealing with loved ones who are sick and dying to be there with them and still be parliamentarians is a profound advancement on the notion of democracy. Democracy is not about a bunch of older white guys like me saying that we roughed it back in the day and so should new members. Democracy is about asking how we can make it possible for other voices and more inclusive voices to participate. That is one of the things the hybrid model has given us.
It means that we will be here the vast majority of the time, where we should be, but it also means there is the possibility that if there is something essential for members to be at in their riding, or sometimes essential to be at with their family, they can do that. That, to me, is what we should be talking about. This is not about us failing to do our job. This is about us recognizing the reality that Canadians are also facing. They want to be able to work more effectively in the wake of COVID, and to do it in a way that is inclusive and respectful and also recognizes the life balance that is needed.
None of us were able to think about what COVID would do to us, and I do not think that any of us are the same after COVID. I know I certainly am not. COVID changed me. It changed how I saw the world. It also changed my voters. We now deal with issues that we never dealt with before. In my office, in the space of two days, I had to call the OPP. That never would have happened before. Our staff deal with pressures that they never dealt with before in terms of threats, in terms of just the social crisis that we are facing and the mental health pressures. Maybe this is all a bad hangover from COVID, but all of our staff are having to look at this. When I am dealing with the staff who represent me in my offices, I am very much thinking about how I can maintain the service to community, the service to people, while also making sure the protection of my staff is intact.
I am really interested in how we actually came together through the hearings on the hybrid Parliament and how we came through the notion of an incredible technological revolution that happened in democracy. It is funny. I have talked to my provincial colleagues, and some of my provincial colleagues are Conservatives. The first thing Doug Ford did was to kill all of that and go back to the old school, the old way of doing it because they wanted to look like they were showing up for work. They were like, “Oh my God, you guys actually get to do that. Do you actually have a functioning hybrid Parliament that works?” Yes, we do. It is about respect for the vast regions of this country, because not all of us can get on a single flight and get to Ottawa. Not all of us can be there all the time.
If we are going to have an accountable democracy, we need to be looking at ways of doing this that respect and understand difference, diversity and the immense geographic distances. For me, this is not an issue of praising or blaming government. This is about us as parliamentarians coming together and saying that our larger function is to democracy itself, and to be accountable to democracy means that we have to make sure that people can participate in that democracy. In Canada, that has not always been that easy. As I have said, there was an old school world that I came from and I was very much in that old school world. If someone had said to me that we would have a hybrid Parliament before COVID, I would have said, “Not on my watch. No way. We will stay up and we will vote every night, all night, as long as it takes.” That is what we did against the Harper government, and I was proud to do that, but it is also not something that is sustainable.
The fact is that people can do this. I myself, right now, am back home in northern Ontario. I will be heading to Ottawa again next week. I get in the car tomorrow, but we have been through brutal fires in our region and we have had a number of issues. There are issues that have to be attended to by us as parliamentarians. The ability to vote and have the voice of the people I represent heard is, I think, showing that we respect democracy at its most fundamental level, which is that we are just the representatives of democracy for our people. We are there for a time for our people, until our people decide to choose someone else to go in our place, but the ultimate focus of democracy, at the end of the day, is their voices and their ability to know that someone from their region was able to vote, no matter what the circumstances.
The hybrid Parliament has worked. We have to give huge thanks again to the translators, who have worked under extremely difficult situations. It has also taught parliamentarians that they are not really the kings of the planet. They have to also be part of a system that recognizes that our translators can burn out and our staff can burn out. Democracy is about that balance. I think we have managed to do that with this. I think this is something that we can all take credit for.
At the end of the day, when I go to a committee meeting and the minister is not there and he or she is there virtually, I am not happy. I will say that. I expect them to be there in person. I expect that the government does not exploit this. I think that if we are going to make these House orders permanent, we have to always hold government to account. They do need to show up and they do need to be there in person as much as possible, but it is valuable for us to have this space where people can at times participate virtually from their regions or while they are on the road as parliamentarians, such as for committee work, to know that they can do hearings.
Just last week, I had to find myself a library in downtown Toronto to participate in hearings, and it was really exciting to be able to do that, to know that I was still able to participate and I was not cut off from the democratic process, because I had a responsibility to do the work that I was doing while I was travelling, but I also had that responsibility to the people of Canada.
I am very pleased that we have moved in this direction. I think Canada could be a model to the world. I will urge my colleagues to really reflect on this. Democracy is in a fragile moment. Democracy is undermined. It does none of us any good to burn the house to the ground to score a point. Sometimes we need to say we can actually all work together. Some days we can do better, and then we can go back to kicking the crap out of the government as per our job as opposition.
Let us make sure the system that we built around us is something that is sustainable for the long term, that is inclusive, and that will bring in more people and more voices into a much more diverse Canada. That is the Canada that I want to be a part of.
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- Mar/1/22 1:46:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the crisis in Ukraine is about democracy. The Conservatives keep using it to claim that we should be pumping oil production, which I think is abusive, but my colleague surprised me when he said there is a crisis in Ukraine and chastised the Bloc for talking about the democratic set-up of the House.
The fight in Ukraine is about democracy. It is about the right of people to make decisions about how their democracy is going to be maintained. I welcome this decision by the Bloc. The Bloc has a right to bring this forward and should not be chided for it. This is a fair conversation.
Why does my hon. colleague think that, just because we are talking about the international crisis, we cannot talk about improving democracy at home?
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- Mar/1/22 12:18:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the NDP supports this motion because it is essential that we maintain a constitutional balance in Canada. It is not only a question of representation. Democracy is based on a balance between the regions and the interests of the different communities. For the NDP, it is essential to preserve and ensure Quebec's voice in the House of Commons.
Does my colleague also believe in the importance of representation for rural regions and other minority regions in Canada?
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- Mar/1/22 11:19:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think it is so profound that we are discussing our democracy in Canada, the voices we can have and who should be at the table as we watch the horrific violence being perpetrated against the democratic people of Ukraine by Putin in Russia. It reminds us in this House how precious and fragile democracy is.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague about this historic moment in our nation and around the world, where we have come together to say that the violence that is being perpetrated against the Ukrainian people must be fought at every level. Canada has to have a coherent plan in order to support the people of Ukraine, support refugees, support democracy and ensure that Russia pays a serious price for this attack on the democratic rights of an independent nation.
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