44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 2, 2022 02:00PM
- Mar/2/22 7:43:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is hard to follow the whip of one's own party when joining debate on this issue. I do not want to re-thread the same ground that he has already covered. I have already basically chopped off half of what I wanted to cover, but I want to specifically focus now on the actual parliamentary review committee.
I have heard all types of things being debated in this House on what will actually be done by this committee. I want to go back to what the law says and what the motion actually says, because I want my constituents back home, the residents of my riding, to understand exactly what it is that we are debating.
The House has already weighed in on the subject, on the wisdom of using the Emergencies Act. We had a vote on it and we are on the record. The Bloc and the Conservative Party are on the record, and so are the Liberals, the Greens and the New Democrats, so our parties have already kind of determined for ourselves, and each individual MP has, whether it was wise to use it or not. The act is very specific. Part 6 of the act is the parliamentary supervision section of the Emergencies Act. It says the following in subsection 62(1):
The exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to a declaration of emergency shall be reviewed by a committee of both Houses of Parliament designated or established for that purpose.
I have heard members in this chamber say that it would be a discussion about the protest, the blockades at the border, how it happened, the use of racist language and the grievances of the protesters, but what we are talking about here is not about keeping citizens accountable: We are talking about keeping government accountable.
The Liberal government has a record of not being willing to be kept accountable by Parliament, by citizens or by anybody. It has repeatedly done this before. In the past six and a half years I have been here, there have been motions pushed forward by government House leaders to try to restrict the ability of members to do their work both in the House and in committees, and beyond. I remember a sitting on a Saturday. We had to sit on Easter Saturday to prevent the government from obtaining almost absolute powers to tax and spend.
This is the same government. It tried to force through Standing Order changes as well. These are the same people who are now trying to jury-rig or jerry-rig this committee in order to have the outcome they want, and it is a predetermined outcome, I believe.
I also want to draw the attention of my constituents back home to the fact that this committee's meetings will be held in private. The law requires it under subsection 62(4):
Every meeting of the Parliamentary Review Committee held to consider an order or regulation referred to it pursuant to subsection 61(2) shall be held in private.
That is the most interesting part of this committee's work. It will be to review all of the internal documentation. I truly hope it will include the opinion of the Department of Justice of Canada on whether the threshold was met in enacting the Emergencies Act for its usage.
Every single one of those meetings will be held in private. Furthermore, even the motion reiterates that an oath of secrecy will be required of every single member of the committee, all the members who are elected or Senate members, and every single single staff member or witness who will be participating in the dissemination of this information at the committee. It would be incredibly difficult thereafter to produce a report on the government's conduct—not the citizens' conduct, but the government's conduct—in calling for this Emergencies Act.
I also want to draw to the attention of my constituents and the House that it is this motion, motion No. 9, that specifies February 14 and February 23. Those are the actions that will be reviewed by the committee members.
Many members have heard the issues that we on the Conservative side have with the way the chairmanship of this committee will be structured. I want to draw the attention of people to the fact that the co-chairs of this committee will be voting chairs. They will be able to move motions at committee. I have been at my share of parliamentary committees, including a joint committee with the Senate. I have never seen a meeting function well when a chair is able to move motions and is able to vote. In this Parliament I was briefly able to chair the public accounts committee, which I think is considered by all accounts to be one of the most neutral committees in this Parliament. As chair of that committee, I tried to bring absolute neutrality to the task in ensuring that we left our partisanship at the door. Both sides, both opposition members and government caucus members, had one goal in mind, which was the proper administration of government and the proper administration of funds. While we had maybe differing interests, the end goal was exactly the same, which was to ensure that taxpayers' money was properly stewarded. It would have been totally impossible to function properly had I, as chair then, been able to move motions myself and to vote on matters. It strikes me as odd that this is something that would be done in this particular situation.
Members have cast aspersions on whether a member of the Conservative Party or a member of the Liberal Party should be chair or not be chair. I think the members who are elected to be chairs of these committees will leave their partisanship at the door. I truly hope that, especially on something as important as this. There was a Bloc member who mentioned the fact that future generations and parliamentarians will look back to this committee and this particular instance and will determine whether this was a wise use of the Emergencies Act and whether the threshold had been met. One would hope that whatever report comes out of this will set the standard for when the government can and cannot, or should or should not, use the Emergencies Act.
I want to draw the attention again of constituents and members of the House to the inquiry section of the Emergencies Act. A lot of what members have been talking about so far is actually covered by the inquiry that must, under section 63 of the act, be called by the government 60 days after an emergency ends. That is the situation where we will see every act, every decision and every protest and blockade that happened in this country in the lead-up to the government's claiming it needed to use the Emergencies Act. The inquiry is the situation where we will also be able to judge the wisdom of what various citizens were doing all across our country, and I am sure there will be criminal court proceedings that will be partially completed by then, or well under way by then, that will be used by the inquiry judiciously in the determination of fault where there may be fault and in finding whether the government wisely used its power and whether the threshold had been met.
Again, that is for the inquiry. What we are talking about with the parliamentary review committee here is judging whether the government was wise to do it.
These are the things I felt needed to be said: This would not be a balanced committee. This would not be a committee that is going to ensure accountability. I have sat at those House leader meetings. I heard the member for Vancouver Granville say they were productive discussions. They were not productive. They were not productive in any way. If they were, we would not have debated briefly a motion from the government side to stop and shut down debate.
It is the government's responsibility to run the calendar of the House of Commons. The Liberals are in charge. They are the ones who determine how many hours of debate everything receives. It is not the responsibility of the official opposition or any of the opposition parties to ensure the government's agenda gets through. I have a great deal of respect for the colleagues in the other opposition parties, but they do not need to help the government push this through. We are here to keep the government accountable, specifically the cabinet, and the government caucus members can take up that responsibility as well.
What we are seeing here is an attempt by the government to engineer a preferred outcome. That is what its members would like to see, and I have tried to stick specifically to my concerns around the motion and what the Emergencies Act says must happen, because that is what my constituents want to hear. This is not about litigating what happened before February 14. This is about litigating what happened between February 14 and February 23, and I think we owe that to people in my riding.
There is a Yiddish proverb that applies here, and I want to make sure I get it in. Members know my great love for everything Yiddish and Hebrew, and for proverbs as well. It says, “When you sweep the house, you find everything.” I think by sweeping through legislation and the actual content of the motion, my constituents back home in Calgary Shepard will see this is an attempt by the government to set a predestined final destination for the report, one that will absolve them of any sins.
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- Mar/2/22 7:53:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am going to remind the member for Vancouver Granville that it is the government's responsibility to set the hours of debate on the motion. It could have done this last week. It could have done this Monday. It could have had evening sittings on the motion in order to ensure that it passed. When we do bad-faith negotiations, like I believe the government House leader has done, this is the result.
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- Mar/2/22 7:54:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, I am not the one who is saying we should not look at anything that happened before. It is clear in the act and the motion what is supposed to happen. The motion specifically refers to February 14 to February 23, and in the act in section 62, and I invite the member to read the sections of the Emergencies Act I am referring to, it says:
62(1) The exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to a declaration of emergency shall be reviewed by a committee of both Houses of Parliament designated or established for that purpose.
The act, the law, tells us what to do, and the motion is specific only to those dates. That is what I am reading. That is what we are voting on here.
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- Mar/2/22 7:56:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely correct in her reading of the act. It is actually the same reading that I have, and I referred to “Meetings in private”, which is in subsection 62(4) of the act.
What I was basically implying, and will say now, is that the best portion of the committee, the one I think the public will be most interested in, will be the discussion of the orders and regulations internally that the government was using, passing and referring to. That is the thing the public wants to know about the most, and that is the thing that will be kept secret and will be private.
The next part is that I do not know how the committee will be able to report on it in an actual, physical report. It may be able to make allusions to it and infer certain things, but it will not be able to specifically say and construct an image of what happened between February 14 and February 23.
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