Scott Reid

[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, April 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, of course it warms my heart to hear how deeply the current government cares, and how much more it cares than the people in my party care, so I will just repeat my question.

Will this caring government change this particular criteria, which is 100% under the control of the caring government, and extend Canada's protection to Afghans who meet all other eligibility criteria but who left the country prior to July 22, 2021?

I will add this final note: There is no need to send a plane to Afghanistan. These are people who are outside of Afghanistan, in Pakistan, for example, who could easily go from there to here, but who are in danger of being deported back to their homeland, where they will be killed.

[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, April 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I take it this evening my question will be addressed by the parliamentary secretary for all departments.

On the final sitting day prior to the Easter break, I rose in this place to ask the immigration minister the following question:

...the immigration minister's program to admit the families of language and cultural advisers who assisted our troops in Afghanistan has such rigid criteria that it will freeze out almost everybody it should be helping.

For example, only those who were still in Afghanistan after July 22, 2021 are eligible, so this rules out the Afghans who were in the most dangerous parts of the country and who therefore had to flee...before the Taliban overran their regions. These family members are now trapped in third countries and are in danger of being transported back to Afghanistan, where they will be killed.

Will the minister change these restrictive criteria to fix the mess he has created?

The response I received from the government benches left me puzzled. The hon. member for Orléans, who responded on behalf of the government, said the following:

If it were a matter of will, there would be 40,000 Afghan refugees here already, but we know that in reality, with everything that has been happening, there have been challenges and obstacles. We are working very hard in addressing those, for instance through Bill C-41. There are a number of factors that we do not fully control, including safe passage.

Now, the most obvious problem with this answer is that the particular impediment which I was addressing, the government's choice to refuse to admit any person who left Afghanistan prior to July 22, 2021, is absolutely a factor that the government does control. They could change that date.

Therefore, I will just repeat my question in slightly different words. Will the government change this particular criteria and extend Canada's protection to Afghans who meet all of the eligibility criteria but who left the country prior to July 22, 2021?

[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, March 31st, 2023]

Madam Speaker, the immigration minister's program to admit the families of language and cultural advisers who assisted our troops in Afghanistan has such rigid criteria that it will freeze out almost everybody it should be helping.

For example, only those who were still in Afghanistan after July 22, 2021 are eligible, so this rules out the Afghans who were in the most dangerous parts of the country and who therefore had to flee their homes before the Taliban overran their regions. These family members are now trapped in third countries and are in danger of being transported back to Afghanistan, where they will be killed.

Will the minister change these restrictive criteria to fix the mess he has created?

[Cannabis, March 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, the fundamental problem is this: if the cost to produce and sell legal product is higher than the cost to produce and sell illegal product, then the illegal product will have the ability to drive out the legal product. This is exactly what is happening in the market today in Canada. There is some high-end product, which, I grant, the legal sector predominates in, but the fact is that, right now, it is a lot worse than a 70-30 split.

I have heard 60-40 and in some parts of the cannabis production industry, I would say it is 50-50 or worse.

One cannot impose massive regulatory compliance costs on the legal sector, which do not exist for the illegal sector, without having the effect of driving these producers out of business.

If there was some way of making the illegal producers stop, we would not have a problem, but that was never possible.

I ask again: what is the government doing to ensure that regulatory compliance costs are brought down and taxes are kept reasonable for legal producers?

Remember, illegal producers do not pay tax—

[Cannabis, March 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I want to tell a short story about the government's regulatory failure, which has cost constituents in my riding hundreds of well-paying jobs in the last month or so.

Until February 9 of this year, Canopy Growth, a licensed cannabis producer, was the largest private sector employer in my constituency. Based at the former Hershey chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, it has been transformed into a high-tech, legal, cannabis-producing facility. At the height of their operations, they employed about 1,800 people in Smiths Falls. However, last month Canopy announced the elimination of 350 jobs, 190 of which were to be cut immediately, and the rest to follow in the coming months. That was at the tail end of series of prior cuts.

Canopy will soon employ fewer than one-third the number of my constituents it once did. These job losses, to a large extent, can be laid at the foot of the government's failed policies. In 2018, the government, with great fanfare, legalized the sale and use of recreational cannabis. I voted for that.

We are just five years on, and the government's delivery on its plan, its crushing federal taxes and its insanely high regulatory compliance costs have allowed the illegal market to continue to flourish, and it is directly causing hundreds of Canadians to lose their jobs in my constituency alone. A month ago, the day after the job cuts in my riding were announced, I raised this point and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry stood to say that his government continues “to engage with stakeholders” and that they have recently funded a “strategy table” to “support dialogue”.

That is nice, I guess, but the government would have been better advised to have acted sooner, years sooner, on the advice it was getting from industry and stakeholders. The next best thing would have been to say it would act immediately. Saying that we will have more talks when the House is not nearly on fire but just about burned down is too late.

A multi-party group of parliamentarians with three Liberals, of which I am a member, has written numerous times to the Minister of Health. We wrote, as an example, about attempts to rationalize various regulations dealing with cannabis infusion beverages. It has inexplicably taken years for movement to occur on that one small issue. There are other issues by far that are much more important and there has been no movement on them. This long struggle for incremental microscopic improvements illustrates the problem the government has. On a macro level, it has failed to deliver on its promise of listening and creating a business-friendly environment for the cannabis industry.

I have mentioned the parliamentary secretary's response to my question from last month, and I am sure that tonight he will repeat at length the same kind of response. He will say that he regrets the job losses. He will say some industries face challenges, and that they want to listen to industry and stakeholders. I am sure he will be saying it honestly, but I truly hope that the government's speaker this evening will acknowledge that their ministers have been receiving advice from industry and stakeholders for years now. They could have acted upon it with far greater speed. If they had done so these jobs would still be in existence.

While there is still some hope that some jobs can be saved, and we will not lose the entire industry, perhaps the government could agree to move quickly on the recommendations that have been made by the legal cannabis industry, which would allow it to prosper and ensure that our industry does not remain 50% in the illegal sector, as it now is.

[Criminal Code, February 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I did not expect to get a second chance to do this, so I will just make the observation that, with regard to mental health and mental issues, the definition of most illnesses and diseases have not changed over time. The definitions surrounding ALS, for example, have not changed substantially over time.

However, the definitions of various mental illnesses under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, have changed constantly. DSM-4 was dramatically different in many respects from DSM-3, DSM-2 and DSM-1. These are, to some degree, arbitrarily defined illnesses, and to say that we can make a firm and meaningful, as opposed to subjective, medical determination that someone is in a position where they are sufficiently mentally ill that they qualify for medical assistance in dying seems to me to be very strange indeed and very subjective.

I talked, perhaps with too much rhetorical flourish, about the triumph of the kingdom of death over life. However, the triumph of subjectivity over objectivity, while wearing objectivity's clothes, seems to me to be profoundly unwise and, once again, a very good reason to say that we ought not to be going down this path. I will leave it there and ask again for the member's commentary.

[Criminal Code, February 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, we are talking about mental illness, mental distress and depression as being reasons why it may be permissible to ask for assistance in dying. I look at this and say that we have come a long way. Our laws were based on some court rulings surrounding people who wanted to die because they had lost their ability to control their bodies. They had ALS; they had no control over their bodies at all. They could not actually go through the act of committing suicide, but they maintained razor-sharp consciousness and a strong will. Sue Rodriguez is one example.

We should not go from that to somebody who is essentially having a failure of will. That is what depression is, being unable to formulate plans to carry on and instead saying there is an easy way out. This seems to me to be fundamentally dangerous, to be almost leading people on. It seems to me this is an obvious underlying problem.

I am glad to have a year to slow down this progress in the wrong direction. Quite frankly, I think we should be very much looking at some entirely different direction. The idea that the courts are somehow going to impose on Canada in the situation of depressed people, people who are struggling because of circumstances that are hard in their lives, is that “life is hard; death is easy”. It is absolutely outrageous to say, “This is it. The kingdom of death is upon us; that is just dandy".

I guess I am asking my colleague to offer some commentary on this national abdication of will that seems to be, at best, coming a year from the present.

[Cannabis, February 10th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, Canopy Growth, which is the largest private-sector employer in my riding, announced it is laying off half of its workforce. This is why: Canada's legal cannabis sector functions under crushing federal taxes and insanely high regulatory compliance costs. The result is that for consumers, legal cannabis costs about twice the price of illegal product. The government has made it impossible for legal producers to be competitive by closing this price gap.

Having created this problem and a robust criminal sector while the legal sector languishes, how will the Liberals fix their own problem?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 30th, 2023]

With regard to Correctional Service Canada’s (CSC) Chaplaincy Program: (a) since November 2015, have any meetings, communications, briefings, or other informational materials been requested, formally or informally by the Minister of Public Safety, the office of the Minister of Public Safety, the office of the Deputy Minister of Public Safety, or the office of the Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada; (b) for each instance in (a), what was the (i) date the request was made, (ii) recipient or office to which the request was made, (iii) nature and details of the request, (iv) result of the request; (c) since November 2015, have any briefing or informational materials been provided to the Minister of Public Safety, the office of the Minister of Public Safety, the office of the Deputy Minister of Public Safety, or the office of the Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada; (d) for each instance in (c), what was the (i) date the material was provided, (ii) recipient or office to which the material was provided, (iii) topic of the material provided; (e) since November 2015, has the Minister of Public Safety issued any ministerial instructions, directives, or analogous decisions with regard to CSC’s Chaplaincy Program; (f) how many chaplains are presently members of CSC’s Chaplaincy Program, broken down by faith, spiritual, or philosophical tradition; (g) how many members of CSC’s Chaplaincy Program are assigned to or responsible for each of CSC’s institutions or custodial facilities, broken down by faith, spiritual, or philosophical tradition; and (h) since November 2015, what actions have been taken to address the proportionate shortage of non-Christian members of CSC’s Chaplaincy Program and, if any, what are the details of those actions?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 30th, 2023]

With regard to the report entitled "Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination with a focus on Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Black Racism, LGBTQ2+ Prejudice, Gender Bias, and White Supremacy Final Report": (a) have any meetings, communications, briefings, or other informational materials with regard to chaplaincy, or section 6 of Part III entitled “Re-Defining Chaplaincy” been requested, formally or informally, by the Minister of National Defence, the office of the Minister of National Defence, the office of the Deputy Minister of National Defence, or the office of the Chief of the Defence Staff; (b) for each instance in (a), what was the (i) date the request was made, (ii) recipient or office to which the request was made, (iii) nature and details of the request, (iv) result of the request; (c) have any briefing or informational materials with regard to chaplaincy, or section 6 of Part III entitled “Re-Defining Chaplaincy” been provided to the Minister of National Defence, the office of the Minister of National Defence, the office of the Deputy Minister of National Defence, or the office of the Chief of the Defence Staff; (d) for each instance in (c), what was the (i) date the material was provided, (ii) recipient or office to which the material was provided, (iii) topic of the material provided; (e) since January 2022, has the Minister of National Defence issued any ministerial instructions, directives, or analogous decisions with regard to chaplaincy, or section 6 of Part III entitled “Re-Defining Chaplaincy”; and (f) have any actions been taken with regard to the recommendations on page 43 of the report, and, if so, what are the details of those actions?