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Member of Parliament

Hon. Ed Fast

  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Abbotsford
  • British Columbia
  • Voting Attendance: 66%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 35 - Feb/20/22
Hon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC)
  • Feb/20/22 10:37:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the motion before us is a story of a profound failure of leadership. When I was elected to this chamber some 16 years ago and became the member of Parliament for Abbotsford, I would not have believed it if I had been told that I would be asked to approve giving the Prime Minister the extraordinary powers of the Emergencies Act. I remember, when growing up as a teenager in 1970, Pierre Elliott Trudeau triggered the War Measures Act to quell the FLQ terrorist threat in Quebec. That crisis had gripped the nation for many months and involved kidnappings, extortion, over 200 bombings, gun violence, robbery and the eventual murder of a Quebec cabinet minister. The circumstances were clear and compelling, implicating the security and sovereignty of our country and justifying the use of this extreme measure. Fast-forward to today and the circumstances are very different. For two years, truck drivers had been the heroes of the COVID pandemic, risking their health to transport goods and groceries as the virus raged across our nation. For a while, the truckers were the good guys. Then the Prime Minister decided to deprive these heroes of their livelihoods because they chose not to get vaccinated, despite the Prime Minister failing to show any evidence that unvaccinated truckers were significant spreaders of the virus. He made no effort to accommodate these Canadians through the use of other tools like PCR or rapid tests. The reaction of the truckers was swift. A convoy was organized with the goal of delivering to the Prime Minister one simple message: Do not force us truckers to get vaccinated in order to keep our jobs. We all know the rest of the story. The protests grew and ended up right here in Ottawa, camped out in front of the Parliament Buildings. They were expecting at the very least that the Prime Minister would be open to listening to their concerns, but they were wrong. He was not. It became clear that the Prime Minister was not interested in hearing out his own citizens. What he did do was resort to name-calling. The protesters were the fringes of Canadian society. They were misogynists, racist, science-deniers, un-Canadian. “Do we even tolerate these people?” he screamed. In fact, he questioned whether those people should have any place in his Canada. In the meantime, residents of downtown Ottawa were rightly becoming agitated. With the incessant honking of horns, shops and malls that had to close their doors and send employees home, major traffic disruptions and misbehaviour by a small number of protesters, life in the protest zone was becoming unbearable. I know. My apartment is within that protest zone. We Conservatives called upon the protesters to dismantle the barricades and for the Prime Minister to reach out to the truckers. He again refused, not even an olive branch. Instead, during the first week of the protests, the Prime Minister simply disappeared into his cottage, missing in action as a crisis developed. When he finally reappeared, we Conservatives began asking him what steps he was taking to resolve the impasse. After all, he had said that invoking the Emergencies Act should not be the first, second or even the third response. We asked him what was his first, second or third response. Had he met with the protesters? Would he sit down with the other party leaders to discuss a resolution to the dispute? Had he deployed a negotiating team to resolve the impasse? Had he delivered the additional policing resources so desperately needed by the city of Ottawa? We were met with stony silence. The answer was obviously, no, the Prime Minister had not taken any steps to address this evolving situation. He even rejected our request to create a plan to roll back mandates, which could have lowered the temperature. For three long weeks, the Prime Minister refused to act and then he did what only autocrats and authoritarian regimes do when faced with peaceful, civil disobedience. He did what his father had done in 1970. He triggered Canada’s war measures regime, except that this time the circumstances do not, in any way, rise to the level of those present during the FLQ crisis. There have been no bombings in the streets of Ottawa, no kidnappings, no robberies, no extortion or gun violence, no murders of politicians; only peaceful civil disobedience by frustrated Canadians who have concluded that the Prime Minister does not care for them. The Prime Minister had at his disposal all of the tools he needed to bring an end to this protest without invoking Canada’s war measures legislation. Indeed, blockades at the Ambassador Bridge, the Coutts border crossing and in Emerson, Manitoba have all been resolved without resorting to the Emergencies Act. What about the violent rail blockades in 2020, the Oka standoff or the Wet’suwet’en dispute in B.C.? What about the riots in Toronto at the G7 in 2010? The Emergencies Act was not required. Not even the circumstances around 9/11 called for war measures legislation. The Prime Minister already has the tools to respond to the Ottawa protest. It is just that he chose not to use them. There was no need to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians for exercising their right to peaceful protest or for donating to the cause. There was no need for the Liberal government to suspend the licenses and livelihoods of truckers without due process, simply because they disagreed with his vaccine mandates. It was completely unnecessary and a reckless overreach by the power-hungry prime minister. By triggering extraordinary, sweeping powers under the Emergencies Act, the prime minister has set an incredibly low bar for abrogating the rights and freedoms of Canadians. How do we know that? The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is challenging the Prime Minister’s power grab in court. Here is what it had to say: The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met. Further, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association states: The Emergencies Act is there to address these kinds of extreme threats to Canada, not to protect the economy [as the Prime Minister had suggested]. Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties. Never before in the history of our country has the threshold for triggering martial law been so low and the overreach been so high as with the motion before us. When the story of this monumental overreach and abuse of power is finally written, when historians analyze and dissect why the Prime Minister would invoke martial law powers to quell peaceful civil disobedience, when historians try to explain why Canada’s Prime Minister chose to use a constitutional sledgehammer to “crack a peanut”, as the NDP’s Tommy Douglas once put it, I want to be on the right side of that history. I want my children, my 12 grand-children and their descendants to know that I stood on the side of freedom and that I stood up to a power-grabbing prime minister. Yes, the streets of downtown Ottawa are now clear, protesters are in jail, truckers are on their way home; bank accounts have been frozen and the lives of many Canadians have been irrevocably damaged by the Prime Minister’s failure to listen and his abuse of the Emergencies Act, but for what? I would ask the Prime Minister how it came to this. This was a mess of his own making. The Prime Minister could have listened and de-escalated. He had the tools to resolve the situation but he refused. That is a profound failure of leadership on his part. Invoking the Emergencies Act is and was completely unnecessary and sets an extremely dangerous and ugly precedent for the future. For all of those reasons, I will be voting against this motion.
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