- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Humber River—Black Creek
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,163.57
- Government Page
- Feb/19/22 2:23:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the things that I continue to be concerned about is the amount of violence that is happening throughout our country on different fronts for different reasons. Maybe some of it is the result of the pandemic and the stress on people. That is what I would like to think it is. Once we can get a bit further along with this pandemic, people will feel better. They will be calmer and they will find a more rational way of dealing with problems.
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- Feb/19/22 2:21:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her support and for her important question. This matters to all of us. It does not matter what party. This is an important piece of legislation that we are standing for and supporting. We all want to make sure that due process happens, which means that there will be a full investigation of what did happen and what went wrong.
Clearly, we can see that right from the very beginning, these folks were allowed to get entrenched the way they did. It just built up. They could have been there for another six months. We could not allow that to happen. I can guarantee her my support and my government's support that we will follow the due process that is required under this legislation.
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- Feb/19/22 2:20:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if we had to wait another five or six days before we could start to remove the illegal protest and illegal blockage that is there, what kind of damage would that continue to do to Canada's reputation?
Many of our small businesses deliver biscuits or other things. They are valuable businesses and they have anywhere from five or six to a dozen employees. They were feeling the strain. I do not want to see those businesses go out of business.
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- Feb/19/22 2:19:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I think there are a ton of nice people outside who are protesting because this illegal protest brought out two years of frustrations. I could have been out there in the protest just as well as they could have. We are all fed up with this. We have all been through a difficult time, but we have to do what we have to do, and that is to respect each other.
There are some extremists out there who are here to cause nothing but trouble, and when we look at the signs saying, “Down with our Prime Minister,” and hear the kinds of threats he has been receiving from many folks across the country, that is very unfair. I would not want any prime minister of any party to have to experience what he and his family are going through.
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- Feb/19/22 2:13:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we have talked about trying to get through this pandemic and the difficulties many businesses are facing, so we cannot stand back and allow things to continue this way.
Michael Kempa, a law professor and criminologist in Ottawa, was asked a few minutes ago if the Emergencies Act was really necessary. He said that it absolutely was, because without the Emergencies Measures Act being brought into play, it would have taken a minimum of five or six more days to get other police services here and deputized. We would have continued to see this kind of illegal activity going on outside Parliament Hill and the disruption to neighbourhoods for another five or six days.
I ask members to think about the impacts this is having on the economy. Nate's Deli, which is located at Sparks and O'Connor, is a little delicatessen many of us go to on our lunch hour. Its workers told me that they were just hanging on at the end of the lockdown restrictions. That delicatessen has now been locked down for four more weeks. Will it be able to open and survive this?
I think of Goodfood, which is company close to the riding owned by a young family. President Dan Simile phoned me last week to tell me that he could not get a truck to deliver boxes across the border. He was having to lay off all his staff.
Those kinds of things are big disruptions to our economy. They are also disruptions to the people living in the Ottawa area in particular. Many employees were unable to get to their places of employment, even to work on Parliament Hill, without being called names and facing abuses. My own staff was subject to some abuse from some of the protesters out there.
We have a responsibility to move forward. Businesses, such as the grocery stores in downtown, are suffering. One had to close up because protesters without masks would come into the store with no respect for anybody else. This upset everybody, so ultimately it had to close.
This has gone on for far too long. Yes, I know this is not easy. I have received lots of calls from people in my constituency who do not quite fully understand this, but they are not here. They are not seeing it every day, and they do not realize the full impact of what is going on. It is imperative we do the right thing. We need to protect our country, and we need to protect its citizens. Very importantly, we also need to protect the economy.
To have a banker in the U.S. refer to Canada as a banana republic is unacceptable to all of us. It is a real insult. I am proud of my country, and I am proud of what we do. We are taking the necessary steps to move forward.
We try to not get into political rhetoric. If folks on the other side choose to join us in a united front to support this, it will only be in effect for a very short period of time. There will be a parliamentary committee that will reviewing it, and there will be a full investigation afterward. This came off the rails right from the beginning, and once these protesters became entrenched, it was very difficult to move them out.
I ask that we stay as united a front as we possibly can and not confuse people by talking about the War Measures Act, because that frightens the very people we represent. Let us try to be more united and provide accurate information regardless of what side anyone is on.
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- Feb/19/22 2:08:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my hon. colleague from Etobicoke Centre.
I stand with great sadness today to talk about the Emergencies Act because it is not something that any of us in this House, especially the Prime Minister, wanted to bring forward. We would not have if it were not absolutely necessary to do so. We need to look at the blockades that were going on last weekend at the Ambassador Bridge, in Coutts, Alberta, and Emerson and what was happening with trade. As chair of the international trade committee, I know these things are very important to all of us. The blockades were preventing goods, services and people from being able to cross those borders.
We know it cost $400 million a day at the Ambassador Bridge, aside from all of the personal issues that my colleague from Windsor West mentioned earlier, such as people being prevented from getting to doctor appointments and nurses prevented from crossing the border to help us with the pandemic. That is a huge economic hit on all four fronts. That is aside from what we are dealing with here in Ottawa.
I would ask my Conservative colleagues that, if their communities were besieged for almost four weeks, would they have said they would like to go through another process of deputizing a whole lot of emergency police officers, which would take another five to six days? They would not have been happy to do that, and we were not able to allow this to go any further. The economic impact of this has been enormous, so it was critical that we move forward to ensure we have law and order.
The concern with what is going on is not just here, it is around the world. I guess the new thing for people do to try to disrupt governments is to bring in transport trucks, trailers and tractors, by some of these people on the extreme right, who then convince a whole lot of other people that this is about mandates. This has nothing to do with mandates or vaccines. This is all about trying to bring down a government and disrupt democracy. When we do not have democracy or law and order, what we are left with? What is happening today outside Parliament, in particular, is that law and order is being put into effect. People have been asked to please go home. The illegal blockade was not a regular protest, it was much more serious than that.
Interim chief of police Steve Bell, three other former chiefs of police in Ottawa and the former chief of police in London all said that the Emergencies Act, unfortunate as it is, absolutely had to be brought in before there was more violence than what we had seen so far. Without that act, it would be much more difficult. I know what last weekend and previous weekends were like. I can only imagine what this weekend would have been like with hundreds more people coming here every weekend to create more mayhem and disruption.
Let us talk about the children. At the foot of the steps of the gate into West Block, there is a bouncy castle and children skipping rope to try to show this as a pleasant little uprising of a protest. This was an illegal blockade that was using children as shields. I would tell anybody participating that it is not democracy when we are talking about children.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Feb/19/22 12:35:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to acknowledge the Province of Quebec and thank it for intervening and helping us with the illegal blockade we have outside. This is a national problem, and what is happening in Ottawa is not the only issue we are dealing with. We are dealing with issues from one part of the country to another, and that is why we need the Emergencies Act.
I would like to know if my hon. colleague is supportive of having the SQ continue to help us. It is helping us very importantly outside right now.
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- Feb/19/22 12:13:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think this is out of order. We are talking about the Emergencies Act. We are not talking about an ethics report from some time ago.
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- Feb/19/22 10:06:08 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have to say to my hon. colleague that much of his speech could have been written by any of us on this side. We all know that law and order are the fundamental backbone of our country. That is what we all want.
However, the hon. member cannot say to me or to the rest of our colleagues that what is happening outside could simply be handled by some police officers shoving the protesters away. This is an illegal blockade that has been there for going on four weeks now. The people of Ottawa have been terrorized. They have been denied their freedom.
For someone who equally respects law and order, how can he stand by and just let another weekend go by and not recognize that this was a measure we absolutely had to take?
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- Feb/19/22 8:34:20 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague on the tone of his comments today.
It would be a much better reflection on all of us if we continued to seek out the things that we can agree on and tried to solve some of these problems at the end of the day, not make them worse. Canadians are watching this debate.
I watched events yesterday, as many of us did. With all of what I heard my colleague say, I heard interim chief Steve Bell, other former police chiefs and RCMP leaders say clearly that they could not have done what they did yesterday, which is only part of resolving this issue, without the Emergencies Act.
Did the member not hear the same things that I heard yesterday? Does he not agree that this is an important piece of legislation for all of us to support and move forward?
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