- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- Jun/5/24 12:18:07 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary addressed the question of ministerial accountability for these scandals. I want to drill down on that.
We have had ministers come to committee. They have not always been forthcoming, and there are many ministers we still need to hear from. However, when we have had ministers at committee, they have always tried to present their role in government as that of a passive bystander, a painting on the wall or a potted plant that is there and that hears things, but it is not actually responsible for anything that happens.
I have asked these questions over a series of procurement ministers, various ministers responsible for CBSA. What did they do? Were they briefed about the problems? Were they briefed about the abuses? I understand that ministers do not take every little individual decision, but as these issues were being raised publicly in Parliament and committee, did they issue directives? Did they take action? The answer is always no. They received briefings. They expected other people to solve the problems.
When will they take responsibility?
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- May/8/24 11:02:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one issue I did not have a chance to talk about during my speech, and I am glad the member spoke about it, is the nature of APT31 itself. Part of this discussion needs to be the appropriate response to a foreign state attacking members of Parliament. Of course, we need to talk about what the government should have done, what we can do differently and processes within Canada.
However, we also need to talk about accountability for the people who perpetrated the attack. One call to action that the IPAC suggested is sanctions against those who target legislators in our country. This seems to me like a no-brainer. When a group controlled by a foreign state is targeting and attacking members of Parliament in our country based on their parliamentary activities, we should be sanctioning the individuals involved in the attack.
This is something that is within the jurisdiction of government, not within the jurisdiction of Parliament. Could the member comment on that call to action for the government, calling on the government to sanction those involved in this cyber-attack?
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- Apr/9/24 7:37:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member began with a ridiculous and irrelevant attack on the Conservative House leader. I want to be very clear about what happened. The Conservative House leader made a post on social media with the names and photos of senators, in terms of how they voted, with their publicly available office phone numbers, and invited people who disagreed with the public votes of senators to contact their office and share their views.
I would just say that if any citizen has a concern or an opinion about how an elected official voted, they should have the ability to phone their office and share their perspective. If anyone disagrees with anything I say or do in the House, they can call my office at 780-467-4944. I am not afraid of accountability. No minister, no member of the government nor a senator should be afraid of people calling their publicly available office number in order to share their perspective.
What farmers want and need in this country is the ability to grow their food without the punitive carbon tax. That is why the government should axe the tax.
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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 6:52:36 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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Madam Speaker, the most important relationship of accountability for day care providers is to parents, in terms of whether they are meeting the needs of the families they are serving. If we are able to strengthen choice and flexibility and make sure parents have the resources they need, then we will have strong mechanisms of accountability in place.
As I said in my speech, we are seeing increasing diversity of the work-family balance that people are pursuing and that they are able to pursue because of all the technology. Let us put families in the driver's seat, recognizing that parents have love for their children and that they will make choices that fit with their situation and their kids.
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- May/4/23 12:59:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is a great question.
Clearly, in areas of national security, not everything can be shared publicly, but that should not be a carte blanche for the government to be able to call anything “national security” when it might not actually pose a risk, or to keep secret whatever information it, for its political interests, wants to keep secret.
Again, we clearly have a problem here of foreign interference and a lack of government action. Let us have a public inquiry where we have a leadership structure that all parties can agree on and a competent outside person investigating what the government is doing. It could make public what it could, of course, not making everything public, but that would provide an accountability function that the government wants to avoid right now. The government wants to keep the sharing of any of this information out of the public eye, not just because of national security, but also, I think, primarily because the motivation is that it does not want to be accountable.
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- Dec/13/22 10:59:40 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague spoke about many important issues, including reciprocal access, human rights, the middle way approach, the whereabouts of the Panchen Lama and other human rights abuses and language and cultural rights. I am pleased that in the Parliamentary Friends of Tibet group we have been able to work collaboratively and talk about many of these important issues.
One important piece of advancing human rights has to include talking about accountability for perpetrators of human rights abuses. That is why I see the framework of the Magnitsky act as being critically important. The government has, in a very limited way, put sanctions on a number of individuals involved in abuses against Uighurs, but we are calling for more action there, as well as use of the Magnitsky act against officials involved in human rights violations in Hong Kong, Tibet and other parts of the People's Republic of China.
I wonder if the member could speak to the fact that Magnitsky sanctions have not been used significantly, certainly in recent years, and what steps we could consider for getting the government to apply Magnitsky sanctions to more people.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his good question.
It is obvious that this bill does not have enough teeth to solve the problem. I spoke about some measures that I believe we should implement.
I think we need to address the problems of significant backlogs. I think people need to have clarity around the reasons refusals are given. I think we need to take the targets we have more seriously. I also think, at the very least, this act should require more, in terms of what the strategy looks like, and require the minister to be accountable when we fail to meet those targets. I do not think we can be too prescriptive on things that do naturally require the management of government, as opposed to the direct prescriptive action of the House of Commons, but we can expect more accountability when the government fails to meet targets.
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Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives have been advocating for a very long time on the issue of direction and control. Direction and control are regulations that severely limit the ability of the charitable sector to do its job. They require that any charitable activities be fully under the direction and control of the charitable organization. This creates problems and needless red tape for organizations that are operating in Canada. It is a particular problem for organizations that are operating internationally.
As many members know and understand, the best practice of international development is when organizations in Canada are able to empower and support those who are acting in their own countries to support development, which really recognizes that the people who are in the process of doing the developing are the heroes of their own story, and the role of international organizations is merely a supporting role for those who are doing that important work. However, direction and control regulations require effectively that those organizations operating overseas be fully under the direction and control of that Canadian organization insofar as it wishes to maintain its charitable status. Not only does this create inefficiencies, needless bureaucratic red tape and millions of dollars in lawyer fees that charitable organizations have to pay every year, it also perpetuates this kind of colonial structure of donor control and the requirement for the foreign organization to be in control of the development activity that is happening on the ground.
We have been advocating for a long time for reforms to direction and control. It was a commitment in the last Conservative platform to make these reforms. It also reflected a unanimous recommendation coming out of the foreign affairs committee in the last Parliament, which directly called out these regulations for being neocolonial in nature. I want to recognize the work of the Senator Omidvar, who put forward a Senate public bill on this, Bill S-216. That bill passed in the Senate twice and is currently being sponsored by my colleague in this House.
With that in mind, I raised the question on this issue in the House a number of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I did not get a very good answer. I was cautiously pleased to see a reference to direction and control on page 195 of budget 2022, which is the first time the government has acknowledged that direction and control regulations are a problem and need to be reformed. The section references Bill S-216 directly, and that the government intends, in its budget implementation acts, to implement the spirit of that bill.
We cannot assume that the fix will fully address the issues. We cannot assume until we have seen those proposed changes what the actual change in the nature of the regulations will be, because Bill S-216 removes the “own activities” requirement and replaces it with an accountability requirement for charitable organizations. The budget does not reference removing the “own activities” requirement. It simply references trying to facilitate mechanisms for easier transfers. It claims it will implement the spirit of Bill S-216, but it does not say it will implement the letter of the bill. As we have seen before, the devil can be in the details, so although the development sector and charitable organizations across Canada are very pleased to finally see at least a recognition of the problem, we are far from certain about whether the solution will be adequate.
Therefore, I would like to hear more from the government on this, because the reference is there in the budget, but it is lacking in clarity. When can we expect the government to implement these changes? Is the government prepared to actually implement the changes in Bill S-216, removing the “own activities” requirement and replacing it with an accountability mechanism? Is the government prepared to work with the charitable sector, including those who work in international development and members of other parties, to ensure that we get it right? It would sure be a shame to get people's hopes up and then not deliver the fix that is required.
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Mr. Speaker, direction and control regulations are a problem for the charitable sector in Canada. Direction and control regulations require that when charities are involved in activities, those activities are to be under the full direction and control of those charitable organizations. It is right that there be rules and restrictions around charitable organizations, that they be accountable for the dollars given to them and that they align their activities with their charitable purpose in accordance with the rules that exist, but this requirement of direction and control is not necessary to ensure accountability. We can have a framework that requires accountability without the restrictiveness of direction and control.
The effect of direction and control is particularly strongly felt in the area of international development because it really limits the ability of charities to form constructive partnerships with organizations in other parts of the world. The best practice in international development is to see the people in developing countries as the heroes of their own story and for donors and external organizations to be supportive, not to try to control and manage all aspects of the development process or of those communities' lives. Direction and control regulations therefore run totally counter to the best practice of self-determination in development. Effectively, they force the kind of ongoing neo-colonial view that many organizations, as well as individuals in developing countries, want to move away from.
In response to these concerns that come up repeatedly from various organizations that work in international development, and that are concerns for other charitable organizations as well, Senator Omidvar put forward a private member's bill that addresses this by moving away from direction and control while still ensuring accountability in accordance with a charitable purpose. This bill passed unanimously in the last Parliament and it passed in the same form unanimously in this Parliament. It now stands in the name of my friend, whose riding I cannot remember, in the House.
We asked the government, on February 14, what its position was on the bill. We asked three questions about direction and control, and I am following up on those questions because, unfortunately, the answers seemed to suggest the minister was not even aware of the issue. I am hopeful that maybe there was some mistake in the process of response and that we can get some clarity tonight about where the government is at on this direction and control issue.
I say to the government that this is not a partisan issue. Fixing direction and control should be a win-win. My colleague who put forward this bill had an NDP member second it as a demonstration of cross-party support. I believe that all opposition parties have been clear already about their support for this bill, so a majority of the House wants to see this bill pass, but sometimes the challenge with private members' bills is that we run out of time. We have a good idea people agree on, but it does not make it through the process quickly enough.
I would like to ask the government what its position is on Bill S-216, the direction and control bill that has now twice passed the Senate unanimously. If the government supports the bill, is it prepared to work with us to try to move this process along so that this Parliament can be the one that finally gets it done? I have worked on other issues, such as organ harvesting and trafficking, for example, where we have a good bill that everyone agrees on and yet it takes over 10 years and we are still talking about it because the clock has run out in every Parliament. I hope that will not happen in this case.
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