- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
- Oct/3/22 6:01:00 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his service as a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Space Agency, and of course for the work he did as the former minister of foreign affairs in standing up for Ukraine and cleaning up the mess that was left by his predecessor, Stéphane Dion.
I want to ask the hon. member about NATO membership. I think the secret to all of this is one of the greatest aspirations Ukraine has right now, which is to become a member of NATO. Does he have any brief comments on the path toward completing its membership within the NATO family?
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- May/12/22 12:27:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would just say this to the Liberal-NDP backbencher. We know there was a time, 10 years ago, when we were trying to get China more integrated into the free market system, to work with capitalism-based nations and to work with democratic nations. We now know that this has all been in folly. I do have grave concerns over any of our natural resources being controlled by state-run Chinese companies, which are ultimately controlled by the communist regime in Beijing.
I do believe the committee should make its own decisions about what documents it should be looking at and what documents should be brought forward. No stone should be left unturned. I think that, at the end of the day, Canada would be better served by it. The people of China would be better served by it, and Chinese Canadians here would appreciate us being able to work more collaboratively with them and the contributions they make to our great nation.
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- May/12/22 12:25:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, well, just to put it on the record, I am supporting the member for Carleton in this leadership race, and I do share some of the concerns that my friend from the Bloc just raised.
Let us go back, again, to the issue of Huawei. We now know that, within the Five Eyes relationship we have with the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, all four of those countries have banned Huawei. Why is Canada still dancing around the issue?
The excuse used to be that we had to get the two Michaels out of detention in Beijing. Well, they are back in Canada, so why are we dancing around this issue when we should be banning Huawei from having any access to our 5G network?
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- May/12/22 12:24:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a sad state of affairs when my friend has to go back a decade to find any article that links our former government to Huawei.
I will say this. Huawei was here for a while and it has been trying to break into the Canadian and American systems. It had access to 3G technology and was supplying 3G technology to Canada, to the United States and to European nations. Everybody, at that point in time, 10 years ago, was hoping that the communist regime in Beijing was going to march forward into market-based economies that would respect human rights, democracy and civil liberties.
That is not the case today. We know a lot more, and we should be banning Huawei.
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- May/12/22 12:13:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is indeed an honour to stand today to talk about the re-establishment of the Canada-China special committee and the work we need to undertake with respect to our relationship with China.
I want to thank my colleague from Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley for his very strong intervention, and indeed all members of the House as we consider taking on this important work.
The month of May is Asian Heritage Month, and I want to recognize all the great contributions that Asians and Chinese Canadians have made to this country. I want to mention the Hon. Philip Lee, who was the lieutenant governor of Manitoba, and the great work he did in representing the Crown in Manitoba, which he did with dignity and grace. He was an excellent representative of the Government of Manitoba.
Earlier this week, a number of my colleagues were outside on the front lawn talking about the 30th anniversary of Falun Dafa, which is known as World Falun Dafa Day. We talked about all of the great contributions that Asian Canadians are making to Canada. We can look at how Falun Gong practitioners have come here and how they practise what they preach: truthfulness, tolerance and forbearance. They have brought those qualities and values to Canada and made us a better country.
Unfortunately, Falun Gong practitioners in China are being persecuted, arrested, subjected to illegal organ harvesting, which is disgusting, and brutalized by the communist regime in Beijing. They expect us to use this committee to get to the bottom of what is happening under the communist regime and to stop it by sanctioning those who profiteer from this disgusting illegal organ harvesting. We need to make sure there is legislation coming through. There is a bill coming from the Senate, Bill S-223, that will address this issue and hold to account not just those who are committing the atrocities in China, but those around the world who are paying for and benefiting from those organs in a way that would be considered illegal in Canada. We need to put a stop to it.
As we look at the work that this special committee on Canada-China relations can do, it can dig down into the human rights abuses that are happening, not only to the Falun Gong practitioners I have mentioned, but also to the Uighurs, Tibetans, Christians and other minority religious groups throughout China that have been completely ostracized by the regime in Beijing. We know they are not allowed to practise freedom of religion. We know they have not been able to assemble peacefully because they will be arrested and ultimately end up in prison or in forced labour. We are seeing more and more the Chinese government using people of ethnic and religious diversities as forced labour, and we have to make sure that no Canadian companies are profiteering or using supply chains that involve this type of forced, illegal labour.
We have talked about supply chains. If we look at what has happened in Canada during the pandemic, the supply chains have been disrupted, partly because so much of that is coming out of China itself. We need to have sovereign control over a lot of those supply chains. We need to make sure we are working with our friends and allies around the world so we can have dependable supply chains, so we can get the electronic chips that go into the cars that are now sitting at parking lots and auto dealerships around the country; they cannot move because they lack some of the computer chips that are needed to operate the vehicles.
We know that supply chains were disrupted when it comes to PPE and that we were scrambling because of the unwillingness of mainland China to bring forward any of the supply we so desperately needed. We need to look at how we can strengthen our supply chain and work more with our allies and trading partners without having Chinese companies, which are often controlled by the state, coming into that supply chain and disrupting it. For our own economy, for our own citizens, it is important that we have control. It is about national security.
One of the biggest disappointments in the past six years under the Liberal government, and now the Liberal-NDP coalition, is that Huawei is still out there as a potential supplier of 5G technology to our mobile cellular system and Wi-Fi systems. We know Huawei has been tied to espionage around the world. That is why our Five Eyes partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, have all banned Huawei from their mobile systems, yet here we are, still waffling because the government cannot make a decision. That is despicable. We need to make these decisions.
We can look at how Huawei in particular has worked, even here in Canada. When I was parliamentary secretary for national defence, we took over the Nortel campus, when Nortel unfortunately closed its doors, and made that into the new campus for National Defence. It took years to clean out all the switches and wiring installed by Huawei, which had the ability to spy on Nortel, and ultimately on National Defence as it took over these buildings. National Defence was not there when this was originally installed in the Nortel campus, and it was not meant to be used against National Defence, but with National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces moving into the Nortel campus, the dynamics changed completely.
There is a huge track record by Huawei of not being trustworthy. It is under the Communist Party of China's control through its own charter as a corporation, and it has to co-operate with the Government of China when it wants Huawei to spy on other nations, corporations or individuals. We need to be very forthright in how we deal with it.
One of the things the committee should look at is how Canada can insert itself in some of the national security conversations that are happening on a global scale. In the Pacific, there is already what is called the quadrilateral dialogue, which involves India, Japan, the United States and Australia. Canada is not part of that discussion, and it should be.
This committee should look at how Canada can get involved in these conversations to strengthen the Indo-Pacific region, how we can make sure we counteract some of those geopolitical games that the communist regime in Beijing has been playing in the South China Sea, how it has been rattling sabres to scare Taiwan, and how it has installed a new administrator for Hong Kong and continues to violate the democratic and civil liberties of the Chinese community in Hong Kong, which includes 300,000 Canadians. We need to make sure we deal with this at the special committee on Canada-China relations.
The other organization that was just set up is being built around a national defence co-operation agreement called AUKUS, which includes Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. They are co-operating not just on intelligence sharing, which the Five Eyes has done, but also on national defence issues, including empowering the Australian navy with submarines, as well as on greater training, co-operation and collaboration among those three allies of Canada.
We should be part of that group. It may be too late for us to get in, and maybe there needs to be a path forward on how Canada can become part of that security agreement, but we are a Pacific nation. As a Pacific nation, we should be more involved in defence issues in the South Pacific, and indeed in the Indo-Pacific region, to counterbalance what is happening with the Chinese geopolitical sphere and the way China is trying to influence and potentially use force as it builds up its military to levels we have never seen.
Finally, when we look at China through this committee, we also need to look at how China is being used as a back door to take Russian goods and enrich the Russian military machine that we see waging war in Ukraine today. We need to make sure we are counterbalancing that, by looking at China and trying to get it to move away from enriching Putin and his kleptocrats. We need to make sure we get more sanctions on Russia, and that includes talking to China about how it should participate in the rule of law under the international agreements we have and isolate Russia, rather than enriching it so it can wage war on the great people of Ukraine.
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- Mar/31/22 12:02:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a question of privilege related to the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics tabled earlier today. This report was previously tabled as the committee's second report in the second session of the 43rd Parliament and spawned two questions of privilege from my predecessors, as official opposition shadow ministers for ethics.
Last June, the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes raised this question of privilege on the day the report was originally tabled. Because the Chair had not come back to the House with a ruling before Parliament was dissolved last summer, the hon. member for Barrie—Innisfil renewed the question of privilege in November on the day of the Speech from the Throne.
Concerning the second question of privilege, the Chair ruled, on December 9, 2021, at page 955 of the Debates, that it was:
...not possible in the current circumstances to seize the House on these questions of privilege....
By tabling its third report today, the ethics committee has changed those circumstances. Indeed, as the Chair ruled in December:
Since we are in a new Parliament, the issues raised are no longer before the House. It is up to the House and its committees to decide whether it is desirable to adopt these orders once again in the new Parliament.
The Chair also pointedly referenced an October 9, 1997, ruling of Speaker Parent. That case concerned the leak of a draft committee report in the dying days of the preceding Parliament, which our Chair favourably cited, saw Speaker Parent uphold, at page 690 of Debates:
If after examination a committee were to present a report recommending that this issue required further consideration, the House would have the opportunity of considering the issue at that time.
The ethics committee has gone to the trouble of considering and passing a motion to readopt word for word its former second report so as to be able to put these issues and the relevant evidence before the House once again.
In brief, the committee's third report can be relied upon to establish no fewer than seven breaches of privilege. I will repeat that: seven breaches of privileges.
The first three concern the failures of Rick Thies, Amitpal Singh and Ben Chin to appear before committee as ordered by the House. The next three relate to the government's instructions to each of these three witnesses to disregard a lawful order of the House of Commons. Finally, there is the prevaricating or misleading evidence given by the hon. member for Waterloo.
Since my colleagues previously laid out extensive arguments, and in the case of the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes provided written submissions at the request of the Assistant Deputy Speaker, I will save the House a considerable amount of time by referring the Chair to these previous arguments, both oral and written, and adopt them as my own.
That being said, there are a few points I ought to address briefly in connection with the December 9 ruling. On page 954, the Chair stated:
...as a result of the dissolution of the 43rd Parliament, the orders of the House...have expired. The government and the people summoned to appear are released from their obligations.
It is correct to say that the witnesses were released from their obligations at dissolution, but all the same, an election call did not allow for their contempt to be purged.
This autumn, the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes shared several precedents in support of the proposition that one Parliament may punish a contempt committed against a predecessor Parliament. The Chair addressed these arguments, noting:
Distinctions must be made between the matter at hand and the precedents cited. When we examine the latter, the House had not expressed itself beforehand...
To be fair, unlike the situation concerning the government's failure to table documents concerning Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory, the House had not yet pronounced itself on a privilege motion arising from the ethics committee work. The original question of privilege was outstanding when Parliament was dissolved, and the second question of privilege did not proceed in the absence of a renewed committee report.
With the third report tabled earlier today, the House is now free to express itself concerning the apparent contempts shown in the face of the ethics committee. Even if the Chair were to take the interpretation that the House had pronounced itself on the witnesses when it originally ordered their attendance on March 25, 2021, a year ago, the issues respecting the government's role in preventing their attendance, as well as the concerns about the testimony of the member for Waterloo, were only brought to the House's attention when the former second report was tabled.
As I noted, it was not pronounced upon by the House before the Prime Minister sent the country early to the polls last summer.
Of course, I will quickly note that it is not an interpretation I would share. Instead, I would argue the House has not pronounced on any privilege matters here, but I do recognize that other perspectives might exist.
In closing, the WE scandal itself was a seriously blight on good government in the country. The ethics committee has done good work shining a light on some of the issues exposed. However, as the ethics committee report also shows, the scandalous behaviour did not stop the Prime Minister's government from offering more than half a billion dollars to his pals, the Kielburgers, but it continued through the committee's study with the open contempt of Parliament shown by cabinet ministers and their staff.
By readopting and retabling this report today, the ethics committee is saying that it does not wish for such irresponsible behaviour to go unchecked and unaddressed.
I would like to quote from the supplementary opinion attached to that report today. It says:
Whether it is illegal vacations to billionaire island, ClamScam, forgotten French villas, political interference in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, or the WE Scandal – this Liberal government’s complete disregard for good ethical governance has greatly damaged Canadian’s trust in their governing institutions [including here, in Parliament]. The existence of a two-tiered set of laws is a reality for everyday Canadians. There is one set of rules for the Liberal elite in this country and another set for everyone else.
This is why I am prepared to move an appropriate motion, should you find a prima facie case of privilege.
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- Dec/7/21 8:29:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we all know that Russia is amassing about 175,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine. President Biden had calls and discussions yesterday with President Putin, France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain. Why did he not call Canada?
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