44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 2, 2022 02:00PM
- Mar/2/22 7:25:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it will, in fact, be the membership of the committee that will ultimately determine how effective the committee wants to be. If there is a highly politically charged agenda going into the committee, there is very little that the committee can do outside of trying to steer it.
I served on legislative committees in the past at the provincial level. They operated on a consensus basis. To see a consensus report come out of this committee, I would give full marks and credit to every single member. It would be a challenge to do that, but it would be a wonderful thing to see: an actual report based on consensus where there are no minority reports. This would not be a consensus and then a minority report, but an absolute, true consensus report on ways in which we could improve the legislation.
I do not believe that the legislation is totally perfect. Let us see if there are ways in which we can improve it.
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- Mar/2/22 7:27:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to refer to the observations that have been made on the hate symbols and extremist, ideologically motivated displays of racism and intimidation, in person and online, that were part of this illegal occupation. There have also been comments about the wilful blindness of the Conservatives to these displays of hate, in spite of them being reported by journalists and organizations that monitor hate speech in this country.
Does the member think that it should be an important aspect of the review to understand how dangerous online spaces influenced those who participated in the clear hate messaging by the organizers? Does it not require a balanced and careful review by the committee?
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- Mar/2/22 7:27:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, given the cost and social consequences of the illegal blockades, whether it was the seizure of downtown Ottawa or at the international borders, which cost billions of dollars a day, and factoring in the extreme right and many of the racial attitudes expressed in places outside of Ottawa, I would like to think the committee would ultimately make its decision in terms of the scope of it. I am hoping, and will try to be optimistic, that we will see that consensus. I will cross my fingers, but I guess we will have to wait and see.
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- Mar/2/22 7:28:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague for Calgary Shepard.
It is an honour to rise today to discuss this extremely serious matter. The unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act requires the utmost scrutiny, and the committee that will be struck is obviously going to play an essential role. The government's attempt to strong-arm the opposition and rig the committee to deliver a favourable outcome is not shocking given the history of the current government; nonetheless, it is unacceptable.
I want to start today by reminding Canadians how we got into this situation in the first place. When we take a step back to consider the actions taken by the Prime Minister and the Liberal government, the need for strong opposition oversight becomes even clearer.
In the early days of the pandemic, the Prime Minister acknowledged that mandating vaccinations would be a deeply divisive and socially harmful policy. That was about 13 months ago. He then saw an opening to try to move from a minority government to a majority, and decided that dividing Canadians and threatening the social fabric of our country would be worthwhile if it gave him a blank cheque for another four years.
While the Prime Minister has always been keen to divide Canadians and others who do not agree with him, recent months have seen him take it to a whole new level, charging those people who do not like his policies as racists or misogynists, or as holding unacceptable views and taking up space. He has taken to suggesting that hon. members of Parliament, even descendants of Holocaust survivors, are standing with Nazis.
What we are seeing is an increasingly tired, scandal-plagued Prime Minister clinging to the reins of power by stoking fear and division. Common-sense Canadians can see right through this. That is why thousands of Canadians from coast to coast left their homes to protest the Prime Minister's divisive policies and his decision to double down on vaccine mandates and restrictions when many provinces and countries around the world were lifting them.
The protesters came with a very simple message for the Prime Minister: Canadians want their rights and freedoms back, and it is time to allow Canadians to manage their risk tolerance for COVID-19 themselves, just as friends and family in other countries have been doing for months. Instead of speaking with them, understanding their concerns and trying to assuage their fears, the government continued to override Canadians' freedoms with no end in sight, and the Prime Minister resorted again to more name-calling.
Then, in a move I cannot fathom, the government and the NDP refused to support our Conservative motion asking for a plan to lift the mandate restrictions. Two years in, the Prime Minister does not believe that Canadians can be trusted with the metrics the government is using to justify public health measures. This is far from the commitment that the Liberal government made: In an open and accountable government, government data and information should be open by default. I wonder if the Liberals remember that pledge.
We cannot accept illegal activity at our borders or on our streets. Infringing on the rights and freedoms of fellow citizens while protesting the government cannot be accepted as the norm, but neither should we as Canadians accept dangerous and divisive rhetoric from the executive branch of our government meant to incite Canadians who disagree with it. It is clear that the Prime Minister no longer shares the guiding philosophy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier's sunny ways, but instead is relying on the winds of bluster.
This is in large part the backdrop against which the Emergencies Act was invoked. After years of insulting, shaming and marginalizing Canadians who disagreed with the Prime Minister, those Canadians rose up in opposition. The use of the Emergencies Act does appear to have been wholly inappropriate in this matter. Conservatives are extremely concerned that in striking the committee as the Liberals are proposing, they intend to simply stack the deck to skirt over the great many concerns that Canadians rightly have.
It is important to note that the existence of an emergency does not mean that the Emergencies Act is the proper tool to be used. I know that many Canadians impacted by the blockades felt that this was an emergency that required extraordinary intervention, but that is not the threshold for using it. In order to use this legislation, the predecessor of which was the War Measures Act, there can be no other options in our federal or provincial laws. We must not lose sight of this fact.
I have listened carefully to experts, including to police officers who were tasked with cleaning up the mess that the Prime Minister instigated. It is clear that the powers under the Emergencies Act were helpful in clearing the blockades, but again, whether they were used or were helpful is not the test for whether the act should have been invoked. It is whether the situation could have been dealt with in any other way through existing authorities. So far, I have seen no compelling evidence that it could not have been.
We know that the police can compel reasonable assistance from others at any point in time. This authority is laid out in the Criminal Code, and that would include calling tow-truck drivers.
We know that if police see a crime in progress, they are able to act on it even if they are outside their regular jurisdiction. Further, there is a process to deputize police from other departments or areas to act. This was done in Ottawa prior to the Emergencies Act being invoked, and it worked.
The Emergencies Act may have been more convenient, but it was not necessary. Convenience is not the test in the legislation. The increased offences that were granted under the Emergencies Act were not necessary, because there are already viable offences and authorities in the Criminal Code. The border blockades were coming down before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, so clearly it was not necessary in those instances. The financial measures were not necessary to bring down the blockades at our international borders, and we were already seeing crowdfunding platforms that were voluntarily cutting off funds without the need of this legislation. They also do not appear to have been charter-compliant, as individuals were assumed guilty and sanctioned by their banks without any due process.
These are all things that the committee needs to consider, and that we cannot simply allow to be swept under the rug by a committee designed to exonerate the Liberals' actions and justify the NDP's backing of them in an attempt to wipe the egg off their face from when they voted to affirm the act's use, only to have it withdrawn 36 hours later.
The government’s proposal for the structure of the committee is totally inadequate. As I have outlined, this committee has a very serious task ahead of it, and it ought to be credible. I appreciate that the views I have laid out, and that I have heard from my constituents, are likely not going to be universally accepted in this Chamber. However, they are valid views and deserve to be heard and considered.
A strong and represented opposition is essential for the functioning of our democracy. Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is beholden to the people of Canada, not to the cabinet, to members of the governing party or to their coalition partners. To try to minimize our role because they do not like what we might say or what we might have said in the past flies in the face of our parliamentary system.
While the Liberals have proved to be too comfortable in criticizing Canadians who disagree with them as holding unacceptable views, and it is their right to say so, no matter how arrogant it makes them sound, they are not the arbiters of acceptability for our parliamentary system. That is a role that is reserved for Canadians at the ballot box, not for the government House leader and the caucus that sits behind him.
While he may have threatened an election over the Emergencies Act, it did not happen and our voices are just as valid in this place, or at committee, as his or any other member's on the government benches.
To quote Sir Wilfred Laurier, a Prime Minister greatly admired by Liberals:
...it is indeed essential for the country that the shades of opinion which are represented on both sides of this House should be placed as far as possible on a footing of equality and that we should have a strong opposition to voice the views of those who do not think with the majority.
I ask the government to take that advice now.
While the government may be inclined to disavow its claimed beliefs for the sake of politics and retaining power, my colleagues in opposition should not have the same concerns. While I have spoken at length about the government’s attempt to vilify Canadians who disagree with it, it is important to remind hon. members that the government has also attempted to curtail the powers of the opposition on multiple occasions. The fact that it is now trying to marginalize the official opposition’s role in the committee because it knows we disagree with it is another link in a concerning pattern by the government to use policy and now procedure to punish those who disagree with it.
We should remember Motion 6, which attempted to marginalize the role of opposition back in 2016 and give the government broad sweeping powers here in Parliament. We should recall the attempts by the government in 2017 to change the Standing Orders so that the opposition would lose numerous tools to hold the government to account. In the early days of the pandemic, the Liberal government tried to give itself the authority, unilaterally and without parliamentary oversight, to raise or lower taxes as it saw fit for up to two years.
When these things happened, opposition parties banded together to say no and oppose the government. The ideological and policy differences that existed then still exist now, but that was not the point. We knew that for our democracy to function effectively, there must be a strong and capable opposition, even if we did not necessarily like what the other parties had to say. It is in that spirit that we should come together now.
In the absence of consensus, the Emergencies Act provides a formula that can be used for striking this committee. While I understand the frustration that some Liberal MPs may have, given that they do not have a Senate caucus, despite the independence of senators appointed by the Prime Minister being questionable, that frustration lies at their feet and at the feet of their Prime Minister who made that decision. They had every ability to harmonize the Emergencies Act with the current structure of the Senate over the past six years, and they did not do so.
Unfortunately, with a closure motion being forced on us to stifle debate, a decision must be made, and I would suggest that adhering to the formula set out in the Emergencies Act will help to ensure a fair and impartial assessment of this incident.
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- Mar/2/22 7:38:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are here today because the Conservative Party was not willing to accept that they should not have a leadership role as a chair on this committee.
If we need evidence to support the fact that they should not, we need not go any further than the member's speech. He even talked in his very own speech about the reasons he does not believe that the government should have used the Emergencies Act. He is drawing the conclusion of the work that the committee should do before the committee has even been struck.
Does he not appreciate the fact that a party that has such an entrenched position probably should not be exercising the role of chair in that committee?
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- Mar/2/22 7:39:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is a completely asinine argument. The job of the official opposition is to hold the government to account and to make sure through robust debate and robust challenging of their decisions and of the policies they implement that the best thing happens for Canadians.
Suggesting that the opposition should not do its role and should align itself with an NDP chair who is complicit in implementing the act in the first place is not actually putting an opposition MP in the chair. It is putting a coalition MP in the chair. This is bypassing the actual adversarial effect of what our democracy is supposed to do when we challenge each other to get the best results for Canadians. I simply do not understand why the Liberals want an audience instead of an opposition.
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- Mar/2/22 7:40:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate my colleague's comment, but only up to a point.
The Bloc Québécois wants this committee to be created, and it wants to get an explanation for the government's choice to invoke the Emergencies Act. The Bloc's own analysis shows that the criteria for invoking the act were not met.
I would like the committee to reflect on what the inappropriate use of this act means for the future. Does this mean that future governments will be able to use the act anytime they run up against any kind of difficult situation?
At some point, there will be a real emergency, the government will invoke the act, and people will think it is just some minor thing like the last time. That is what worries me because people will not get the right message.
Can my colleague tell me if he thinks the committee's findings will enable the public to better evaluate the use of this act in the future?
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- Mar/2/22 7:42:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what do we have here? We have a Liberal government that through its members' rhetoric and tone and the way they talk to Canadians, does an amazing job of sticking up for, and rightly so, the rights and freedoms and the jobs of the people here in Ottawa who were impacted, but with no consideration for the jobs that were lost by everybody who came here to protest.
The situation we end up with is that the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, according to the Liberals, are going to co-chair this committee. The Liberals would not even have been able to do this if it were not for the support of the NDP. Now the Liberals and their NDP coalition partners, who have been propping them up all along, are going to basically decide who gets called as witnesses, who gets to speak at the committee and whose testimony they are going to adopt at the committee as the basis of the report.
Any other political entity in this Parliament that supports this motion will be complicit in that. It is a dangerous precedent, because bypassing the official opposition and the role that it has here in Parliament is a dangerous precedent to set.
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- 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 7:52:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciated very much the proverb, particularly that when we start to sweep, we start to find things.
Given that the opposition is actually supposed to be Her Majesty's loyal opposition, surely there would be an interest in getting to the business of sweeping to find out what actually went wrong quickly. Why is there this need to hold back the committee from actually starting the important work, recognizing the government will not have any of the chairs?
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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 7:53:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Calgary Shepard for his remarks, because I think he once again has betrayed some of the contradictory positions the Conservatives are taking here.
The member professed to believe in the importance of accountability under an act that was passed by a Conservative government, yet the Conservatives have been standing in the way of the committee getting under way because they are saying they should be chair. Then he said he does not want a predetermined outcome, but in his speech he said this committee should not look at anything that happened before the Emergences Act was implemented. Once again, the member is showing the contradictions in the Conservatives' position.
Would the Conservatives not agree that if accountability is so important, we just need to get on with the business of getting this committee going?
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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 7:55:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, another Yiddish proverb comes to mind: The best way to know a man is to watch him when he is angry. We have seen far too many angry people in this place as we discuss the Emergencies Act.
I would put to the member the statute again, because he seemed to infer in his remarks that Canadians should be suspicious about a committee that has to meet in secret. I draw his attention to the definition of “threats to the security of Canada” within the act. It is a defined term found in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, and it is all about things that would be regarded as secret, such as espionage and sabotage. The one that I think applies here says:
foreign influenced activities within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive
It is very likely that if we look at the real threat to the security of Canada, the manifestation of a deep unpleasantness for the people of Ottawa is one aspect. However, the aspect that drew me to decide to vote yes was the disinformation that came from foreign sources. Looking into that is inherently going to require security clearance, and it is required as well by the act for this committee.
I would love to ask the member for Calgary Shepard if he recognizes that the committee is required by the act to meet in secret and that it makes sense given the security implications of the definition of a public order emergency found in the act.
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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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- Mar/2/22 7:57:37 p.m.
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We will resume debate. The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands has 20 minutes coming to him, but it is three minutes to eight o'clock, so whenever he stops, we shall stop. I thought I would point that out.
The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.
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- Mar/2/22 7:57:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there will be 337 people mad at me if I choose to take that full 20 minutes, so I assure you, I will not.
I do want to say I hope people who are watching this can appreciate and understand what is really going on here. Normally, establishing a committee like this is something that can be done through a unanimous consent motion that takes no more than 30 seconds of House time.
Instead, we are now on the second day. This would have been a full day of parliamentary business, and it has essentially been wasted on the fact that the Conservatives really want to have a chair on this committee. They want to hold one of the roles of chair.
It has been said in this House, and I certainly agree, that it does not make sense that the Conservatives would hold a chair position given the fact that they were so adamantly in favour of what was going on out there. That is not just through the actions and the posts we saw on social media, but also through documents that have come forward, which the member for Vancouver Granville and others referenced earlier.
We know that they had a vested interest in this. Certainly, the governing side was the side that actually implemented the act and used the tools within it, so it goes to say that the governing side should not have a chair on this committee either. I cannot understand, for the life of me, why Conservatives are so interested in ensuring that they have this position.
If Conservatives are just as interested in letting things come to light, I would assume that somebody who is innocent would think, “Well, I do not want to be perceived as being in the middle of the decision-making in how the committee operates because I want to come out of this looking as clean as possible.” However, that is not what we have seen.
I am very much interested in learning what happens in the committee and in understanding what it discovers. How did this movement start? Who fuelled it? Who funded it? I am not going to lie, I would love to know how many Conservatives donated to this particular GoFundMe or the GiveSendGo. Maybe that will come out in the committee. I do not know.
Maybe that is the reason the Conservatives are holding this up and dragging it through Parliament, so we do not get to the point of actually establishing this committee. I do not know. I would like to think that is not the case, but I cannot understand why they would be putting up such a roadblock to something that is otherwise treated in such a simple manner to establish the committee.
I know we are now at eight o'clock. I want to make sure we can get to voting on time. I am very much looking forward to the work this committee will do, getting it established and seeing the results that come out. I have total confidence in the NDP, who voted in favour of using the measures, and the Bloc, who voted against using the measures, along with the one representative from the Senate. I have total confidence in their ability to properly manage and exercise their roles of joint chair on that committee, and I know they will ensure that a proper report is produced for this House to consider.
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- Mar/2/22 8:01:27 p.m.
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It being 8:01 p.m., pursuant to an order made earlier today, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of Government Business No. 9, and of the amendment, now before the House.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes to request a recorded division or that the amendment be adopted on division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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- Mar/2/22 8:03:32 p.m.
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- Mar/2/22 8:03:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we would request a recorded vote.
8 words
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- Rabble!
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