Declaration of Emergency Committee on Feb. 13th, 2024

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Thank you, Senator Harder.

Mr. Green has the floor.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

I have to say that I've certainly benefited from taking the time to listen to everybody's arguments. As you know, throughout this process I've been fairly consistent on taking the positions of principle that I think are consistent with our party.

As a party that supported the invocation of the act on its face value, based on public information that was readily available, while respecting the summary that was put in terms of the context, it seems that we always miss the context that there was an armed action in Coutts, one that I think the average objective person would look at as a threat of terror, given its attempted targeting of police. As somebody who has a long history of being critical of the police as an institution, in this particular case I think it's incumbent on us to recognize the seriousness of that moment and what that could have meant across the country.

Now, you'll also recall that throughout the three years, I've been fairly consistent in supporting demands for documents. I believe the public has a right to know, to the best and fullest of its abilities, the same information that the government side has been privy to. I would state, right here on the record, that through this process I think the government has failed to articulate itself in a way that is consistent with the law as it's been explained to us by numerous experts.

But I have to recall the frustration I had, prior to the revelation of the scope of untranslated documents, about us getting to a place where I think we were at 39 of 50 recommendations that we had already voted on. We were already there. Nowhere did I hear Perrin Beatty, who I thought was perhaps one of our most learned experts, say that it's our mandate to be a book report club for Rouleau or any other judicial proceeding. That was not in the spirit or the language of any testimony I heard, and I think we've fallen into that trap.

I think the issue of translation is a serious issue. I commend the senator for taking it through its obvious complaint and appeal processes as it relates to the commissioners and the Privy Council. However, I would agree with Senator Harder that there is a translated version of the Rouleau commission. I can tell you that I don't have the resources to sift through tens of thousands of documents. I don't think any of us do. At this point, I'm willing to accept translated documents as legislated through our Official Languages Act, and I'm ready to move forward.

I also want to honour the spirit of the search for documents and the search for particularly what the threats to security are and what the threshold is. I think that is a material issue that has to be addressed by this committee in order for us to have adequate recommendations that would hopefully modernize this act to contemplate the current social, economic and political context we're in, which certainly wasn't contemplated back when Perrin Beatty drafted this piece of legislation.

MP Romanado, don't sell yourself short. In your short time here, this is a good motion that you've put forward. I think there are concessions there in terms of the witnesses.

Let's be clear: We're offering a revisiting of witnesses in a way that we didn't consider during Rouleau. If we're going to really open all of this back up, then let's hear from the folks who were held captive in the nation's capital here, the residents and all the other people who testified at Rouleau. I don't think that makes sense for Rouleau and I don't think it necessarily makes sense for this report either.

However, what does make sense to me, and I would put this to the movers of the motion, is that if we break this up section by section, I'll tell you right now, in this open session, that I support section (a)(ii), which is your demand for documents. I've always supported that. I think Canadians do have a right to know what the legal thresholds were that the government was using to make this decision. I think that's material to our report, and I think it would help dovetail into the work we've already done on the 39 or so recommendations.

I'm prepared to pick up where we left off. I'm prepared to accept the Mosley decision as an appendix to this as we did with the Rouleau in its translated version. I commend MP Romanado, on the Liberal side, for agreeing to revisit the other folks. Having worked on this for three years, I know Minister Virani is going to be a very learned member, as both a participant of this committee and a new minister. Minister Leblanc is ultimately accountable under his new ministerial mandate. I think that's great.

I'm not interested in opening this back up. I've expressed this offline, and I'm going to say it to the public now. For those who are watching, before you get your fundraising emails, this is not a cover-up. This is a three-year process that needs to come to an end based on a mandate that we have as a committee without any conspiracies. There is lots of time for folks to get their say in these upcoming appeals and civil proceedings.

I would ask that we do find that common ground, and that we break this motion up. That would allow me to support the demand for documents. I think section (b) and MP Romanado's motion are similar enough that I would be prepared to support MP Romanado's motion should it come to the floor next after having supported the demand for documents.

Thank you.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

It's now Mr. Brock's turn.

Mr. Brock, I see that you're not available. Would you like to give your turn to Senator Carignan?

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to cede my time to my colleague, Mr. Motz.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Since Mr. Motz has already spoken, the next person to speak will be Senator Carignan. If you want to speak after him, I'll give you the floor.

Senator Carignan, you have the floor.

[Claude Carignan]

I'd like to come back to Mrs. Romanado's motion.

It looks like a closure motion. The motion says that we are inviting officials from the Privy Council Office and the translation bureau to explain to us what happened on the translation side. Ministers Virani and Leblanc are also invited to speak for an hour and a half. It then says that after this meeting, no other witnesses will be heard and that all the committee's remaining meetings will be devoted to preparing the final report.

Nothing is said about the unilingual testimony that was heard or about the witnesses who would complete the part of the evidence that we did not present. There is absolutely nothing. There is nothing about producing documents and there is nothing about translating the documents that were filed. The memorandum invoking the emergency measures has not even been translated. It's in English only. We cannot be satisfied with that.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Thank you, Senator Carignan.

Mr. Brock, are you ready to take the floor again?

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

I'm passing my time to Mr. Motz.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Mr. Motz was next on the list anyway.

Mr. Motz, the floor is yours.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you very much.

I have just couple of reminders for the committee and for some who obviously haven't had a chance to review everything.

Mr. Maloney, you mentioned some comment about the committee.... I want to refresh the committee's memory about the Senate law clerk's evidence that he provided to us early on about our mandate and what it is that we're supposed to be doing.

The law clerk's evidence was:

Accordingly, this committee is master of its own affairs, subject to any direction from the House and the Senate. It can determine what information may or may not be relevant and necessary to the task it has been assigned, and it can determine whether a given line of inquiry is or is not within the scope of its mandate. In other words, the committee is within its rights to determine, on its own, whether any given line of inquiry or piece of information is relevant and necessary to its work.

Additionally, the then House law clerk opined as follows:

While the mandate of the committee does not explicitly include “the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued”, it will be for [the] committee to determine whether and to what extent a consideration of such circumstances would be [given]....

Now, what's interesting is that there was another comment from the Senate law clerk, who said:

...indeed my understanding. Among other things, the role of the committee is precisely to look at whether the exercise of powers that were put into place is consistent with the charter and other instruments.

Additionally, my colleague, Senator Carignan asked a question of Mr. Dufresne. In the senator's interaction with the House law clerk, he said:

We still need to review those powers to determine if they were appropriate or not. If the powers were taken on illegally, that may mean they were exercised inappropriately.

That was Mr. Carignan's question. The House law clerk—Mr. Dufresne at the time—said:

That will definitely be part of how you interpret your mandate. You will be able to ponder [those] questions, that is, try to determine whether the powers were exercised appropriately, the situation in which the powers were taken on and whether it had been anticipated....

Again, I want to go back to the question of section 62. It says: “The exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to a declaration” of the act.

I appreciate your comment, Mr. Maloney, with respect to how you wondered if we should still be sitting after the fact. In an ideal world, this wouldn't have had to be invoked, but when it is, the idea of this committee is to sit contemporaneously, as you said, at the same time as the government is trying to navigate this process. Our very purpose is to ensure the government is following the law, not an interpretation of the law: that they are following exactly what the law says. That is what our role would be if this were still going on and we met at the time.

Additionally, on the performance of “duties” and “functions”, the act is very clear that needed to be charter-compliant. It needed to fit with section 2 of the CSIS Act for national emergencies. There had to be a threat throughout all of Canada.

To me, our role is quite clear: that's exactly what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be looking at whether or not the government acted lawfully and whether or not they were compliant with the charter. That's what the mandate of this committee is, in my opinion. The exercise of “powers” is exactly that: Did the government act within their legislative powers to do what they did?

I appreciate that we might disagree, and that's okay. Again, I appreciate the comments that have gone on. I too don't want to sit here for years to come. I think we can get this done expeditiously. I believe that the Canadian public, who we are here to serve, deserves to know what it is that we are doing and why we're doing it. Obviously, there will be more than one version of a report. I'm confident of that.

I guess the question that needs to be asked is this: How long do we beat our heads against the wall to try to get a report that we can almost all agree to, and when do we say that this particular report does not align with what I believe the Canadian public deserves and you present your own?

That's just something I wanted the new committee members to be aware of. I think we'll be hearing bells here very soon, from what I'm hearing.

I do respect, Mr. Green, your suggestion that there may be some compromises, as we all say, at the very front end. We need to look at what those might be.

If everybody's in agreement, while we vote or whatever that looks like, we could maybe suspend for a little while and see how we might be able to come to some compromise from both sides.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Thank you, Mr. Motz.

Mrs. Romanado, you have the floor.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to give my time to Senator Boniface, who hasn't had a chance to speak yet.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

She was next on the list.

So you're skipping your turn.

Senator Boniface, you have the floor.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface (Senator, Ontario, ISG)]

Thank you very much.

Thanks for all the comments. I started out thinking that we weren't going to get very far, and I think we are coming to an end.

I as well have been here for almost two years. I think we need to think about the impacts of various decisions that will come. I don't disagree on taking into account what Justice Mosley has said, but I also want to remind you about what we have to work with. Justice Mosley's report is 190 pages and Rouleau's report is 2,000-plus pages. As Senator Carignan rightly commented on, a number of briefs aren't translated.

We as a committee have had 26 meetings so far. We've heard from 66 witnesses ourselves. We've spent multiple meetings drafting a report and recommendations that I would have thought we were getting near the end of. We were certainly beyond the halfway mark, to say the least. I think the work we've done around recommendations is actually very good and won't necessarily change, or some of them won't, but we have to look at it through the lens of a new perspective, which is Justice Mosley. I have no problem with that.

I really like the comments of my colleague and co-chair Mr. Green. As I look it, I would ask the question around legal opinions, because we've asked for these already and not gotten them. We will have two ministers here, one of them who will be the Attorney General of Canada. In our questions, we can ask him if he will produce those legal opinions.

My point is this, Mr. Brock. We've asked for this already and been turned down, so we're asking again. We'll have a justice minister here who can answer the question yet again. I don't think his answer and the reply that we get will be any different. That's the only question I raise around those legal opinions. I think it's something that we may want to ask ourselves, on whether or not we're going through another exercise for naught.

The only other point I wanted to make is with respect to the reference to other witnesses in the motion put forward by my colleagues from the Conservatives. For me, it's so far open; like Senator Harder, I feel that without knowing what that looks like, it seems like it's an endless exercise.

I want to reiterate that I think what I'm hearing from everybody around the table is that we want to figure out how we take all the information and all the work we've done over the 26 meetings, and all the material we have that we can work with, and continue working on our report recommendations in a way that introduces the new information around Justice Mosley's report and try to figure out how best to come to conclusions that are valuable for Canadians.

Thank you.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Thank you, Senator Boniface.

It's now my turn to speak.

Senator, would you like to chair the meeting while I ask questions? It's not really evidence, but I'll let you chair the meeting, in case you need to call me to order.

I won't repeat everything that's been said. We've already discussed the issue of producing documents and I don't see a way out. I agree with everyone; it didn't seem like anyone really intended to provide us with a translation of all these documents. I see that as well. Like Mr. Green, I'm not about to spend my weekend digging through millions of pages of documents before we begin drafting the committee's opinion. However, if I had access to all these documents in French, I'd be able to choose the ones that seem most relevant to me. If my selection was wrong and I left out an important document, I would be solely responsible and I'd have to take responsibility for that.

For the moment, I've been asked to indicate which documents I'd like to see. We've already been through this. Not so long ago, we asked for an index of the documents, since we couldn't have the millions of pages, indicating that we'd be able choose which ones we wanted once we had the index. It wasn't perfect, but at least we could have tried to determine what we were less interested in and what seemed very important to read. However, we never even got the index. I think we were told that it would cost $16 million to translate the index and $300 million to translate the documents. I'd actually love to hear the Clerk of the Privy Council explain how he came up with those figures, which seem enormous to me.

I'd like to know why it's impossible to obtain these documents when, in principle, we have the right to work in both French and English. I think this is important. Senator Carignan was right to say that this is the case not only for francophones, but also for anglophones, because some of the evidence and documents are in French, so anglophones won't be able to read them. Would it have made a difference? Would it have changed any of our opinions? Maybe or maybe not, but we'll never know because we can't read them. I think this problem will affect the quality of our report, since we won't be able to see all the evidence, not to mention that it violates our democratic rights.

As I've mentioned a couple of times now, we have to decide whether we want a bilingual Parliament or not. We can't say that we want it to be bilingual only when it doesn't cost too much or take too much time, and that if it becomes too expensive, we just won't bother anymore. If that's the case, perhaps we need to decide at what point bilingualism is too expensive. It would be easy to dismiss this question without a second thought, but I see it as a fundamental issue.

Personally, I think we do need to hear from officials with the Privy Council.

Mrs. Romanado, I think you put forward a good motion and I congratulate you on it. For someone who just joined the committee, you seem to have grasped the challenges involved.

That said, with all due respect, I think the difficulties associated with translation and the recent ruling by Judge Mosley are significant. Again, no disrespect, but I think we're botching our work here. Once again, until I see the documents that were tabled or presented to the Rouleau commission, and to which I was supposed to have access under the motion we adopted about a year and a half ago, I can't proceed blindly and I can't select the relevant documents.

I think it was Mr. Green—I may be wrong—who said that we could choose the documents we thought were important. That's all well and good, but if I don't know what documents are available, how can I determine which ones are important? It's a bit like telling a child to choose the candy he wants but without showing him the candy dish. His answer may come as a surprise, and the child probably won't get the candy he wanted because he didn't even know what was in the dish.

In short, I need to hear the people from the Privy Council explain, first and foremost, this business of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to translate documents. It seems astonishing to me.

I'm sure they'll provide us with some convincing explanations. I look forward to hearing them. That's the first step.

Next, we'll have to discuss with the Clerk of the Privy Council what we can do to obtain, at the very least, an index or list of documents to establish which ones we want translated. Of course, there's a good chance that, at the end of the day, our report will have to point out that we didn't have access to all the evidence. We may not have a choice in the matter.

I don't think we can afford to be lazy at this point. We need a minimum of rigour, and we must try to obtain as much information as possible in order to produce a report that is as consistent and rigorous as possible.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mrs. Romanado, you have the floor.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Given the fact that for the last hour and a half we have been discussing and referencing my motion, I think it would be a good time to actually discuss the motion.

I move that the committee proceed to another order of business, with that being my motion. It's dilatory.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Mr. Green, do you have a point of order?

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

I want to keep with the spirit of the discussion, which is that we take some time during our call for votes to see if we can get to some kind of common ground before proceeding to your order of business, because in doing that, we may be presupposing an opportunity to find common ground. I would respectfully suggest that happen after the votes, rather than before.

We're heading to the votes now. Is that right?

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Mrs. Romanado, if I understood correctly, you're proposing that the committee vote on your motion.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

I want to move a dilatory motion to switch the motion we're discussing. I move that we stop debating Mr. Brock's motion and debate mine instead. With a formal discussion on the motion I want to move, perhaps we can find a way to proceed.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

I think we've been discussing the two motions at the same time all along. They're somewhat related.

We're going to suspend for a moment. I'd like to verify a few things with the clerks.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

I call the meeting back to order.

Before we suspended, Mrs. Romanado had the floor. She asked that we change the agenda, and we said we couldn't do that. Mr. Brock is next, according to the list I have here. I'm not making this up.

Mr. Motz, I understand you have an amendment to present, but in any case, Mr. Brock said he would do it. I will therefore give the floor to Mr. Brock.

Unless I'm mistaken, he's the next speaker on the list. Of course, Mrs. Romanado will be able to speak afterwards.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

I have a point of order. If I may, we have the dilatory motion on the floor. I understand Mrs. Romanado wishes to withdraw that motion, so that we can deal with the amendments on my motion.

[The Joint Co-Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

If everyone is in agreement, I'm fine with that.

Go ahead, Mrs. Romanado.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much.

I seek the unanimous consent of the committee to withdraw my dilatory motion.