- Member of Parliament
- Member of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
- Bloc Québécois
- Montarville
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 59%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $115,582.71
- Government Page
- Nov/1/23 5:07:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, you are no doubt familiar with the expression, “with friends like that, who needs enemies”. I feel this expression is particularly appropriate today, and today is just a new episode in a series of actions taken by the Conservatives that I believe will prove extremely harmful to Ukraine.
It takes a lot of gall for the Conservatives to launch this debate today on the motion to concur in the report on Ukraine. I will explain.
It took months for the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development to concur in this report, which was supported nearly unanimously by the committee members. Indeed, the Conservatives decided to filibuster the work of the committee, which made it impossible for us to concur in this report. Not only did this filibuster unduly delay concurring in the report, it also prevented the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development from travelling to Ukraine for a first time.
I will come back to this, because our Conservative friends also prevented the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development from going to Ukraine a second time.
The first time was because of their filibuster, which lasted months. I think I can safely say it lasted three months. I will digress for a moment. I have said repeatedly that the Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development should be the least partisan House committee. Deep down, we are not so far apart in our values. Furthermore, it is to our benefit to present a united front abroad, especially concerning the war in Ukraine, and yet it took months for this report to finally see the light of day.
The Conservatives decided to present a motion to concur in this report today. Please understand me: It is an excellent report. I will come back to that in a few moments. However, why are they choosing to debate it today? Why choose to do it this afternoon, at the very same time the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development is sitting? I was supposed to speak in committee, but I had to ask my colleague from Shefford to take over on short notice because I had to come give a speech to the House for the concurrence of a report from this committee. Could the timing have been any worse?
Even worse, the subject the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development is debating is humanitarian aid for Ukraine. Who started this debate at the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development? As members may have guessed, it was the Conservatives. The Conservatives are filibustering themselves, as it were. We are debating one of their motions at the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, but at the same time, we must debate concurrence of this report on Ukraine in the House. What bad timing.
Worse yet, the Conservatives chose to hold this concurrence debate when we were supposed to be discussing Bill C-57. My colleagues referred to it earlier. Bill C‑57 deals with implementing a free trade agreement with Ukraine. The Conservatives are delaying the passage of a bill that would ratify and implement a free trade agreement with Ukraine.
It seems like the Conservatives are constantly trying to prevent us from getting Ukraine the help it needs. What did Ukraine need today? If we want to put ourselves in the shoes of our Ukrainian friends, our Ukrainian allies, we must ask ourselves what they needed today from the House of Commons.
Did they need the House to make progress toward the passage of a bill on free trade between Canada and Ukraine, or did they need us to concur in this report on Ukraine today, rather than three weeks, three months or nine months ago?
In other words, we could have concurred in this report some time ago. The Conservatives, however, chose to move concurrence on the very afternoon we should have been discussing the bill to implement the free trade agreement with Ukraine.
I do not believe that Ukraine needed this report concurred in today. Ukrainians needed it months ago. They needed the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development to finally come out with this report months back. However, the Conservatives decided to throw sand in the gears and delay everything. This just shows how constructive our Conservative colleagues are. They never miss an opportunity to throw sand in the gears.
Our Liberal colleagues failed to get the message after the last election that they would have to govern as a minority government and take everyone's opinion into account, but I think our Conservative friends also failed to understand that their role is not to stop Parliament from functioning, but to ensure that Parliament moves forward. Every time that the discussion turned to Ukraine, the Conservatives put up roadblocks.
They blocked the adoption of this report. It took months before we could adopt it. The Conservatives spent a long time filibustering on a completely different issue: the fact that we wanted to undertake a study on women's sexual health. Of course this topic bothers them, because the word “abortion” was mentioned. It means the intentional termination of a pregnancy, and they think that it is terrible. Instead of letting us proceed with the report on Ukraine, they spent months throwing sand in the gears. In the end, they did not prevent us from launching the study on women's sexual health. We even completed it. However, they did obstruct the work of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development for months, which delayed the adoption of this report for months.
Because of their obstruction, we were unable to complete the request for a mission to Ukraine. They decided that we would no longer travel, that parliamentarians should not travel anymore. Last summer, they once again refused to let the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development travel to Ukraine. As I said at the outset, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
The Conservatives keep repeating that they love Ukraine and are determined to defend Ukraine. In reality, however, they are not walking the talk. They keep looking for ways to throw sand in the gears every chance they get. It is extremely unfortunate. Ukrainians need our support, which includes increased trade between the two countries.
The implementation of this free trade agreement has been delayed because, once again, the Conservatives are using completely futile and unproductive parliamentary guerrilla tactics that only delay what must be done. That is what is the most detrimental. This report was delayed for months before it was finally adopted. The Conservatives delayed it to stop the committee from doing a study on women's reproductive health, which was finally able to take place. All the Conservatives are doing is delaying what needs to be done. This free trade agreement needs to be implemented, and it will be.
However, once again, we are being forced to deal with the tactics of the Conservative Party, which is self-filibustering in that the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development is sitting right now to study the matter of providing humanitarian and food aid to Ukraine as a result of a Conservative Party motion. It makes no sense.
When this report was made public, I said that I was very proud of the work that was done by the members of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, but I also said that I was very embarrassed. This report sets out 15 recommendatoins and contains some very worthwhile proposals to better support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, which have not yet all been implemented by the government. As I said earlier in my speech, it took months to release this report.
At that time, I also had the opportunity to say that the war has showcased how extremely dependent western economies are on oil and gas. Our Conservative friends reacted by saying that we were going to sell more to our European allies, not realizing that the other observation coming out of this war is that we need to get away from oil and gas post-haste. We need to support Europe so that it can get moving on the green shift as quickly as possible and reduce its dependence not only on Russian oil, but on oil in general.
I said at the time that this study is not finished. It will continue as long as the war continues. That is why the committee is meeting even as we speak. That is why I said that the committee will soon go to Ukraine, which, thanks to the Conservatives, has not been able to happen until now.
I said that this is an interim report because other things are going to come up. The war is not over; it is ongoing. We have to pay attention to what is happening and adjust our recommendations as the situation evolves. That is what is being done at the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development as I give this speech.
Once again, our Conservative friends said that the Russian ambassador needed to be expelled. I mentioned the fact that we decided the time might not be right for such an action, although it is still an option. The lines of communication have to stay open. I am calling on our Liberal friends to show some consistency, because even though the Russian embassy remains open here, and the Canadian embassy is still open in Moscow, diplomatic communication has ended for all intents and purposes. There is no contact anymore.
We obviously support the sanctions regime that has been put in place against Russia, Belarus, oligarchs and banks of all kinds. The fact is—and this was the subject of our observations—that we are not in a position to accurately determine the extent of the assets and the nature of the frozen assets. The government made a point of passing legislation allowing it to seize assets to help rebuild Ukraine, but it still does not seem to know how to proceed legally in that regard. We have been unable to determine the nature and extent of the assets seized. This has been hard to assess for the simple reason that the government decided to outsource this responsibility to the private sector and the banks, without giving them any specific information about what was expected of them.
We understand that banks might be a little uneasy about having to sanction customers. The federal government has therefore shirked its responsibilities, which means that we are not really in a position to have a clear idea of what is happening with the sanctions. The monitoring process is difficult to follow. Of course, we have to coordinate with our allies, but we also have to take into account our own specific conditions.
We talked about the fact that a certain number of Russian banks have been excluded from the SWIFT international system, which is very good news. The problem is that there are still some Russia banks on the SWIFT system. What do members think happened? Transactions simply moved from certain banking institutions to others, so now they are getting around the sanctions, often with help from third-party states, which is enabling Russia to continue waging war on Ukraine. All these measures need tightening up.
Our agriculture critic noted that some sanctions even seem counterproductive. I am thinking of the ones targeting grains and seeds, which are punishing our own producers and making Russian products more competitive on international markets than Canadian products. In that case, the result goes against the desired objective.
The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development started studying our sanctions regime. We are currently finalizing a report on that. We see that there is still a lot of work to be done.
I will close by saying that it is a good report and it is a good thing that it is being concurred in. However, I will reiterate the question I asked earlier: Was today the right day to move concurrence? I do not think so, and I think I have demonstrated that, for a whole host of reasons, the strategic and tactical choices that the Conservatives made turned out to be harmful for Ukraine. We are seeing yet another example of that today, which is extremely harmful.
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