- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Lac-Saint-Louis
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $123,581.21
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on this first day of the new parliamentary session.
I would start by saying that the role of debate is to separate the wheat from the chaff, to use our experience, intelligence, discretion and insight to pinpoint what is really going on as opposed to what we think is going on, which can be influenced by the rush to easy assumptions and various biases, personal and societal, and so on.
The point of intelligent and informed debate, that is, of reasoned democratic discourse, is to safeguard against the kind of populism that appeals to simple intuition or, to use the new Conservative code word, simple common sense. Common sense sounds so right, so good. Who could object to it? Common sense is a deceptively appealing slogan, but there is a difference between common sense and good sense.
There is a distinction to be made between good sense and common sense. Good sense that is thoughtful, nuanced and based on facts and rigorous analysis is an excellent thing. On the other hand, what is referred to as “common sense” can be reductionist and simplistic, a populist trope designed to get the public to buy into easy solutions that serve narrow ideologies and well-established political agendas.
“Common sense” is a catchphrase that seeks to oversimplify and to get the buy-in of the public for simple solutions to complex problems, solutions that are not always the best but that serve an ideological agenda like cost cutting or rolling back environmental protections. I believe there is such a thing as collective wisdom that offers up time-tested notions, like the difference between good and evil, the need for caution in the face of too much rapid change or the value of preserving order in society. However, age-old collective wisdom cannot always guide us in dealing with technically and legally complex matters of contemporary public policy. So-called common sense can be off the mark.
So-called common sense can lead us down the wrong path. It can actually lead us right off the road.
With respect to bail reform, this seems to be the Conservative common-sense approach or belief: Those apprehended and accused of a crime are guilty and therefore should remain in jail while awaiting trial. However, in our justice system, the product of centuries of accumulated wisdom and reason, in law one is, thankfully, innocent until proven guilty.
Traditional small c conservatives are supposed to put faith in accumulated wisdom and the organic evolution of thought, laws and institutions, as opposed to promoting reactive solutions. Canada's bail system is the product of English common law dating back hundreds of years.
Let me be clear: One murder because someone is out on bail who should not have been is one death too many. It is a tragedy and we should not stand for it. There is not a single person in this House who disagrees. However, to claim, as the opposition does daily, that the streets are being overrun by murderers on automatic bail in a revolving-door justice system is, I believe, demagoguery.
How does the bail system work, versus the opposition's truncated version of it? Namely, it is up to police and prosecutors in provincial jurisdiction to make the case against granting bail to an individual. In other words, the onus is on the state to justify why someone who has not yet been found guilty should have to remain behind bars while awaiting trial. However, something not generally understood is that when it comes to charges of murder and certain other offences, the onus is actually reversed. The accused must convince the court why they should be released while awaiting trial.
In 2019, Parliament adopted Bill C-75, which extended the reverse onus to repeat offenders charged with an offence against an intimate partner, or what we call intimate partner violence. Again, this will be news to many listening today. The burden of proof is also on the accused for certain firearms offences, including weapons trafficking, possession for the purpose of weapons trafficking, illegal importation or exportation of a weapon, discharging a firearm with intent, discharging a firearm with recklessness and the following offences committed with a firearm: attempted murder, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, hostage-taking, robbery and extortion. Again, that is a far cry from a revolving door. Furthermore, the law is already clear that detention without bail is justified when deemed necessary by a judge to protect the safety of the public.
When someone is granted bail, they typically are required to have a surety, that is, one or more people who commit to supervising the behaviour of the accused and who will pay a certain sum if the accused breaches their bail conditions. There are many reasons bail can be denied: the accused has a criminal record or failed to comply with past bail conditions; or, as mentioned, the accused is thought to pose a risk to the public; or the accused lacks a surety or place to live, which is a problem that more often afflicts members of disadvantaged groups.
Here is a news flash that will come as a surprise to many people listening today: In 2020, 77% of people in Ontario's jails were in custody awaiting trial. In other words, we are not a lenient country, contrary to the Conservative populist narrative. To quote Queen's University professor Nicole Myers, “We've had more people in pretrial detention than in sentence provincial custody since 2004.”
All that said, we do need bail reform, and Liberals are reformers by nature.
How do we reconcile the need to protect the public while at the same time preserving the central tenet of our criminal justice system, which is “innocent until proven guilty”? The answer is Bill C-48. The bill would add a reverse onus for an accused person charged with a serious offence involving violence that was used, threatened or attempted, and the use of a weapon such as a knife, where the person was previously convicted, namely within the previous five years. This makes sense because a previous offence is an indication of risk. A serious offence would be defined as an offence carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment, such as assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon.
The bill also expands the list of firearms offences that would trigger a reverse onus. These offences include unlawful possession of a loaded or easily loaded prohibited or restricted firearm, breaking or entering to steal a firearm, robbery to steal a firearm and making an automatic firearm. Currently, there is a reverse onus when the person is subject to a weapons prohibition order and violates it. The new law would clarify to include prohibition orders made at bail.
Bill C-48 would also broaden the reverse onus for repeat offenders of intimate partner violence to those who have received a discharge under section 730 of the Criminal Code, or, in other words, where the offence no longer appears on a criminal record.
Finally, Bill C-48 would require courts to consider an accused person's history of convictions for violence as well as concern for community safety. As OPP commissioner Thomas Carrique told The Globe and Mail recently, the changes in Bill C-48 “go a long way to help eliminate and prevent harm and senseless tragedies in our communities”.
We need to keep in mind that indigenous people are denied bail more often than others, while Black people in Ontario spend longer in custody while awaiting trial than white people for the same offences. This is because courts use police reports to decide on bail, and police reports can contain racial bias. Another reason is that members of disadvantaged groups often have trouble finding sureties or bail money. It is worth noting that the longer someone is detained without bail, the greater the probability of a plea bargain or that the person will plead guilty despite having a viable defence. Either way, justice is compromised.
Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, accused persons in Canada have the right to bail unless there is a very compelling reason to keep them in custody. This is constitutional law, whether Conservatives like it or not.
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- Oct/19/22 5:34:39 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I have a great deal of respect for the member. I had the pleasure of listening to one of her speeches during a Conservative Party opposition day. She delivered a magnificent speech on pricing pollution.
Honestly, I would rather that we not open the Canadian Constitution. The member may want to see the Constitution reopened and constitutional discussions, but I remember constitutional discussions and I would like to stay away from that sort of idea.
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- Jun/14/22 3:54:02 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand and speak to this bill.
As I was preparing my speech, I was thinking back to the 1990s, when I came to Ottawa as a legislative assistant. It was after the 1993 election. The winds of change had swept through this place. The Bloc Québécois was the official opposition and the Reform Party had a big presence, with around 50 members. I remember following question period, which was part of my job. I do not mean to be partisan, and this is not a partisan tone, but I remember that in question period member after member of the Reform Party would get up and ask questions about criminal justice. They would talk about specific cases and describe these cases in great detail. The message in every question was that one could not trust the courts. The questions were intended to impugn the courts and to make people believe that judges were not approaching issues with an objective framework but just injecting their own personal biases into the decisions they made. I think that is very dangerous.
I think we are heading in this direction more and more in our political culture. That is very unhealthy for our democracy. I am looking more toward the United States right now, where I think people are starting to view the courts as an extension of the political system. When people start doing that, they just lose faith in the constitutional democracy.
I read something in the paper the other day and I was just flabbergasted. The state legislature of Ohio passed a motion. It came down to party lines. It is a Republican-dominated state legislature. The Republicans voted for it and the Democrats voted against it. The motion was that Canada should be put on the watch-list of states that suppress religious freedom, ignoring the fact that we have a constitutional democracy and that we have courts that defend charter rights and so on. I think this is a very dangerous thing. It is a kind of new populist relativism and it is not healthy for democracy.
Let me get more specifically down to the bill.
There is unconscious bias in sentencing, for sure. This bias is embedded in the long-standing practices of sentencing. It is embedded in the system. For example, according to Canada's prison ombudsman, Ivan Zinger, whom I had the opportunity to meet when I was the public safety critic in opposition, indigenous women now account for half of the female population in federal penitentiaries, whereas only one out of every 20 women in Canada is indigenous. Similarly, recently the Auditor General found that Black and indigenous prisoners are more frequently placed in higher-security institutions at admission, compared to their white peers, and that they are not paroled as often as others when they first become eligible.
Personally, and this is not a partisan statement, I believe the Harper government's approach to sentencing reinforced and aggravated this bias. At the time when the Harper government was introducing tough-on-crime legislation, one after the other, to my knowledge those bills did not have to be accompanied by a charter statement the way they have to be today. That meant that the Harper government really pushed the limits on this issue. That is why so many of the bills that have been struck down by the courts were passed between 2006 and 2015. I am referring to a document from the Library of Parliament, a multiple-page document.
That said, sentencing has been used intentionally to suppress racialized groups, not to my knowledge in this country, but it can happen. Someone said before in the House that the same sentence applies to everybody regardless of creed, colour or whatever, but sentencing has been used to suppress particular groups.
I want to read a quote. As I said, I am not attributing anything to any Canadian politician I know, but it is interesting to see that it can be used deliberately. John Ehrlichman, counsel and assistant to Richard Nixon and a Watergate co-conspirator, is quoted as saying:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.... We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Of course, that was a particular period of American history, one that was extremely divisive.
What about Bill C-5? It is not about being soft on crime. It is about having sentences that fit the crime and the circumstances. It is about law reform, a work in progress that draws on evolving and accumulated wisdom. It is about removing an approach to sentencing that has proven not only discriminatory but also costly and, in many cases, futile and ineffective.
It is costly because minimum sentences clog up the courts. There is no incentive to plead guilty. It is ineffective because they involve a greater use of prosecutorial discretion. For example, a research paper by Doob, Webster and Gartner, from the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa, stated:
On 1 April 1995, a sentencing referendum (Measure 11) brought in by the voters in Oregon resulted in long mandatory minimum sentences.... [I]t was found that there was a decrease in the prosecution of Measure-11-eligible cases and an increase in the prosecution of “alternate” cases (typically lesser degrees of the same offences which did not attract the mandatory penalty). Trial rates for Measure-11-eligible offences also increased in the first two years after implementation, and then reverted to their former levels. But the nature of pleas changed: there was an increase in the number of cases in which the accused decided to plead to lesser included offences, and a decrease in pleas involving the original charge.
It is futile because a slew of Harper-era minimum sentences have been struck down by the courts, and I just referenced a document from the Library of Parliament a moment ago. There is something called “deterrence through sentencing”, and this is the policy that was adopted in the Harper years. Again, Doob, Webster and Gartner state:
At this point, we think it is fair to say that we know of no reputable criminologist who has looked carefully at the overall body of research literature on “deterrence through sentencing” who believes that crime rates will be reduced, through deterrence, by raising the severity of sentences handed down in criminal courts.
We need to realize that there is nothing objectively true about minimum sentences. They are not something handed down by Moses. Those who advocate for minimum sentences do so based on an accepted but false intuition whose appeal is a simple but misleading logic: The greater the penalty, the greater the deterrent. However, intuition is often wrong. This is why we invest in research and analysis.
Even without the benefit of science, there are some who possess uncanny insights at different times. John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, is quoted as saying, “Certainty of punishment, and more especially certainty that the sentence imposed by the judge will be carried out, is of more consequence in the prevention of crime than the severity of the sentence.”
Doob, Webster and Gartner said:
We suspect that what Macdonald meant by “the certainty that the sentence imposed by the judge will be carried out” is simply the certainty that there will be a criminal punishment. But whatever John A. Macdonald meant by that phrase, clearly he did not think that “severity” of sentences was very important. He was almost certainly correct in this.
They also said, regarding the assumption about minimum sentences, “An additional problem is that people really don’t have much of an idea about what the sentences are likely to be for ordinary crimes.... Most offenders do not meet the relevant 'thought' requirements—that is, believing they might be caught”.
There are a lot of misconceptions and a lot of policies in the last few years that have been based on a sort of intuition. We know that intuition can sometimes be correct, but sometimes it can be extremely misleading.
Bill C-5 is about reaffirming trust in our judicial system, and this is fundamental to a healthy constitutional democracy. I know that is something that everyone in this House desires. The Conservatives used to believe that our institutions needed to be respected because they evolved organically and contained the inherited wisdom of our forebears. Those values seem to be from a bygone Conservative era, long ago, before the party veered into hard-right politics.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to debate this bill, which is very important for our country and for official language communities across Canada.
Canada's Constitution was tailor-made for a modern federation like ours with a non-homogenous population. Some might even call our federation postmodern. Ours is a federation that brings together different cultural groups, peoples and nations who all live together in mutual respect, who adapt and who work together to build a society founded on the principles that we all adhere to.
I am, of course, talking about the indigenous peoples, the French from New France and the British settlers, who, over the years, were joined by people from other cultures who all worked together to build the new Canadian reality. Our Constitution was designed for the modern world, for a world that is becoming increasingly complex, in which the historic boundaries of cultural groups have become more flexible, and different groups share the same country.
One of the pillars of our constitutional democracy is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of the world's wisest and most progressive bills of rights. Our diverse country calls for moderation and a sense of compromise. The charter contains the distinctive section 1, whereby rights are not considered absolute but rather are tempered where it is reasonable to do so.
Another defining pillar of our democracy, in addition to the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights, is the entrenchment in the Charter of Rights of official language minority rights. It is very important to be clear that, and this is a message that I want to get across to the many who might be watching today who are from minority language communities, language rights in our Constitution are beyond the reach of the notwithstanding clause, a clause that has attracted a great deal of attention and, I would say, begun to be used in a perfunctory manner by different governments.
I am speaking of minority language education rights under section 23 of the charter, as well as the right by virtue of section 133 of the British North America Act to use English or French in the federal courts and in Quebec courts, a right that also extends to Manitoba courts by virtue of section 23 of the Manitoba Act of 1870, and to New Brunswick courts owing to the province's 1993 amendment to the charter. These rights are beyond the reach of the notwithstanding clause. This is important for minority language communities.
The Official Languages Act adds a layer of protection and promotion to these constitutional language guarantees by protecting and promoting the use of official languages in the federal context, namely, in the federal public service and in Crown corporations, such as Canada Post, Air Canada, Via Rail, CN and Nav Canada.
In our constitutional democracy, independent courts adjudicate constitutional rights through the prism of our most fundamental values, and perhaps no program has been more valuable in protecting official language minorities in this country than the federal court challenges program. The program offers funding to those launching legal challenges to protect their rights, including linguistic rights, from laws and policies that threaten those rights.
The court challenges program was recently used by Quebec's English language school boards to protect them from the Legault government's Bill 40. the bill aims to eliminate school boards, which are central community institutions for Quebec's English-speaking minority.
As we know, there was a court decision that said the Quebec government could eliminate school boards, but not English-speaking school boards, because the community has protection under the Constitution regarding minority language rights, and this case continues through the courts. Earlier, the program was vital to protecting Ottawa's Montfort hospital against callous attempts by the Harris government to close this institution, which is so vital to eastern Ontario's francophone population.
As promised, Bill C-13 would strengthen the court challenges program by de facto referencing it in the legislation, namely section 43(1)(c) of the act. I admit the reference could be more explicit and more definitive, and we will see what happens in committee. We will see if someone proposes an amendment to make that clause a little more affirmative. However, like any government program, whether it is in law or not, its effectiveness is ultimately directly related to its budget.
Challenging a bill like Bill 40 through the long process of court appeals can be costly. I have heard it could cost up to $1 million for the English-speaking school boards in Quebec to fight Bill 40 all the way to the Supreme Court. I think this is beyond the capacity of the court challenges program, so I call on the government to increase the program's budget. It would be money well spent in support of the fundamental principles to which we, as Canadians, adhere. Not to mention that the 2021 Liberal election platform includes such a commitment.
I represent a riding in Quebec with a large anglophone population. It is, however, very much a bilingual riding with an English-speaking school board that offers bilingual and French immersion primary and secondary education. The community is rightfully attached to its schools and to the education rights of their children.
The new section 41(4) of the modernized Official Languages Act would help maintain those rights by requiring the government to proactively, through the census, help estimate:
...the number of children whose parents have, under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the right to have their children receive their instruction in the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of a province or territory, including the right to have them receive that instruction in minority language educational facilities.
I would like to pay homage to my colleague from Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, who worked very hard on having the census be used to estimate the number of people in minority language communities across this country who have rights under the Constitution.
Whether their roots stretch back generations, or they have more recently arrived, Quebec's anglophones are deeply rooted and embedded, by choice, in Quebec society. They are profoundly attached to living in the only place in North America where French is broadly spoken every day, and they wish to remain in Quebec and contribute to its development, but they require employment opportunities to be able to do so.
The representation of anglophones in the federal public service in Quebec is, as I understand it, below the community's share of the population. Bill C-13 will hopefully help eliminate this gap in two ways. Section 41(5) of a modernized Official Languages Act would place a duty on the federal government to take concrete positive measures to enhance the vitality of English-speaking and French-speaking linguistic minority communities in Canada and assisting their development, including, presumably, by ensuring anglophones have their rightful place in the federal administration in Quebec.
Moreover, the role of the Treasury Board would be expanded as a result of Bill C-13. The Treasury Board would have a duty to establish directives and policies to give effect to the requirement to institute positive measures, as well as responsibility for “general direction and coordination” of these positive measures across departments. This is a very important addition to the Official Languages Act.
It is worth noting that in Bill C-32, Bill C-13's predecessor, this obligation was discretionary. In Bill C-13, it is mandatory. Also, Bill C-13 will require the Treasury Board to “monitor and audit federal institutions in respect of which it has responsibility for their compliance” with the aforementioned directives and policies.
As in Bill C-32, the Commissioner of Official Languages' role and enforcement powers have been enhanced, including the power to make compliance agreements. Namely, section 64.1(1) of the new modernized Official Languages Act will, after Bill C-13 is passed, state the following:
If, at any time during the course of or after carrying out an investigation, the Commissioner has reasonable grounds to believe that a federal institution has contravened this Act, the Commissioner may enter into a compliance agreement with that federal institution aimed at ensuring compliance with this Act.
As has been mentioned, the government, in parallel to introducing amendments to the Official Languages Act, has also introduced a new act, the use of French in federally regulated private businesses act. This second act reasserts Ottawa's role in regulating businesses operating in federal jurisdictions in Quebec. I know this is something not all parties in this House agree with. If I recall, all opposition parties would relinquish that jurisdiction to the province.
As I see it, this second act will reinforce bilingualism in federally regulated businesses. It will give consumers in Quebec:
...the right to communicate in French with and obtain available services in French from federally regulated private businesses that carry on business in Quebec...
This is already the case, practically speaking.
In any event, Quebec anglophones would not object to this principle. The Quebec anglophone community displays a very high degree of bilingualism. I cannot recall ever seeing a francophone consumer in Quebec being unable to obtain service in their language from an anglophone. As a matter of fact, sometimes what happens is a rather curious kind of dance where an anglophone goes into a store. The person behind the counter asks them in French if they can serve them and the anglophone asking for service is not really sure if the server is an anglophone or a francophone, ending up with two anglophones speaking to each other in French. This happens quite a lot and it is a moment of levity for all concerned.
Moreover, Bill C-13 does not prevent consumers from transacting in English. Section 7(3) states:
For greater certainty, the rights set out in subsection (1) do not preclude consumers from communicating with or obtaining services from the federally regulated private business in English or a language other than French if they wish to do so and the federally regulated private business is able to communicate or provide services in that language.
As regards language of work, section 9(1) states that employees of a federally regulated private business have a right to carry out work and be supervised in French. Again, I do not believe that anglophones in Quebec, at least not in my community, have a problem with this statement in principle. Of course, there will be regulations to determine how this right will be applied, and we will see what the regulations say.
Employees will have a right to use work instruments and computer systems in French. Again, this does not take anything away from those who speak English. Computer software interfaces provide for this flexibility. I trust the regulations will recognize this software flexibility.
This right to workplace bilingualism is reinforced in section 9(3), which reads:
The right set out in paragraph (1)(b) does not preclude communications and documents from being in both official languages...
Therefore, we see that this bill is reinforcing the core values that underlie the Official Languages Act, which of course is bilingualism.
Further, proposed subsection 10(2) states, “In developing the measures referred to in subsection (1)”, that is, measures to foster the use of French in workplaces, “the federally regulated private business must consider the needs of employees who are close to retirement, have many years of service or have conditions that could impede the learning of French.”
I believe this clause may require amendment. It seems to refer to medical conditions that could impede learning French, but there are many reasons why some individuals remain unilingual that have nothing to do with a medical condition. I think that needs to be taken into account.
Further, proposed subsection 11(2) states that a federally regulated private business “must not treat adversely an employee who occupies or is assigned to a position on or before the day on which this subsection comes into force for the sole reason that the employee does not have a sufficient knowledge of French.”
The vast majority of anglophones in Quebec are bilingual and growing more so every day. They should not be negatively impacted by this particular clause. The regulations will be key to ensuring an appropriate flexibility that protects everyone.
Many if not most federally regulated businesses deal with entities outside the province. One thinks of logistics and freight-forwarding companies, of which many are located in my community. This further reinforces the practical value of bilingualism in the federally regulated private sector, which brings me to section 11(3), which states:
Requiring an employee to have a knowledge of a language other than French does not constitute adverse treatment for the purposes of subsection (1) if the federally regulated private business is able to demonstrate that a knowledge of that language is objectively required by reason of the nature of the work to be performed
Federally regulated businesses tend to deal internationally, so there is a role for bilingual individuals in these businesses.
All that said, I feel strongly that no one, anglophone or francophone, should be prevented from working in a federally regulated business because they do not have knowledge of the other language, just as they would not be prevented from working in the federal public service because they only have knowledge of one of the official languages unless the position requires a level of bilingualism. I hope the regulations will respect this fundamental principle of the Official Languages Act.
I would like to see the regulations that will follow under Bill C-13 guarantee in some way this right to work. Perhaps this could be done through amendments to the bill. On a practical level, given today's acute labour shortage, it would be in the best interests of employers and the provincial economy to ensure that the law does not hamstring federally regulated businesses and their ability to recruit and hire qualified personnel.
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- Feb/19/22 10:56:02 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, like my colleague who spoke before me, I would like to thank the members of the Parliamentary Protective Service and the peace officers who have come to Ottawa to deal with this unprecedented situation.
There has been a great deal of misinformation, misconception and misunderstanding around the pandemic and the public health measures that have been necessary, as well as about how these measures stack up against the guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I have received a great deal of mail, even prior to what we are experiencing today in downtown Ottawa, about mandates and how they violate charter rights.
It is incumbent upon all of us to tell our constituents, which is what I have been doing, that the mandates and public health restrictions that are now being loosened and eliminated did not violate charter rights. If they had violated charter rights, court cases would have been brought, judges would have made decisions and mandates would have been struck down. That is just a fact of our democracy.
As a matter of fact, in Newfoundland, at the very beginning of the pandemic, there was a very serious public health restriction that barred anyone from entering Newfoundland unless they had some kind of medical document. That case was brought to the court, and the court found that public health measure was not a violation of charter rights. It is very important, and it is incumbent on us, as elected members of Parliament, to reassure Canadians that their charter rights have not been violated. Yes, these measures have imposed constraints, but the constraints are not necessarily a violation of charter rights.
Some will say in response that they do not want to talk about the courts because they are part of the government, or they are stacked with liberal-minded judges. Once we get to the point where there is no agreement on the structure of our democracy, and how it operates and functions, then it is impossible to have constructive conversations. Every law that is tabled in the House is accompanied by a charter statement. While orders in council do not require a formal charter statement, they are vetted for charter consistency.
It is also important to remind Canadians that what we have been seeing in front of Parliament and at many border crossings across the country is not peaceful, lawful protest. We have to remind Canadians that these have been unlawful protests that have surpassed what can reasonably be considered legitimate protest based on constitutionally protected rights and freedoms.
The so-called “freedom convoy” has not been without negative consequence, especially for the people of Ottawa. Businesses have been closed in downtown Ottawa, and workers who need to feed their families have not been able to work for three weeks. Their income has been stopped. As well, Canadians suffered income interruptions because of the blockage of supply chains at the border. These people have felt the very real consequences of these illegal blockades.
I will go back to talk about the people of Ottawa, and will quote from an article that appeared recently in The Globe and Mail about the mental health impacts of the blockade here in Ottawa on the citizens of this city. It says, “Experts worry that the stress could have long-lasting effects on the health of residents who have also been navigating life during a pandemic.” Then the article goes on to quote Ivy Bourgeault, professor in the school of sociological and anthropological studies at the University of Ottawa, who stated, “I don’t think, as a resident, that one can look at one’s environment in the same way again. That when there are other protests, this will be a trigger.” She went on to say, “Uncertainty and no control just causes enormous amounts of stress, and that is in addition to the chronic stressors that people have been dealing with in relation to the pandemic.” I could go on.
I would also like to speak about the economic impacts. I mentioned these before, in a question to one of the hon. members who was speaking. The point I was trying to make was that if someone wanted to undermine the security of a nation, especially a trading nation that imports most of its products from a neighbouring nation such as the United States, they would block the points of entry. It would harm that nation. They would block the Ambassador Bridge. They would block crossings in Manitoba and Alberta. They would block 12 additional points of entry. Of course, they would also breach the confines of the CBSA plaza in Fort Erie, resulting in a lockdown of the office to prevent additional protesters from gaining entry. That is what someone would do if they wanted to undermine the security of this country.
I have watched the reaction from the official opposition, and I do not want to be partisan because this is not a partisan issue. I have watched the reasoning and messaging coming from the official opposition for a couple of weeks. The first notion that the official opposition tried to float was that if the Prime Minister would sit down and have a cup of coffee with anti-democratic organizers, then everyone would go home happy. I do not believe that a so-called law and order party really believes in that notion.
Then, the official opposition had been giving credence to the notion that the police are directed by the federal government. If the protest is still there, it is the fault of the federal government because it controls the forces of law and order. Many people believe that. Many people have written to me, asking why we cannot do anything about this. I remind them that in a constitutional democracy, governments, whether municipal, provincial or federal, do not direct the police.
When the government finally did something by invoking the Emergencies Act, the official opposition recoiled in shocked surprise. They asked how we could possibly think of doing that, after telling the government that it was not doing anything. There is plenty of contradiction in the messaging coming out of the other side, but I would like to leave that aside for a moment.
Another point that has been raised is that this could have been handled normally using normal laws, but we saw for three weeks that the Ottawa police were overwhelmed. They could not do anything, and we saw that. That is a historical record. For three weeks, the Ottawa police could not get this situation under control. That was not the federal police. That was not the provincial police. That was the Ottawa police.
What did the Emergencies Act allow? It allowed the Ottawa police to be supported by police forces from, I think, seven other municipalities. What did the Emergencies Act allow? It meant that these police officers could join and help the Ottawa police in clearing out this blockade that is in front of the Parliament buildings, and they did not have to deputize each individual officer in some kind of bureaucratic process—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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