- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- Jan/29/24 6:59:58 p.m.
- Watch
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.
366 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/29/24 6:58:43 p.m.
- Watch
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!
132 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/29/24 6:57:06 p.m.
- Watch
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—
92 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/29/24 6:52:36 p.m.
- Watch
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.
463 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/29/24 6:51:53 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, it is good to hear from the member—
11 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/29/24 6:39:52 p.m.
- Watch
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—
1471 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, why does the hon. member want to prevent this House from debating the Standing Orders on the one day per Parliament set aside for doing precisely that?
29 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, I have no choice but to find myself in violent agreement with the member that there should be proper consultations. I would just emphasize that those consultations should be with members of the House, not just with House leaders of recognized parties.
When there is a unanimous consent motion, the idea is that the House as a whole is expressing itself. There needs to be a mechanism for all members of the House to be properly and officially informed prior, just as we have with bells and the normal notice procedure. That is extremely important for protecting the rights not just of parties, but of all members.
109 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, with respect to these issues of representation, the Conservatives supported the bill saying that no province's number of seats should drop, and I think I have been clear about that. I also think the principle of representation by population is an important principle in our democracy. We need to recognize that Quebec's identity is important, Alberta's identity is important and British Columbia's identity is important, and that every person in this country needs their voice to be heard in the House. That is my view.
However, if Parliament is not functioning properly and is not the mechanism through which individual MPs can actually be heard, check the power of government and debate legislation, the Standing Orders are not working properly. If Parliament is not working properly, then it barely matters who is here, because Parliament is prevented from doing its job. Even prior to the issues the member is raising is the question of whether Parliament is able to be that deliberative assembly of one nation. That is what I think is really important.
180 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, the hon. member did not listen or he did not want to listen. IDEA, the organization I referred to that ranks global democracies across a series of metrics, draws on various metrics, and Freedom House is part of the input data that IDEA uses.
IDEA ranks democratic performance across a range of metrics including civil liberties, checks on government, pluralism and other metrics. What I said is specifically on the metric of checks on government. I did not talk about civil liberties. There are issues there but I did not talk about them. On the issue of checks on government, our objective ranking is declining.
The member's question completely ignored my comment on how checks on government and metrics on effective Parliament are in decline. On checks on government and effective Parliament, we have dropped massively in international ranking since 2015. That is a different metric from civil liberties. It is an extremely important metric and the member should be aware of the difference.
167 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, the Bloc members point out we are into a debate on a different motion than what was scheduled for today, which was the one day when we were supposed to be talking about the rules of the House and the impact on our democracy. I will endeavour to make the link.
The Standing Orders and the Speaker, I believe, should work to preserve and protect the rights of members and the health of our democracy by constraining these practices of Standing Order abridgment. Requests for unanimous consent motions should not be entertained outside of certain very narrow circumstances, and those circumstances should involve a required consultation with all elected members, not just three or four.
The Standing Orders should constrain the use of programming motions, such as through prohibiting the use of time allocation or closure on a programming motion. The deadly combination of a programming motion and closure is allowing the government to pass a bill at all stages in an afternoon.
By constraining their own abridgment, the Standing Orders could reduce these abuses that are weakening our Parliament and roll us back toward unconsidered mob rule. I have no desire to see our Parliament reduced to a body that ritualistically gives perfunctory approval to bills that ministers assure us are very good, while endorsing unconsidered motions simply because they sound nice at first hearing.
Our parliamentary democracy, providing the mechanisms for the people's representatives to genuinely debate about important ideas over a reasonable period of time, is worth defending and preserving, and that is the issue we need to be discussing today.
However, we have Liberal members, and one in particular, who want to talk for a great deal of time on a different Bloc motion: a motion that we are formally debating right now, but we could be debating at any time. They want to discuss it at great length to avoid this vital conversation about the health of our democracy, and that is shameful.
331 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time.
This really is quite incredible. There is one day in the entire life of Parliament set aside for debate about the state of our democracy, and in particular the rules of order that govern this place. Unfortunately, we see other parties that want to debate a different motion and therefore overwhelm the time set aside for this important debate on the health of Parliament and the health of our democracy.
In particular, the member for Winnipeg North, who seems to be the only person speaking most of the time in the government caucus, has already eaten 40 minutes of the day that would otherwise have been set aside for this conversation on the Standing Orders, the rules of Parliament, and the state of our democracy.
It is very clear why the Liberals do not want to have a debate about the state of our democracy and the rules that govern it. The sad truth is that ours is a Parliament in decline. This is evident to many of us and is shown in the objective metrics of the health of our democracy. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the use of time allocation and prorogation of Parliament provoked conniptions from Liberals and from the commentariat concerned that such measures were hurting democracy by curtailing debate and limiting the ability of other parties to hold the government accountable.
Today the Liberals, with the NPD's support, not only regularly use time allocation to limit debate but have normalized the routine use of programming motions that completely skip over whole stages of deliberation on bills, including blocking all committee study and preventing opportunities for amendment. These parties have gone from being apoplectic about any limiting of time at a particular stage of a bill, to passing motions to wholesale skip stages of consideration.
This Parliament has also spent substantial portions of the past few years suspended, and when it is sits, it is partially reduced to a Zoom call. Duly elected members of Parliament and their staff are barred from entering Parliament because of personal health choices, even while those same people mix unmasked and unvaccinated with staff and MPs at receptions only a block away.
Many of the same people who decried time allocation under Stephen Harper now defend the wholesale running over of the normal functioning of this institution on multiple fronts as allegedly necessary to prevent the so-called playing of partisan games and delay tactics, as if members of Parliament were obliged to do everything possible to pass government legislation quickly without serious review.
Today we have Motion No. 11, which is another attack on democracy. It allows the government to change the adjournment time at will without any notice and without a vote, which makes it extremely difficult, by design, for opposition politicians to do their jobs.
We are not just a Parliament in decline; we are a democracy in decline. To observe as much is not to say that we have ceased to be a democracy, but that our democracy is weakening and we need to act in response. The globally recognized authority on democracy measurement is called IDEA: the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. It is based in Stockholm.
IDEA recognizes that democracy is not an absolute: It is a measure of a country's performance across a series of metrics, such as representative government, impartial institutions and fundamental rights. According to IDEA, Canada's performance on key variables of checks on government and effective Parliament are in sharp decline. Our performance, in terms of checks on government, is at .68. That is lower than the United States and any nation in western Europe. Our score for effective Parliament has dropped precipitously from .73 in 2015 to .59 now. It is just barely above the world average.
It is not just Conservatives who say our Parliament is in decline. It is the world-leading experts responsible for measuring the health of parliaments and parliamentary democracies who say that we are a Parliament in decline.
Unfortunately, I do not have time to do a complete analysis of democratic decline in Canada, but I want to talk about what we should be talking about today, which is how the proper functioning of the Standing Orders provides tools for us to resist democratic decline. As the rules of the House of Commons, the Standing Orders have a particular role to play in trying to help preserve the vitality of our institutions.
The purpose of Parliament is to bring Canadians together who are chosen by and speak for the experience of different localities, to deliberate about the common good of the whole nation and pass laws in accordance with it. Within that, the role of the Standing Orders is to prescribe the form of that deliberation, such as who gets to speak, for how long and in what ways on what subjects. This balances the need to hear from a multiplicity of perspectives with a need to proceed with legislation in a reasonable amount of time.
The Standing Orders and traditions of this place are finely tuned to achieve that necessary balance. Ultimately, in a democracy the majority should have its way. The rules of the House exist, to some extent, to slow down the majority and to give other points of view the opportunity to be heard and to create space for the minority to try to persuade the majority.
Democracy is the idea that the majority should rule, but not that the majority is always right. Majorities can get vital issues wrong. In particular, since the dawn of democracy, thinkers have worried about how the stimulation of short-term passions in the majority can make for a kind of mob rule mentality and lead to bad decision-making. Even unanimous decisions stirred up around short-term impulses and passions can be deeply regretted afterward when the tyranny of the moment has passed.
The framers of modern democracies perceived these risks. They have noted that the world's first democracy killed the world's first known philosopher. Modern democracy has sought to improve on ancient mob rule by liberating the people from both the tyranny of elites and the tyranny of short-term thinking, and has thus sought to stimulate decision-making based on the considered judgment of the people over time.
The majority should rule, but should still be expected to hear contrary points of view and to sleep on decisions before finalizing them. Such requirements still do not provide a guarantee of right decision-making, but they do improve the chances.
Individuals and collectives make better decisions when they think about those decisions first. It is a key function of Parliament in general, and of the Standing Orders in particular, to create the time and space required for authentic, deliberative democracy and for the considered judgment of the people over time.
Those who have developed and refined Parliament as both an expression of, but also a check on, majoritarianism understood well that proportionate deliberation increases the chance that the majority will get both the big and the small questions right without unintended consequences.
The Standing Orders that we have are not perfect, but they are generally tuned to help strike this vital balance between majority rule and deliberation. A problem that is substantially driving the decline of our Parliament today is not so much the Standing Orders themselves, actually, but the casualness with which the rules contained therein are frequently abridged.
In principle, if rules are established and structures are as they should be, there is no need to abridge them, yet it is a veritable constant that we hear some delegate of the government rise in the House to propose that the House take some action notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House. Every time we accept this, we are choosing to act contrary to that long-standing wisdom and, as such, we should be very careful.
Unanimous consents, even on mundane procedural matters, involve the House derogating from established practice. I am certainly not against the limited use of this abridgement in such cases, but I still think we should acknowledge its risks.
What is much worse is what we see more and more of in this Parliament, which is the way that the House now frequently goes beyond rule abridgement by unanimous consent for procedural simplicity. We are now operating under a series of special rules, passed by a majority of the House over the objections of the minority, that have fundamentally changed our operating practices to limit opposition input and government accountability.
We have government programming motions, which I have already discussed. We have the routine efforts of members of the House to get the House to pronounce itself on substantive issues through unanimous consent, without notice, where members are asked to unanimously endorse something, oppose something, or even adopt a piece of legislation at all stages with no advance notice or debate.
The use of these unanimous consent motions does respond to a real problem: It is that members of Parliament do not, I think, have enough opportunity to put substantive proposals forward. I would support changes to our Standing Orders that expand the available opportunities for members to put forward substantive motions or private members' bills for debate.
I still suspect that even with those opportunities, we would see MPs stand up out of the blue and expect the entire House to pronounce itself on substantive matters without formal notice or debate, and we would still see government motions that try to abridge long-established Standing Orders.
Those who obsessively use unanimous consent motions are, perhaps unwittingly, seeking to abridge vital checks and balances and bring us back to democratic mob rule, where the tyranny of the moment, instead of the considered judgment of the people over time, is what rules. I oppose these efforts to roll the clock back to a purely majoritarian democracy instead of a functioning, deliberative democracy.
The use of unanimous consent motions also lends itself to significant gamesmanship: efforts to move such motions when particular members are out of the House, or to actively engage certain members in conversation so that they will not notice that a motion is being moved. It is a given, with committee assignments and other responsibilities, that all members are not able to be in the House all day.
This is why we have, for instance, bells before votes. Unanimous consent motions override the rights of members who are not present. The Standing Orders and the Speaker should work to preserve and protect the rights of members and the health of our deliberative democracy by constraining these kinds of Standing Order—
1793 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk a little bit about the Alberta nation.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Garnett Genuis: This is not a joke, Mr. Speaker. We have a distinct culture, different festivals. We use the same language as some other parts of the country, just like Quebec uses the same language as some other parts of the world.
Does the member agree with me that Alberta is a nation and has the right to be recognized as such?
This is not a joke. It is very serious.
91 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
