- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Saskatoon West
- Saskatchewan
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,909.92
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I had the honour of being elected by the good people of Saskatoon West in 2019 and again in 2021. My focus has been on what policy changes I can make as an MP to improve the lives of people in Saskatoon.
Representing voters is a big responsibility that I take very seriously. There are issues like affordability and allowing people to keep more of their paycheques by reducing taxes, like the double carbon tax scheme that will add 61¢ to every litre of fuel. There are issues like crime, and making sure violent repeat offenders are put in jail and not repeatedly given bail. Also, there is providing more focus on addictions treatment instead of handing out free drugs. There are issues like lowering inflation, building more housing, allowing newcomers to work in the field in which they have been trained. These are the policy changes I have been focused on. I did not expect to spend time on a motion like this one, providing virtual options to make the lives of MPs easier. I want to make the lives of ordinary Canadians easier. I am not worried about making my life as an MP easier, and I would argue that virtual Parliament has the potential to make it worse for MPs.
Indeed, virtual Parliament was my introduction to becoming a member of Parliament, as COVID hit shortly after my first election. I did not have the prepandemic opportunity that many of my colleagues had to meet other MPs in caucus, attend committee meetings in person and make direct friendships within their party and across the aisle. Therefore, when an issue arose, the person I needed to talk to was often at home instead of in Ottawa, making it much more difficult to connect with them. For example, there was a man in Saskatoon being deported to Uganda. This was an urgent case, because the man is gay, and Uganda considers this a crime with very severe implications, including death. I had to intervene with the minister in order to keep this man in Canada. Fortunately for him, I was successful, but it involved several discussions with the minister. For issues like this, meeting face to face is always better. That is why I believe MPs are elected to serve and do the job they were elected to do to represent their voters in Ottawa. To me, it is not acceptable to “mail it in”.
I am sure most people watching have no clue what Standing Orders are. Basically, they define the rules on how Parliament functions, what is allowed and not allowed, and how proceedings must be done. However, the motion before us would change the Standing Orders to permanently allow virtual options. This would affect things like voting, speaking, remote participation, how to file paperwork, etc. For example, the Standing Orders allow individual members of Parliament 60-second statements each day before question period begins. Standing Order 31 would be one of the affected Standing Orders if this virtual Parliament motion is adopted. Perhaps I should demonstrate, for those watching at home, what a member’s statement is by actually delivering one on a topic such as our upcoming national holiday:
“Mr. Speaker, Canadians are coming together on July 1 to celebrate Canada Day. In Saskatoon, this means sunshine, barbeques, and fireworks. Canada Day is a day we spend with our families, our friends, our neighbours and even people we may have met just that day, to celebrate our country, our province, our city and ourselves. In Saskatoon, we are proud to be Canadians. It does not matter what one's ethnicity, race, religion, or sexual identity is; in Saskatoon, everyone is Canadian.”
“Indigenous people, first nations and Métis celebrate Canada with us. Newcomers to Canada, refugees, economic immigrants, or those here for their families are all celebrating that they are in Canada. July 1 is truly a day that makes us all patriotic and all equal.”
“For myself; my wife, Cheryl; and our two adult children, we know we hit the jackpot because we were lucky enough to be born and to live in Canada.”
“I thank all my friends in Saskatoon West and wish them a happy Canada Day.”
As members can see, the Standing Orders are a wonderful set of rules that give us, as members of Parliament, the ability to speak to issues that are important to the people who sent us here. The Standing Orders govern how debate happens in the House, and they govern how we coordinate ourselves in committees.
Virtual Parliament, of course, has made it down into the committee structure. Conservative members of Parliament understood that while COVID-19 raged, it was important for MPs to keep their distance and undertake committee hearings remotely. However, now we have instance after instance of NDP and Liberal MPs using Zoom to avoid accountability, mute their microphones and look otherwise completely disengaged and bored while in the comfort of their homes during committee meetings. I am not criticizing them for taking advantage of the rules as written; I am criticizing the rules for allowing this behaviour in the first place. This is the failure of virtual Parliament.
We, as opposition members, hold the government to account on committees, and yes, these changes to the Standing Orders directly affect how committees function and how they report to the House. For instance, Standing Order 66(2)(c) would also be changed by what the NDP-Liberals are doing here today. This Standing Order affects concurrence debates on committee reports.
I will give a little background for those who are on the edge of their seat, wanting to know all about concurrence reports. However, first, I must admit that I am the vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, and I have participated in several of these debates since the election.
In the past 18 months, I have been able to speak to concurrence debates on Bill S-245 regarding the Citizenship Act, the persecution of Uyghurs and Turkic minorities in China, and the special immigration measures for Ukrainians fleeing the war. In practical terms, what do these specific changes to how reports are concurred in mean to the people of Saskatoon West? Perhaps an illustration is in order.
Last week, on June 8, I had the honour and privilege of filling in for one of my colleagues on the status of women committee while it was dealing with two very serious reports in camera. As these reports were in camera, that is to say confidential until made public, I will not comment on what I heard during our deliberations. However, I can say what the topics were, as these are publicly available on the committee website.
The first was women and girls in sport and the second was human trafficking of women, girls and gender-diverse people. When these reports are adopted by the committee, they will come to this House, and any member of Parliament who is or is not a regular member of that committee, such as me, will then be able to move concurrence on the report and begin a debate on that issue in this House. This allows members who were not able to take part in these discussions at the committee level to get their thoughts on the record.
In these cases, they are both very serious issues that unfortunately only get attention when they make headlines, and bad headlines at that. I do not think any of us who has children, girls or boys, wants our children subjected to any form of abuse when they play organized activities or sports. We hear what happens to young girls and teenagers on sports teams. There are horrible stories that run the gamut, from bullying to psychological abuse to physical assault to, in some cases, sexual abuse and rape.
This is totally unacceptable at all levels and must be stopped for all of our children. It must be stopped in organized activities, in sports and in our schools, just as human trafficking of all people must be stopped. Women, girls, men, boys and gender-diverse people are all subject to horrible forms of human trafficking in Canada.
While studying illegal border crossings at the immigration committee last fall, we saw time and time again the RCMP begging us for more money and resources to combat this problem. On November 25, I asked the acting commissioner for the RCMP, Michael Duheme, the following question about human smuggling: “How many charges have you laid for smuggling?” He said, “it's a challenge to get them to talk.... The idea is, how do you intercept them beforehand so that you can get them to talk a little more?” This is an issue I am clearly engaged in, and I will bring my expertise to a concurrence debate.
I am worried that making virtual Parliament permanent would change how concurrence debates and other parliamentary processes function. Others have raised serious concerns about the workload that virtual Parliament places on interpreters and the resulting diminishing of the French language in Canada. Unfortunately, I do not think a proper study has been done on these issues, nor has proper consultation taken place.
People may ask what the big deal is. Lots of people are working virtually now; why not MPs? Take my son, for example. He works in IT and has spent many hours working remotely from home. For him it works because his job mostly consists of sitting at a computer and writing code or responding to emails. My other son works in a potash mine, a physical job that requires his physical presence.
The point of all this is that some jobs are better suited to virtual and others not so much. I would suggest the job of an MP is best done in person. It is a job that requires extensive personal contact for success. It also depends on unplanned interactions in the hallway, in the restaurant or here in this House of Commons. I think everybody here can recall a time when a significant moment randomly happened simply because of being present. It is this work, this significant work, that we risk losing or diminishing.
Ultimately, what this debate is about is not what is best for me, for the Speaker, for the NDP-Liberal coalition or even for the Conservative Party. It is about what is best for the people of Saskatoon West. It is about how we as MPs deliver the best results for Canadians. As much as I would like to stay home and do Parliament via my computer screen, I know I cannot deliver the best results that way. Being an MP is a person-to-person, in-person job. If we want to deliver the best government possible, I believe we need to conduct our business here in person. I urge all members to vote against these NDP-Liberal measures.
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Madam Speaker, I want to start by letting you know that I am going to be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Nose Hill.
I am here to talk about Bill S-245. It is not something I planned to do today, and I am sure most members in the House had not planned on doing this, but here we are, and I want to make sure that people are clear on what it is we are talking about.
This is a private member's bill that has come from the other place, the Senate. Senators, just like members of Parliament, are able to produce legislation called private members' bills, so this is the legislation that has come from Senator Yonah Martin from the other place. It is her intention and her idea. It is something that she wants to see done. That is what we are talking about here. It is now in the House and we are working with it.
The subject of this is the “lost Canadians”. We have heard many different explanations of this, but many people may not quite understand what that is. Essentially, our Citizenship Act has some flaws in it that cause certain people to either lose their citizenship or to not get it in the first place. They create these little categories of people who, through no fault of their own, do not have access to Canadian citizenship.
There have been attempts over the years to fix some of these problems. Many of them have been fixed over the years, but there are still some groups of people who are still considered lost Canadians and are not being treated the way they should be, as they are unable to receive Canadian citizenship status. Over the years, there have been bills brought attempting to plug those holes and fix those gaps to ensure that those people who deserve to be Canadian citizens are, and this bill is one of them. There is a particular group of people, a fairly clearly defined group of people, that it seeks to remedy. It is not trying to fix everybody, and that was part of the point initially.
I also want to mention that often times when we think about people who are not citizens of Canada, we immediately think of immigrants. This does not necessarily mean immigrants. There are in fact many people who would not consider themselves immigrants who fit into these categories of lost Canadians. They are just Canadians who do not have their citizenship. There are different categories of these. Part of the point here is that trying to catch them all, and fix all of the holes in the legislation in one shot, is very difficult. It has been attempted over the years and, so far, it has been unsuccessful. We believe that a better approach is to target a very specific area, a specific group of people who are lost, and at least fix those, and then if there are more holes, we would fix those holes, rather than trying to do everything at once. This is a simple bill to fix one of those groups.
This is the same as Bill S-230. In a previous Parliament, the bill was studied in the Senate. It went to committee, was looked at carefully, and was sent here to the House to be worked on. Then an election happened, so that legislation never saw the light of day. Therefore, the attempt to rectify the citizenship situation of those lost Canadians failed. It failed because it did not get through the process in time before an election was called. That is very significant because right now we are in another minority Parliament, which means an election can happen at any time, so we do not have a lot of time. Time is not our friend in this case; we need to move to pass these bills quickly.
The same senator, Yonah Martin, has now put forward the same bill, Bill S-245, which has also gone through the Senate. This time in the other place it was not reviewed or studied because it was exactly the same as the previous legislation. Therefore, the Senate decided to fast-track it, move it through the other place and then to the House here so that we could deal with it. That is where it is now. It is here in the House and we are dealing with it now.
I just want to mention this with respect to the sponsor of the bill, Senator Yonah Martin. She was able to get it through the last Parliament. It took a lot of work and effort to bring everybody together to agree on things, but she was able to get it as far as it got. Unfortunately, it was not far enough. However, she was able to get it here quicker, which is a testament to her ability to work across party lines and with other people in the Senate, because she knew that time was the enemy and the biggest problem that the bill faced. The assumption that went along with that, as she got it to this House, was that it was the same bill as last time. From the Senate's perspective, this bill is the same one that it studied before and therefore it did not need to study it again. That is important and we should remember that.
Why are we here today? We are studying this bill at committee. We are getting very close to the end. There has been a lot of debate and talk about it. We have heard many witnesses speak to this bill. Indeed, there are many groups of people who represent these groups of lost Canadians, because there are numerous groups of lost Canadians. Everybody wants to solve this problem. The Conservatives want to fix this problem, as do the Liberals and all of the other parties. However, we want to fix it; we do not just want to talk about it. We do not want to study it to death, but fix it. We were able to get a lot of testimony and hear a lot of things to understand what the scope is and how it is going to work.
So people understand, what happened toward the end of this process is this. With respect to private members' bills, we have to stay within the scope of the bill. We cannot add things that go beyond the original intent of what, in this case, Yonah Martin had. There must be some ideas out there to do that, to go beyond the scope of this bill, because the government and the NDP teamed up together to bring this to the House now so that it can authorize the committee to go beyond the scope of the bill. That is what we are here talking about today.
This is really significant, because the originator of the bill, in this case Yonah Martin, had an intent for this bill. She came to committee and spoke about the bill and what her intent was. She was specifically asked if she would allow for amendments to the bill that would expand its scope. She was very clear on that. She said that she was willing to accept amendments that would clarify the bill, but she was not willing to accept amendments that would expand it. The reason she said that was very simple and makes a lot of sense.
Why would she accept amendments to clarify the bill? She wants the bill to be successful. She wants to plug that hole for this group of lost Canadians once and for all, so in her mind, if her words were not quite correct and somebody had a better idea to make those words a bit better, she was all ears and willing to do that. It only makes sense, because we want to get the wording correct. We have an army of lawyers in this place who are able to interpret our laws and statutes who I am sure had ideas and suggestions to clarify those things.
Why did she not want to expand its scope? It is very clear. She knows that if the scope gets expanded it creates a whole new pathway for this bill. First, it goes beyond what she had intended, which makes it more complicated, which means more work and more understanding is required. It goes from a simple one-page bill to a multi-page bill that has implications on all kinds of things. Most significantly, should it come through the House and be amended and expanded in scope, then it ends up back in the other place. Why did it pass through the other place very quickly? Because it was the same bill that had been studied in the previous Parliament. It had been looked at and studied in the Senate. The senators had their chance to talk about it and tweak it. That had all been done. The only reason they expedited it through this time was because it was exactly the same as the last time.
If we put two and two together, if it goes back to the other place having been changed, what is going to happen? The senators would say that it is not the same bill and would want to know what happened. Senator Martin would have to explain that it has changed and grown in scope and they would say that they need to study the bill and that it is going to committee to be studied.
With the way timelines work around here, we would be adding months to the process. The enemy of this bill is time, so we would clearly be doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing, which is adding time to this bill. We would be adding complexity to it, which means it would have to be studied at committee and looked at again. At the end of the day, there could be an election. We all know that an election could happen at any time. It could happen over this issue today. I heard members saying that might happen, so we never know what could happen. We never know what the day is going to bring. Time is the enemy of this bill, and this process would be adding a lot of time to it. That is the whole point of why Senator Martin wanted this to be done.
As I close, I want to highlight two things. First, we are all in support of fixing these problems for lost Canadians. There are no members on either side of the House who do not want to fix this law and correct the problem there. That is a given.
Second, we oppose the idea of the government taking a private member's bill, expanding it and putting things in there that were never intended to be there by the member who raised the bill. That is something we are very concerned about. We do not want to set a precedent. We do not want to allow the government to come in and pull up someone's bill and do that.
It was great to speak in the House today.
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