- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- Jan/30/24 10:52:05 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Chair needs to clarify whether the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot will be able to speak prior to your further ruling. I appreciate you would like to take the time to—
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- Jan/30/24 10:41:49 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to draw the attention of the House to an incident on December 15, 2023. The member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques presented a petition in the House. At the end of the petition, he said, “I hope that as a result of petition e‑4604, the Liberal government will finally understand that it needs to meet the expectations and needs of our students and researchers.” I note that at that time, the Assistant Deputy Speaker objected to the member's statement and highlighted this rule: “The hon. member may present only the content of the petition. He cannot present his point of view on the petition to the House. I just want to make this point, because a member was about to raise a point of order on this subject.”
However, the Assistant Deputy Speaker at the time did not request an apology. That was one incident. I think there are many instances where members have been accused of going over the line in their commentary on petitions. When that has happened, other members have raised points of order. The Chair has sometimes chastened the member, encouraged the member to speed up or encouraged the member to stop.
It is without precedent that the Chair would demand an apology from a member who engages in this fairly minor and somewhat subjective transgression of the standing order. There are many examples. I have cited one of them from December 15, 2023, which I found after about 10 seconds of searching. I could find dozens of such examples where, yes, members may have gone over the line a little bit; yes, points of order may have been raised and the Speaker may even have said that the member should not have done that and should remember for the next time. However, it is not reasonable to simply make up a new standard, apply it to a particular member and require that member to apologize for such a minor infraction.
I hope, Mr. Speaker, that you will take all of that precedent into consideration and provide some clarification.
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- Jan/29/24 6:59:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know members have been missing me over the Christmas break. It is good to see everyone back and to be restored to my friends here in the Chamber. It is sad in a way, because many of them will not be here after the next election. We should spend as much time together in fruitful, substantial debate as possible.
The point is that we have a concurrence report regarding the actions of the Speaker. It should have been a clear case. After repeated instances of partisan activity by the Speaker, including an incident involving being in the Speaker's office, wearing the Speaker's robes and so forth, it should have been clear that the Speaker would not continue with the confidence of the full House.
However, the governing coalition, backstopped by the NDP, chose to defend scandalous behaviour. The NDP is consistently tied up in knots, because it wants to be tough and challenge the government. It wants to be in opposition and in government at the same time. However, Canadians can see the hypocrisy. They can see how, every time there is an important vote or Liberals are under investigation, which is a lot these days, their friends in the NDP will back them up.
We are calling for a restoration of integrity in politics, where people do the things they say and where they are consistent in what they say, regardless of where they are or whom they are talking to; where politicians do not take on an office and then do things that are contrary to the requirements of that office; and where politicians do not attack the government on the one hand and then provide them with a blank cheque on the other hand.
That is what this debate is fundamentally about. I challenge the NDP, in particular. Liberals are going to act in a scandalous way, but the NDP should stop covering for them. What I said when this coalition deal came about was that we were at risk of getting the worst of both worlds: NDP economics and Liberal corruption. That is what we have: radical left-wing NDP economics with typical, same old Liberal corruption.
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- Jan/29/24 6:58:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the NDP member says this is just a “gotcha”. The NDP is really “got” here, I have to say, and that is why they are objecting.
What I have been talking about for some time is how this issue with the Speaker, the issue with ArriveCAN and the investigation we wanted to do on the Prime Minister's vacation are all examples of the NDP choosing to cover for their coalition partners in the Liberals. The NDP could have done the right thing and joined with the opposition in standing for integrity and consistency in the Speaker's office. The NDP could have joined with us in demanding accountability for those who are trying to penalize those who spoke out—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Jan/29/24 6:57:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the irony of these points of order interruptions, by the way, from a procedural perspective, is that there is limited time for this debate. The more points of order we have, the less time will be available for questions and comments. I welcome the opportunity for debate. If members do not interrupt on points of order, there will be more time after my speech for us to have an actual debate in the proper format.
The point of highlighting what happened with the arrive scam and talking about how—
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- Jan/29/24 6:52:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is good to see my friend from Edmonton Griesbach here. I enjoy debating with him. I also enjoyed door knocking in his riding, which I think is very enthusiastic about the Conservative message. It is a riding that did not think it was voting to keep the Prime Minister as the Prime Minister. When New Democrats campaign in Alberta, they rarely admit how close they are to the current Prime Minister or how complicit they are in covering up corruption with their Liberal partners. However, the reality is very clear.
In this vein, it is important to underline for the House what happened in the arrive scam scandal and how the NDP continues to facilitate the government's efforts to avoid accountability. We have a situation in which two senior public servants gave very frank testimony at the government operations committee on November 7. Within three weeks, they both received letters saying that they were the subject of investigations for inappropriate behaviour. Those investigations have not been concluded, yet these senior public servants have now been suspended from their jobs without pay. Therefore, we had two public officials come and give critical, frank testimony about what happened with the arrive scam scandal, and then they were suspended without pay within months after that testimony.
In response to that, I raised a question of privilege at the committee. I said that parliamentary committees need to be able to hear from public servants and from others without those potential witnesses fearing that they will face reprisals as a result of their testimony. When we call and insist on a public servant coming before the committee, that person has an obligation to do so and to tell the truth as they see it.
When we have a situation in which public servants come to committee, tell the truth as they see it and then are subjected to very rare, extreme forms of professional reprisals, this undermines the privileges of Parliament and the ability of Parliament to be able to ask frank questions and get frank answers. It is notable that some of the most explosive testimony from these individuals was not part of their opening remarks. It was not stuff that they necessarily came planning to say. However, they were asked frank, direct questions, and they provided answers to them.
I asked in question period today if the government could explain why there are reprisals being levied against people immediately after their presentations at committee. What is the government trying to hide with respect to the arrive scam scandal? We saw this explosive report from the Office of the Procurement Ombud just today. It just came out. This new report from a critical watchdog finds that 76% of the contractors did no work.
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- Jan/29/24 6:51:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is good to hear from the member—
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- Jan/29/24 6:39:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House today.
Before I get to the subject at hand, I want to acknowledge a tragic anniversary. Today is the seven-year anniversary of the Quebec mosque shooting, a horrible act of Islamophobic violence in our country. I want to extend my condolences to the families and the members of that community who are still dealing with the pain of that, to all those throughout the country who have been profoundly affected by that event and to those who are deeply concerned about Islamophobia today. I had many conversations today with members of the Muslim community about the challenge of present Islamophobia and about some of the escalating tension and division we are seeing in our society.
In the course of those conversations, I had an opportunity to reflect a little on the importance of integrity. When we are looking at difficult issues, issues that may be contentious within or between different communities, what people are looking for from their politicians is integrity. That is to be a fully integrated person and to be the same consistent person, regardless of where one is and regardless of what group one is speaking to. It is very important for us in the Conservative Party to act with integrity.
If we speak to one group and deliver a message in that group, and if we then speak to another group perhaps with a different perspective, then we nonetheless deliver the same message. We stand for the same things, and we believe the same things and we are the same things, regardless of who we are with or who we are talking to. We do not change who we are, how we describe our convictions or what we say our policies are depending on who we are talking to, but we are leaders with integrity.
One thing that is really driving some of the tension and confusion around the government's position is that, on some of the critical issues facing our country and the world, we see very clearly an absence of integrity. We have a government that, on certain issues, has a strategy to say different things to different groups of Canadians and to try to sell them the message they want to hear. Reflecting on this issue of what integrity means and why it is so important is what brings us to this discussion today, a discussion about an action taken by the Speaker.
Following a decision by the Bloc to move this motion, we are debating a concurrence motion on a report by PROC, the procedure and House affairs committee, that deals with the conduct of the Speaker. It responds to a series of incidents involving the Speaker acting in a partisan way that is contrary to what is appropriate to the office.
The largest incident, the most prominent incident, was a video recorded of the Speaker wearing the Speaker's robes in the Speaker's chamber, speaking in a partisan fashion and identifying himself with a political party. When he was caught for doing that, he provided an explanation, a challenging explanation, and then, subsequently, there have been other points or revelations brought up of the Speaker acting in a partisan way.
I think what we would expect from the Speaker and what we need from the Speaker is to have confidence that there is a consistency, an integrity, in his or her, as the case may be, presentation and that, as they are in a role that requires non-partisanship, they would be consistent in demonstrating that non-partisanship. Again, regardless of what room they are in or who is in the room, the Speaker would act with that kind of consistency. It is clear that this particular Speaker comes to the position with a history of partisan activity, but we would have expected that to be put aside when he took on that role, and that has not happened.
This led, close to but not quite, a majority of members of the House to take the position that we needed to have a new Speaker. The reason the committee, in the end, did not recommend a new Speaker is that, ironically, the committee divided along partisan lines.
When the governing coalition of New Democrats and Liberals says that it endorses the Speaker's continuing in his role, a role that has included his acting in a partisan way, and then the two real opposition parties say that they do not have confidence in the Speaker, that underlines the problem. When the Speaker's position is a point of partisan cleavage, that illustrates the problem that the Speaker is in fact no longer able to identify as a non-partisan representative of the whole House.
However, in a way, the Liberals' taking the position that they did is not particularly surprising. We have a Speaker in his robes, speaking at a Liberal Party event, who was then supported by the Liberal Party in continuing in his position.
Obviously, there was a problem at the end with the last Speaker, but I will give the last Speaker credit for making a very important ruling that went against what the government wanted and that protected the prerogatives of the House right before the last election. The previous Speaker demonstrated integrity in that ruling by applying the precedent and by defending the prerogatives of the House even when the government likely did not want him to.
Therefore, after his resignation, when he took the fall for something that the government bears a substantial amount of responsibility, a Speaker came in who had a history of much more partisan positioning. The partisan Liberals have supported the continuation of a Speaker who engaged in partisan Liberal activity while in his office. This is unfortunate and is not defensible from a view to grand principle, but it is understandable based on past behaviour of the Liberal Party.
What is perplexing is what the NDP members have in mind. Not just in this case but across the board, we have seen how the New Democratic Party is defending and protecting the Liberals from scandal prosecution. Why would the coalition partner of the government be so eager to always provide cover for a scandal-plagued Liberal Party? That is a question that is harder to explain.
The NDP, for a long time now, has been supporting Liberal cover-ups, supporting the adjournment of committee meetings that are looking into scandals and preventing questions of privilege from proceeding to the House when the privileges of a committee have been violated in terms of their requests for documents. We have seen how, time and time again, when Conservatives have tried to probe Liberal scandals, Liberals have been able to rely on their cover-up coalition cousins in the corner to block those investigations. We saw this again in this particular case with the Speaker.
I have been talking about integrity, about saying the same thing regardless of where one is and about presenting oneself in a consistent fashion in different environments. Far from this vision of integrity, the New Democrats have themselves twisted up into knots because they now want, for electoral reasons, to be seen to be challenging the government. They want to talk tough on the government. We heard the NDP leader's question today. He was trying to sound very tough and was asking why the current government has not done more on homelessness?
He has an opportunity to oppose the government, to express his non-confidence, if he does not have confidence in how it has handled the homelessness challenge or other problems facing our country. We gave the NDP leader hundreds of opportunities in the fall to express his lack of confidence in the government if he was so willing, but he was not.
The NDP is increasingly trying to perform in a tough way while, on every occasion when it counts, providing a blank cheque to the Liberal government, helping to cover up its corruption, and supporting its confidence and supply measures as it persists in showing flagrant disregard for the concerns of Canadians.
The NDP brings forward motions at committee asking the government to do things that it did not include in its confidence and supply agreement with the government. It says that the situation is unacceptable, yet it continues to preserve the status quo through its blank cheque coalition with the Liberals.
Most critically, when it comes to the issues of scandal and corruption we are discussing today, the NDP consistently stands with the Liberals in helping them do those cover-ups.
An hon. member: Oh, oh!
Mr. Garnett Genuis: Madam Speaker, I invite the member across the way to heckle a little louder, and I will respond. I cannot quite—
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- Feb/6/23 3:30:09 p.m.
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I rise today to speak to the House about the ongoing Liberal-McKinsey scandal. This is the affair through which the government gave over $100 million in contracts to its friends at McKinsey & Company.
The Liberals' response to this scandal has been to say not to not worry, that they will have the ministers responsible for the Treasury Board and procurement investigate what happened in the context of Treasury Board and procurement. In other words, they are not only having Liberals investigate Liberals, but precisely having the Liberal cabinet ministers responsible for this issue in the first place investigating themselves.
The Prime Minister thinks that an appropriate response to waste and corruption within his own government is to have the ministers responsible for that waste and corruption investigating themselves. The Conservatives do not think that is an appropriate response to scandal, and that is why we are moving this motion today to call for an independent investigation by Canada's non-partisan Auditor General.
Of course, we have seen in the House the Auditor General attacked by the Minister of National Revenue. The Conservatives have faith in our independent officers of Parliament, and that is why we want to bring in the Auditor General and ask her to investigate the waste and corruption we are seeing under the Liberal government.
The Liberal-McKinsey affair has three main elements to it. We can speak about corruption, about control and about character.
The Liberals have given over $100 million that we know of so far in contracts to McKinsey & Company. At the same time as McKinsey was selling its services to the Liberal government, Dominic Barton, who was the managing partner of McKinsey, was leading the Prime Minister's own growth council. Although Dominic Barton has said that he is not friends with the Prime Minister, that he barely knows these people and that he did not recognize the Prime Minister in an elevator the first time he saw him, we have the Deputy Prime Minister talking about how close Dominic Barton was to the Prime Minister, how accessible he was and how they had a relationship of being able to contact each other any time, which was build up over time.
On the word of the Deputy Prime Minister, there is a close relationship between the managing director of McKinsey at the time and the Prime Minister. Analysts at McKinsey are doing analytical work for the Prime Minister's growth council at the same time as McKinsey is selling its consulting services to the government. It is no surprise under those circumstances, when we have these clear conflicts of interest and close relationships, that there was a significant spike with respect to the volume of contracts McKinsey was getting from the government. We have conflicts of interest driven by these relationships.
Let us talk as well about control, because Canadians are asking who is pulling the strings, who is making the decisions and who is really deciding the direction of the government. What has been happening with the government is that it has been bringing in high-priced outside consultants, who have been both selling to the government and also making very significant policy decisions. They have been doing work that the public service has said it could be doing itself. We do not know what these consultants are doing, but the consultants are playing a very significant role in setting policy and direction, and they are not subject to the same kinds of transparency requirements as the public service.
If Canadians want to know what discussions were happening within the public service, they can use the transparency and accountability tools that are available to them. However, if Canadians want to know about decisions that are made at McKinsey that are in fact shaping what happens in government, they are not able to access that information. In fact, up until now, McKinsey has not even been willing to provide its client list and that is a huge problem, because McKinsey has a history of working on both sides of the same issue.
In the United States, we had instances where McKinsey was working for the FDA, which is responsible for approving drugs, and it was working for pharmaceutical companies at the same time. It is working for the approval body as well as for the companies that are seeking that approval. In fact, the New York Times revealed instances where the same individual was working for both the FDA and those making the applications.
Is that same thing happening in Canada? Do we have decisions being made by McKinsey while it is also working for clients who benefit from those decisions? The reality is that we do not know, because McKinsey will not disclose its client list. Therefore, there is a lack of transparency and there is influence and control coming from these high-priced consultants who are being hired by the government.
Therefore, there are issues of corruption and control. However, there are also issues of character.
Who is this company? Who is McKinsey, and what has it done around the world? Most notably for the impact it is having here in Canada, McKinsey worked for Purdue Pharma. This is the company that invented OxyContin and was responsible for driving the opioid crisis that has devastated our communities.
In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty to criminal misbranding of its products and downplaying the addiction risk to market these opioids to people. It did this so that it could make money with total disregard for the suffering caused. After 2007, McKinsey continued to work for Purdue Pharma even though it had pleaded guilty. McKinsey put together proposals with a number of recommendations aimed at helping Purdue Pharma supercharge its opioid sales.
Those recommendations included, incredibly, paying bonuses to pharmacists in instances of overdose deaths. In cases where traditional pharmacies were trying to put in place mechanisms to prevent over-prescription, McKinsey proposed that one could have a mail-in process for people to order opioids without needing to go to traditional pharmacies, allowing them to circumvent the checks that existed.
McKinsey was doing this kind of work for Purdue with no regard for basic ethical or moral norms. That was when Dominic Barton was leading McKinsey. I asked him about this at committee last week, and Mr. Barton said he had no idea that McKinsey was doing this work for Purdue. It was a client for 10 years, and the managing director claimed he had no idea.
McKinsey has done other work around the world. It has worked with Russian state-owned and affiliated companies. It has worked with a Chinese state-affiliated company that is building militarized islands in the South China Sea.
These points speak to the character of this company. If we want to talk about conflict of interest, we have a company that is doing work for the Department of National Defence here in Canada while working with Russian and Chinese state-owned and state-affiliated companies.
McKinsey did a report for the Saudi government in which it identified influential dissidents who were driving criticism of Saudi economic policy. Not surprisingly, after those accounts were identified, these dissidents were subject to various forms of harassment. One of them actually lives in Canada and was subject to harassment on Canadian soil.
We have corruption. We have conflict of interest. We have control. We have a lack of character from this company. This is the company that the Prime Minister keeps. This is the company that has gotten over $100 million in contracts.
While Canadians are suffering, well-connected Liberal insiders have never had it so good, especially the well-connected Liberal insiders at McKinsey.
In the context of this scandal, the government's response is that it is going to have the cabinet ministers responsible for procurement and for the Treasury Board do their own investigation. That is clearly not good enough.
The Liberals have made a complete mess of governance. They are wasting taxpayers' dollars and giving money to their friends. The public service is growing, and they are giving more and more money to outside consultants. We cannot trust the Liberals, who are responsible for these scandals, to then come in and say that they are going to investigate themselves.
That is why, as an urgent matter, it is time to ask the Auditor General to come in and get to the bottom of what happened here. We need the resources and the ingenuity of the Auditor General to find out what is happening and assess value for money.
There are many different aspects to this scandal. Canadians need to decide, at a basic character level, if this is the kind of company that they want to see their prime minister doing business with. The Auditor General is well positioned to assess value for money, to say, “What did we actually get for this $100 million-plus?”
How much money was actually spent, by the way? We cannot get a straight answer from the government on this. Moreover, was there value for money? Many public servants have told the media that they do not know what work was done. They brought in PowerPoint slides and said that they were going to change everything, but nothing got done.
It is time to bring in the Auditor General. Conservatives want this motion adopted so that the Auditor General will help all of us get to the bottom of what happened between the Liberals and McKinsey.
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- Dec/13/22 6:41:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is trying to constantly shift this into a debate about whether or not the emergency benefits were a good policy. As he pointed out, all parties supported providing emergency supports during COVID. However, the question is not whether these emergency benefits were required and were valuable. The question is whether the government was right to pay tens of billions of dollars to people who were not eligible for the programs. That is, the House agreed to specific criteria for these programs, and tens of billions of dollars, according to the Auditor General, very likely went to individuals who were not eligible for those programs.
The government said that it had to get the money out quickly at the beginning, fair enough, but the bargain was that there would have to be clear, effective, after-the-fact verification in every case. Either we have to do the verification up front, which is normally what happens, or we have to do some kind of verification after the fact. However, the government has said clearly, in response to the Auditor General's recommendation, that it will not, in fact, do this verification in every case, and the minister attacked the Auditor General on this.
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- Dec/13/22 6:33:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, on Tuesday last week, the Auditor General released an absolutely damning report on the government's COVID-19 programs. This is report 10 from the Auditor General. This report chronicled mismanagement, waste and a lack of focus leading to tens of billions of dollars in government waste.
Let us be very clear: We are not talking about the policy of the COVID support programs. This was a policy that, in principle, all parties supported and it is not the Auditor General's mandate to critique the government's policy, but rather to analyze the effectiveness of implementation. That is whether the actions of government lined up with the stated policy goals.
The Auditor General pointed out that the government made a policy decision not to have an effective pre-disbursement review. It basically relied on an attestation model, an honour system, where people would say they met the criteria and they would get the benefits. Many Canadians were honest and accurate in how they filled those out.
Generally, we say there should be some kind of verification mechanism, either before or afterward. The government said that it needed to get these dollars out the door quickly in terms of these benefits, so it did not do the advance verification, but it said it would do verification after the fact. It would follow up and see if the money went to the right people, and if it did not go to the right people, it would follow up in the appropriate fashion.
The government is now saying it is not going to do those after-the-fact reviews and verifications in every case. For much of the money that the government spent in various COVID-19 support programs, there was no checking before the money went out and no checking after the money was received. This means people could simply attest that they were eligible for benefits. They got cheques as a result and there was no verification.
The Auditor General was able, based on data the government already had available, to assess what indicators there were of whether people who did not meet the requirements of various programs ended up getting money anyway. Here is what she found.
Incredibly, she found that $4.6 billion went to ineligible recipients. That means people who were not eligible for these programs still got money to the tune of $4.6 billion.
Another $27.4 billion went to individuals who, on the face of it, did not meet the program criteria where the Auditor General conservatively says further investigation is required. There were cases, for instance, where individuals did not meet the income requirements, yet still received CERB.
The total of certainly ineligible or almost certainly ineligible, based on the Auditor General's analysis of data in the government's own possession, came to $32 billion. Some $32 billion of COVID-19 benefits went out to individuals who were not eligible for those benefits.
Again, we are not talking about whether offering this support was a good idea. We are talking about whether the government should be held accountable for over $30 billion going to those who did not meet the stated criteria for those programs.
The Auditor General is recommending in this report that the government follow up, get to the bottom of this and track down that money. The government does not agree, does not support it and will not implement this recommendation of the Auditor General. It says, on the final page of the report, that it will not follow up with every one of these cases, as the Auditor General recommends.
The response of the Minister of National Revenue when this issue was raised in the House was to impugn the Auditor General's independence. The Minister of National Revenue got up in this House and said that the Auditor General made the decisions and the recommendations because of pressure from the opposition, which is a totally outrageous attack on a strong, independent public servant by the government simply to cover up its own incompetence.
The government wasted $30 billion. It should be held accountable for that waste and it should not be attacking the Auditor General.
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- Dec/6/22 2:59:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government is attacking the Auditor General's independence in order to cover up its own incompetence.
More than $30 billion went to ineligible recipients; that is, people who did not meet the criteria of the programs. When the Auditor General called this out, the government's response was to criticize the work of a strong, independent professional whom the Liberals, in fact, appointed.
Will the Minister of Revenue apologize to the Auditor General and agree to accept all her recommendations?
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- Oct/25/22 6:48:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the implication of the parliamentary secretary's remarks is that any means are justified and we are either on the side of the protesters or on the side of using the Emergencies Act. Many Canadians might not have agreed with things that were done in the protest but also do not agree with the suspension of civil liberties.
In particular, the parliamentary secretary danced around the core question here. The Minister of Public Safety claimed that the advice he received from law enforcement was to invoke the Emergencies Act. That was explicitly contradicted by every law enforcement agency and, in effect, by the deputy minister. That contradiction is not being acknowledged. That dishonest statement is not being acknowledged.
Can the parliamentary secretary answer the basic question? Does she still believe law enforcement asked for the Emergencies Act?
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- Oct/25/22 6:40:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the current Liberal government is desperate to justify their dishonest and unjustified use of the Emergencies Act. We have seen a series of misleading statements and outright fabrications about these protests, and it is part of the pattern of dishonest behaviour we have seen by the Minister of Public Safety and by the Minister of Emergency Preparedness.
The Emergencies Act is an extreme piece of legislation that, when invoked, allows the suspension of normal protections for civil liberties. The Emergencies Act is therefore for genuine public emergencies and not for the government to invoke arbitrarily. Even when laws are being broken, the government should not use the Emergencies Act unless it has no other alternative.
Conservatives have always encouraged protesters to make their voices heard through lawful means, but the fact is that the border blockades were all cleared by law enforcement without and prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act. The Liberal government knew all this. It knew that law enforcement agencies had not yet exhausted their options, yet it suspended civil liberties and proceeded to threaten the bank accounts and financial security of Canadians, even Canadians who were far away from the national capital.
Incredibly, the Emergencies Act has never been used before in Canadian history, despite the various events that have taken place since it was created. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was only used during the First World War, the Second World War and the FLQ crisis. It has not been used in response to a myriad of other protests and challenges, including a couple of years ago when our national rail network was shut down by protesters.
There is a big difference between enforcing the law and falsely declaring a national emergency to give oneself the tools to punish those one disagrees with. Many people who did not agree with the protest that took place have still spoken out against the government's arbitrary use of the Emergencies Act to suspend civil liberties and the negative precedent that this sets.
As part of the Liberals' efforts to justify this, in April of this year the Minister of Public Safety claimed, before a committee, that law enforcement had asked for the Emergencies Act. He said the advice received was to invoke the Emergencies Act. That is what the Minister of Public Safety said. However, later, the RCMP commissioner and Ottawa's police chief both confirmed that they actually did not ask for the Emergencies Act. The deputy minister later sought to offer some clarification and, maybe making the situation more fuzzy, said that the minister had been misunderstood. However, it was clear then and it is clear now that the Minister of Public Safety misled the House and he should resign. He should have resigned, but he is still here.
There are many other claims advanced by members of the government. For instance, different members of the House claimed repeatedly that protesters who were here as part of events in January had tried to burn down a building. It was subsequently clarified that the attempted arson had nothing whatsoever to do with that protest, yet that was a claim that was repeated over and over again. We saw claims that these protests were Russian funded, that they were government funded and that there were guns at the protest, all of which has been shown to be totally false.
We have a Minister of Public Safety who has misled the House and now, to update things to where we are today, we have information about the Minister of Emergency Preparedness misleading the House about interfering in an investigation and contradicting the RCMP commissioner.
The fact is that Canadians cannot trust the current government when the two ministers responsible for emergency preparedness and public safety have clearly shown a lack of regard for the truth. These ministers should resign. When will they resign?
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- Jun/14/22 3:01:51 p.m.
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Mr Speaker, the minister is desperate to blame someone else, but there is only one person who is under investigation and that is the Minister of Public Safety. The state of his credibility is grievous and irremediable. It is completely untenable to have a Minister of Public Safety who misleads the public about advice he is receiving from the police.
Respectfully, so that his important office can be filled by someone who the public can trust, will the minister please resign?
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