- Member of Parliament
- Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- Conservative
- Red Deer—Lacombe
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,499.79
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and speak on behalf of the constituents of Red Deer—Lacombe about an issue that I am hearing quite a bit about. Before I go any further, I will note that I am splitting my time with my friend from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa.
Bill C-11, the online streaming act, and in the previous Parliament Bill C-10, is causing a lot of concern and a lot of debate here in Canada. We are not debating the bill per se anymore in the sense that it has been returned to this place. This does not happen very often. Those who are still able to freely watch this at home need to understand that it is very rare for the Senate of Canada to return a piece of legislation to the House of Commons, because normally MPs do their due diligence in the legislative process here. It goes through committees, where we hear from witnesses and hear from experts, and we can generally amend legislation in the House of Commons. I am not saying it ever goes to the Senate in perfect format, but if we are actually doing our job here, the Senate would have very few recommendations or changes to propose for a piece of legislation.
That is not the case with this particular piece of legislation. I believe there were 26 or 29 amendments made by the Senate. I can tell members how many Conservative senators there are in the Senate. I think there are 15, so that tells us that the vast majority of senators in the Senate are not in the Conservative caucus. However, that Senate, by a majority vote, decided to report the bill back to the House of Commons with well over 20 amendments, some of which the government has decided to accept. They are largely the innocuous ones. The important ones, dealing with what people can freely say online, what constitutes Canadian content and what the government and the CRTC can regulate, have not been accepted by the government, so we are in this debate now, in this standoff.
I want to be fair to the government in my analysis of the legislation, so I want to talk about the correspondence I have gotten in my office from Canadians and from my constituents in regard to the bill. We know how it is when we go to a convention. There is the “yes” microphone and the “no” microphone, with people speaking in favour of something and people speaking against something, so in fairness to the government, I will talk about the correspondence I have received that have a positive view on Bill C-11.
Now that that is out of the way, I am going to talk about all of the negative things we are hearing from constituents. Not since the proposals on firearms have I had this much uproar in my constituency. Actually, I have not had this much uproar since back in 2017, when the previous finance minister, Bill Morneau, tried in the summertime to change the tax laws in this country, which created so much furor.
Not one person in my constituency has written into my office to says they agree with everything the government is doing on Bill C-11, and there are people in my constituency who use social media, watch Netflix and watch Disney+. They are those who have not cancelled Disney+ and saved themselves from financial ruin, according to the current finance minister. All kidding aside, they have not, and here is why: It is because they trust the people who are being very critical about this piece of legislation. They are largely objective people.
Margaret Atwood has said, “bureaucrats should not be telling creators what to write” and that bureaucrats should not be in charge of deciding what is Canadian. She has referred to all of this with two words that I think should make every member of this House stand still and think for a second: “creeping totalitarianism”. That is from Margaret Atwood, a voice of reason. Everybody around the world has read, understands or has access to some of the fine works of Margaret Atwood.
Senator Richards, who was appointed by the current Prime Minister and is himself a novelist, in his January speech in the Senate said that Bill C-11 is “censorship passing as national inclusion”. I hear this all the time. I do not know what my colleagues hear, but basically when we hear the government talk about inclusion, what it really means is that everybody who agrees with it is included and everybody who disagrees with it finds themselves on the outside looking in and feels like they are foreigners in their own country. Our country has never been more divided, and there has never been less trust in institutions. We only have to go back to a little over a year ago to see what the reaction has been to the divide-and-conquer approach the current Prime Minister and the government have taken.
Senator Richards goes on to say, “Cultural committees are based as much in bias and fear as in anything else. I’ve seen enough artistic committees to know that. That what George Orwell says we must resist is a prison of self-censorship.” This is Orwellian language being invoked by a Senate appointee of the current Prime Minister. He also said, “This law will be one of scapegoating all those who do not fit into what our bureaucrats think Canada should be.” That is what an intelligent, articulate senator, a novelist appointed to the Senate of Canada, is on the record as saying in a speech in the Senate.
It is shocking that we find ourselves here in this place reviewing this legislation again after everything we said when it was Bill C-10 and before Bill C-11 went to the Senate. It has now come back to us with the senators confirming all of our suspicions, all of our concerns and all of the problems we identified for the Canadian public.
Professor Michael Geist, who has been a perennial witness here, is one of the most learned people when it comes to free speech and all of the laws pertaining to it. He is the University of Ottawa's Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law. On digital content, he says, “Canada punches above its weight when it comes to the creation of this content, which is worth billions of revenue globally. We are talking about an enormous potential revenue loss for Canadian content producers.”
This is at a time when Canadians are having an increasingly difficult time making ends meet with inflation, the carbon tax, the cost of living and the cost of housing. Everything is going up in this country. If we go back to January, Jack Mintz wrote an article about this. In 2015, the cost of the federal government service was about $38 billion a year. Today, eight years later, the cost of public service salaries is $58 billion, an increase of $20 billion. It is an increase in the size of the federal public service in Canada of over 30%, so there are 30% more people working for the Government of Canada now than there were in 2015. Have things gotten better? Have people gotten their passports quicker? Are people getting across the border quicker? Are people getting anything done? Are any of the services needed by my fellow Canadians getting done in a quicker and more timely fashion? The answer is clearly no.
Why on earth, why in the name of everything that is good about the free country we live in, would we increase the size of the bureaucracy even more through the CRTC and give it the ability to do to the Internet what it has done to cable TV and radio? Canadians are no longer watching. They have tuned out. They have tuned out to the point where the government has had to spend $600 million just to prop up legacy media outlets because nobody is interested in their mandatory content.
Why do we not hear from them? We can hear from many people. I have been a member of Parliament here for 17 years, and I hear from people I disagree with all the time, but that does not make me a bitter or jaded person. It does not make the information I am hearing more or less valuable. We need to hear from everybody, and everybody should have the ability to say what they need to say. When they are not heard, when they feel like they are not being heard and when they feel like their government is working against them all the time, they start doing things they would normally not do. We saw that manifested on this Hill for three weeks last year. This is the kind of governance we are getting from the folks across the way.
The implementation of this bill is going to be a blunder. There is no reason for me to believe that increasing bureaucracy and the capacity of the CRTC is going to create a better outcome for the people of Canada than the current 30% massive increase in the size of the government we have already seen. On behalf of my constituents who have written me, I would urge the government to at least reconsider its position on the amendments and accept all of the amendments the Senate has proposed, because it would at least make a horrible bill somewhat more bearable.
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- May/2/22 6:36:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, may Gord rest in peace. We miss him here.
I will be splitting my time with my colleague for Battle River—Crowfoot.
I rise to oppose government Motion No. 11. It is not because we do not want to have more debate here; it is just that my colleague, who just spoke across the way, does not understand what the contents of his own motion are. He could not even answer a simple question from the Green Party MP about why there was an extension for the medical assistance in dying committee. He does not understand his own motion here, either.
Conservatives are ready to debate, but the issue before us is the wording of the motion in several places. One of the most egregious things that is in the motion is the ability for the government, a minister or the Prime Minister, at any point in time after Motion No. 11 is passed, if it is passed unamended, to simply adjourn the House. That is something that is reserved for the Speaker only, as we saw on that one day when the Speaker adjourned the House during the convoy when the police had moved in. There was supposed to be a debate on the Emergencies Act that day, but the House was adjourned so we had a reason why the Speaker took that particular prerogative.
Normally, when a prime minister wants to adjourn the House, he or she has to go through the process of prorogation to reset the political agenda. That would be the only reason. We have already agreed, as political parties here, what days we are going to sit. We have the parliamentary sitting calendar, so it is simply not true that Conservatives do not want to have a debate. We already have the parliamentary calendar set up. What is actually true is that the government, which is blaming Conservatives for being obstructionist when we are simply doing our job debating legislation, has already been able to pass eight of the 18 bills that it has introduced in this particular Parliament. Yes, Bill C-8 is taking some time, but it is billions of dollars in spending. Here is what the Liberals are not saying about Bill C-8.
First of all, the Prime Minister called an unnecessary election in August of last year, which used all of the sitting days that would have been available in September and October all the way up to November 22, which by my calculation is at least seven sitting weeks. That is 35 days of Parliament that we otherwise would have sat and we could have debated and discussed this legislation. Even more cynically, the Liberals tabled Bill C-8 on the very last day of the fall sitting, which was December 16, which means that they basically had not one day. They tabled the bill one day before the House adjourned in the fall. That means that the fall economic statement had zero days of debate in the fall.
If we fast forward, after weeks of Parliament being adjourned over the Christmas break, the Liberals' mismanagement, and the name-calling of Canadian citizens that resulted in a protest that sidetracked this place, here we find ourselves. Lo and behold, the Conservatives have only been speaking to Bill C-8 for a handful of days, and the bill has gone through committee and passed at second reading. It is now at report stage and is moving its way through third reading. All the Liberals had to do was simply ask their coalition dance partners in the NDP if they wanted to move this along.
We have legitimate concerns about the legislation. There are some things we may agree with on this side of the House, but there are also some things in there that we disagree with. It is our job to bring those matters to debate before the House of Commons. As I said, they have a supply and confidence motion, otherwise known as a coalition with the NDP. They simply had to ask their dance partners for approval to do this. For whatever reason they did not get it, so I do not know how much confidence the Liberals could have in what the NDP is supplying them, but I will leave that for the dance partners to talk about.
My point is that the mismanagement of the time of the House by the Liberals is what is actually the problem. They have been able to get bills passed, but we have a right and a constitutional responsibility to oppose legislation that we do not agree with. Even if we agree with bits and pieces of it, our job is to challenge the legislation that is before the House. The whole notion of how a democracy is supposed to work is through the cut and thrust of debate, the to and fro of debate. It is to have the best ideas from all sides of the House and all sides of the chamber, and all the people who voted in the last election have their ideas come together and bubble to the top.
The problem with the motion is the tone of the motion. This is what the Liberal and NDP members are trying to do. If a citizen is at home watching this and wondering what is actually going on, let me spell it out for them.
In a normal sitting of the House, there is this thing called “quorum”. The House must have at least 20 MPs here. Normally, the governing party, the party that is responsible for the legislation that is being discussed, has to be present to carry the debate. That would require, in addition to the Speaker, at least 19 Liberal members of Parliament, or Liberal-NDP members of Parliament if they are working in cahoots together, to be present for the debate.
In Motion No. 11, there is a clause that says the government will remove any ability to call quorum or to move a dilatory motion. People at home might wonder what a dilatory motion is. That is a motion to adjourn the House and end the debate. It ends what we are talking about or stops what we are doing at a particular point in time. It adjourns a meeting of the House of Commons.
It is the quorum part that matters. As Conservatives, we are willing to be here and debate. That is not a problem. On behalf of the millions of people who voted for us, we would expect that at least 20 Liberals would be in the House to listen. With the motion worded the way it is, the government is basically saying, to Conservatives and Bloc Québécois MPs, “Talk to the hand.” The government is going to pass an autopilot motion in the House of Commons that is normally reserved for debates, such as take-note debates or emergency debates, where there is no question, no vote, at the end of those debates.
At the end of Bill C-8, and at the end of Motion No. 11, there is going to be a vote. That is different. To put the House in that type of scenario is completely unacceptable. For those who are watching at home, this is the part that the Liberals and the NDP are not telling people. They are not telling Canadians that they are getting rid of the actual processes and procedures in the House of Commons: the Standing Orders that we normally operate by. They are getting rid of those things because they do not necessarily want to be here.
I am pretty sure the member for Kingston and the Islands will be here and my friend for Winnipeg North, who is always here in the House, will probably be here. There will be one if not two of them. I might see some of the other MPs from the Liberal Party, but I do not expect to hear from them because, frankly, I never do.
Notwithstanding any of that, for people who are watching at home, it is not just Conservatives who are opposed to this: it is members of the Bloc as well. I am pretty sure there are some members in the NDP who are very uncomfortable with what is happening: people who used to stand up for the working-class Canadians in this country, and people who used to actually stand up for transparency and accountability in this country, are looking at this and wondering what is going on as well.
To Canadians who are watching at home and listening to the talking points from the Liberal MPs who are speaking, this is the part that is egregious. They would simply take away the ability for the Prime Minister or the government of the day to just adjourn the House, so that when things get a little hot around here, if the Prime Minister was under another investigation, they would just shut down the House but they would not have to go through the embarrassment of calling a prorogation to do it. That is the first thing.
The second is quorum. “Talk to the hand,” is basically what they are saying to Conservative members of Parliament and the Bloc Québécois. The government just wants us to talk. We could just have a joint caucus meeting with the Bloc, according to the motion. We do not actually need to be here. There is no point in us sitting here debating if the government is not interested in listening.
If the government is not interested in listening, why not? Does the government not care about the millions of Canadians who did not vote for its members in the last election? Are there no good ideas from the official opposition? Is there no role for the official opposition? Is there no role for the people who voted for the Bloc Québécois to bring up the issues that are important to them?
Where are we in this democracy? This is the problem. To Canadians who are watching, this is the problem. This is why Conservatives are so adamant that Motion No. 11 is fundamentally flawed. We are okay to come to work. We want to come to work. I have been here for 16 years, and the last two weeks in June is the time when extended sitting hours are automatically in the calendar. If MPs in the governing caucus want to have extended hours, they do it. I have done it. As a matter of fact, I was a member of the Harper caucus when Harper was the prime minister. We had motions like this, but we would never dream of putting in an autopilot motion on government legislation.
It is egregious. It is an abuse of the powers of the House. What is shocking to me is that the NDP is going along with this. Where is the party of Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton?
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- Mar/2/22 7:28:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague for Calgary Shepard.
It is an honour to rise today to discuss this extremely serious matter. The unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act requires the utmost scrutiny, and the committee that will be struck is obviously going to play an essential role. The government's attempt to strong-arm the opposition and rig the committee to deliver a favourable outcome is not shocking given the history of the current government; nonetheless, it is unacceptable.
I want to start today by reminding Canadians how we got into this situation in the first place. When we take a step back to consider the actions taken by the Prime Minister and the Liberal government, the need for strong opposition oversight becomes even clearer.
In the early days of the pandemic, the Prime Minister acknowledged that mandating vaccinations would be a deeply divisive and socially harmful policy. That was about 13 months ago. He then saw an opening to try to move from a minority government to a majority, and decided that dividing Canadians and threatening the social fabric of our country would be worthwhile if it gave him a blank cheque for another four years.
While the Prime Minister has always been keen to divide Canadians and others who do not agree with him, recent months have seen him take it to a whole new level, charging those people who do not like his policies as racists or misogynists, or as holding unacceptable views and taking up space. He has taken to suggesting that hon. members of Parliament, even descendants of Holocaust survivors, are standing with Nazis.
What we are seeing is an increasingly tired, scandal-plagued Prime Minister clinging to the reins of power by stoking fear and division. Common-sense Canadians can see right through this. That is why thousands of Canadians from coast to coast left their homes to protest the Prime Minister's divisive policies and his decision to double down on vaccine mandates and restrictions when many provinces and countries around the world were lifting them.
The protesters came with a very simple message for the Prime Minister: Canadians want their rights and freedoms back, and it is time to allow Canadians to manage their risk tolerance for COVID-19 themselves, just as friends and family in other countries have been doing for months. Instead of speaking with them, understanding their concerns and trying to assuage their fears, the government continued to override Canadians' freedoms with no end in sight, and the Prime Minister resorted again to more name-calling.
Then, in a move I cannot fathom, the government and the NDP refused to support our Conservative motion asking for a plan to lift the mandate restrictions. Two years in, the Prime Minister does not believe that Canadians can be trusted with the metrics the government is using to justify public health measures. This is far from the commitment that the Liberal government made: In an open and accountable government, government data and information should be open by default. I wonder if the Liberals remember that pledge.
We cannot accept illegal activity at our borders or on our streets. Infringing on the rights and freedoms of fellow citizens while protesting the government cannot be accepted as the norm, but neither should we as Canadians accept dangerous and divisive rhetoric from the executive branch of our government meant to incite Canadians who disagree with it. It is clear that the Prime Minister no longer shares the guiding philosophy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier's sunny ways, but instead is relying on the winds of bluster.
This is in large part the backdrop against which the Emergencies Act was invoked. After years of insulting, shaming and marginalizing Canadians who disagreed with the Prime Minister, those Canadians rose up in opposition. The use of the Emergencies Act does appear to have been wholly inappropriate in this matter. Conservatives are extremely concerned that in striking the committee as the Liberals are proposing, they intend to simply stack the deck to skirt over the great many concerns that Canadians rightly have.
It is important to note that the existence of an emergency does not mean that the Emergencies Act is the proper tool to be used. I know that many Canadians impacted by the blockades felt that this was an emergency that required extraordinary intervention, but that is not the threshold for using it. In order to use this legislation, the predecessor of which was the War Measures Act, there can be no other options in our federal or provincial laws. We must not lose sight of this fact.
I have listened carefully to experts, including to police officers who were tasked with cleaning up the mess that the Prime Minister instigated. It is clear that the powers under the Emergencies Act were helpful in clearing the blockades, but again, whether they were used or were helpful is not the test for whether the act should have been invoked. It is whether the situation could have been dealt with in any other way through existing authorities. So far, I have seen no compelling evidence that it could not have been.
We know that the police can compel reasonable assistance from others at any point in time. This authority is laid out in the Criminal Code, and that would include calling tow-truck drivers.
We know that if police see a crime in progress, they are able to act on it even if they are outside their regular jurisdiction. Further, there is a process to deputize police from other departments or areas to act. This was done in Ottawa prior to the Emergencies Act being invoked, and it worked.
The Emergencies Act may have been more convenient, but it was not necessary. Convenience is not the test in the legislation. The increased offences that were granted under the Emergencies Act were not necessary, because there are already viable offences and authorities in the Criminal Code. The border blockades were coming down before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, so clearly it was not necessary in those instances. The financial measures were not necessary to bring down the blockades at our international borders, and we were already seeing crowdfunding platforms that were voluntarily cutting off funds without the need of this legislation. They also do not appear to have been charter-compliant, as individuals were assumed guilty and sanctioned by their banks without any due process.
These are all things that the committee needs to consider, and that we cannot simply allow to be swept under the rug by a committee designed to exonerate the Liberals' actions and justify the NDP's backing of them in an attempt to wipe the egg off their face from when they voted to affirm the act's use, only to have it withdrawn 36 hours later.
The government’s proposal for the structure of the committee is totally inadequate. As I have outlined, this committee has a very serious task ahead of it, and it ought to be credible. I appreciate that the views I have laid out, and that I have heard from my constituents, are likely not going to be universally accepted in this Chamber. However, they are valid views and deserve to be heard and considered.
A strong and represented opposition is essential for the functioning of our democracy. Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is beholden to the people of Canada, not to the cabinet, to members of the governing party or to their coalition partners. To try to minimize our role because they do not like what we might say or what we might have said in the past flies in the face of our parliamentary system.
While the Liberals have proved to be too comfortable in criticizing Canadians who disagree with them as holding unacceptable views, and it is their right to say so, no matter how arrogant it makes them sound, they are not the arbiters of acceptability for our parliamentary system. That is a role that is reserved for Canadians at the ballot box, not for the government House leader and the caucus that sits behind him.
While he may have threatened an election over the Emergencies Act, it did not happen and our voices are just as valid in this place, or at committee, as his or any other member's on the government benches.
To quote Sir Wilfred Laurier, a Prime Minister greatly admired by Liberals:
...it is indeed essential for the country that the shades of opinion which are represented on both sides of this House should be placed as far as possible on a footing of equality and that we should have a strong opposition to voice the views of those who do not think with the majority.
I ask the government to take that advice now.
While the government may be inclined to disavow its claimed beliefs for the sake of politics and retaining power, my colleagues in opposition should not have the same concerns. While I have spoken at length about the government’s attempt to vilify Canadians who disagree with it, it is important to remind hon. members that the government has also attempted to curtail the powers of the opposition on multiple occasions. The fact that it is now trying to marginalize the official opposition’s role in the committee because it knows we disagree with it is another link in a concerning pattern by the government to use policy and now procedure to punish those who disagree with it.
We should remember Motion 6, which attempted to marginalize the role of opposition back in 2016 and give the government broad sweeping powers here in Parliament. We should recall the attempts by the government in 2017 to change the Standing Orders so that the opposition would lose numerous tools to hold the government to account. In the early days of the pandemic, the Liberal government tried to give itself the authority, unilaterally and without parliamentary oversight, to raise or lower taxes as it saw fit for up to two years.
When these things happened, opposition parties banded together to say no and oppose the government. The ideological and policy differences that existed then still exist now, but that was not the point. We knew that for our democracy to function effectively, there must be a strong and capable opposition, even if we did not necessarily like what the other parties had to say. It is in that spirit that we should come together now.
In the absence of consensus, the Emergencies Act provides a formula that can be used for striking this committee. While I understand the frustration that some Liberal MPs may have, given that they do not have a Senate caucus, despite the independence of senators appointed by the Prime Minister being questionable, that frustration lies at their feet and at the feet of their Prime Minister who made that decision. They had every ability to harmonize the Emergencies Act with the current structure of the Senate over the past six years, and they did not do so.
Unfortunately, with a closure motion being forced on us to stifle debate, a decision must be made, and I would suggest that adhering to the formula set out in the Emergencies Act will help to ensure a fair and impartial assessment of this incident.
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- Feb/17/22 6:20:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. In accordance with Standing Order 43(2)(a), I would like to indicate that the remaining Conservative Party of Canada caucus speaking slots are hereby divided by two.
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