Hon. Marilou McPhedran: Honourable senators, hello, tansi.

As a senator from Manitoba, I acknowledge that I live on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

I also want to acknowledge that the Parliament of Canada is situated on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territory.

[English]

Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill C-22, the Canada disability benefit act, with appreciation to Minister Qualtrough and Senator Cotter, the bill’s sponsor here, for best efforts to shepherd it through the legislative process culminating in our review today.

Many parliamentarians understand how crucial this bill is. It is long overdue and deserves support for the millions of people with disabilities across Canada who live in poverty.

We can be proud of the thorough and thoughtful contributions made by members of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, or SOCI, and of the trust placed in us by colleagues in this chamber in their support for these amendments, which result in a stronger Bill C-22 returning to us today with all but one of our six amendments incorporated.

The accepted amendments include an appeal mechanism by which applicants can contest decisions about their eligibility to receive the benefit and the amounts to which they are entitled. Also adopted was the expanded list of factors that must be considered in the benefit calculation, among which are Canada’s poverty line, the costs created by systemic barriers to accessing work, the intersectional needs of applicants and Canada’s human rights obligations as they relate to the disability community.

The final amendments accepted are those that provide for an expedited implementation timeline for the benefit by requiring that all the regulations must begin to pay out under the act and be in place within 12 months of the new act’s coming into force date. These changes bolster this framework act by ensuring crucial implementation mechanisms rather than risking them to the uncertainty of regulations yet to be drafted.

One amendment has been rejected. I doubt Senator Gold intended to ghost me, but it was proposed by me on behalf of disability rights experts and organizations. Proposed for clause 9(c) of the bill, this amendment would have protected recipients of the Canada disability benefit act by preventing private insurance companies from deducting the amount of the benefit paid out under the act from payments made under long‑term disability policies.

These clawbacks by private insurance providers were not discussed in committee in the other place, but they were studied extensively when Bill C-22 was examined by the Senate’s Social Affairs Committee. The amendment to stop rich insurance companies from clawing back the benefit from poor people with disabilities was endorsed by over 40 legal aid clinics, community leaders, academics and disability advocacy groups. On the question of its constitutionality, every provincial trial lawyers’ association in Canada supported the amendment as viable in law.

Therefore, we have before us a bill that enables private insurance companies to claw back the new, publicly funded disability benefit regardless of whether Minister Qualtrough calls it a social benefit or not.

Many private insurance contracts are clear that they can set-off any government benefit, effectively subsidizing private insurers instead of providing additional financial support for members of the disability community as intended by the act.

Colleagues, concerns about industry clawbacks are not far-fetched or hypothetical. Clawbacks are happening now to available public benefits. Old Age Security benefits, for example, are already explicitly set-off from long-term disability payments by many private insurance companies while similar deductions have been made from insurance payouts to recipients of the dependent benefit under the Canada Pension Plan, or CPP.

Further, the courts have sided with private insurers. For example, in a 2008 class action, the court affirmed the legality of deductions from long-term disability payments of this nature absent any provision in either the policy or in the legislation prohibiting it, and private insurers leaped to enforce those deductions through litigation against disabled recipients.

For example, in a case involving the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, the appellant’s insurance company sought to enforce the deductibility of the CPP dependent benefit on the basis of the 2008 class action ruling. And in Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc. v. Brine, the private insurer sought to enforce deductions from a long-term insurance policy in the amount of benefits received by the policyholder under both the Canada Pension Plan and the Public Service Pension Plan.

Time does not allow me to list the many other cases wherein private insurers went to court to claw back payouts under long‑term disability policies premised on the policyholder’s receipt of public benefits. The rejected amendment prohibiting clawbacks of the new benefit by private insurers would have done what the courts have said needed to be done in order to protect recipients and ensure that benefits are received by those for whom they are intended rather than function to subsidize private insurers.

The time to respond to this concern is sooner rather than later. When the CPP dependent benefit offset was challenged in 2008, industry relied on the fact that its premiums were adjusted on the assumption that it could offset CPP benefits but held that without the availability of that offset, insurance premiums would undoubtedly rise. No such adjustment can presently be relied on by industry in relation to the Canada disability benefit, as premiums taking the new benefit into account have yet to be calculated.

Concerns were raised at the Social Affairs Committee and in this place as to the constitutionality of a provision that engages with the insurance industry by purporting to regulate insurance contracting as falling outside the jurisdiction of the federal parliament. The fact is that such a provision is not unprecedented in Canadian benefit regimes. For forty years, the Merchant Seaman Compensation Act, for example, has protected recipients with wording closely similar to that proposed in the rejected amendment. Forty years, honourable senators, with no court challenges, constitutional or otherwise.

Another relevant precedent can be found in the 2020 reference regarding the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act, which grappled with the constitutionality of a federal legislative scheme to regulate aspects of insurance contracting by preventing private insurers from requiring genetic test results as a precondition for health insurance eligibility. In reviewing the legislative scheme, the court determined that its overall goal was not regulation of the insurance industry per se, but rather the prevention of genetic discrimination in the provision of goods and services such that the insurance provisions at issue comprised only part of a broader regulatory scheme and were necessary in order to preserve the purpose of the federal legislation. Sound familiar?

Absent the act’s protective insurance-related measures, the scheme’s purpose would be seriously undermined, justifying the minor incursion into a matter traditionally falling within the ambit of provincial jurisdiction.

These real-life cases support the viability of a provision like the rejected amendment prohibiting set-offs by private insurers of payments under the Canada disability benefit act. It is clear in the act that the Canada disability benefit is designed to be supplementary for those who qualify under the act.

The legislative purpose of making a supplementary sum available to eligible recipients is undermined if private insurers are permitted to correspondingly claw back payments under their policies because, in practice, the recipient is left with substantially the same amount they were receiving before introduction of the benefit. Absent this simple operational protection, the bill before us today will effectively indemnify private insurers and deny the intended recipients the benefit.

Lifting disabled people out of poverty is the stated fundamental purpose of this bill. In this regard, it will become a mockery of Minister Qualtrough’s promise to disabled people, who desperately need and deserve the Canada disability benefit. The exclusion of this amendment to prohibit benefit clawbacks by private insurers is a choice the Trudeau government has made: to not ensure that certain eligible recipients under the act receive the full supplemental benefit promised to them.

Time will tell how many private insurers will exploit this loophole given to them, and perhaps some day Parliament will have a second chance to bring justice to those disabled recipients who are now exposed to the legal force of rich private insurers.

But let’s not pretend that the real cost will be borne by poor, disabled recipients who would be made to suffer because this government chose not to protect them. They will suffer, and the cost will be borne by them.

Last week, Senator Pate and I received a letter from Mr. Duncan Young, whose standard of living is determined largely by a private insurer. I share the following with his permission:

I am not one of the many selfless volunteers who advocate on behalf of the disabled. Neither am I an activist or lobbyist for any such person or group. I am simply an “average” 55 year-old working-class Canadian, who happens to love his job, and is looking forward to working at it for as long as he can. Or at least I was...

3 years ago, I received a diagnosis of spinocerebellar ataxia 3 (SCA3): an extremely rare, hereditary, neurological disorder that causes the cerebellum to atrophy, thus completely destroying a person’s motor skills; impairing walking, talking, swallowing, bladder control, etc.

It is progressive, has no known treatment(s) to abate its development-and there is no cure. Of note, an affected person typically does not present symptoms until somewhere between ages 40-55: Meaning I (and most like me) are enjoying a full life, still in its ascendency, when suddenly your brain will not allow your legs to form the motion necessary to let you run to catch the bus, or let your fingertips stay still long enough to do up the tiny buttons on your button-down collar.

Let me be clear: Without that amendment enshrined in statute, as worded, I will receive $0 from the creation of the benefit. It would be-in its entirety-an eligible clawback according to my LTD provider’s contract. In short, the only beneficiary of such a benefit would be the shareholders of a publicly-traded insurance company-while I continue to slip below the poverty line. Both points here are not conjecture: They are quantitative facts.

So now you know exactly, unquestionably and with detail, exactly what the passing of C-22 without this amendment will mean to myself and every disabled person in similar positions: Nothing.

I’m so sorry, Mr. Young, but at this stage we must hope that Minister Qualtrough and this government can somehow turn this around by actively convincing provinces and territories to ban private insurance clawbacks of the Canada disability benefit within their respective jurisdictional authority. Such advocacy should not be left, again, to the disability community to take on alone.

Honourable senators, we all know this disability benefit is long overdue and desperately needed. The disability community in Canada has advocated for stronger and more reliable income support for far longer than this bill has been in contemplation by Parliament.

I am grateful for the many insightful comments and valuable contributions to the development of this bill from community leaders and advocates, both in committee and various other capacities. Mindful of time, I can acknowledge only a few. I extend appreciation for the legal expertise provided to the Social Affairs Committee by witnesses who brought the clawback to our attention: David Lepofsky, Robert Lattanzio, Steven Muller and Hart Schwartz. For the sake of those eligible recipients who are unlikely to ever see a penny of the Canada disability benefit, I fervently hope that those experts will continue to be vital contributors to the minister’s promised consultations to fill in the framework legislation.

Let us now pass this bill into law before we leave for the summer. Thank you, meegwetch.

Hon. Marilou McPhedran: Honourable senators, hello, bonjour, tansi.

As a senator for Manitoba, I acknowledge that I live on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji‑Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

I acknowledge that the Parliament of Canada is situated on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territory.

[English]

I rise today to speak in support of Bill C-226, introduced in the other place by Member of Parliament Elizabeth May, Co-leader of the Green Party of Canada, and sponsored here by my esteemed Manitoba colleague Senator M.J. McCallum.

Honourable senators, it is heartening to note that this is one of the rare private member’s bills that received government support, as you heard when Senator Gold spoke in favour earlier this week.

It is my hope that I can best voice my support for this bill — which asks the Minister of Environment and Climate Change to develop a national strategy to counter environmental racism — by noting the ways in which passage of this bill will bring Canada more into alignment with existing international obligations including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Let us recall that apologies have been issued by Canada to Indigenous peoples, and now we must see actions to match. Bill C-226 could well galvanize such actions.

Having reviewed other contributions to this debate, the international context has certainly been mentioned, but I hope it will be helpful if I add some more detail to this aspect of why Bill C-226 is so deserving of our support.

Allow me to begin to observe why alignment with and implementation of our international human rights obligations is important and relevant to this bill on countering environmental racism.

To quote the Institute for Research on Public Policy just yesterday:

While Canada has long had a stellar reputation internationally for protecting human rights, our domestic track record is more dismal than that reputation would suggest. Time and again, decision-makers have failed to implement United Nations human rights treaties and recommendations at home on issues including the rights of Indigenous peoples, racism, gender equality, refugees and migrants, disability, housing, law enforcement and corporate accountability.

At the core of Canada ratifying any international rights treaty is our constitutionally entrenched commitment to equality rights, as well as the practical outcome that people in Canada can not only know and claim their rights, but — through implementation — they can also live their rights.

In the international context, Canada has recognized various human rights implicated by hazardous substances and wastes through its ratification or accession of seven United Nations human rights treaties. Under these treaties, Canada has specific obligations. These obligations, assumed voluntarily by Canada in signing and ratifying such treaties, clearly set out commitments to protect, respect and fulfill universal human rights, including the right to life and dignity; health; security of the person and bodily integrity; safe food and water; adequate housing; and safe and healthy working conditions.

Canada has specific obligations regarding the human rights of all people in Canada — all underpinned by protection from discrimination. These rights and obligations combine to create a duty for Canada to counter environmental racism.

In Bill C-226, we see a practical, measured way for Canada to take some big steps forward in bringing Canada more into alignment with existing international human rights obligations.

With the bill’s short title, national strategy respecting environmental racism and environmental justice act, it is set out in this bill that the national strategy must include measures to examine the link between race, socio-economic status and environmental risk; collect information and statistics relating to the location of environmental hazards; collect information and statistics relating to negative health outcomes in communities that have been affected by environmental racism; and assess the administration and enforcement of environmental laws in each province. It must also include measures to address environmental racism in relation to possible amendments to federal laws, policies and programs; the involvement of community groups in environmental policy-making; compensation for individuals or communities; ongoing funding for affected communities; and the access of affected communities to clean air and water.

In his 2020 report on Canada, the UN Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes — after visiting a number of racialized communities, and meeting with government representatives in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec — noted:

Canada has obligations regarding the rights to information, participation, access to justice and remedies, and specific obligations regarding the rights of Indigenous peoples, children, different genders, workers, minorities, migrants, and persons with disabilities, among other vulnerable groups . . . .

Together, these rights and obligations create a duty for Canada to prevent exposure to toxic and otherwise hazardous substances. The only way to protect against violations of the above human rights is to prevent exposure. . . . However, businesses have critical responsibilities to prevent exposure as well.

To respect my time boundaries today, I’ll limit references to former UN special rapporteur Baskut Tuncak in his report on Canada, but I do want to note that he acknowledged that Canada has ratified all international chemicals and wastes treaties, and is in the process of moving toward adhering to the Basel Ban Amendment to the Basel Convention, which Canada adopted in 1992, with the primary objective of protecting human health and environments from the adverse effects of waste. If Canada respects and implements the Basel Ban Amendment, hazardous waste can no longer be exported to other countries from Canada.

The UN special rapporteur also noted numerous concerns; for example, he noted the “jurisdictional quagmire” faced by Indigenous peoples — where reserves often fall between the cracks of federal and provincial jurisdiction, posing a risk for unregulated exposures. For example, throughout Canada, provincial drinking water quality standards are not applicable on reserves, and federal standards are not legally binding, as they have yet to be set. As stated by the UN special rapporteur, “Jurisdictional separation is not an excuse for shortcomings by the Government in taking prompt action to address toxic exposures.”

He also noted:

. . . marginalized groups, and Indigenous peoples in particular, find themselves on the wrong side of a toxic divide, subject to conditions that would not be acceptable elsewhere in Canada.

Honourable colleagues, environmental racism has two main components: distributive spatial injustice and procedural injustice. The first is concerned primarily with the inequitable location of industrial polluters and other environmentally hazardous projects, and the second focuses on institutional mechanisms and policies that perpetuate inequitable distribution of those activities.

Close to home for me, year after year, Indigenous leaders in Manitoba present well-documented actions of Manitoba Hydro that — as they have noted — show how these two components of injustice operate in systemic ways to the detriment and, far too often, the destruction of First Nations communities.

According to Wa Ni Ska Tan, an alliance of Manitoba First Nations:

Manitoba Hydro has profited for over a hundred years at the expense of its First Nation partners. It pushes for the development of devastating hydroelectric mega projects to make millions of dollars exporting power to the United States, and Indigenous communities pay the price a thousand times over. New partnerships . . . are more of the same, with communities being saddled with millions of dollars in debt — on top of cultural and environmental costs — for a generating station that provides little or no economic benefit.

Colleagues, there is a cruel irony in the fact that many First Nations families report high electricity bills — often upward of $500 per month. This seems particularly unfair, as the power is generated from their now-destroyed ancestral lands.

In short, in Manitoba, Indigenous traditional livelihoods and ways of being are often undermined or destroyed by environmental racism. For example, Senator McCallum has spoken here about the negative impact of “man camps” — how the influx of external workers for hydroelectric developments can lead to increased sexual exploitation, substance abuse and social disruption, exacerbated by incidents marked by racism and sexism that have led to violence and loss.

In concluding his report on Canada, the UN special rapporteur made a number of recommendations that are addressed positively in Bill C-226. I will note one that relates directly to the adoption of this bill: “Establish a sound environmental justice framework based on the principles of procedural justice, geographic justice, and social justice . . . .”

Colleagues, given the importance of the issues discussed, and being conscious of how time will become more limited for non‑government bills as we navigate the precious — and pressured — final weeks before we rise in June, I now invite your active support for this bill. Let’s send it to committee for continued study as soon as we possibly can.

Thank you. Meegwetch.

(On motion of Senator Martin, debate adjourned.)

[Translation]

The Senate proceeded to consideration of the eighth report of the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration, entitled Amendments to the Senate Administrative Rules, presented in the Senate on May 16, 2023.

Hon. Marilou McPhedran: Good evening, tansi.

As a senator from Manitoba, I acknowledge that I am a resident of Treaty 1 territory, the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

I would like to share a quote from the February 19 edition of La Presse:

They were well within their rights to protest, but not to block the heart of the capital and threaten its democratic institutions. . . .

In an attempt to disrupt the police operation, “patriots” flooded the 911 line with non-urgent calls, endangering the lives of the people of Ottawa.

Some even had the gall to put children between the line of police and the protesters. They used their own children as human shields.

[English]

The so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests were ostensibly marked by a January 2022 regulation mandating truckers and essential workers crossing the border to provide proof of vaccination. The truth is that these protests are less a reaction to this mandate and more a reflection of the general frustration with the pandemic-related restrictions of the last couple of years.

Unfortunately, it has become increasingly apparent that these protests have been appropriated by more radical, politicized voices and elements to the disservice of the majority of protesters, and any legitimate debate has been subsumed by polemically divisive populism.

It is telling to note that with 90% of truck drivers vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, the majority of the industry is sitting out the convoy protest. The Canadian Trucking Alliance and the Ontario Trucking Association have been vocal against the convoy actions and in favour of government intervention. What’s more, even if the government were to immediately lift the federal vaccine mandate for truckers, a parallel U.S. vaccine mandate, announced last October, for foreign truckers would still keep them from crossing the border. So the cross-border vaccine mandate for essential workers is clearly symbolic rather than central to these protests. Something else is happening here.

I think we can all understand and empathize with the high frustration and uncertainty that many Canadians feel regarding the pandemic. But let us also remember the many more Canadians who have lost over 35,000 of their families and friends.

Restrictions have been imposed and then lifted in ways across the country by federal and provincial governments, and they haven’t always been effectively communicated. A more profound impact on our lives than we could have ever imagined, but let’s be clear and fair. Those same restrictions — clunky, inconvenient, and perhaps from time to time intrusive, as they have been — have helped keep our country’s COVID death rate at about one-third proportional to the United States. Frustration is real, but so too is science, and the health policy and legislating for the common good has been relatively successful.

As many have voiced already, Canadians have the privilege and right to protest and demonstrate. We see this all the time. Some are small; some are large and organized. Most of us have participated in demonstrations from time to time. I certainly know my kids grew up, from the time they were in strollers, being wheeled into demonstrations, and those demonstrations were peaceful. Those demonstrations did not block anybody’s right to their life or to health care or to services that are essential.

However, jurisprudence has clarified that section 2(c) guarantees the right to peaceful assembly. It does not protect riots or gatherings that seriously disturb the peace. Furthermore, it has been stated that the right to freedom of assembly, along with freedom of expression, does not include the right to physically impede or blockade lawful activities.

We recognize and accept the necessity to balance our rights and freedoms with the rule of law in our democracy. That is the essence of section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, reasonable limits placed by a democratic process.

The protests, convoys and occupations manifested across the country with the underlying issue, supposedly the coronavirus. There’s a global pandemic that has today resulted in the deaths of more than 5.9 million people. In a Canadian context, 45,000 Canadians died in World War II, and more than 35,000 Canadians have died in this pandemic so far, with more dying every day.

This is an issue of public health and common good. This is an issue of peace, order and good government, as is set out in our Constitution.

Yes, there have been limits placed on Canadians, from the mandatory use of masks to limiting group sizes to limits on mobility, and even on business and school closures, but that has been to reduce the spread, not eradicate the virus, because we know that isn’t possible. It’s been done for the common good. It’s been done so that health workers can do their work for people among us who need health care.

We have seen incontrovertible evidence that a combination of medical and technical interventions, and equally imperative individual conscious behavioural changes, are required to effectively counter this or, indeed, any pandemic. The imposition of COVID-related restrictions and health regulations is intended to minimize illness and death in the maximum number of Canadians, and that’s exactly what vaccinations have done.

But none of us has the right to behave as though it isn’t important for someone else to protect their health. This is a balancing of rights and privileges, and a weighing of responsible and proportionate measures to respond to this crisis. In my opinion, the declaration on February 14 fit within the criteria necessary under the Emergencies Act.

When Alberta dropped virtually all health restrictions on July 1, 2021, the cases skyrocketed. Albertans were dying from COVID-19 at more than three times the Canadian average. The province was in crisis because the provincial government did not maintain health restrictions that could have kept its citizens safe. This is an issue that is at the core of what we are struggling with here in this debate.

Much of the power that has been objected to by many of the protesters actually has little to do with the federal government because of our Constitution, because of the division of powers between the provinces and the federal government.

This is really an analogue to this current debate; whether the invocation of the Emergencies Act is another form of unreasonable and, therefore, unjustified imposition of limits on our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Yes, in my opinion, it does meet that test for proportionality and reasonableness as set out so clearly in the Oakes test by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Specific to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, I am convinced by the evidence that these protests moved beyond peaceful assembly, and the open demonstrations of citizens has been, unfortunately, hijacked by radical elements that have been using and continue to use these demonstrations to foment the movement to ferment, infiltrate, spread and move into areas that are potentially far more sinister.

To extrapolate out words from what we have seen in these past weeks, by which I refer to the border blockades and deliberate crippling of infrastructure; to weapon seizures and the charges of conspiracy to commit murder in Coutts, Alberta; to the occupation and siege of Ottawa; the documented organizational involvement of active and former military police, as well as individuals known to have deep connections to extremist groups publicly proclaiming that they want a racial war, publicly proclaiming that if there isn’t this kind of insurrection, then we will all soon be forced to speak Hebrew.

The intelligence assessments prepared by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre are pertinent to this discussion. They warned in late January that it was likely that extremists were involved, and they said that the scale of the protests could yet pose a “trigger point and opportunity for potential lone actor attackers to conduct a terrorism attack.”

I remind you that according to section 83.01(1)(b)(i)(B) of the Criminal Code, terrorism is an act that is committed:

in whole or in part with the intention of intimidating the public, or a segment of the public, with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act . . .

We could think, for a moment, about the entire closure of the Rideau Centre in downtown Ottawa as just one example.

It is understood that demonstrations always tend to attract some extreme individuals and groups, but the apparent level of coordination and integration, as reported by ITAC and observed by other policing and security agencies, indicates clearly that this occupation has moved far from the original intentions of many of its participants. Extremist attitudes have instead infiltrated, derailed and co-opted the original voice and intent of the majority of the protesters. This irreparably changed the convoy from a peaceful assembly to something calculated and dangerous.

I want to focus my remaining remarks on some oversight and control measures provided for in the act, in particular section 59, which provides for only 20 members of Parliament and 10 senators to come together for an early end to the use of the declaration under the Emergencies Act, and section 62, which mandates the parliamentary review process.

On section 62, I wish to highlight a number of facts that are troubling and which I hope we will ensure that the parliamentary inquiry will study.

One, the presence and apparent organizing leadership of active and former Canadian Armed Forces members, as well as active and former police. Two, the presence, positioning and safety of children within the protest and how this affected policing decisions and actions. Three, the double standard in how the police have responded to the actions of this group compared to a very different use of force and arrests at some Indigenous and climate justice protests or, indeed, has been mentioned at the Toronto G20 summit. Lastly, the legitimacy, efficacy and precision of employing financial seizures as a reasonable alternative to violence or more aggressive coercive police action.

Honourable senators, many people have commented on the fact of the rather astonishing degree of peaceful dismantling of this siege, and I think we need to pay close attention to the use of the financial leverage in this way and the likelihood that this contributed to the relatively peaceful process that we saw happen in the last number of days.

With grave concern about extension of the extraordinary powers, I note that the Emergencies Act does not suspend civil liberties or Charter rights. It ensures that the Prime Minister and cabinet are not allowed to dictate without parliamentary oversight. Honourable senators, that’s why we’re here. The act requires that the declaration must be tabled in Parliament within seven sitting days of cabinet issuing its declaration.

In closing, may I just say that I will vote in favour of the declaration under the Emergencies Act, and I will also work with anyone who wishes, across all boundaries, to gather together the twenty members of Parliament and the ten senators to begin the process of ending these extraordinary powers. Thank you so much.