- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Barrie—Innisfil
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $99,360.72
- Government Page
- Mar/19/24 3:51:28 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is a real honour and privilege to rise on behalf of the people that I represent in Barrie—Innisfil.
There is a full-blown carbon tax revolt going on in this country right now. Today's motion represents voices across the country. They are saying that, on April 1, when the 23% increase in the carbon tax occurs, it needs to stop.
I know the Speaker is from Nova Scotia and that he heard the news today out of Nova Scotia that the Nova Scotia Legislature unanimously passed a motion to stop the carbon tax increase on April 1. In fact, 70% of premiers in this country are asking for the same, and 70% of Canadians are asking to axe the tax increase on April 1. Yesterday, the Liberal leader of Ontario stood in front of microphones in the Ontario legislature and called on the federal government to axe the 23% tax increase on April 1.
That is why we are here today. One thing I get to do as the member of Parliament for Barrie—Innisfil is communicate regularly with my residents. I know many of the MPs utilize the tools that are available to communicate; in every circumstance that we deal with mailers, we ask a question.
We ask the question so we can get a sense of how our constituents feel about certain issues that we are debating in this country. Recently, I sent out a constituency mailer. What this represents is just a small portion of the responses that I got back.
The responses were telling. They were telling of the circumstances that my constituents are feeling right now, not only as a result of the carbon tax but also as a result of the affordability and inflation crisis and the interest rate increase crisis. These things have dramatically impacted my residents and people right across this country, and not just people, but businesses as well.
In some of those responses, 81% of the respondents that got back to me with the mailer said that they wanted to scrap the carbon tax. It was not a trick question that I asked. It was a very simple and succinct question: “Do you support the carbon tax?” Eighty-one per cent of the residents came back and said that they do not. There were some, I acknowledge, that did support the carbon tax, and that is fine. However, what I saw is consistent with what I am seeing right across this country; this is that 70% of Canadians want the carbon tax scrapped.
Here is what some of the residents are saying. I am their voice. I stand up here in the House of Commons as the voice of the people of Barrie—Innisfil, who have elected me since 2015.
“We are 80 and 81 years old. We cannot afford the taxes we have”, said Lyle and Phyllis from Barrie.
“Every month on average my carbon [tax] cost just for the gas bill is $59. At the end of the year that is $708 just for the gas bill, not to mention the cost of the groceries that have gone up. We can't save anything. Even with that little bit of my paid taxes (yes our money) I'm getting back 4 times a year, the PM acts like he is doing me a favour. It doesn't put a dent in the cost of everything going up,” said Lulu in Innisfil.
“Just a quick note to let you know that I am OPPOSED to the upcoming April 1st carbon tax increase on gasoline. As a pensioner, I am finding it difficult to keep up with all the increases in taxes, cost of food, utilities, etc. My pension only increases...2% a year”, said Mark in Barrie. The carbon tax is going up 23% on April 1.
“The general public cannot handle any more taxes at this time”, said Jennifer in Innisfil.
“It's a significant contributor to inflation, which we urgently need to control”, said Alexander in Innisfil.
“Don't believe it effectively encourages less fuel consumption”, said Todd in Lefroy.
“They should cancel it; life is very expensive already”, said Nora in Barrie.
That is the crux of what we are discussing here today.
As I mentioned earlier, the affordability and inflation crisis gripping our nation right now is having a real impact on people. We can add to that interest rate increases and mortgages that are coming due for renewal. Is it any wonder that there is a carbon tax revolt happening not only at the grassroots level but also among provincial premiers in this country? This is because they are on the ground. It is easy for us to sit here in the Ottawa bubble and not recognize the impact this is having on people in our country.
I am sure Liberal, NDP, Bloc and other members are hearing from their constituents, as I am, about the affordability factor. All we are asking is to give people a break and not increase the carbon tax by 23% on April 1. This is not the end of it. The tax will be going up four times more by 2035. It is going to increase to four times more than what it is right now. People cannot afford it now; how are they going to afford it then?
Of course, the argument from the government is that it is revenue-neutral. If one does not take it from people in the first place, then one never has to give it back. The fact is, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, people are not getting back what they are paying into the carbon tax.
Liberals can argue all they want as they stand up here. As the former environment minister famously said one time, as she was sitting in a bar in Newfoundland, if they say things loud enough and long enough, people will totally believe what they say. It is effectively propaganda.
However, the facts are in front of us, through the Parliamentary Budget Officer. In the province where I am from, Ontario, in 2023-24, the cost of the tax will be $1,363. The rebate will be $885, which means that people are spending more on the carbon tax than what they are getting in the rebate, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. In other provinces, such as Newfoundland and Labrador, it is $1,281. People are getting back $934. In Alberta, people will pay $2,466 in carbon tax, in terms of the fiscal and economic gross cost; the rebate they are getting back is $1,756.
If we cannot believe the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the data he provides to parliamentarians, then why do we even have him? I would suggest that the Parliamentary Budget Officer's data, and the anecdotal data I am hearing from residents in my riding, say exactly this: They cannot afford this carbon tax. They cannot afford the increase.
One thing I want to focus on for a minute is the cost of business. We have said many times in this place that, when one taxes the wholesalers, producers and transporters, the tax ends up at the consumer through grocery stores. The stores, by the way, are paying to heat and cool their buildings. It is ultimately the end consumer who ends up paying for it. On the supply side, business ends up paying for it.
Yesterday, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business produced a document that it posted on its website. It reaffirmed to its members that the “carbon tax is increasing by a staggering 23% on April 1st! That means the cost of a litre of gasoline will include 17.6 cents of carbon tax!” One thing it discussed is the fact that the federal government had promised to return the carbon tax to business. Across this country, there is currently $2.5 billion owed in rebates. In the province of Ontario, $2,637 is owed to each business as a result of this rebate, yet the government continues to hold on to that money. These businesses are still being impacted on the supply side with the increase in the costs I mentioned earlier.
I am here today on behalf of the people I represent in Barrie—Innisfil, who I know are going through a massive affordability issue. These are seniors, single moms and people trying to keep a roof over their heads, not just because of the carbon tax but because of all factors. All we are asking for today on behalf of not just the people I represent in Barrie—Innisfil but all Canadians, in this carbon tax revolt that is currently ongoing, is to axe the tax and try to help make life more affordable for Canadians.
1492 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to stand in this place and speak to legislation and, in this particular case, it is an honour to speak to the report stage of Bill C-34.
Before I begin, having just spent the weekend back in my riding and arriving this morning back in Ottawa, at different events and in lots of interaction with my constituents, since we are speaking about competition, I cannot say enough about the impact of the Prime Minister's decision last Thursday to limit the carbon tax, or actually take away the carbon tax, on home heating oil within Atlantic Canada and how much of an impact that is having on the residents whom I represent in Barrie—Innisfil, in a negative way. Many are questioning and wondering why the same application of an exemption to the carbon tax was not applied equally across the country.
I know the Prime Minister gave his rationale, but that is literally cold comfort to the people whom I represent, especially the seniors who are struggling to pay for groceries and to pay their natural gas bills. Many of them are sending me their natural gas bill, and the carbon price is oftentimes equal to the distribution charge of natural gas itself. There are families who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, moms who are worried about paying the bills on a daily basis and, of course, single-parent families who are just struggling to make ends meet, buy nutritious food for their families and pay their gas bills, especially with winter coming up. It was quite the topic of conversation this week within my riding.
Quite frankly, I did not have an answer for any of them because the Prime Minister's decision was to exclude solely Atlantic Canada when the rest of us are still paying the carbon tax for home heating in particular, and those prices are going to go up. The cost of distribution is going to go up and the cost of the carbon tax is going to go up. People in the riding I represent are quite concerned about the inequity of not having the same benefit other Canadians have. I wanted to share that message because it is something I heard on the weekend in my many interactions with the people whom I represent in my riding of Barrie—Innisfil.
We are here today to speak to Bill C-34 at report stage with respect to the improvements, and some needed improvements, to the Investment Canada Act. It is important because we just finished, at the ethics committee, a study on foreign interference and the role that nations, particularly China and Russia, are playing as state-owned actors making investments into our economy for the purpose, quite frankly, of control, including controlling Canadian businesses, controlling Canadian minerals, controlling Canadian resources and controlling, in many cases as the hon. member just spoke about, some of our northern and offshore areas as well. Therefore, it becomes critically important for the government to keep a keen eye, and multiple eyes, in fact, on what is happening with foreign investment and the approvals.
Bill C-34 highlights a few simple things. Number one, there are numerous foreign state-owned enterprises who have acquired interest and control in many Canadian companies, intellectual property, tangible assets and the data of our citizens. We are finding more and more that this access to data and theft of data are not just to use it for nefarious reasons but to propagate disinformation and misinformation to create societal chaos, so we have to be mindful of that. The government, quite frankly, would do very little to protect our national economic and security interests with this bill, despite what we are hearing the Liberals say today and other days during debate, and certainly at committee.
We have to take sensitive transactions seriously, and we have failed to fully review some of the transactions, particularly as they relate to Chinese state-owned enterprises in the past. Later, I am going to be citing some examples of where we have put at risk not just Canadian intellectual property but also Canadians in general.
One can agree with some of the principles of this bill, and we certainly agree with some of the principles, but it does not go far enough to address some of the risks faced by Canadians. That is why we worked to pass significant amendments in committee to better protect Canadian interests and Canadian assets.
When I look through the list of amendments that were proposed for Bill C-34, only four were passed at committee out of the roughly 13 we proposed. One that was accepted was on reducing the threshold to trigger a national security review from $512 million to zero dollars for all state-owned enterprise investment made in Canada. Lowering that threshold was critical so that at least it would trigger and initiate a security review.
The other amendment that was passed would ensure that items renewable under the national security review process include acquisitions of any assets by a state-owned enterprise. Again, this is all about protecting Canadians and protecting our valuable assets, our businesses and certainly our interests.
The other one would ensure that an automatic national security review is conducted whenever a company has previously been convicted of corruption charges. If somebody had not supported that, I would have been surprised, quite frankly. It is one of the proposals at committee that were adopted.
The last would require the minister to conduct a national security review by changing the word “may” to “shall” to ensure a review is triggered whenever it is in the new threshold. This was quite frankly a no-brainer.
However, there were some amendments proposed that were not accepted at committee and rejected. The one that concerns me the most is the one that would require the minister to conduct a national security review by changing “may” to “shall” to ensure the review is triggered whenever in the review threshold.
One of the things we have to be mindful of is that anytime a transaction being proposed impacts the national security interests of our country, we have to make sure there is a review. One of the proposed amendments was to have a Governor in Council review of this so there is not just one eye on it, the minister's eye. It would go to the cabinet table so there are multiple eyes on it and multiple questions being asked, which is critical when we are dealing with sensitive national security interests.
Why is this important? As I said earlier, there have been situations in the past where companies have not had the type of review they should have. That has been widely publicized. A Chinese takeover deal in 2015 had been previously rejected by the Conservative government, but it was approved in 2015. This was based on Hong Kong O-Net Technologies Group as it related to a business here. Having multiple eyes on the review therefore becomes critical.
In fact, three years ago, a Deloitte study suggested to the government that we should not buy sensitive security IT from despotic regimes. That was in relation to a $6.8-million contract to supply security equipment to Canada's embassies. This was Nuctech, which is known as the Huawei of airport security. Some may recall that this involved X-ray machines being supplied for use by the Government of Canada.
While there are some things to support in this bill, the amendments that were proposed by our Conservative colleagues in committee were reasonable and practicable and should have been applied to many aspects of the bill we are debating today.
1305 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/15/23 6:59:38 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, there is another example. Last year, the government did the same thing in June, with the NDP's help. They did it right before Canada Day. They said that if we did not vote, we would be staying here.
They are using this issue as a hostage-taking exercise. This is why we are ending up at the end.
However, on the point of not discussing, we have had consensus around this place on changes to the Standing Orders. That has been the convention, but obviously the government knows that it has NDP members in its hip pocket and it is using them to make these changes.
I ran as an MP knowing the issue, knowing that I would be here in Ottawa, and I would suggest to anyone that if they do not understand the obligation of a member of Parliament to sit in Ottawa, in this seat of power, the constitutional place of power in this country, and if they cannot conform to that, then maybe they should run for mayor or maybe they should run for councillor or maybe they should run for public school trustee.
I understand what my obligation is, as do many of the members, not just on our side but I suspect on the Bloc Québécois side as well. This is where people need to be.
230 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/23/22 12:38:55 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I sat on PROC when we studied this at the beginning of the pandemic. The concern was always that this was going to become more permanent in nature, and I believe it is the goal of not just the Liberal government but its partners in the NDP to make this more permanent.
There were other concerns as well. Members may use this not to come here so that in close ridings they can perpetually electioneer. I suspect that this is probably going to be the case for the NDP and the Liberals.
As I said last night about somebody who wants to be in their community, this is a transcontinental country, and the expectation is that when we get elected here, we are going to come to Ottawa. If members want to be in their riding, they can run for mayor, run for council or run for public school trustee. They should not run for MP, because the expectation is that they will need to be here.
169 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/23/22 12:32:59 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the fact is that constitutionally Ottawa is the seat of power. It is the seat of Parliament, and this is where people are expected to be.
Do I think that going hybrid during COVID served a purpose? I explained very well in my discourse last night that at the height of the pandemic, yes, it did serve a purpose because there were many unknowns at that point. There were agreements among all the parties to move, and I give full credit to the administrative staff.
However, in terms of what we are dealing with today, we are normalizing this process of a hybrid Parliament in the fall when no other legislatures around the world or even in this country are doing it. Why are we dealing with this now? If we want to talk about how to modernize Parliament, we can do that, and the procedure and House affairs committee is the proper venue for it.
158 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, we have been seeing that all along, and it is a great point the hon. member brings up. We have seen the dysfunction of virtual Parliament. I mentioned that as I was speaking about the motion. We have seen the impacts that it has had on the translation bureau, for example. If the chair will not come to Ottawa, then, yes, maybe we need to take the committee out to Vancouver or other places to eliminate and stop the dysfunction.
I think this speaks to the broader picture. The broader picture here is that the Liberals are misusing hybrid Parliament. We saw it today in question period. How many parliamentary secretaries, who should be here in the seat of power, in the seat of Parliament, are—
129 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/22 11:25:48 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to once again rise in the House to speak on behalf of my constituents in Barrie—Innisfil. I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Louis-Saint-Laurent.
Today is an opposition day, which means that one of the opposition parties gets to decide the topic of conversation here in the House. This is one of two Bloc opposition days this spring, when we get to discuss some matters that are important to the Bloc and I expect to the people of Quebec. With great respect to my colleagues, and I mean that sincerely, we should be discussing issues that are having a profound impact on Canadians and Quebeckers, such as affordability, the RCMP investigation into the fraud of the Prime Minister and his lucky break with regard to that, the Liberals' conduct on foreign relations and government mismanagement with regard to accountability. We have a passport crisis, a fiasco, that is happening in this country that should be discussed. There is also the increasingly sketchy justification shown by the government for invoking the Emergencies Act. That is just to name a few.
This country has never been more divided than it has been in the last six and a half years, along regional, racial, ethnic and faith lines. The division we have seen in the last six and a half years is a result of the Prime Minister wedging, stigmatizing and dividing Canadians. We have been hearing a lot of disinformation in the House from the government side, and it is, quite frankly, disturbing. It relates to the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Talking today about Standing Order 30 will not, I suspect, gather much attention across this country, perhaps with the exception of the House.
I do not know about anyone else, but when I was in my riding this weekend, as I am every weekend, not a single person came up to me and asked what my position was on Standing Order 30. What is Standing Order 30? In short, it directs the Speaker to read a prayer at the start of the day's sitting before the TV cameras are turned on. No one sees this. It is a private moment of reflection for the 338 of us who sit in the House. That is why the Speaker always follows the moment of reflection with “Let the doors be opened”. The doors are opened and the public comes in.
Only on the rarest of occasions has the public ever actually been privy to it. My staff told me, and some staff have been here for more than 40 years, a long time, that the last occasion the prayer was read in public was October 23, 2014. That is the day after the terrorist attack at Centre Block and the National War Memorial. That was the day that Kevin Vickers, the Sergeant-at-Arms who downed the armed gunman in the Hall of Honour, led the Speaker's parade into the House.
Mr. Vickers was rightly greeted with a sustained three-minute standing ovation by a packed chamber that morning. The prayer was read, and I can say that I understand the moment and the incidents of that week really put into perspective the prayer's call to “give thanks for the great blessings which have been bestowed on Canada and its citizens, including the gifts of freedom, opportunity and peace that we enjoy.”
After the prayer, the House erupted into a very emotional and heartfelt rendition of O Canada. Mr. Vickers, the true hero he was, did not gloat in arrogance or beam with pride. Rather, he struggled valiantly to keep his tears to a minimum, much as we might expect any genuine Canadian hero to be: modest in demeanour and deeply humbled by displays of gratitude.
All of that was visible to Canadians that day because the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, who was then the Speaker, made the executive decision to allow Canadians into the galleries and for the TV cameras to be turned on so we could witness it. The House needed it and the nation needed it, especially after a very distressing day in Ottawa, when no one really quite knew what or how much was happening.
The video of that morning of raw emotions when the prayer was open to the public can still send chills down one's spine. That procedure of a prayer normally read in private is rooted, as I mentioned, in Standing Order 30, which traces its origins to 1927, when our rule book went through a significant update driven by a special committee chaired by the Speaker. That amendment was a simple codification of a practice that began in the 1870s after the adoption of a recommendation from another special committee.
The current prayer read daily was developed by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in 1994 under the chairmanship of Peter Milliken, with a view to having a short prayer reflecting the diversity of religions embraced by Canadians. Do we see a pattern here? It is that committees and consensus drove these decisions.
Canada's Conservatives have long held and long observed the importance and necessity of amending our internal rules and procedures through consensus. It is an important point when we are talking about the rules that regulate the balance between governments and oppositions, especially when we consider the fact that Canadians ask Conservatives and Liberals to swap sides of this chamber every few years. Another switch, I am sure, is coming pretty soon.
The approach is just as relevant when it comes to matters of conscience such as prayer. On top of that, we are required by our own rules to conduct a review of our procedures after every election. The motion would have been a natural suggestion to raise then.
Standing Order 51 requires the House to hold a day-long discussion sometime between the 60th and 90th sitting day of the Parliament. The results of that conversation are then referred to the procedure and House affairs committee to consider.
Today is the 68th day the House has sat since the election. Based on our calendar, the 90th sitting day will be on June 16. Quite literally, we are going to be holding a comprehensive discussion about changes to our procedures sometime within the next five weeks.
A member of the Bloc could have used a few minutes of his or her 10-minute speaking slot to make the suggestion and then seen where the committee goes with that idea. Perhaps a consensus would form around the proposal in today's Bloc motion. Maybe the consensus would back the status quo, or possibly even recommend some third approach we have not thought of yet. That speaks to the power of parliamentary committees and of consensus-based rule-making, and it should be happening in this case, as well.
Therefore, I will be voting against the Bloc motion, because I sincerely believe that permanent changes to our procedural rules, and especially on a subject matter like this, really ought to come from a Standing Order review process, be deliberated upon by a committee and be implemented as the result of a consensus-based recommendation coming from that committee of MPs, as they always have been.
1228 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/28/22 1:21:58 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is the government's actions that should be held to account here. It is the government that decided to invoke the Emergencies Act. We need to find out what thresholds were met. We also need to understand, as I said, that there is a strong level of anger and anxiety that exists and that it has manifested across this country because of what people have been dealing with over the last two years. What we saw in Ottawa is the same thing we are seeing in Barrie—Innisfil and in other parts of the country.
We need to look at not only the manifestation of what has gone on, but also the government's actions. It is the one that invoked the Emergencies Act. The government is the one that has to justify it and be accountable for this. That is where the focus should be, in my opinion.
153 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/28/22 1:01:19 p.m.
- Watch
I apologize for that, Mr. Speaker. It is no wonder people were angered when the Prime Minister of the country referred to his own countrymen, his people, in those terms because he does not agree with them and they do not agree with him. It is not prime ministerial, and it really has affected a lot of people in more ways than perhaps the Prime Minister thinks.
The challenge right now is that the anxiety and the anger are persisting, and are still manifesting themselves. The situation we find ourselves in is with respect to the level of trust. We are looking into our public institutions and making sure that they are functioning in a way that gives confidence to Canadians and that our democracy is functioning in a way that gives confidence to Canadians, because we have seen over the course of the last six years a pattern of systemic overreach by the government.
I can cite this pattern. Whether it is the banking information of 500,000 Canadians that was being looked into by Stats Canada, the ethics breaches, the WE Charity scandal, the cellphone and mobility-data tracking of millions of Canadians, this pattern has shown itself to be an overreach. This is in addition to the contempt that the Liberals have shown with respect to the Winnipeg lab documents, with the Speaker making a ruling and the government not allowing that information. This is the erosion of confidence that makes it even more important for this committee to provide the confidence that Canadians need in order not just to get to the bottom of the invocation of the act, but also to make sure that the actions of the government were justified and met the threshold of the imposition of this act so that we can provide that for Canadians.
The other thing I would like to address is the other pattern we have seen, particularly in this Parliament. It is inexplicable to me how an opposition party can be in lockstep with the government. I am speaking specifically about the New Democratic Party. It is in lockstep with the government in everything it does. We mentioned during the emergency debate that the foundations of that party were in being the working people's party. To see the New Democrats act in lockstep with the government on everything, even in the support of the invocation of the Emergencies Act, was quite frankly upsetting to many people.
We saw the Prime Minister, last week, imply that a lack of support for the invocation of the act meant that it was going to be a confidence vote. In fact, I stood up just before the vote and I asked the government House leader about that. He said we should just get on with the vote. Convention around this place dictates that the government advise Parliament and the Speaker that a vote is in fact a confidence vote.
However, the Prime Minister and the government not only browbeat the NDP and put its members into fear that we were going to call an election, which we all know the NDP does not want at this point, but the Liberals also browbeat many of their backbenchers, including two of the more vocal backbenchers: the member for Louis-Hébert and the member for Beaches—East York. They said last week that they did not agree with the invocation of the act and it did not meet the threshold that the government had purported, yet they were told that if they did not support it the Prime Minister was going to call an election. Can members imagine the Prime Minister threatening his own backbench and threatening the NDP into supporting the invocation of the act, if they did not support something that he wanted and that we do not know was justified, which is the purpose of this committee.
Of course, by coincidence or not, two days later we saw the revocation of the act. All of a sudden, everything was fine in the land, so let us revoke the order. The Prime Minister obviously tried to justify this. As I said at the start, I believe this was done for political reasons, unless I see evidence otherwise, to justify the many criticisms the Prime Minister was receiving as a result of inaction on this.
It was not surprising to me when the NDP supported the Liberals on this and continue to support them, as I suspect, on this motion as well. Why would they not? They would be getting a chair of a committee. Why would they not want to support the government on this? It is extraordinary, because it is not the third or fourth party that gets the chair of a committee. It is the official opposition that gets the chair of an oversight committee, not the third or fourth party. This would be breaking from convention, and this is why we have a problem.
The other thing we proposed, and I know that this has been publicized and the government House leader has spoken about this, is that the way the act was written in 1988 prescribed that members of a recognized party with 12 members or more would form the committee. I brought this up in our initial House leaders meeting. This would mean the Liberals, the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc, as well as a recognized party in the Senate, which would mean the Conservative Party. That is what is prescribed in the act and is in the spirit of the act, as well.
After we went back and forth, and this absurd proposal we are dealing with today came to me, it was my position that I would default back to the act. It is not my fault, nor is it the fault of our colleagues or of any of the opposition parties, that the government has not amended the Emergencies Act to reflect the current composition of the Senate. That is the government's problem. It has not done that to this point, and now the Liberals are saying they have to have those senators there, but it is not prescribed in the act.
When we did not agree to this absurd proposal of the committee structure we are dealing with today, we said that we could go back to what the act says. It is not my fault the Prime Minister created the Senate in the manner in which he did, but has not done anything to reflect not just this act, but other acts that would need to be amended. If the government wants to reflect better what the current composition of the Senate is, it can certainly do that.
In fact, over the weekend there was a story in the National Post that suggested the government was working on this, but then it called an election. The Liberals were working on it, but then they called an election. B.C. was burning, and they called an election. Afghanistan was falling, and they called an election. There were lots of consequences to the Prime Minister calling an election 18 months after the last one for his own vanity.
There are several other points that can be made on this, but the main one I want to make is about establishing this trust in government. A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in the ethics committee. We had the Ethics Commissioner there, and I asked him about his perception of the level of trust in government. His response was that there had been a significant decline in the level of trust in government not just recently or with recent occurrences, but also over the course of the last six years since the Liberal government had taken over. Certainly in polling we have seen this.
For me, this is a matter of principle. It is not a matter of politics. I am not looking at playing partisan political games. I am not looking at trying to undermine the work of the committee. We have already established committees in Parliament that are purpose-built for this type of scrutiny and oversight. On the Conservative side, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask that we maintain a structure similar to what we have instead of this ad hoc committee that the government is proposing. I think it is not an unreasonable request for us to do that.
I just want to reiterate the threshold of what constitutes a national emergency and why this is important. It is defined in the act as:
an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that
(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada, and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
There is a strong argument to be made. I know that many people have weighed in on this. We had a fulsome weekend of debate about whether that threshold was in fact met. This is what the committee is going to be charged with. Was it for a political reason that the government invoked this act, to deal with the criticism of the Prime Minister when all of the other emergency powers were already in place, both provincially and municipally? What has been prescribed in legislation were incredible powers given to ministers of the Crown to deal with these types of situations. We saw situations in Emerson, Manitoba, and at the Ambassador Bridge. In Coutts, Alberta, police defused the situation. It was the same with Emerson and the Ambassador Bridge. Could those powers, which had already been enacted and given through regulatory and legislative authority to the ministers of the Crown, have been sufficient without pulling this nuclear option of the Emergencies Act?
That is what this committee is going to be charged with. We have to make sure the oversight and scrutiny that this committee will provide, and the subsequent inquiry that will follow, do exactly that. This is a matter of trust, and it is up to the government to defend its actions. It is up to the government to justify its actions.
It is up to opposition members, all of us in this place, to use the powers that we are given to provide this extraordinary scrutiny and oversight on the government so that Canadians can have confidence in their ability to understand what just happened, what happened during the crisis, and whether the government in fact did overreach or extend beyond what it needed to during the crisis. There is no doubt that the people of Ottawa dealt with a lot. There is no question about it, but we have to make sure that the spirit the Emergencies Act intended, and the thresholds the Emergencies Act calls for, were met. It is up to the government to justify that.
In conclusion, I will move the following amendment. I move, seconded by the member for Kelowna—Lake Country:
That the motion be amended:
(a) in paragraph (b), by replacing the words “with three Chairs of which the two House Co-Chairs shall be from the Bloc Québécois and the New Democratic Party and the Senate Co-Chair shall be determined by the Senate;” with the words “with two Chairs of which one House Co-Chair shall be from the Liberal Party and the Senate Co-Chair shall be from the Conservative Party”;
(b) in paragraph (1)(iii), by adding, after the words “election of the”, the words “Co-Chairs and”.
1974 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
