Bill C-10 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures

This enactment amends the Air Canada Public Participation Act to provide that Air Canada’s articles of continuance contain a requirement that it carry out aircraft maintenance activities in Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba and to provide for certain other measures related to that obligation.

Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Madam Speaker, I just want to start off by setting a bit of context about how the Liberals treat Parliament in general.

We all remember the 2015 election campaign when the Prime Minister pretended that he cared about things like accountability, transparency and the supremacy of Parliament, and the fact that we come to this place from all corners of this country to hold the government to account. That is not just a phrase that one might hear in a political science class or a high school civics class. Holding it to account is not just some kind of bookkeeping exercise where we make sure the numbers add up. Yes, that is part of it, but it is really about litigating the decisions of the government to ensure that Canadians get only the best. It is through the rigour of parliamentary debate, committee investigations and the daily questioning of the Prime Minister and cabinet that the facts emerge and Canadians are able to make informed decisions when it is time to vote.

I was House leader back in 2015 right after that election, right after the Prime Minister said he would respect the role of Parliament, that he would always defer to the important role that the House of Commons plays in our democracy. Something happened in that first few months after the 2015 election that totally showed what a phony comms exercises all of that rhetoric was. There was a bill before the House back then; I believe was Bill C-10. The Liberals had trouble counting their caucus members one Monday morning. There was a vote that the Liberals were not expecting on that day and they almost lost it because they did not have enough members in town. They still had members back in their ridings perhaps or on international junkets, or on any number of other things. There was a tie-vote in the chamber. A piece of government legislation was almost defeated and the Speaker had to break the tie at that time and, as was the convention of the Speaker, broke the tie in favour of continuing debate and allowed the bill to pass at report stage, so the bill continued on.

They were so rattled by that episode that just a few days later the government House leader came into this chamber and proposed Motion No. 6. Motion No. 6 was a complete defanging of the opposition, a removal of most of the tools that opposition parties use to hold the government to account, to draw out those details, and to litigate the government's course of actions and its legislation. It gave the government unprecedented power to move legislation along quickly and to prevent the opposition from using its very legitimate tools to hold up debate, not just for the sake of filibustering or delay for the sake of delay. It is in that delay that members of Parliament find those details, find the mistakes that the government makes or hear the stories from witnesses about how those unintended consequences might do more harm than good.

The government's reaction at that time to a tie-vote on a piece of legislation was what might be called a parliamentary hissy fit where it just completely lost its temper and tried to take away all of the things that the opposition party could ever hope to use to hold the government to account. Thankfully, the opposition parties understood what was going on.

It is always amazing when parties with as wide a variety of views as the Conservative Party, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP can find common ground, but the Liberals are good at doing that. When the Bloc, the Conservatives and the NDP can find something to be such an affront to parliamentary democracy and everything that we are supposed to do here that we join forces together, and put our differences aside to protect this institution, it is actually a terrible indictment on the Liberal Party, and so often we have had to do that. For the sake of our institution, for the sake of future generations of Canadians, for the sake of future Parliaments and future members of Parliament to be able to have those very important tools to do the job on behalf of their constituents, we have had to join forces. I remember being there when the House leaders from all the recognized parties, along with the Bloc Québécois, told the story. We all told the story to Canadians about the motives and the consequences of what the government was doing. We were able to push back on that, whether due to the effective communications of all the opposition parties or due to the fact that in those moments, the Prime Minister lost his temper.

The Prime Minister actually injured an NDP member of Parliament, when he elbowed an NDP member and forcefully grabbed the Conservative whip at the time. He completely lost his temper and physically manhandled a member of Parliament. Maybe that is why he finally backed down, but I like to think that it was at least in part because of the important points we were making as opposition parties to defend our institutions.

We see this time and time again. Every time the Liberals do not get their way, they try to change the rules of the game. It is important to note that the tools that are available to the opposition to delay, to propose amendments and to physically have members of the cabinet and the government in the chamber, are an important part of the process. We have a system whereby the executive branch sits in the chamber, and the opposition parties have to have some tools at their disposal to be able to highlight the shortcomings, failures and mistakes in the government's agenda.

It does not just happen in this House. The other place also plays an important role in that. I should point out that the other place has completely put aside its hybrid Parliament mechanisms. They have been back under normal operating standards for a long time now. For months, they have been able to continue doing their job. It is really just this chamber.

In fact, it is just this chamber in all of Canada that is continuing on with a full host of measures that were originally put in place, as the government House leader acknowledged, when there was consensus about how best to do two things. One of these things was to respect the public health orders that were in place at the time, about people travelling from different parts of the country to come together, and the other was respecting the orders and regulations at the time to have people who were from different households being certain distances apart.

We agreed at that time to respect those two things, because we could not have a period of time when Parliament was not doing its job. Thank goodness, we insisted on that. I remember those days, when the government was trying to arrange for unanimous passage of its legislation in response to the pandemic, without any debate at all. The Liberals wanted to just email the text of the legislation to members of Parliament, have them come in here for just a few moments, pass it all and then go home again.

Thankfully, the official opposition, the Conservative Party, said no to that. It was through that parliamentary scrutiny that we learned many terrible things about the government's response to the COVID pandemic. We found out that the Prime Minister attempted to use the pandemic to try to enrich his friends. We found out because Parliament was sitting, because we had the tools at our disposal, in terms of committees and debates in the chamber. He did this with the massive disruption in people's lives; loss of life; people having to say goodbye to loved ones over Zoom; people having to miss birthday parties, anniversaries and funerals; businesses going bankrupt; and children missing out on activities and important parts of their childhood.

The Prime Minister tried to give his friends at the WE Foundation, an organization that had paid members of his family hundreds of thousands of dollars, an untendered sole source contract worth half a billion dollars. However, he got caught, because we did not give up those tools in our tool kit to hold the government to account.

We found out through parliamentary scrutiny that the government used the pandemic, as well, to reward Liberal insiders and defeated Liberal MPs, such as Frank Baylis. He got a sole source contract for providing medical supplies that he had no history of ever providing. The arrive scam app is another example of waste and mismanagement. Thank goodness we still had those parliamentary tools at our disposal.

I want to address a few points that the government House leader brought up in his speech. He talked about unanimity consensus. My colleague in the Bloc Québécois just made a very important point. As a former speaker, I have learned a little about the history, about the importance of the Standing Orders and their evolution over time, as well as why things are the way they are.

The McGrath committee was one of those great examples where Parliament had not been updated for a long period of time; society had implemented a whole bunch of innovations, and parliamentary life had changed. In response to those changing times in the 1980s, the government of the day decided that it would have a fulsome analysis of the Standing Orders, the parliamentary cycle and the daily routine of business. It was essential that all the opposition parties were brought in and a true effort was made to find consensus and common ground; where there was no consensus, the government did not proceed.

It was out of that committee that we had major changes, for example, in the election of the Speaker. For generations before the 1980s, the Prime Minister chose the Speaker. It was a motion that the Prime Minister moved, and it was basically a fait accompli; whomever the Prime Minister wanted to become Speaker became Speaker. In the 1980s, the House decided, in its wisdom, that it would be better to preserve the impartiality of the Chair if the Speaker did not have to worry about pleasing or displeasing the Prime Minister. Therefore, the House instituted the secret ballot election, and former speaker John Fraser was the first to be elected by secret ballot. Ever since then, speakers have been chosen that way. That was a very important development in our parliamentary democratic underpinnings. It was a great development. It was a fantastic idea; it has served the House well, and it has served the Speaker as well.

The point that I am making to my hon. colleague from the Liberal Party is that it was achieved through consensus, because if all parties from all different corners of the country and from different political perspectives cannot be convinced that it is a good idea that will serve the institution as an institution, and not one party over another, then maybe it is not such a good idea. Maybe we should at least go back and try to build that consensus. However, that is not what they are doing here. They would be creating a precedent, whereby future governments and future Parliaments would look and say that it has been done before where a government, perhaps backed by a junior coalition partner in a minority context, could say that at the end of the day, it is just going to ram it through anyway.

We offered a good-faith effort to preserve the idea of consensus, to prevent what is about to happen when the government ultimately rams this motion through. We said that, in order to preserve the importance of overhauling the Standing Orders only after a government has achieved that consensus, we would agree to things on a time-limited basis that we might not normally agree to. We were willing to allow aspects of this hybrid package to continue, with the one caveat that the package of changes would sunset after the next election. This is a very simple and, I believe, common-sense proposal.

What would that do, and why is it important? After every election, it is part of our normal routine of business that the Standing Orders are studied by the procedure and House affairs committee. There is supposed to be a debate in the House about the Standing Orders and whether anything needs to be changed or how the Standing Orders are serving the House at the time. It has never really resulted in anything substantially major, because the government of the day always wants to use government time to implement business. That is reasonable; the members get elected on a platform, and every day that they spend debating the Standing Orders, as they are today, is a day that they do not have to debate the legislation they would like to put out.

Our proposal would have required a government of the day to, proactively and in a positive way, actually take some action to extend these changes. I submit that we are still only about a year or so out of the complete lifting of COVID restrictions. In some parts of Canada, it has literally just been 12 to 14 months since those restrictions have been fully lifted, so it is hard to say for sure what the long-term consequences of these changes will be on our parliamentary life. It is not just life in terms of our personal lives or how we conduct our business but also in terms of the institution itself.

My hon. colleague, the House leader, has lots of examples of how it is tough to be here. Yes, it is difficult, but I do not think that members of Parliament should ask for considerations that hard-working Canadians from across the country in other industries do not have. Yes, it is difficult to be here. I have five children, and there are lots of things I wish I could have stayed home for. There are lots of important milestones I missed. I knew that when I ran for office.

I knew when I put my name on the ballot that it would be a trade-off in my life. Yes, I would get the incredible reward of fighting for the things I believe in and serving my community and my constituents, but the counterpoint to that is that I would be away from home an awful lot. I made the decision to do it anyway, because I so value the important work that my party does and that my team does.

I believe that the things I believe in are important enough that I am willing to sacrifice those special moments at home to help make Canada a better place. I want to help undo the damage that big government intervention has caused in our lives, with the liberty and individual freedoms that we have lost over the past few years under the Liberal government.

It is worth it. I might miss one of my children's birthdays, but hopefully, I will help to roll back some of the misery that big government intervention in their lives causes for them. They will be better off for it throughout their life. That is one of my motivating factors when I have to miss those important moments.

For Canadians in lots of different industries, they might have an important milestone in their family that they would like to get back for. Maybe they have to go to a trades conference, or maybe they are in the legal profession and have an important court date. They cannot just phone it in because they have something going on at home. I do not think members of Parliament should grant to ourselves a privilege and a comfort that so many Canadians across the country do not have in their lives. I do not believe that this is sufficient in and of itself to justify the changes that the government is making today.

In terms of the important precedent that it is creating here today, it will likely not be singing from the same song sheet in future Parliaments if a future government does something it does not like with the Standing Orders. However, I would submit to the government that it is not too late. In a few moments, I will be proposing an amendment that will more closely resemble the consensus that we are trying to achieve in negotiating these packages of Standing Order changes.

We have long held that major, enduring procedural reforms must be implemented with the support of a consensus of the recognized parties in the House. Making permanent such a sweeping change to parliamentary life is absolutely the sort of thing that should first be embraced by all sides of the aisle.

In the interest of consensus, the official opposition would have agreed to renew the current hybrid procedures with some important limitations, subject to that sunset a year into the next Parliament, when a further renewal could have been considered with proper deliberations. It is the flip side of what the government House leader is saying. He was saying that a future Parliament could undo it. We are asking why we do not do it the opposite way. The onus is on the government to justify and to answer for all the potential and unforeseen consequences of its changes. It would have been far better for the House and for future Parliaments if it had been done in reverse, and if the onus were on the government for continuing them.

I want to focus on hybrid participation in the chamber. There really is something to the physicality of the place. Holding ministers to account in person really adds a dynamic that we lose when we have hybrid Parliament. It is not just me saying that. There are parliamentary experts from all around the world in Commonwealth parliaments and even former Liberal MPs who have said the very same thing. Being in the chamber, with that thrust and that back and forth, is as much a part of the debate as the words themselves are.

When the House sits in a hybrid fashion, it takes a tremendous amount of resources, particularly with translation services. Members of Parliament and Canadians have the right to read and watch the debates in either official language, in French or English. It is difficult for the House administration. I sit on the Board of Internal Economy; for Canadians who might not be familiar with the term, this is the management committee that oversees the House of Commons and its administration. It is generally non-partisan. It is literally designed to help make sure that the precinct is secure and that members of Parliament have the services they need to do their jobs.

The strain placed on our translation services by hybrid sittings has been brought up multiple times at that committee. The translators have a very difficult job. They have to listen at a very specific sound level. They have to be able to hear what is being said and speak out the translation in real time. It is not as if translators get copies of speeches and can transcribe them into the other language and then just read them out. They have to simultaneously listen and speak at the same time.

Our interpreters have had a surprising number of workplace injuries. Members of Parliament get up to speak, but maybe they are too close to the microphone, maybe they start off too loudly or maybe their headset is not calibrated properly. Our translators then get that initial blast of sound, and over time we have had an unfortunate number of interpreters who have had to go on leave or have been put on medical leave because of those injuries. As a result, our pool of available translators has shrunk, and it is now incredibly difficult for the House to find adequate levels of human resources for a hybrid Parliament while at the same time providing the same for committees.

The reason I bring this up is that because of the nature of the importance of the deliberations in the chamber, the House of Commons itself is always given the first right of refusal on human resources. That means that we will always have translation services available to the House. Where does the House get those services when human resources are stretched thin? It gets them from committees.

I know we have lots of colleagues in the chamber right now who sit on committees. How many of them have had a committee cancelled at the last moment over the last few months because of a lack of resources? I am sure every single member has experienced that. Often when the government extends the hours of the House by six or seven hours in the evening, suddenly the House administration has to scramble and reallocate those translators. As a result, committees get cancelled.

Why would the Liberals want committees to be cancelled?

The Prime Minister hates parliamentary committees, and it is not hard to understand why. It is at committees that we have exposed the most egregious examples of waste, corruption and mismanagement. We are able to really pore through the spending, the contracts and the hypocrisies in government programs in terms of economic mismanagement.

We have had incredible breaking news and bombshell reports that have come out at committee. We catch one minister saying something that has been denied by another minister or we get a look at those contracts that have been awarded to Liberal insiders or we hear expert testimony that—

Industry and Technology

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the real shameful stuff is going to come up, I can assure the member, in regard to the Conservative Party, but the Bloc is sitting a little too close. I was just wondering if the member wants to shoo over a little bit more. I agree. I would do that too.

They are starting to have a negative influence on the Bloc. Today, we were supposed to be debating Bill C-27, and we know how important it is to our constituencies that we provide security in the privacy of information on the Internet. We all recognize how important that issue is. The Bloc do not want to discuss that today, even though we have attempted to have it passed through the House. I understand it supports the legislation, which is a good thing. However, it wants to talk about the aerospace industry by bringing through concurrence of a report to use up government time. This is not the first time. We are used to the Conservative Party doing it.

Having said that, I am happy to talk about the aerospace industry. When I think of the aerospace industry, I think of John Diefenbaker. Do members remember John Diefenbaker? John Diefenbaker was a prime minister of Canada.

Canada, at the time, was leading the world, virtually, in the development of a first-class interceptor, a plane that was incredibly fast. We have to remember that this was after the world war, when there was a need for development and an enrichment of our aerospace industry. The prime minister at the time, John Diefenbaker, destroyed Canada's aerospace industry by cancelling the Avro Arrow.

That was a high-altitude plane. It was ahead of its time. I want members to imagine that plane program not having been cancelled. Avro employed hundreds of people at the time, possibly over 1,000, but I will say hundreds for now. They all worked in the province of Ontario.

I think of the technology and the research that was done. They actually rolled one of the Avro planes out. It was recognized around the world as likely the leading candidate for the development of a plane that was like a rocket, going to altitudes of 40,000 and above.

John Diefenbaker cancelled the program. Back in the late fifties, he cancelled the program. It is the truth. As a result, Avro actually went broke and closed its doors. All of the equipment and, more important, all of the brains and skills were dispersed. Many of the individuals who developed the Avro ended up leaving Canada so they could get into and expand that particular industry. Canada lost out big time, and it is something which even today, 70 years later, we reflect on. What would our industry look like today?

Well, earlier today, I was asking questions of members of the Bloc. I am happy to say that it is the province of Quebec that leads our aerospace industry. I pointed out, in the question I posed earlier, that in the province of Quebec, one can build a plane from the very beginning, from the bolts to the polishing of the aircraft, the final product. That is fairly rare.

When we think of the aerospace industry in Canada, one is talking about tens of thousands of jobs, well over 100,000 jobs. Do members know the average salary of someone working in the aerospace industry in Manitoba? It is estimated, I believe, to be over $60,000 a year. These are good middle-class types of jobs with incredible skill sets. In Canada today, it is Quebec that leads.

With respect to jobs, I suspect that the province of Ontario lost the opportunity to play that leadership role as a direct result of a federal government's decision not to invest in the aerospace industry.

Let us fast forward a few decades. Today, we have a national government that does support our aerospace industry in a clear and tangible way, and we have done this from day one. We talked about Bill C-10 and how important it was that we ensure future contracts. We talked about how we could support the industry even though, at times, it meant there would be some give and take. That give and take is important to recognize. The world has changed.

I had a tour of Magellan in my home city of Winnipeg. I felt a sense of pride when I walked around the floor and saw an F-35 wing being manufactured. We have an absolutely incredible aerospace industry in Winnipeg, which contributes to the industry not only in Canada, but worldwide.

Those workers show their love and passion for the construction of very important components of the F-35. Imagine being a worker at Magellan who sees an F-35 on a news broadcast. He or she might reflect on whether that wing was manufactured in Winnipeg. Even in crating the wing, someone would need an engineering background to build the crate that houses the wing prior to its shipping.

The member before me talked about the importance of schools. Magellan has a classroom in which Red River College contributes to the education. It is very important to recognize that it is not only Ottawa that has the responsibility of supporting these industries, even though it feels we are alone in doing that at times. Many stakeholders have a role in ensuring that Canada continues to lead an industry that is so vitally important to the world. The best way to do that is to work with our partners and stakeholders.

When I was an MLA a number of years ago, and I hope the Manitoba legislature Hansard would show this, I spoke about the aerospace industry in the province of Manitoba. I said that the province needed to step up and support the industry. If the local entities and provincial governments are not at the table, it hurts the industry. It also hurts it if the industry itself is not at the table.

As much as I would love to talk about the province of Quebec, I think the similarities are striking between Manitoba and Quebec. We have aerospace industry umbrella organizations and those organizations are there for the health and the well-being of that industry.

This comes from Winnipeg's aerospace industry's umbrella agency. I will quote from its website so people can get a sense of what I am referring to when I talk about Manitoba's aerospace industry. It states:

Canada is a global leader in aerospace and Manitoba is home to Canada’s third largest aerospace industry. Our highly competitive aerospace sector produces world-class products for customers on six continents.

From modest roots in small bush plane repair in the 1930′s, the Manitoba aerospace industry has grown to include sophisticated design, manufacturing, servicing, testing, certification and research and development capabilities. We are home to Canada’s largest aerospace composite manufacturing centre, as well as the world’s largest independent gas turbine engine repair and overhaul company. Also located in Manitoba are the internationally acclaimed Composites Innovation Centre and two of the world’s most advanced aircraft engine testing and certification centres developed by Rolls Royce, Pratt & Whitney and GE Aviation. Along with these global aerospace leaders, Manitoba has a network of SMBs that compete and supply into the global marketplace. This growing cluster is strengthened through the Competitive Edge Supplier Development initiative, an internationally recognized learner to world class supplier and supply chain development program.

This gives us a sense of the impact the aerospace industry in Manitoba has on the world. We could come up with even a stronger statement, in a different perspective coming from the province of Quebec.

I remember another occasion when I was in the Philippines. I talked to some military representatives, who talked about the Bell helicopter. They thought that the province of Quebec had a wonderful product in the Bell helicopter, that Quebec was a place they could look at. I asked a representative why he was looking at the province of Quebec in particular and what he thought about the manufactured helicopter. I did not expect, and the member commented on this, him to say that it was the fact that politicians in Quebec were so impressed with the makeup of the workforce in the construction of the helicopter, referring to the fact that people of Filipino heritage were in that industry.

With respect to our aerospace industry, one of the nice things is the diversity we see when we tour these plants, whether they are in Quebec, Manitoba, Ontario or British Columbia, “the big four”, as I would like to say. Hopefully Manitoba will even become higher and more prominent, but that is a personal bias. It is that diversification of the workforce and the skills they have.

That is why it is so critically important that Ottawa not only continues to support the aerospace industry, as it has prepandemic, during the pandemic and today, but that we also ensure, as much as possible, that those stakeholders are at the table as well. We want Red River College and the University of Manitoba at the table. We want those post-secondary facilities, whether they are in Manitoba, Quebec, Ontario, B.C., or any other jurisdiction, to be at the table to ensure we continue to invest in research and technology.

When we think of manufacturing in Canada, many would argue, especially many of my Ontario colleagues, that we lead in the automobile industry. After all, we can take a look at the hybrids, at the plants that are being announced, the thousands of jobs, the clean energy, and all these things. In a good part, it is coming out of Ontario, but when we take a look at the overall picture of the manufacturing industry, Canada's aerospace industry is recognized, within our bigger picture of the manufacturing industry, as one of the best, if not the best, in investing in research, technology and advancement. We are seeing that in the types of demands that are there for Canada.

Ottawa should continue to support the industry. As the Minister of Industry indicated in a question about something he recently announced in the province of Quebec, I can make reference to things that recently have been announced in Manitoba. Whether it is through procurements and how the federal government supports the industry, or direct investments in the industry, or indirect things that are done through things such as trades and skills, my appeal would be that we look at what other stakeholders and jurisdictions can do that would complement the types of initiatives that the federal government is taking to advance a very important industry.

This industry employs thousands of people, with well-paying jobs. It contributes billions of dollars every year to our GDP, thereby enhancing our lifestyle. We can all take a sense of pride in how our aerospace industry has been able to do relatively well even during the pandemic. As we get through the pandemic and look at the potential to increase its demand in the years ahead, it is critically important we continue to look at ways to support our aerospace industry.

As much as I enjoy talking about the aerospace industry, I hope the Bloc and Conservatives will come onside and support Bill C-27 when it comes up for debate later today. It would be wonderful to see that legislation pass, which would make this debate that much better.

Procedure for Votes in Chamber

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a question of privilege, of which I have given notice to the table, regarding the vote that happened on the Speech from the Throne earlier this week. I understand the member for Vimy has indicated she does not want her vote to be counted. You said that would be done. Obviously, we accept that.

However, this is much more serious than that. This raises many more questions, which I will get into here and which I believe you need to give us some direction on, Mr. Speaker. This affects the privileges of every member of the House.

The privileges of all members are affected when there is a question about the conduct of one member. In this case we are in a minority Parliament where every single vote that is a confidence vote will matter.

In this case, while there was a significant spread between the yeas and the nays, one can easily imagine a scenario in which the vote of one member could determine whether the government maintained the confidence of the House. We have a situation where a member was given not one, not two, but three opportunities to talk about what happened.

I say with respect, and I do not wish to overstate this, that it is so important that the voting rights of members be protected here. Maybe when the Standing Orders were written it was simply enough, without cameras in this place, to trust the word of a member.

Mr. Speaker, if you review the tape, which we all have access to, and which is the official record of what happens in the House, you will see that the member in question was not in her seat for five minutes after the vote commenced.

Every time the camera pans past her seat, it is empty. This is not a matter of seconds and a member saying, “I heard it and I rushed in and sat down.” I am sorry. I want to take all members at their word in this place, but the video evidence is crystal clear.

For the hon. member to say today, “I now know that I needed to be in the chamber in order to vote”, you told us that on Monday night. You told the House, “To be clear, you must be in the chamber in order to vote”, and she stood and said, “I was here. I heard the question.” That is absolutely false.

Now what do we do? What do we do when there is a situation where it could absolutely have been the difference between the government surviving and the government falling? Do we have a situation where a member can stand in this place and mislead the House and there are no consequences for it? The government survives, the legislation passes, the motion passes and the next day, or two or three days later, they say, “Oh, sorry; what could we do? I made a mistake.”

Mr. Speaker, we need you to protect the rights of all members of Parliament. If some members of Parliament are given the right to vote when they are not in this place, that takes away the rights of every member of Parliament.

Mr. Speaker, a misleading statement by a member is listed as an offence against the House. That is on page 82 of Bosc and Gagnon. It is an offence against the House. It is not an offence against a particular party. I would say it is offensive to you, Mr. Speaker, as the guardian and custodian of our privileges, but this is something that could have made all the difference.

In the last Parliament, on Bill C-10, the transport bill, it was a tied vote that the previous Speaker had to break the tie on. We had three members in the lobby. We had three members who knew better than to come in and take their place and vote because to do so would have been dishonourable. It would have broken the rules of the House. What if we had just sent them in? The legislation would have been defeated at second reading. What would the remedy then have been?

Mr. Speaker, we are in this situation now where it is more imperative than ever that you protect the rights of all members and not just the governing party, and I know you would never do that. You are here. You were elected by all of us. You protect the rights of all of us.

I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, but I think you need to review the tape to see if you find the same as we have, time after time. I wanted that member to get up and unequivocally apologize. Instead what she did was to say, “I was here”, three times. The tape does not lie. The tape shows exactly what happened.

I believe that we need this to be found a prima facie question of privilege and that the matter be referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, because we need to know what the path forward is.

What if this is just an instruction that is given to any side of the House where they say, “You know what? Things happen. Just run in and say you heard it. There is nothing the Speaker can do, and the House has no powers. Just be close to the House, come in, and if it comes up before your empty seat is called, just stand up and say that you were here. We'll sort it out in the wash.” That is unacceptable.

Again, I implore you to watch the tape, Mr. Speaker. This is not a matter of that single vote. That single vote has been withdrawn, but when the camera pans across the first row, second row, third row and fourth row before the member is in her seat, I am sorry, but she did not hear the question. She knows she did not hear the question.

I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that you rule in favour of moving this to the procedure and House affairs committee so that we can settle this once and for all.

Opposition Motion—Government Policies

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, after listening to the member for Winnipeg North's speech, I would just like to remind my colleagues that this is only day one of the remaining seven weeks, so we should all pace ourselves.

As always, in these dying days of the 42nd Parliament, it is a great honour to stand in this place. It is a real privilege to be the voice of the amazing constituents of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. I appreciated, as I am sure all members did, the previous two weeks, when I got to go to my riding on beautiful Vancouver Island, where spring actually arrived when it was supposed to. I enjoyed the sunshine, speaking with constituents and going to many community events.

I was really excited when I saw the notice of the motion we had picked to debate today. I think it goes to the heart of the kind of message that we, as a party, want to put out there to differentiate ourselves from the other parties in this place.

Before I got into politics as an elected member, I used to work for a former member of Parliament, Jean Crowder. I can remember going to an event at someone's house and seeing an old poster by the CCF. The tag of the poster was “People Before Profits”. That is one of the principles that has always guided me personally, that the people of our great country are key.

We can look at the staggering amount of wealth that corporations have. Some people may see a corporation's wealth by how big its bank account is, how well its executives are paid and how well its shareholders do with dividends. However, in this corner of the House, we prefer to see the wealth of a company in the workers, the services they provide and the things they build. It is ultimately the workers of the company who are on the front line, providing those services to people and giving the company its reputation. In all of our efforts, by all parties, it would serve us well to remember that.

The main thrust of this motion today is that given the experiences over the last three and a half years of this Parliament, we feel there have been some demonstrations quite clearly that corporate executives and their lobbyists have had far too much access to and influence on the Government of Canada.

The most recent example of this, which I think many Canadians still quite clearly remember, is the SNC-Lavalin affair. When that news story broke in the The Globe and Mail on February 7, it very much altered the political landscape. I remember the Liberals first reaction to that story was to deny it, to say that it was not true, that there was no pressure. However, their narrative kept on changing as more facts kept coming out. Ultimately, what it resulted in was the loss of two of their most capable ministers, the member for Vancouver Granville and the member for Markham—Stouffville, the loss of the Prime Minister's principal secretary and the loss of the former clerk of the Privy Council.

Why is that whole affair relevant to the motion today? Last year, unbeknown to parliamentarians and even the Canadian public, a small section was hidden in one of the budget omnibus bills, which even the Liberal backbenchers found out about, with surprise, when they were studying the bill at the standing committee on finance. Of course that was the provision in the budget bill to bring in an amendment to the Criminal Code that would allow for deferred prosecution agreements. I am not against deferred prosecution agreements per se. They can in some cases be a very legitimate tool. The important thing, though, is that it is not up to me to decide that. It is not up to anyone in this chamber to decide that. That role falls squarely on the shoulders of the director of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada.

That brings me to the next step in this whole sordid affair. We found out that it was SNC-Lavalin that lobbied hard to get such an amendment into the Criminal Code and it succeeded with that. Then it started this coordinated orchestrated campaign with the Prime Minister's Office to get the former attorney general, the member for Vancouver Granville, to basically overrule the director of public prosecutions.

When I sat on the justice committee, I was at Ms. Kathleen Roussel's confirmation hearing. She is a very accomplished lady who has immense qualifications for the job. However, when she was looking at the request for a deferred prosecution agreement, she had all the relevant facts of the case before her, she knew what the provisions of the law were and in her capacity, she made the decision that the company was not eligible for a DPA. Of course, she referenced this to the former attorney general of Canada who agreed with that assessment.

The lobbying of the Prime Minister's Office to get the independence of that decision overturned is very worrying. Yes, no laws were broken, but the irony is that no laws were broken because of the efforts of the former attorney general of Canada, who very much stood on her principles and decided she would stand against that pressure and not overrule the director of public prosecutions. Ultimately, she was shuffled out of her cabinet post and then had to resign, followed by her colleague, the member for Markham—Stouffville. The two of them could no longer in good conscience sit in the cabinet and defend the government day to day when they knew the truth of what had really happened behind the scene.

That is item number one of the most clear and recent examples of the awesome power of corporate lobbying and what it was able to achieve with the current government.

I will take members back to 2016 to another example. The government introduced Bill C-10, an amendment to the Air Canada Public Participation Act. This was in spite of the fact that many Liberal MPs represented ridings where aircraft maintenance workers lived and worked and in spite of the fact that in the 2015 election campaign, the Prime Minister was right there with Avios workers, saying that he was there in solidarity with them and that he supported them. However, what did that government bill do? It basically amended the act so that Air Canada, which had done extensive lobbying of the government, would now be free to move its aircraft maintenance work offshore. It would no longer be constrained by the provisions in the act where it had to have maintenance facilities in places like Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. Again, this goes to the heart of where corporate lobbying led to a change in the law, which ultimately will and has hurt workers.

Of course, we have the Minister of Finance who brought in Bill C-27, which I am very happy to see remains in purgatory, stuck at first reading. The government has been far too timid to bring it forward for debate, because it knows the uproar that would happen. The Minister of Finance own company, Morneau Shepell, used to specialize in this kind of work of changing pension plans. The Liberals finally became aware of the uproar that would happen, and that bill has not proceeded any further, which I am glad to see. However, it did not stop the Minister of Finance who, in a clear conflict of interest, introduced that bill in the first place, showing what the Liberals' intent was all along.

Then, of course, I move to pharmacare. I was listening to the member for Winnipeg North as his volume got steadily higher and higher. We have short memories in this place. It was back in 1997, 22 years ago, when the old Liberal empire of the 1990s was at the height of its power. Members will remember that the Liberals won a majority in 1993, again in 1997 and again in 2000. This was a clear promise they made in 1997. They did not follow through with it then, they did not follow through with it in the 2000 government and here we are, three and a half years into the term of the current majority government, and what do we have? We have a paragraph in the budget, which is an intention to do more consultation. However, we can look at the lobbying records and the coordinated campaign that was brought about by the pharmaceutical industry. On average, pharmaceutical companies and their associations lobbied the government approximately 49 times, which is about the average over 11 years. However, in 2018 alone, it was 104 times.

The report by the Standing Committee on Health recommended a universal pharmacare plan, one that all Canadians can get behind, one that would save Canadian families $4.5 billion. On average, Canadian families would save about $550 and some families would save far more.

The proof is in the pudding, because instead of us being at a point where we could implement a national universal pharmacare plan, the lobbying has had its desired effect. What we are probably going to get from the Liberals, these masters of the long promise, the ones who like to tell people to re-elect them and they might get what they want, is that the lion's share of the national housing strategy is going to come after 2019, and the pharmacare plan is probably going to be some kind of a patchwork system. In other words, the pharmaceutical industry was able, through its lobbying efforts, to get what it wanted all along. It wanted to have a patchwork system where it still had that key role to play.

Finally, there is the Loblaws example. My friend from Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke had it perfectly in his intervention earlier when he asked why a company as wealthy as Loblaws is able to access $12 million, when it commands so much wealth and would have been able to do that itself, headed by a man who is worth more than $13 billion. For Mr. Weston, $12 million is pocket change. That is something he could lose in the blink of an eye, a rounding error for a billionaire.

The question is legitimate. Why is this money not being made available to the corner stores, to small businesses, which would use that $12 million to make significant upgrades to their bottom line to be energy-efficient. No one is arguing the fact that we need to take these steps. What we are trying to underline is the power of big corporations, the lobbying efforts they can employ with the government to get those kinds of corporate handouts, when small businesses, the ones that really need them, are being left behind far too often.

I appreciate this time to speak on behalf of the constituents of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, whether it is the legislation that was put in the 2018 budget bill that helped out SNC-Lavalin or whether it is Bill C-27 that the Minister of Finance introduced but did not advance any further, we see concrete examples of legislation being changed to suit corporate interests.

One bill that passed three years ago now was Bill C-10, direct lobbying from Air Canada, to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act so it had the freedom to move its maintenance facilities offshore. Lo and behold, Liberal MPs from ridings where those maintenance workers lived supported that legislation.

I would like my colleague to comment on that bill. Memories are short in this place and it would serve us all well to remind Canadians of that particularly egregious example back in 2016 and what the Liberal government was prepared to do for its corporate friends in Air Canada to the detriment of the maintenance workers.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I think the purpose of today's motion is to zero in on some specific examples, so let us go through the legislative history of the 42nd Parliament.

This is a government that has serviced Air Canada by bringing in Bill C-10, which basically allowed Air Canada the freedom to ship maintenance jobs overseas. The government amended the Air Canada Public Participation Act to allow Air Canada that freedom. Part of Air Canada's privatization deal was that they would keep jobs in Canada.

The government has not done anything legislatively for pensioners. My colleague from Hamilton Mountain has brought in legislation that would amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. Again, there was nothing on this from the government.

With respect to the national pharmacare plan, the lobbying that the pharmaceutical industry associations have done with the government has gone up to almost double the average. They are telling Canadians that if the government proceeds with a publicly funded national pharmacare plan, certain prescriptions will not be covered and costs will go up. This is total misinformation when compared to the evidence.

Given these specific examples, does my colleague not think that corporations and industry insiders have in fact had improper influence on the government's policies?

Interim Estimates

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we are governed by two broad principles that you have enforced throughout this Parliament.

First, each member of Parliament has the responsibility to be in the House to hear the questions before he or she can vote. That precedent has existed throughout the term of this Parliament.

Second, once that question begins, effectively the Speaker continues. As you will recall, we saw that in the tie vote on Bill C-10, where there was an attempt to obstruct the vote by certain members of the government, but the Speaker proceeded to what ultimately was a tie vote, which you, as Speaker, broke.

Those are the two principles that govern this vote and this situation.

I have been in the House for 15 years. I have never had a situation, which appears to have happened this time, where members of Parliament, who are obviously late for the vote, who have obviously not heard the entire question, are not being honest and forthright in saying, “I should not be voting on this question.”

That is why it is incumbent upon you, Mr. Speaker, to suspend the vote so we can determine who has the right to vote on this important vote, Motion No. 126, and we can ensure the integrity of this Parliament and parliamentary proceedings are maintained.

Alleged Interference in Justice System

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we are here tonight to talk about a serious charge made by the former attorney general at committee yesterday. At committee she said, “For a period of approximately four months, between September and December of 2018, I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin.”

It is a pretty serious charge. At the heart of the charge is a company that employs many people—and we are grateful for good jobs in Canada—but that is not a free pass to do whatever the company would like.

This is a company whose boardroom has a checkered past. For instance, SNC-Lavalin has been banned by the World Bank from bidding on contracts for 10 years, after investigations revealed that it undertook bribery schemes in Bangladesh and Cambodia. As well, a former SNC-Lavalin executive recently pleaded guilty to breaking election laws to funnel tens of thousands of dollars into the coffers of both the Liberal and Conservative parties. It is a company that in 2011 was able to buy Atomic Energy of Canada's commercial operations for only $15 million, including the plans to the CANDU reactor, and at the same time got a guarantee of $75 million worth of contracts for the work, which more than pays for the price it paid for an important Canadian asset, the plans for the CANDU reactor.

Currently, SNC is part of a consortium that stands to benefit from a multi-billion-dollar capital project right here in downtown Ottawa, with the privatization of the operations of the heating and cooling plant that serves many buildings downtown, including the very building we are in right now.

Now we hear of political interference by the Prime Minister on that company's behalf—not for the workers, but to help SNC-Lavalin executives escape these criminal charges. I will have more to say on that further on in my remarks.

In response to the testimony we heard from the former attorney general that there was a sustained effort to pressure her inappropriately into changing her position, the NDP has called for the Prime Minister to waive cabinet confidence for the period after she was fired from the position of Attorney General but was still in cabinet, because that was not waived and she was very clear at committee that there are elements to the story that bear on her ultimate decision to resign from cabinet that she is not able to tell because they continue to be covered under those confidences.

We have also asked that the justice committee hear from the 11 people the MP for Vancouver Granville named as part of the pressure campaign, who include the Prime Minister. Certainly he has details about what went on that Canadians would like to know and that are essential to being able to understand the nature of what transpired, so he ought to appear before committee.

We also called for a full public inquiry when the story broke some time ago, and we renewed our call because there are a lot of moving parts to this story. I do not think that comes as a surprise to anyone here. It seems there are new revelations almost every day. The scope of the current investigations is simply not adequate for the task of understanding the entirety of what is going on. Each investigation may bear important fruit in terms of figuring out a piece of the puzzle, but by no means can any one of the existing investigations tell the whole story. That is why it is important that we have a public inquiry.

Why is it important to get to the bottom of this? Anyone who has ever been pressured or bullied into doing something they thought was a bad idea probably has a sense of what is wrong with this picture, and anyone who has been pressured or bullied by someone in a position of authority over them will have an even better idea. Perhaps it is a supervisor at work who can terminate someone's position and take away their salary or a landlord who governs whether or not one someone can stay in an apartment unit. It could be a parole officer or a team coach. These are people someone in positions of authority. By and large, people who occupy those positions do a good job and are leaders in our community, but when people in those kinds of positions decide to abuse that power and authority, it is an awful feeling to be subject to it. It is ugly and it is wrong.

The allegation is that the Prime Minister, his principal secretary, his chief of staff and the Clerk of the Privy Council, who all have a lot of authority and power, did just such a thing. According to the former attorney general, as I said, they used that power to inappropriately pressure her to reverse a decision of the director of public prosecutions in order to get a corporation charged with bribery of public officials out of facing criminal charges. The Prime Minister wants to chalk that up to a difference in perspectives and he wants to put his word up against hers.

However, I think anyone who watched the testimony yesterday would have seen that the member for Vancouver Granville offered a calm, consistent, well-documented testimony and she embodied everything one would expect in a credible witness. I believe her testimony, and I encourage any Canadians listening at home to watch it for themselves if they have any doubt. While she and I disagree on a number of policy matters, and we have had disagreements in the House, I do respect her integrity. She has set an example for us all in the way she has conducted herself in a very difficult situation, and that example stands for all of us, whatever our political stripe.

The former attorney general was taking decisions that were hers to take. It was a decision not of the Prime Minister but of the former attorney general whether to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement. When she said that she had made up her mind, the decision was taken.

It was not inappropriate initially for the Prime Minister to have some conversation with her about the economic impact of these things. That is part of good policy-making and good decision-making, frankly. However, when she said that she had considered those things and had made up her mind, that ought to have been the end of it.

However, we did not hear in her testimony that when the Prime Minister and various officials at the top levels of government kept coming back at her and her staff to try to convince them to change this decision, that they were presenting any new information. Perhaps if the Prime Minister would like to come to committee and testify, then he could tell us what new information he was offering her, but that is not what we have heard. We have heard that they were coming with similar arguments and veiled threats to get her to change her mind.

She stood up to the Prime Minister and his team for the sake of an important principle, which is the rule of law. Why is that important? The rule of law gives us rights. It is what protects us from egomaniacs and bullies that sometimes make it into positions of power.

As Canadians, we are entitled to a fair hearing and equal treatment before the law. We can contrast that with other places in the world today or in times past where people live or lived in fear of the whims of people at the top. We passed laws over time to build a system that protected Canadians from that kind of arbitrary treatment, but there is no law we can pass that can guarantee that forever. Protecting our rights, just like protecting our democracy, is a job that is never done and it is why moments like this are so important.

The rule of law and democracy also have an important cultural component. We have to build a culture of respect for rules and due process in our institutions if we want to safeguard democracy and the rule of law. The higher up the food chain one goes, the more power one has, the more important it is for democracy and the rule of law that one conducts oneself according to the highest ethical standard and in respect of those rules. The member for Vancouver Granville lived up to her duty in that regard, but based on her testimony yesterday, the Prime Minister and his team fell far short of that mark.

On December 5, in a meeting with the former PMO principal secretary, Gerry Butts, he is alleged by the former attorney general to have talked to her chief of staff about how the statute was set up by Harper and that he did not like the law, as if that were relevant. In a December 18 meeting, Gerry Butts and the PMO chief of staff, Katie Telford, told Jessica Prince in the former attorney general's office that a resolution to the DPA situation was necessary. He stated, “Jess, there is no solution here that does not involve some interference.” Telford stated, “We don't want to debate legalities anymore.” That is from the member for Vancouver Granville's testimony yesterday.

In a December 19 phone call between the former attorney general and the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Clerk stated that “I think he”, the Prime Minister, “is going to find a way to get it done, one way or another. He is in that kind of mood, and I wanted you to be aware of it.” He also told the former attorney general that she did not want to be on a collision course with the Prime Minister.

For some reason, the Prime Minister felt that he could override the independence of the attorney general. Perhaps that should not come as a surprise. He was, after all, the first Canadian prime minister to be found guilty of ethics violations by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner.

What about when KPMG ran into trouble? The Liberals were willing to cut a secret deal when KPMG was found to have devised a tax-dodging scheme. All KPMG had to was pay the taxes it owed, without penalties. It got amnesty, and there was secrecy around most of the terms of its settlement.

This is the government that made a science out of cash-for-access fundraising, which has a whole world of ethical problems in and of itself, and it is something we have to watch out for, because a culture of entitlement like this can easily slip into habits of corruption.

That is why it is important to be vigilant. It is also why it is important to get to the bottom of what happened. It is why it is so important that the former attorney general be able to tell her full story. It is why it is important that the Prime Minister waive the rules of cabinet confidence not only for the period when she was the Attorney General, which has been done, but also for the period when she was the veterans affairs minister.

She made it clear in her testimony that there are things she cannot say about her ultimate decision to resign from cabinet because of something, presumably, like a conversation or something else, that happened between the time she took the job as veterans affairs minister and the time she resigned from cabinet.

It is also why it is so important that we have a full public inquiry and get to the bottom of what happened.

Having established the importance of the issue, I want to take some time to address some of the arguments I have heard from Liberal members in the chamber today.

They have said that the opposition should not be concerned about this because an investigation is happening at the justice committee. I respect that the justice committee has a job to do. However, I believe the scope of the study it has selected is already too narrow to capture everything that is going on. Within the scope of the study the committee selected, we will not get to the bottom of all the allegations that have come out from the testimony.

As well, it needs to be said that there is a fundamental political conflict of interest in leaving that investigation to a committee that is dominated by Liberals, who have a clear political interest in ensuring that the problem goes away so that it does not ultimately hurt the Prime Minister. The fact that so many Liberals seem to be blind to that fact or do not really see a problem with that or understand why people would have legitimate concerns about the justice committee being the principal forum for getting to the bottom of this is very telling in terms of how the government got into this kind of trouble in the first place. Liberals do not seem able to identify these kinds of obvious, or at the very least apparent, conflicts.

When we pursue the highest ethical standards, as the Prime Minister told his ministers in his mandate letters he wanted to do and as he told Canadians he wanted to do in the 2015 election, apparent conflicts of interest are just as important as actual conflicts of interest. There is certainly an apparent conflict of interest when six Liberal members of Parliament are going to be the final adjudicators on what has happened in this case.

The Liberals have also said that since the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner is running an investigation, we should not be concerned. They say we should not have any extra questions, as he is going to decide everything. We are quite aware of that. In fact, it was the NDP Party that requested that investigation.

It is not that we do not have confidence in the commissioner and therefore want a public inquiry and it is not that we do not think there is some value to the investigation that is going on; it is that the commissioner's investigation is also limited in scope. It is limited by the very rules that set up the office of the commissioner and gave him his powers and responsibilities.

As such, there is no way his report is going to get to the bottom of all of what we have heard. These allegations of political interference fall outside the narrow scope given to the Conflict of Interest Commissioner, who only looks into conflicts of interest as they pertain to the direct financial interests of a member of the House. We will be interested to hear the conclusion of his investigation, but there is certainly a lot more going on here than that.

The Liberals also say that another reason we should not worry is that the director of public prosecutions has said that she made an independent decision. No one has ever doubted that she made an independent decision. The problem was not that somehow her decision was not independent; the problem was that after that decision was made, political actors, including the Prime Minister and those in his office, sought to reverse that decision. Furthermore, they did not just do it with a one-off conversation with the former attorney general. They coordinated a pressure campaign in order to try to reverse that decision.

That is the problem. Let us not see anyone get up to say that the director of public prosecutions made her decision independently. Of course she did. The question is whether someone else sought to overturn that decision for political reasons.

I have heard the Liberals stand up today and say that the Prime Minister told the former attorney general that it was her decision at the time, so there is nothing to see here and not to worry. I do not doubt that he did. That is a pretty good way to cover his behind. I can believe that she even took him at his word at the time, which is what she said in testimony. When she was fired from the position, that probably changed her point of view about the conversation they had when she was told that it was really her decision and hers alone. When she made the decision the Prime Minister clearly did not want, she lost the job. That cast a whole new light on the conversations they had had up to then, which she reasonably may have thought were sincere.

We have also been told that we should be quiet, because the Prime Minister gave her a waiver on solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidentiality. The thing that leaves out is the fact that the waiver on cabinet confidentiality does not cover the period when she was in cabinet between the time she was fired from her job as attorney general and took the job as the veterans affairs minister and when she chose to resign. She was very clear at committee that there are aspects of the story she is unable to tell. Presumably something happened in that period that made her change her mind. If we are going to get to the bottom of this, we need to know exactly what that was.

My colleague from Victoria presented a motion yesterday at committee simply asking that the justice committee request of the Prime Minister that cabinet confidentiality be waived. It does not have any power to compel the Prime Minister to waive it. I watched as each Liberal member of that committee voted the motion down and refused to at least ask the Prime Minister to take it upon himself to liberate the former attorney general to tell her full story.

I know I only have a few minutes left. I want to talk about the principal argument we have heard in this place in terms of the Liberals' defence, which is jobs, jobs, jobs and that they want to save the jobs. Everyone here has an interest in seeing Canadian employed, but that does not mean anything goes. It cannot be a get-out-of-jail-free card. It cannot be that if a company is big enough and employs enough people, it can bribe public officials and get off the hook. That is completely inappropriate.

Was it about the workers? Was it about the jobs? When we heard from the former attorney general that the Prime Minister was raising political concerns about the fact that he was the MP for Papineau and there was a Quebec election and something had to be done about this, it was not about the workers or their jobs. It was about the political interests of the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party. That is what it was about, and it had very little to do with the workers.

What could have been an option, which is something the Liberals are also pursuing, was reforming the integrity regime with the 10-year ban on contracts. In fact, it is an option they are pursuing. I dare say that this is the appropriate option, not looking at inappropriate pressure to abandon criminal charges but looking at the sanctions regime and maybe changing it. That is where the conversation should have happened. They have prejudiced and sullied that conversation, because no matter what they do now, it is going to look like they are exercising all the options and pulling out all the stops to help get SNC-Lavalin off the hook.

The Minister of Public Services and Procurement was at committee yesterday. I asked her a simple question many times. I asked if she would say that the bribery of public officials is a serious offence and would be treated as a serious offence in the new integrity policy. She told me that the government does not have a position on the hierarchy of offences. That is what she said. As the minister who oversees the largest capital budget in government, she refused to say that she thought the bribery of public officials was a serious offence. I could not believe it. It is a testament to how deep the desire to help out this company goes in the government and how fearful people on the other benches are of doing anything that could undermine the interests of that company.

I hope I get a chance in questions and answers to talk a bit more about workers and the record of the government when it comes to workers. One of the first bills I saw passed in this place was Bill C-10, which was under time allocation and everything else. That was a bill to change the law to allow Air Canada to outsource its maintenance work for the aerospace industry out of the country. I have a few more examples, so hopefully I will have a chance to address them in questions and answers.

Postal Services Resumption and Continuation Act

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I said that the union is going to be taking this legislation to court, and I suspect that it may well find that the government does not respect people's right to bargain collectively, because it should be at the table.

If we heard it from the Conservatives it would be one thing. We are hearing it from a government that swears up and down that it believes in the collective bargaining process.

I talked about all the things the government has done in terms of failing to act on the injury rate and other things. This crisis did not just come because the workers, as a last resort, decided to go out on rotating strikes. These are not new issues. They did not come out of nowhere. Instead of trying to put this on Canada Post workers, who are using their tool of last resort to get action, the government needs to own up and say that it should have been doing something about this a long time ago. It needs to recognize the fact that a number of actions the government took in this process over the last four weeks or five weeks poisoned the well. That is not what good-faith collective bargaining looks like, and it is certainly not what a government that supports collective bargaining looks like.

As long as governments that profess to be supportive of collective bargaining are the ones to undercut it and effectively take it away, then, legal point notwithstanding, we are not going to find ourselves in a position in Canada where workers are able to exercise their rights meaningfully. Companies are going to know that when they come asking, as long as they are big enough, as long as they are an eBay, a Netflix, a Facebook or an Air Canada, and I am thinking about what the Liberals did to aircraft maintenance workers with Bill C-10, which allowed Air Canada to offshore a bunch of maintenance work, contrary to what the government was saying before the election, the government is going to see to it that they get their way. Workers are not going to have meaningful rights in Canada, whatever their legal status is.

Transportation Modernization Act

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Madam Speaker, before I begin, I wish to notify you that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Windsor West.

When I look at this bill and examine some of the debate surrounding it, I think about some of the Liberals' key messaging over the last two years, specifically how they like to talk a lot about helping the middle class and those working hard to join it. However, when we look at some of the measures contained within Bill C-49, I believe that some of them are indeed designed to help the corporate class and not the middle class.

I want to concentrate my speech, because to give a 10-minute speech on such an expansive bill makes is nearly impossible to do in the detail it deserves, but there are a few key areas I wish to touch on that I believe have incredible significance for the constituents I represent and, indeed, many Canadians across this great country.

We have opposed some of the principal amendments proposed in this bill. I have to give great credit to my colleague from Trois-Rivières for his incredible work on the transport committee, and the way he has informed our caucus of the work he is doing. He did a lot of great work on this bill. He attempted to shift it, to amend it, to change it, and to make it more amenable. We can see that those efforts came to naught when the Liberal-dominated committee chose to reject them.

The first measure in the bill that we oppose is with respect to the arrangements between airlines. This bill amends the Transportation Act to give the Minister of Transport the power to approve joint venture arrangements between airlines even if the Commissioner of Competition finds an arrangement to be anti-competitive and one that could increase the price of airline tickets. Again, this measure is not really designed to help middle-class Canadians, who will have to suffer through this if prices are increased.

Next, the Transportation Act is amended to increase the limit on foreign ownership of Canadian airlines from 25% to 49%. I believe there was even a study cited on Transport Canada's website showing that this would have absolutely zero effect on increasing the competitiveness of Canadian airlines. Therefore, we have to wonder why that measure is in here.

Another point is with respect to the amendments to the Railway Safety Act that would will force railway companies to use video and voice recorders.

Of course, there is also the attempt to create some sort of passengers' bill of rights, wherein the Canadian Transportation Agency is ordered to propose and make regulations to establish a new passengers' rights regime. Indeed, this last issue is one that is very near and dear to our caucus. In previous parliaments, several members have fought long and hard to codify a passengers' bill of rights through private members' bills. Therefore, although we are glad to at least see the attempt made here, we are certainly unhappy with the end result.

This bill primarily protects the interests of foreign investors and violates the right to privacy and workers' rights. That is specifically with respect to railway workers.

We are certainly in favour of improving the rights of air travellers and protections for grain shippers, but we want to call upon the government, and indeed we have called upon the government, to separate those specific measures out of this omnibus bill so they could be studied as separate pieces of legislation and passed into law. I think the government side would have found a lot of co-operation from the Conservatives and NDP if those measures had been left to standalone bills so they could be examined in the detail they deserved.

We opposed Bill C-49 at second reading, and certainly made attempts to amend the bill at committee. Many amendments were put forward by both the Conservatives and the NDP, but ultimately many of them did not make it. We moved amendments specifically to establish far more concrete air passenger protection and compensation measures, to make the interswitching routes more accessible to grain farmers, and to protect the labour rights of train conductors, which were all rejected by Liberal members of Parliament.

Now I would like to talk about the joint venture agreements between airlines. Currently, the Commissioner of Competition has the power to determine whether these joint venture arrangements are anti-competitive and whether to apply to the Competition Tribunal. It gives me great pause to now know that the minister is in fact going to have final power over these measures.

The bureaucracy is supposed to be non-partisan and not influenced by outside events. However, cabinet is lobbied extensively by many different companies and private interest groups. In the current government and in previous governments, once corporations try to bend the ear of government, legislation sometimes is changed in their favour. To give the minister this kind of power, a person who can be lobbied by industry, and who perhaps gets a greater voice than the average Canadian citizen does, gives me cause for concern.

If Air Canada proposed an arrangement to merge its operations with those of an American company, even if the commissioner were to find that agreement would lessen competition among airlines and would increase ticket prices for passengers, the minister could still approve that arrangement. We are quite concerned with this.

With the amendments to the Railway Safety Act, Bill C-49 would force railway companies to fit their locomotives with video and voice recorders. The government wants us to believe this measure will improve rail safety, but we are worried that Canadian National and Canadian Pacific could use the information to discipline their employees and measure their productivity.

We believe the bill is far too vague and does not specify how the private information of train conductors would be accessed, collected, and used by the minister and the railway companies. Therefore, we proposed amendments to limit the use of these video and voice recorders to the Transportation Safety Board. Of course, that was rejected by the Liberals. We have concerns this may violate those workers' charter protections, specifically under section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The vice president of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference stated:

We think the bill in its present form is contrary to our rights as Canadians. To exempt 16,000 railroaders from PIPEDA, we believe is not appropriate, and this legislation would call for a specific exemption for the purpose of our employers, the people who have been found to foster a culture of fear, to watch. We have a problem with that.

I would like to move on to the part that has the most significance for people all across Canada, the venture to try to establish some sort of rights regime for passengers.

In the previous Parliament, the NDP introduced Bill C-459, which would have codified many of these measures and put them explicitly into an act. It was a far stronger effort than what we see in Bill C-49. The measures in Bill C-49 give the minister the power to make regulations.

Regulations can be well and good for certain measures. For certain legislation, we want the minister to have that leeway to change rights and so on. However, we again have to raise our concerns that if airline companies start lobbying the minister really hard on these, how are the regulations eventually going to turn out? Are the regulations going to start benefiting airline companies, or are they honestly going to be on the side of passengers? That is why we feel codifying these in the actual bill rather than leaving them to regulations would have been a far stronger measure.

My concerns are not unjustified with respect to Air Canada. I would like to remind members of when we were busy debating Bill C-10, which was the government's attempt to legislate outsourcing for Air Canada. It was an amendment to the Air Canada Public Participation Act. Air Canada definitely had the ear of the government during that time. It brought forward a bill that specifically benefited that company and left many workers out in the cold. It gave Air Canada the ability to outsource jobs if it so wished.

Half measures are not what we were expecting after this length of time. Two years have passed. We would have liked to have seen some greater efforts in many of these areas. We are disappointed that this bill is the final result.

Motions in amendment

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am speaking to Bill C-49 today. I am opposed to this bill because of a number of issues with it, but in particular I want to speak to section 14 of the bill.

Section 14 concerns the review of arrangements involving two or more transportation undertakings providing air services. In other words, section 14 involves joint ventures between two airlines, joint ventures that allow airlines to co-operate in terms of sharing routes, frequent flier programs, and revenue-sharing and cost-sharing.

This is not an insignificant section of the bill. This is a major change to competition law. Section 14 of Bill C-49 makes major changes to the Competition Act.

I want to take a step back and explain why I think this is so concerning. The Competition Bureau is a very important organization. It ensures fair competition in Canada. It ensures that Canadian consumers and Canadian companies operate in a marketplace where they can prosper, a marketplace where there is sufficient competition, and a marketplace that delivers lower prices and more choices for consumers and companies.

Canada has long had a strong legal tradition and strong framework legislation in the area of competition law. We introduced competition law before the United States did in the 19th century, and throughout the last 150 years we have continually strengthened that competition law in order to ensure that we do not see anti-competitive behaviours in the marketplace.

I remember in 2004 when the then-minority government of prime minister Paul Martin was in place. It introduced a bill that would modernize competition law with the introduction of administrative monetary penalties that would work in place of, and alongside of, Criminal Code penalties that have a much higher threshold of proof.

While that legislation did not pass, the subsequent Harper government introduced similar legislation that was eventually adopted, and administrative monetary penalties are now part of our competition law. Canada has long had a strong tradition of ensuring competitive marketplaces. We are also seen around the world as leaders in competition law enforcement and ensuring that companies cannot abuse their marketplace position.

It is with great concern that I read section 14 of this bill that is in front of us, because it would weaken the bureau. The bureau is an independent law enforcement agency. This bill would actually take power away from the Competition Bureau and the commissioner of competition, and give it to the Minister of Transport. Not only that, it would allow the Minister of Transport to ignore competition concerns and to approve airline joint ventures.

The reason why this is so very concerning is that we know that more competition and a more competitive marketplace leads to lower prices and more choice for Canadian consumers. If we look at the history of airline policy in this country, we have come a long way over the last 30 years.

Privatization and increased competition have given Canadians more choice and lower prices in the airline industry. We started with deregulation in the 1980s, we privatized Air Canada in 1988, we spun out of Transport Canada the airports across this country in 1992, we established independent airport authorities in the 1990s, and because of that, there have been literally tens of billions of dollars of investment in airports and in airlines in this country.

For example, in the early 1990s, some $50 million a year was being spent on airport improvements. Since airports were spun out of the Department of Transport in 1992, over $14 billion has been invested in Canadian airports. The same is true of Air Canada. It is a much better airline today than it was in the 1980s when it was heavily regulated and not subject to competition, and owned by the Government of Canada. Today it is a much better airline, and it is a better airline because it has been subject to competition.

However, the job is not yet done. It is clear through numerous studies that the Canadian travelling public is still paying far too high a price to get from A to B in this country. That is why section 14 of the bill is so very concerning. It is going to lead to less competition, increased prices, and less choice for the travelling public, which runs counter to the effort that we made over the last number of decades to increase competition and lower prices for Canadians.

I want to give an example to illustrate this point. In 2011, Air Canada wanted to enter into a joint venture with United Continental that would allow them to share many transborder routes between Canada and the United States, and Canada and other destinations. That joint venture was fully reviewed by the Competition Bureau and the bureau demanded that certain conditions be put on that joint venture. The bureau in its review concluded that 10 cross-border routes between Canada and the United States would be less competitive for Canadian consumers because Air Canada and United Continental would be subject a monopoly and nine other routes would be subject to less competition than currently is the case.

The bureau refused to approve the joint venture unless certain routes were exempted, so the consent agreement that was entered into between the parties and the Competition Bureau exempted 14 cross-border routes from this joint venture, ensuring that on those 14 cross-border routes there was sufficient competition for Canadian consumers. The bill in front of us today would allow the minister to override the bureau and to approve these joint ventures without any conditions to ensure sufficient competition.

If we take a step back from this and we ask ourselves why the government is doing this, it seems to me that one of the reasons is that it has become a bit of a political “scratch my back and I will scratch yours” game. The government pressured Air Canada to buy 75 C Series jets from Bombardier in order to help the government politically with the problem it had with Bombardier. Fearing that the company was entering a dangerous period of insolvency, the government put a lot of pressure on a private sector company to purchase these 75 C Series jets.

I suspect that in return two bills were introduced in Parliament. I think the government needs to come clean on whether or not there was a quid pro quo in this arrangement. Air Canada buys these jets and in return the government introduces two bills, Bill C-10, which lifted the requirement for Air Canada to have maintenance facilities in certain cities in this country, and Bill C-49, which has section 14 that would allow the Minister of Transport to approve joint ventures without any conditions to ensure sufficient competition.

This would be a real step back for competition law. It would weaken competition particularly when it comes to future joint ventures that airlines in this country may enter into. It would lead to higher prices for Canadian consumers and less choice. It is for that reason that I strongly believe that this section of the bill should be deleted and why I am opposed to the bill. I look forward to members' questions and comments.

Resuming debate

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the debate concerning motion No. 14 is not about having a problem with working until midnight each evening—except, obviously, on topics raised by the opposition. I agree with what the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons said in the House yesterday, that most of us are already working every day on a similar schedule.

In my previous career, I was already used to long hours. When I ran a global business, my European colleagues began calling me at 4 a.m., and my days would often stretch until midnight. This was necessary so I could meet with my employees and people in the plants and businesses in the Pacific region I was responsible for.

As the head of a North American refining and petrochemical company, I realized that maintaining customer relations and meeting deadlines to submit applications made for very long days.

The Liberal government said it wanted to make Parliament more family friendly in order to encourage women to get into politics. I support encouraging more women to get into politics, but I do not believe that many women would choose to work until midnight each evening, away from their kids.

Now, why did this government introduce such a motion, when theoretically it should oppose it?

As I have said, I am not opposed to working long hours. I said earlier today, and will say it again, Einstein was quoted as saying that the definition of insanity was repeating the same action hoping for a different result. The government has not accomplished a lot in the way of legislation. If we think about the 19 bills that have passed versus 52 in the same time frame when the Conservatives were in power, really not much has been accomplished. There is no prioritization of what is coming forward.

I want to take a moment to talk about what has already passed because it shows something important.

So far in Parliament the transparency for first nations has been removed with Bill C-1. Bill C-2 gave back to the middle class $932 a year in taxes and then Bill C-26 increased their CPP payments by $1,100 a year, with no benefit. Bill C-10 gave Air Canada a deal to get maintenance jobs out of Canada and escape a lawsuit. Bill C-14, medically assisted dying, was passed without protecting the rights of conscience. Bill C-17 addressed environmental items for Yukon. Bill C-18 was environmental change for Rouge Park in Toronto. Bill C-30 was a CETA deal that now has to be renegotiated with Brexit happening. Bill C-31 was the trade deal with Ukraine. The rest were all maintenance budget items that needed to be done. That is all we have accomplished in 18 months of the Liberal government's agenda. Everything else is lost in process, being amended in the Senate, and not coming forward.

What is the government going to achieve by making us sit every night until midnight, which, as I said, I am fully willing to do? I really do not think it is getting anywhere. Why is it not getting anywhere? Because it does not listen to the opposition's points of view.

The job of the opposition is to bring reasoned and intelligent arguments on why a government proposal is not good for Canada and to make helpful suggestions about what would make it better.

When bills are sent to committee, the committee's job is to make helpful suggestions and amendments that would make them something all Canadians could embrace. That is really what is happening. The government is not accepting amendments, not listening when the opposition talks, and again and again, when things go to the Senate, the Senate comes up with the same amendments and spends more time studying them, doing exactly the same thing that committees of the House are supposed to do. That is one problem.

Another problem is that there has to be trust when parties work together.

I am going to compare the antics that I see happening here with what I see in the business world. In the business world, people work together. People have to be able to trust one another when they make deals. They have to be able to follow up on things as they said they would.

From what I have seen, the opposition House leaders are trying to work with the government House leader but she is not keeping up her end of what she has agreed to. Every day I watch her stand in the House and misrepresent to Canadians that she just has a discussion paper, when really a motion has been rammed through PROC. I have seen her avoid answering questions that she is accountable to answer.

I would suggest that there has been a huge erosion of trust in the government House leader and sometimes that cannot be fixed in order to restore the ability to work together. The government should really consider changing up that position and coming back to a place where we can work together and trust that agreements that are made, amendments that are suggested, and motions that are brought forward are as agreed. That is really important.

There is another point that I would like to make that has not been discussed much here. I have listened to the debate on Motion No. 14 and I have heard a lot about the blame game. I hear from the Liberals that when Stephen Harper's government was in place, it did this bad thing or that bad thing, or whatever. Honestly, two-thirds of the Parliament are new. Some of us were not here in the previous Parliament. We have an opportunity to do things differently now. If we think something was previously done wrong, we have the opportunity to do it differently in the future.

When items come up in the business climate, not everything needs the same amount of time to be talked about. I have sat in the House and heard Liberal members stand up and say they support such and such a bill and I have heard Conservative members and NDP members stand up and say they do too, and then we talk about it for days.

This is not the way we should be spending our time. If the government had not squandered all of the time in that way, we would have more time and we would not have to sit late. In the same way, there are things that need to be discussed longer that cannot be rammed through, things such as the budget bill that has been combined with the infrastructure bank. When comments come forward, the government needs to lead. It needs to separate those things out so that the things that can be quickly passed get passed on. When I say passed on, I am saying that if we all agree on a bill at first reading and we do not need to change anything, then the legislation should be sent right away to the Senate. Why are we spending time doing second and third reading and committee and everything else? We need to be able to update some of the processes here.

I am not about just criticizing without providing recommendations for how I think we could make this better. Here are my recommendations, which I think the government could use to change some of the things that it is doing and which would result in getting legislation passed through in a better way.

When it comes to the rules of the House, I see an opportunity to modernize those rules but a change would need to honour the tradition of Parliament and have all-party consensus or at least the consensus of a majority of members to change things, because those things influence our democracy and they are important. Doing some of those things would, as the suggestions I have made about passing things we all agree on and everything else, clear the legislative agenda in a way that would move things forward more positively.

I also would reiterate that you have to have someone working with the opposition leaders who can be trusted, and I think that trust is broken.

The other point I would make is about amendments that are brought forward and are agreed to by the opposition members. It is not often that the NDP and the Conservatives play on the same team and sing from the same song sheet. That does not usually happen but lately it has happened a lot. When that happens, it should be a signal to government that this is an amendment that Canadians want to see.

The government needs to say what it is going to do and then it needs to own up to it. Some of the credibility loss that has happened has happened because the government said it was going to do something and then it did not. The government maintained it was going to be open and transparent and then facts have been hidden or things have not been well represented. The government said it was going to be accountable but then every day when we stand up and ask questions we get the shell game. It does not answer our questions, and this would not be acceptable in the business world.

These are some of the things that would help to get the legislative agenda flowing through. As a member of the opposition, I want to see the right things happen for Canada and I am willing to work with the government to see that happen.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

moved:

That the question of privilege regarding the free movement of Members of Parliament within the Parliamentary Precinct raised on Wednesday, March 22, 2017, be referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

Mr. Speaker, let me begin by saying that your ruling today is truly a testament to your position as Speaker, and to the Speakers who have gone before you. Truly, the role of the Speaker is one of the utmost principles in our parliamentary democracy, and I think today, in the long line of Speakers who have gone before, you have found the appropriate ruling.

After all, often the role of the Speaker is determined to be one of a referee, and we often hear that referred to in tour groups and among university lecturers. However, the role of the Speaker is so much more than that. The Speaker is truly the defender of the rights and privileges of this place.

I am reminded from time to time of the words of a great English Speaker, William Lenthall, who said with great conviction to the King in his place in his time, when met with King Charles I, the executive of the day:

...I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am....

Today the Speaker made such a ruling and stood up to the face of opposition from the government ministers.

Let me begin my remarks by saying that I will be splitting my time today with the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot.

It is in a way unfortunate that we have to have a redo of this debate. This debate was properly started last week when the Speaker did rightly find a prima facie case of privilege, and it is troubling in two manners: first, the nature of the incident itself, that two members of Parliament were prevented from undertaking their duties of voting in this House; and second, by the unfortunate actions that were undertaken by the government in preventing this matter from coming to a vote.

As the Speaker rightly found in his ruling, this is unprecedented. Never before in the history of this place has a matter of privilege been dealt with in such a way. Never before in this place has the government shut down and prevented all 338 members of this House from voting on a matter of the privileges of us as parliamentarians. Every other case of privilege has been dealt with one way or another through a vote, either in the affirmative or in the negative, but not in this case.

This is most unfortunate. It is unfortunate for so many reasons. If, as members in this House noted before, the government is allowed to proceed in this manner on this case, how many times going forward will votes on questions of privilege be prevented from coming to a vote in this House by the duly elected members of this House?

I want to state the great respect I have for this institution and for those who serve this institution. I want to state as well the respect I have, specifically, for the parliamentary protective service, in whom I have the utmost of confidence for defending us and keeping us safe as parliamentarians.

In my short time as a parliamentarian—I have only been elected for about a year and a half—I have always felt safe in the exercising of my duties here in this place, and indeed, another speaker in last week's debate, quoted from the back of our ID badges, and I think it is worthwhile to reread that into the record:

Under the law of parliamentary privilege, the bearer has free and open access at all times, without obstruction or interference to the precincts of the House of Parliament of which the bearer is a member.

In fact, the law of parliamentary privilege is enshrined constitutionally in section 18 of the Constitution Act, 1867, also more commonly known to us in its original title, the British North America Act, 1867.

Let us remember exactly what took place on budget day. Two members of Parliament, at least, were affected. We know of at least two. There could have been others as well. There was indication from the Speaker's original ruling that there were others potentially on the buses who were also denied access. However, at least two members, the members from Milton and Beauce, were unable to attend a vote in this House, in this place.

The outcome of that particular vote is not relevant. The fact is that they were prevented from doing their duty, the duty that they as elected members of this place are entrusted to do on behalf of their constituents. All of us have that duty to the constituents we are honoured and privileged to represent.

Let us imagine for just a moment how this could have played out differently. Imagine there had been a vote of confidence and members were prevented by one way or another from attending this place to vote. Certainly in this case there is a majority government and one or two members not exercising their vote may not seem like a significant matter. Let us think back into the not-so-distant past to May 2005. There was a budget vote, a confidence vote in this very House. The Paul Martin Liberals were on the ropes. It looked as if they could be defeated. A couple of lucky floor crossings and the support of an independent member of Parliament meant that it ended up in a tie vote. Mr. Speaker Milliken at the time was forced into the position of breaking that tie vote in the affirmative. One vote would have made the difference, in that case, of an election, the dissolution of Parliament, or the continuation of that government. It would have been one vote.

In fact, in this Parliament not too long ago on Bill C-10, on a Monday morning, or afternoon by the time we voted, we had a tie vote in this House on a piece of government legislation. One vote would have made the difference between that piece of legislation moving on to third reading and that piece of legislation being defeated in this place. The Speaker at the time was forced to once again break a tie. Interestingly, in a majority government, that does not happen very often, but it happened in that case. I would point out that it is somewhat ironic that the government is currently proposing changes, and one of the changes it has mentioned is perhaps sitting earlier in the morning, but if we use the example of Bill C-10, that vote was in the early afternoon, so I would be surprised how many members might be in this House at that time.

We are faced with the question now of where we go from here, where we move forward in the appropriate manner. As my motion clearly states, it is appropriate at this point that the matter be referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, as it is the appropriate location. I know there have been flimsy procedural efforts for the committee to self-direct to undertake its own study of privilege, but as we know, the Standing Orders clearly state that matters of privilege do not fall under the mandate of the procedure and House affairs committee, and it falls on the House to direct the appropriate committee to undertake a study of the privilege. After all, the rights and privileges of this House are a matter for this House to undertake.

I do feel a bit like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day; we are redoing the same battle again and again, the same debate that has been undertaken. I have been told I am better looking than Bill Murray. I am not so sure about that, but I will say this. On a matter as important as the privileges of this House, a procedurally flimsy effort by the government to shut down the debate is truly unfortunate. Two members were denied the right to vote and now, by the Liberals' efforts, the attempt was to deny 338 members the right to vote. That is truly unfortunate.

It is unfortunate that it is being done at the same time that the procedure and House affairs committee is undertaking a Standing Order change, a change that would be done unilaterally without the support of opposition parties. The government states that it wants to have a discussion on the matter. A discussion can only happen if both sides are listening and discussing. The privileges of this House are of the utmost importance to each and every member of this House. It is not a matter for the government to decide. Rather, it is a matter for this House to decide by way of a vote.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak to an issue that concerns one of the most important rights of members of the House of Commons, which is to have unfettered access to this place at any time, and particularly when there are votes happening.

A question of privilege has been raised. Members have said they were not able to make it to a vote because they were obstructed. The Speaker has said he does think there is a prima facie case. The appropriate thing to do, and what is typically done, is that it goes to the procedures and House affairs committee. My understanding is that, typically, the committee takes that matter up forthwith and makes a determination.

My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley is quite right to say that it is at committee that this matter should be properly studied, because the committee has the ability to call witnesses and to delve deeper into the details of the issue.

There is some contention as to whether or not it was the media bus that was responsible for the shuttle buses being delayed and therefore members not being able to make it to the House on time for a vote, or whether it was the Prime Minister's motorcade. The Speaker's ruling does not say one way or the other which one it was. That is why it would be good to find out.

The way to find out is to call on the people who were involved, in order to get an accurate representation of what happened. That way we would know. If it is something to do with the Prime Minister's motorcade, then maybe the procedures around what happens with respect to the Prime Minister's motorcade, and other vehicles on the Hill when the motorcade is present, could be modified to ensure it does not fetter members' access to the House of Commons. That is fully possible.

I have been on a bus that was sitting behind the Prime Minister's motorcade by Centre Block. I was only going back to my office at the Confederation building, but I was told by the driver that the rules are they are not allowed to pass the Prime Minister's motorcade. Maybe some bus drivers decide to do that anyway because they are trying to please members of the House, and we appreciate all their good work, but in that particular instance, I was told by that driver that he would not pass the Prime Minister's motorcade because he was under instructions not to do so.

Therefore, in my experience, there is an issue about how the Prime Minister's motorcade interacts with other vehicles on the Hill. If protocols around that are not handled correctly, there is the potential to fetter or obstruct the access of members to the Hill. I am sure all members, including government members, do not want that to be the case, so what we need to do is a detailed examination to make sure that the protocols around that are appropriate and do not get in the way of members getting to the House. The motion before us simply refers this to PROC to get that more detailed answer.

We have heard from members on the government side; well, one member actually. We always know when members of the government are not really comfortable with their own position because it is only the member for Winnipeg North who gets up on his feet. No one else is willing to speak to those issues. We kind of know when the government feels that perhaps it is not on the right side of the issue, because the only one with the gall to get up and speak to it is the member for Winnipeg North. That has been in evidence today.

He said a few things, and I just want to zero in on some of them, because I find them troubling in a couple of different ways. One thing he said was that the amendment to this motion, which simply says that PROC will treat this issue with priority, is not a very good amendment because PROC does that anyway. That is what he said in his speech. I find that passing strange because the Liberals' contention at PROC on another issue right now is that they want certain changes, including a prime minister's question period. They have said these are good reforms and we need to get them through so we can do these things. The funny thing is that we do not need to change the Standing Orders to do that. In fact, we saw that yesterday when the Prime Minister undertook to answer almost every question in question period, although not every question. There were no changes to the Standing Orders required in order to do that, and yet they say they want to change the Standing Orders. If changes to motions and rules are redundant simply because one can do it anyway, then they should not be asking for a change to the Standing Orders in order to do prime minister's questions.

I fear that the member, perhaps unintentionally, and I am being generous because we are in the House of Commons, is being inconsistent, and I would not deign to say disingenuous, when he makes that particular argument.

He also said that he had reservations about sending it to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs because of the quality of the debate so far in the House and he was concerned the debate in the PROC committee would be a waste of time. It is completely wrong for members in this place to prejudge the deliberations and decisions at committees.

If he wants to be an advocate in this place, as he sometimes says he is, for the independence of committees, then he has some nerve to suggest that we might consider not referring a matter that is totally appropriate to refer to a particular committee because he already has some prejudicial notions about what members at the committee might say or do during those deliberations, or what the committee might decide. That line of argument shows a serious disrespect for committees and it is important to not let that go unanswered.

I wanted to take some time in my remarks to address those comments made by the member for Winnipeg North. He often makes reference to his long parliamentary career, over 25 years, but if he had spent more time listening over those 25 years as opposed to talking, he would not have made the arguments he made earlier in this place. I really do think it is just wrong to make decisions about whether to refer something to committee based on speculation about what some members may or may not say at committee. When we spell it out like that, it is obvious that it is ridiculous and disrespectful to make decisions based on that kind of speculation.

That is what we want to do. We want to do what is the usual thing to do with a serious matter of privilege. I do not think one has to be a long-time parliamentarian to appreciate the problem with the idea of interfering with members' access to the chamber, particularly when there are votes. I am not saying that has been abused in this case. It was likely not intentional. One of the reasons for sending it to committee for a detailed analysis is for the committee to be able to speak to those involved and clear the air so that there are no worries or concerns that the blocking of members' access to the House was intentional.

That is what we want to do. We want to take this matter to committee, because if it does start that blocking members' access to the House of Commons is allowed, it is clear to see how a government that may not have the best of intentions—and I am not saying that is the case with the current government or governments of the past, but some hypothetical future government.

We cannot allow it to be acceptable that potentially, and we don't know, protocols around the Prime Minister's motorcade are allowed to interfere with members' access to the House, or whether it is protocols around the media bus, or whatever it is that got in the way of these particular members reporting on time for the vote, because let us face it. We have seen procedural shenanigans around here. If we allow shenanigans to interfere with members' right of access to the House of Commons, an unscrupulous government may start to see it as a legitimate procedural tactic as to where to put media buses or a prime minister's motorcade, because it is a close vote.

I will remind members on the other side of the House, as they may not know or have forgotten, that not all parliaments are majority parliaments. It is also not in all cases, even in majority governments, that the government wins the vote. In fact, I recall a vote held last spring on Bill C-10 that was a tie vote and the Speaker had to break the tie. It is only because the vote was on the report stage of that bill that it proceeded. That is how the Speaker is traditionally required to vote in order to continue debate. Had the vote been on third reading stage, that bill would have been defeated.

Imagine if we were debating this question of privilege with respect to that vote and not what we are discussing. We can imagine that tensions would be a lot higher. It is no less an offence to block members from one vote, even though it may be known that a majority is likely going to win the vote, than it is on a tie vote, but it is harder to have the conversation around a close vote, because tensions are that much higher.

Therefore, it is important that we have the discussion now and we not wait for it to be a monumental vote, because at that point the issues of substance and procedure will become so entangled that we will not be able to make an appropriate decision.

CANADA LABOUR CODE

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Hamilton Mountain.

I am very pleased to be speaking at third reading of Bill C-4. I wish I had had the opportunity to do it sooner, because this is a good example of legislation that ought to have passed through the House far more quickly than it has. It was a clear commitment of the government during the election campaign. There is multi-party support within the House to get it done. It has been reported recently, and it is quite true, that it has been a relatively light legislative agenda from the government. Here we have a piece of legislation that is not competing for time with other government bills, because there are not that many. It is almost a year into the government's mandate and we are still talking about repealing Bill C-377 and Bill C-525. With the exception of those members who belong to the party that brought those bills in, there is virtually a consensus here in the House. If there was a bill that was going to move quickly through Parliament, this would have been the bill. It is a bit of a mystery why it is we are still debating it almost a year out from the election when we should be passing it.

I know all the members in the chamber by now are quite familiar with what Bill C-4 does. It repeals two acts from the previous Parliament. One is Bill C-377, which was a kind of red tape bill for unions. It was based on the pretense that simply because union members get some money back on their taxes for the dues they claim, the government has the right to mandate that they make all of their expenses public to everyone. It was not being asked of non-profit groups, whose donors also receive money back. The government was not saying that because corporations get to write off expenses, which is money back from the government, their books should be made open. It was discriminatory in the sense that it really did just focus on unions, who happened to be, it is fair to say, an opponent of the previous government. Therefore, there was a sense that it was a politically motivated targeting.

There were many parties in the House that agreed the bill simply had to go. I am glad to see we are moving forward with that, although I believe we could move forward more quickly.

Bill C-525 from the last Parliament made it easier to decertify unions, and therefore, made it harder to have a higher rate of unionization within the federal workforce. We know from many studies that in the lead-up to secret ballot voting it did that in two ways. It raised the threshold of members in a workplace who would have to consent to have a secret ballot vote in order to certify and it took away the option to certify through a card check. Card check means members in a workplace sign a card affirming they would like to be represented by a union and which union they would like to represent them. If a certain threshold of workers sign cards, that obviates the need to go to a secret ballot vote because a majority, whatever that majority happens to be, in this case it was 50% plus 1%, have indicated their support for the idea of having a union in the workplace.

We know through a number of studies and research into this that in the lead-up to secret ballot votes there are often instances of intimidation by employers of their employees. That can lead to a change in the outcome of the vote. In fact, success with those secret ballot votes is often inversely correlated with the length of time between announcing the intention to vote and the vote itself. The longer the period between the stated intention of having a vote to certify and the vote itself, the less likely that vote is to be successful. We know that is often because it gives the employer more time to use certain kinds of intimidation tactics on their employees to make them afraid of certifying.

That is the package we are talking about getting rid of.

I have already spoken a bit about how I think it would have been better if we had been able to pass Bill C-4 earlier in the term. I am thinking of a few other related labour-type issues and legislation that we have been dealing with in the House. I am trying to learn a lesson about the new government and what it means for something to be a priority of the government, because if anything was a priority, if we look at election commitments, this was a very clear commitment. It was shouted from the rooftops by the Liberals during the election. A major part of their strategy for doing outreach within the labour world was that they were going to get this done.

This should be a priority. Why it is not done I cannot fathom. Some may say on the other side of the House that it is because Conservatives want to talk out the bill, but Conservatives were not in favour of Bill C-10. We were not in favour of Bill C-10. I believe my colleagues from the Bloc and the Green Party were not in favour of Bill C-10. Nobody else in the House except members of the government were in favour of Bill C-10, an act that has made it easier to export aerospace maintenance jobs out of Canada to other shores, even though that was not an election commitment, even though that came out of left field, and in an important sense was not therefore a priority of government, certainly not one of stated ones. I have not seen that on the list of any priorities of the Liberals, to make it harder to employ Canadian aerospace maintenance workers. That does not appear on any document that I have seen. If it does appear somewhere, I would sure like to see it. Maybe we could have that tabled.

That was not a priority of government and that is signed, sealed, and delivered for the executives of Air Canada. That is done. This was a priority for Canadian workers, for labour activists, and a stated priority of the Liberal government, and here we are still talking about it when the ship for Bill C-10, which may be mixing metaphors, has long since sailed. I find that one hard to wrap my head around.

I think about another labour issue that has been before the House, Bill C-7, which sets a framework for RCMP members to bargain collectively. That had a Supreme Court imposed deadline. In fact, I think it is fair to say with hindsight that the deadline was used as an excuse to get that legislation through. We were told that maybe there were things that were not great about the bill, but it had to get passed by May 16 or the sky was going to fall and we were not going to be able to proceed in an orderly fashion with the certification of the union for RCMP members. That is what we were told. May 16 has long since gone by and that bill went to the Senate where amendments were made, but we have been back now for two weeks and I do not see when we are going to start talking about Bill C-7. If the government has a plan to bring that forward, I would sure like to know and I know there are RCMP members across the country who would like to know it is going to be brought forward.

There we have it again. Another priority of the government and it is sitting on the books, when legislative favours for Air Canada executives are what is really being rammed through and that is where the real priority of the Liberals has been. It is to get those things done that they never talked about, while things that have been on the books for a while and stated priorities of the government continue to languish. If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that it is not very good to be on the priority list of the government because it will launch consultations. They are not doing consultations on Bill C-4. They do not need to. That issue has been debated plenty in Canada and part of the decision that was made on October 19, 2015, was to reject that approach to labour legislation, but here we are. The same laws are on the books.

Part of what some people wanted and certainly RCMP members imagined was that when we had a government that thought about labour issues differently, it would be good for them because they would get an appropriate bargaining framework that they did not trust the Conservatives to deliver on. Yet the legislation that the Liberals decided to move forward with was almost a carbon copy of some of the worst aspects of the previous Conservative bill. Here we are. It is sitting on the books. I will say one last time in case anyone missed it, Bill C-10, which was not a promise of the government, which it did not consult thoroughly on, has passed. Government members talk about not moving forward with anti-scab because we do not have a robust consultation process. There was no robust consultation process for Bill C-10 and the sell-out of Canadian aerospace workers, so where was the ethos of consultation on that one?

The lesson learned is, God forbid something is named a government priority. It is far better to simply be a friend. Then the Liberals will get it done. If it is a stated priority for election purposes, the sooner the bill passes the sooner they have to stop talking about it, which means the sooner they have to stop reaping whatever political benefits caused them to make the commitment in the first place. That is disappointing. I hope we can end this debate, get this passed, and move on to some of the other things they said are priorities. Some of them are good priorities. It would be nice to do something about them rather than nothing.

Economic Action Plan 2015 Act, No. 1

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to talk today about this important issue. Bill C-5 is one step on a long road to recovery for Canadian public service workers, and more generally, for the rights of all Canadian workers.

The previous government's concerted assault on the rights of Canada's public service workers, on the value of the important services they provided, and by extension, on the rights of every hard-working Canadian have really negatively impacted our ability to attract new talent to the public sector and has seriously deteriorated the services the Canadian government is able to deliver to all Canadians. The result is costly. It is costly to the economy, to the Canadian way of life, and to the well-being of public servants, plus it creates gaping holes in our social fabric, which sadly means that particular segments of the Canadian population are left behind or are underserved.

The previous government's Bill C-4 showed little regard for basic business principles, willful ignorance of common and elementary knowledge about sickness in workplaces, and zero concern for the well-being of other people. In this day and age, there is no good reason to demand that a person go to work sick.

The previous government's trampling of workers' rights was shortsighted and unwarranted and has left a negative impact on the public sector and the Canadian way of life. Repealing the bill is obviously the right thing to do, but we can do better.

My NDP colleagues and I ask the current government to continue to stand up for workers' rights and to immediately repeal the previous government's Bill C-4, which interferes with free collective bargaining, infringes upon workers' rights to a safe work environment, and restricts the right to strike. The government should move immediately to repeal each section of this bill that undermines the constitutional rights of public service employees.

Under the previous government, we witnessed a major dismantling of important public sector departments. This made many Canadians uncomfortable, so uncomfortable, in fact, that some even wrote songs about it, which is partly why we have a new party in power today.

Many of these public sector departments provide the information, research, and analysis necessary for a government to make informed decisions. Being informed when making any decision is a key factor in making good decisions, whether that decision conforms to preconceived ideas or not.

Dr. Peter Wells, a former public servant and environmental scientist, said in an interview with the National Observer that the previous government was quite “simply anti-science, anti-evidence, and anti-informed policy and decision-making.... More than 2,000 positions and people were lost, many in my field [of environmental science], resulting in a loss of a generation of skills, knowledge, and capacity that were there to serve the public”.

“There to serve the public” is the important part here. It is there to serve the public good, not the good of a single political party or the agenda of a small group of ideologues. The public service is essential to a functioning democracy. They ensure that we live under the best conditions with the best resources and the best information available anywhere in the world. The health of our public sector plays a crucial role in whether we lead the world or fall behind. The public sector is essential to every Canadian's well-being and safety. In short, the public sector deserves respect, and public sector employees should be treated with respect.

Canadians want a Canada that trusts its public servants, because frankly, our public service workers are not the enemy. Canadians trust their public servants to show up to work every day and to diligently serve Canadians in what are often highly challenging and demanding situations. Canadians also understand that these same public servants should not show up to work sick. Passing on illnesses to co-workers and taking longer to get better only reduces productivity.

Trust is key in any healthy relationship. The Government of Canada is not a babysitter and should not babysit the people it is elected to serve. That is not the role of government. A government should trust the people who elected them, because unless we have forgotten, many of these people are our neighbours. Despite our many differences, we must respect our neighbours' right to freedom of speech, to health and well-being, and to a safe workplace. We must respect our neighbours' right to make their own decisions, to learn, and to have the space and resources to grow, because every single Canadian benefits when each of us has the opportunity to prove our potential.

Governments should provide leadership and vision, not micromanage public servants and certainly not abolish rights that will endanger the safety and well-being of public servants and ultimately the people they serve.

Moreover, our government should be working to build, not destroy. A government should protect and not harm. A government should not steal rights but respect them and provide opportunities for exercising those rights. That same government should also trust public sector workers to carry out the important work necessary to maintain the daily operations of the Canadian government.

Every day, thousands of our neighbours go to work to ensure that our food and borders are safe, that our pension cheques are delivered, and that the best of Canada is represented abroad. All of these workers make us proud, and our government should reflect that.

With any system, there is potential for abuse of that system by its users. There is always someone who will try to manipulate situations to their own perceived advantage, often at a cost to everyone else. That can be said of many systems. It can be said of governments, government services, and even representatives of governments themselves. However, like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, the previous Bill C-4 of the previous government declares everyone guilty until proven innocent, and, in the process, smashes the entire structure to pieces so that little usable remains.

Moreover, a parliamentary budget officer report from July 2014, requested by the former member for Ottawa Centre, shows that the previous president of the Treasury Board and the justification for this poorly thought-out bill misrepresented the level of sick leave taken by civil servants. It clearly shows that the use of sick leave in the federal civil service imposes no significant cost on the government or taxpayers.

The PBO report states:

the incremental cost of paid sick leave was not fiscally material and did not represent material costs for departments in the [core public administration].

That means that most employees who call in sick are not replaced, resulting in no incremental cost for departments.

Likewise, and this is important, the PBO also confirmed that the use of sick leave by public servants is in line with the public sector. However, creating a problem where none exists to advance an ideology was the previous government's MO.

The previous government's Bill C-4 does absolutely nothing positive for Canada or Canadians and has paved the way for unenlightened ways of forcing Canadian public servants to go to work sick. Likewise, it sets a precedent that negatively impacts the whole of the Canadian working population.

Organized labour, like any professional association, is designed to look out for the well-being of its members. That is a simple fact. Every similar organization, whether it is a professional association, a chamber of commerce, or a taxpayers federation, does the same. Even pro athletes have their unions. In fact, that is the reason they organize. It to present strength through co-operation, to protect one another's rights, and to fight for more rights.

Organized labour, like other professional organizations, has provided leadership in our society. Its members have endured hardship and even ridicule while standing up for better working conditions. Their hard-won gains have benefited all Canadians, and many of these gains are taken for granted by many of us today: weekends, overtime pay, vacation pay, parental leave, health and safety regulations, and even sick days.

Creating a standard for all Canadian workers, unionized or not, to be treated with respect has led to all of us having the basic rights of association and freedom of speech and the right to a workplace that is safe. As small as it might seem, organized labour also helped set a precedent that if one is sick, one can stay home and not lose a day's pay or one's job. Despite what the previous government thought, this makes great business sense, and it has become a standard across the country and across sectors.

Today, these benefits are what helps an organization, private or public, attract top talent. It is also what helps keep that talent because measures such as sick leave ensure a modicum of decency between employer and employee, positively influence staffing efficiencies and stability, and express a confident statement regarding the well-being and health of an organization's or business's workforce. Given all the benefits that a happy, healthy workforce brings, it did seem strange that the federal government as an employer chose not to, or did not want to be a leader.

For example, Shift Development, a forward-thinking development company in my riding, pays a living wage to all its workers. Its CEO, Curtis Olson, says he pays all his employees a living wage rather than the minimum wage because he cannot afford not to. He said, “For me, as a business owner, the cost of employee turnover is a huge cost”. Mr. Olson knows the value of and relationship between high employee morale, health and stability, and increased returns from productivity, efficiency, and success. He said, “If I take care of my employees and help meet their financial and lifestyle needs, they’ll take care of the company and the growth of the company”. The Canadian government should learn from our business leaders' successes and start valuing and trusting their employees because without them the government cannot deliver a single service to Canadians.

The previous government's Bill C-4 was unenlightened and primitive. It pushed labour relations and standards back decades and set precedents that were regressive and reached far beyond the confines of the public service sector. It is incomprehensible to many Canadians why the previous government would want to erase rights that took decades and in some cases many generations to earn, rights the Conservatives wiped out in massive undemocratic omnibus swaths and a sweeping ideological mugging of Canadian rights and freedoms. These transgressions were made without consideration for the consequences for the Canadian working person, the economy, or the future Canadian workforce, our children.

Today, we are debating a return of only one of those rights. In the coming days, months, and years no doubt a great deal of time and energy will be lost to rebuilding what was destroyed by the previous government. Thanks to that government, we must move backward in order to move forward. Instead of debating a national living wage, which would increase the health and well-being of our local communities and economies, the previous government left us in the sorry state of debating the reinstatement of sick leave to public servants. If news reports about the current negotiations are accurate, the Liberal government has not lived up to all of its election promises about respecting the public service. It is all very good to promise to negotiate fairly and to bring a renewed respect to its dealings with public service workers, but if they are serving up some of the same offers as the previous government, it is not real change.

I urge the government to keep its promises and not break faith with the public service. It is my hope that the new boss is not the same as the old boss. Let us work to fix what is broken, including a pay system that has left thousands of workers unpaid or underpaid, the full effects of which are not yet to be seen. Let us get this bill passed now and move on to creating and implementing things such as a national housing strategy, which would save Canadians billions of dollars in health care and correctional services costs. Let us work on pressing issues such as quality affordable childcare, improving access to health care, and tackling climate change. Let us focus on improving the lives of families and seniors, and creating brighter futures for our young people. I know for a fact my riding would benefit from discussion on all of these issues, and I am sure my riding is not the only one in the country.

As such, while I support Bill C-5, more needs to be done to restore the numerous and hard-earned rights of Canadian workers, especially those in the public sector.

I urge the government to commit to repealing all the regressive changes made to labour law in the former government's Bill C-4. The previous government's Bill C-4 undermined the constitutional rights of federal public service employees to collective bargaining, including the right to strike. It also offered government negotiators an unfair advantage at the bargaining table. Unions, of course, fought against the changes throughout those legislative processes.

Happily, with collective bargaining about to resume in a new process for several tables of large unions, the government has the opportunity to make a gesture of good faith by committing to repeal provisions of the previous government's Bill C-4 affecting collective bargaining. That would be a start, because there are some seriously questionable aspects of that bill.

In fact, the Public Service Alliance of Canada asked the court to immediately declare that division 20 of Bill C-59, which is part of Bill C-4 of the previous government, is in violation of its members' charter rights because it denied the right of employees to good-faith bargaining by giving the employer the unilateral authority to establish all terms and conditions relating to sick leave, including establishing a short-term disability program, and modifying the existing long-term disability program; it allowed the Treasury Board to unilaterally nullify the terms and conditions in existing collective agreements; and it gave the employer the authority to override many of the provisions of the Public Service Labour Relations Act.

In short, the previous government's Bill C-4 gave the government unbridled authority to designate essential positions. It eliminated the public sector compensation analysis and research functions that had previously allowed the parties at the bargaining table to base wage offers and demands on sound evidence and facts.

The previous Bill C-4 also changed the economic factors that could be considered by a public interest commission or an arbitration board, which placed the employer's interests ahead of its employees and tipped the scales, shamelessly, in the employer's favour.

The NDP has stood with the public service workers and the public sector unions every step of the way, while right after right was stolen from them by the previous government. During and after the last campaign, the NDP proposed a comprehensive suite of reforms that would help ensure that the relationship between public service employees and government is responsible, reliable, and respectful, now and into the future. These measures include protecting whistleblowers, empowering the integrity commissioner, introducing a code of conduct for ministerial staff, and reining in the growing use of temporary work agencies at the expense of permanent jobs. We remain committed to taking these important steps forward.

However, beyond changing specific policies, what is really needed is a change of attitude. Our public service workers have been neglected, undermined, and abused by brutal cuts and restrictive legislation, under both Liberal and Conservative governments and administrations. It is time we revisit our thinking.

What do any of us know about what is possible until we change the way we have been thinking and try a new road, a road that respects the independence of public servants, that respects the important work they do, and that shows that respect by honestly and fairly coming to the bargaining table? The current government must commit to restoring capacity in the public service so that essential services for Canadians can be delivered.

The Liberal government has said it is a friend of labour, both during the election and in government, but sometimes its words and actions do not line up. Its exclusion of such important issues as staffing, deployment, harassment, and discipline from the collective bargaining process for the RCMP staff is one such disappointment.

Another is Bill C-10, which made the layoffs of 2,600 Air Canada and Aveos workers permanent by allowing Air Canada to ship aircraft maintenance jobs out of the country. The Air Canada Public Participation Act required the air carrier to keep heavy maintenance jobs in Montreal, Mississauga, and Winnipeg. In a unanimous ruling, the Quebec Court of Appeal recognized these obligations. However, instead of respecting the court's ruling, the present government decided to side with Air Canada, at the expense of workers.

I hope the government will stop saying one thing and doing another. I believe it is time it makes good on many election promises. I urge the government to make a commitment to repeal the previous government's Bill C-4.

Aerospace Industry

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Madam Speaker, Bill C-10 is a complete sellout of the aerospace industry in Manitoba. However, the Liberals just seem to be shrugging off the damage it is doing. They are even ignoring the new Premier of Manitoba, and all of those people in Manitoba whose jobs are going to be lost.

My question is: Will even one Liberal member of Parliament, there are seven of them, stand up and speak on behalf of the aerospace industry and those important jobs in our province?

Opposition Motion—Internal trade

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to the motion moved by my colleague, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. This motion has been affectionately dubbed “free the beer”.

As a new member of Parliament, I must say that it is truly motivating to listen to an experienced parliamentarian like the member for Abbotsford.

This member just shared his vast experience as a minister in the previous government. His words were very inspiring, as was his belief in the importance of eliminating trade barriers.

He is an inspiration to us, and he should also serve as an inspiration to the new government, which should be taking advantage of the experience this member gained by negotiating numerous free trade agreements with other countries. These negotiations were successfully carried out by our colleague from Abbotsford, and I applaud him for that. By way of tribute, I would say:

He was fast and efficient.

I will admit that using beer as the foundation of a motion on the liberalization of internal trade is a little unexpected.

However, for the benefit of those who have been tuning in since the start of the day and who have heard about the Comeau case, but who do not really know what we are talking about right now in the House, I would like to recap because I think it can be useful to look at why the motion came to be and explain how we got to where we are.

This is about a citizen of New Brunswick, Gérard Comeau, and his fight for justice, which highlighted how difficult it is for Canadians to trade freely within our country's borders. Mr. Comeau singlehandedly broke down the barriers to internal trade.

I found a good summary of Mr. Comeau's story in an editorial. The title of the publication made me smile: it is called “Bières et plaisirs”, or “Beer and other pleasures”.

Even so, it is a very serious editorial. It recounts Mr. Comeau's story, which I will now share with the House of Commons and all of the Canadians who are tuned in.

Gérard Comeau was arrested in October 2012 in possession of 14 cases of beer and three bottles of liquor. He had just done some shopping on the Quebec side of the border. In October 2012, Gérard Comeau committed an illegal act: purchasing a quantity of alcohol over the authorized limit in another province, not in a licensed establishment.

According to the Government of New Brunswick and other Canadian governments, alcohol is under provincial jurisdiction.

Here is more from the editorial in “Bières et plaisirs”:

All residents of New Brunswick buy their alcohol in provincially owned licensed establishments: outlets of the New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, also known as the liquor commission.

That is the law as enacted in 1928, a year after the commission was created. Laws governing the sale of alcohol were enacted around that time across Canada. The goal was to protect each province's market....Many New Brunswickers prefer to buy their alcohol in Quebec, where prices are much lower. The Province of New Brunswick sometimes applies high mark-ups to wine, beer, and spirits sold in its stores.

The article goes on to say:

After receiving a guilty verdict, Gérard Comeau decided to take his case to the New Brunswick provincial court. His argument was simple: the Fathers of Confederation passed a law that stipulates that the provinces of Canada must allow interprovincial free trade, a law that was written long before all of Canada's post-prohibition laws, and one that remains in effect all across Canada....The court found in favour of Gérard Comeau. The judge ruled that the provincial law was unconstitutional. Gérard Comeau was found not guilty.

Our motion today is very clear. It recognizes one of the key elements of the vision of Canada's founding fathers:

That the House: (a) recognize that it is a constitutional right for Canadians to trade with Canadians; (b) re-affirm that the Fathers of Confederation expressed this constitutional right in Section 121 of the Constitution Act, 1867 which reads: “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces”...

The wording is very clear.

I think that the article in Bières et plaisirs is a good summary of the Comeau case, but also many other cases involving countless Canadians who travel across our country and would like to take advantage of a free market here at home. It took a New Brunswick man standing up for his rights to remind us, the elected representatives of this great country, that we have an important role to play to preserve the spirit of our Constitution.

We are talking about beer here, but the Fathers of Confederation were clear:

121. All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.

It is simple. I am sure that most Canadians did not even know that some provinces put up so many barriers that hinder interprovincial trade. I can understand them, because we form a single great country made up of extremely dynamic provinces and territories. We all want to improve the economy of our regions, and it is rather amazing to realize here that Canadians do not always have the right to do business with one another as they would like.

The Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said this morning in the House that he prefers that any disputes be settled by negotiations between the provinces. Despite years of negotiations, it seems that the agreement the minister would like to negotiate is not possible. On this side of the House, we believe that this government does not have the leadership required to arrive at such an agreement. It is all well and good to say that the government wants to promote trade and reach an agreement with the provinces. However, at the first opportunity this government does the opposite.

Take the example of Bill C-10, which was supposed to meet Quebec's and Manitoba's expectations. By invoking closure, the government rammed through a bill that forces the legal action against Air Canada to be dropped. Lo and behold, two provinces asked us not to act too quickly because they cannot conclude their agreement as negotiated if the threat of court action, which is on their side, disappears. The government ignored the provinces' requests.

Another example is Bill C-14. The Quebec Minister of Health said that Bill C-14 was inadequate. Even so, the Liberals went ahead and imposed a gag order so that parliamentarians could not express their views.

That does not bode well for the federal-provincial negotiations under this government. Since it took office, the Liberal government has shown leadership and interest in only two things: running an ever-growing deficit and increasing the tax burden on small businesses. The Liberals have done a good job on those things.

Today, the Liberal government has a unique opportunity to do something tangible to help small businesses and, once again, it is turning its back on them by relying on a negotiation process with an unknown timeline. We are skeptical about the results of that. The second part of my colleague's motion is clear. It states:

[That the House:] (c) recognize that the recent Comeau decision in New Brunswick creates a unique opportunity to seek constitutional clarity on Section 121 from the Supreme Court of Canada; and that therefore, the House call on the government to refer the Comeau decision and its evidence to the Supreme Court for constitutional clarification of Section 121.

That would finally make it possible to set clear guidelines for trade between the provinces.

Creating more free trade in Canada is not a partisan issue. The issue here is what is fair. Canadian businesses do not want their government to tell them with whom they can and cannot do business. Businesses should be able to sell their products across Canada, and consumers should have more choices on the market.

In my member's statement today, I spoke about young entrepreneurs in Quebec. Three thousand young entrepreneurs in Quebec will make deals and work hard to sell their products and share their passions. Three thousand of them will open their own small business. Imagine telling them that they cannot do business with their neighbour because they are not on the same street. They are in the same city, same province, and even same country. These are the kinds of barriers we want to eliminate. We want to eliminate them to enable small and medium-sized businesses to do business, create wealth, and drive our economy.

I will wrap up quickly and say that this was the will of the Fathers of Confederation. The government has a unique opportunity to take action. I hope it will seize this opportunity to do away with empty rhetoric and to finally take real action for small businesses in Canada. For all these reasons, I urge the government to join me in supporting this motion to free the beer.

Aerospace Industry

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the agreement has not been signed. Bill C-10 was introduced this week at second reading in the Senate on behalf of the Liberal government by independent senator André Pratte, who was just appointed by the Prime Minister.

The government deliberately misled the senator. The senator said in the red chamber that the Government of Manitoba had an agreement with Air Canada, which justified the quick passage of Bill C-10. The Minister of Transport's stubbornness is jeopardizing hundreds of jobs in Manitoba and Quebec.

Out of respect for all parliamentarians and all senators, when will the Minister of Transport open his eyes, do the right thing, and acknowledge that he was wrong with Bill C-10?

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, it is not only with first nations in Manitoba, but the aerospace industry in Manitoba is also being ignored.

The provincial legislature has passed a motion opposing the Liberals' Bill C-10, including Liberals from the province. Premier Pallister has raised their concerns about losing jobs in this important industry directly with the Prime Minister. These concerns have been completely ignored.

Why has not even one of the seven Liberal MPs from Manitoba stood up for the aerospace industry in our province?

Air Canada

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today Manitoba is joining Quebec and indeed thousands of Canadians in condemning the government's Bill C-10, which is a get out of jail free card for Air Canada not obeying the law.

It is interesting that the recent Liberal nominee to the Senate, André Pratte, said something yesterday that is of a great deal of concern to us. It would appear that there is a deal that Air Canada is threatening if it does not get what it wants.

We want to know, on behalf of those workers, what is in the secret deal with Air Canada, why is Senator Pratte saying that if we do not remove the threat of lawsuits, the deal will fall—

Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1

[François-Philippe Champagne, Liberal, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Bécancour—Nicolet—Saurel. I had plenty of opportunities to cross swords with him during the election campaign, and I have a great deal of respect for him. He is the dean of the House of Commons, so obviously, we always pay close attention when he speaks.

To answer his question, I must say that I am proud to be here on this side of the House and working with my Liberal caucus colleagues to advance issues affecting Quebec and promote the province's economic interests.

The member is well aware that in the last budget, we invested $30 million to help the pyrrhotite victims in Trois-Rivières, which is adjacent to his riding. That is a regional issue that also affects him. He knows that.

We also invested $500 million in high-speed Internet, which will help regions of Quebec like mine and his, which really need that service.

On the more substantive part of his question, I am proud to support the bill because we made important choices both in the budget and with regard to Bill C-10 on deregulation. This legislation affecting Air Canada will also create jobs in Quebec.

In closing, with regard to employment insurance and the fact that wait times have been reduced from two weeks to one week, I can say that from the discussions I have had with my constituents and his, people are happy that for once, they have a government that is thinking about middle-class workers and working for them.

[Louis Plamondon, Bloc, Bécancour—Nicolet—Saurel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my learned colleague how he feels, as a member of Parliament from Quebec, about remaining silent on certain economic files that are very important to Quebec, such as Bill C-10. The government is about to tell Aveos employees, 1,800 of whom are in Quebec, that they will be losing their jobs, even though the Prime Minister guaranteed that this law would require that all work done on Air Canada aircraft be carried out in Quebec, Ontario, and Winnipeg.

How does he feel, as a member from Quebec, about employment insurance, for example, given that all Quebec regions were excluded from the special program? How does he feel about the fact that the automotive industry received $1 billion and Bombardier is not getting a penny?

Is their only duty to serve the party and not to serve the interests of Quebec?

Criminal Code

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, back in 2015, when this came out, a panel was set up by the former justice minister. However, I look at the work we have done today, and we can talk about these timelines. Let us be honest, this week we did Bill C-2, Bill C-6, Bill C-10, and Bill C-11. We had all of these things shifted off of the Order Paper.

What has happened here is this. Although it is a very important bill, unfortunately, when it came to the agenda of what we were supposed to be discussing and what we were discussing, a lot of political games were being played at that time. This took away the rights of the opposition members to debate this. We can talk about that. However, let us be honest about what happened this week. We lost hours of crucial debate because of the actions of the government.

Air Transportation

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to note that in both the debate about Bill C-10 and the decision by the minister to not approve the lengthening of the runway, members have continually referred back to Bombardier. I appreciate the member's affinity for the Bombardier C Series aircraft. Like her, I look forward to the aircraft entering into service with Swiss airlines later in the year and seeing first-hand how the aircraft operates.

If the member truly does believe that overwhelming local opposition exists to the future expansion of this airport, why will she and her government not let the process continue and let Toronto City Council have a vote on it? Is she afraid of Toronto City Council making a decision that the member for Spadina—Fort York will not agree with?

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I would posit that there is not a single airport in Canada that is more tightly or effectively regulated by its local government than the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.

A strict noise limit is in place. A strict number of landing slots is available. A strict morning and evening curfew is in place. Nav Canada ensures that more than 90% of all approaches to the airport are over Lake Ontario. Contrast this to Pearson airport or Montreal airport at Dorval, where many of the final approaches are over densely populated areas, and large aircraft can land 24 hours a day.

Quite frankly, with his tweet ending any possible expansion of the Billy Bishop airport, the minister succumbed to the very worst type of not in my backyard politics. Of course there are always community concerns with any change to an airport's profile, but it is government's role to put in place the conditions for this type of initiative to succeed through stringent regulation or investment, rather than to quash it.

Unfortunately, the Liberals have opted to be the party of no rather than the party of how. I would also like to remind everyone that the federal government is just one of three signatories to the tripartite agreement. While it does have veto power, I would suggest that it has the least skin in the game when it comes to the future of the Billy Bishop airport.

The other two signatories of the agreement, the City of Toronto and the airport's operator, PortsToronto, have far more interest in the future of this airport.

If the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister is so sure that Toronto City Council would never allow the expansion of the airport, why did he have to order the Minister of Transport to pre-empt its process? Unfortunately, this Billy Bishop tweet was merely foreshadowing more of the Liberals' “it is my way or the highway” behaviour.

With Bill C-10, we have once again seen the federal government act with great haste to pass legislation, while the Government of Quebec and the Government of Manitoba are telling Parliament to put the brakes on this legislation.

When it comes to acting in the best interests of their constituents, I am saddened that the entire Liberal GTA caucus has chosen to remain silent and stand behind the will of a vocal few.

We should not be surprised. With the member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley voting against Bill C-10 at second reading because he truly believed it was not in the best interests of his constituents, voting in support of it at report stage, and then indicating that he would vote against it at third reading, we know who controls the party behind the scenes.

That member will vote for what he believes is in the best interests of his constituents only when he can be assured that he will be outvoted by a large majority, and his vote has become of negligible consequence. Some good that will do.

My question is very simple. Will the federal government withdraw its veto on the future of the Billy Bishop airport and allow Toronto City Council to have a free vote on the future of its island airport?

Income Tax Act

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Mount Royal, who, like me, spoke in French during Monday's debate on Bill C-10. I wanted to make that correction since the hon. member for Outremont misinformed the House about that on Tuesday. In fact, I speak French more than he does in the House. He would contribute more to the quality of the debates in the House if he checked the facts before making unfounded accusations.

I rise to speak to one of our key election promises: the 7% tax cut for the middle class, whose tax rate will go from 22% to 20.5%; the tax increase for wealthier Canadians from 29% to 33%; and the reduction in the TFSA annual contribution limit from $10,000 to $5,500.

I commend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance and my riding neighbour, the hon. member for Saint-Maurice—Champlain, on his maiden speech. Our ridings meet along a provincial gravel road, Parent Road, where government signs strongly advise the use of CB radios. This border is located more than 300 kilometres north of Montreal, not far from the community of Parent.

Bill C-2 is important to the growth of the middle class. It includes crucial changes to Canada's tax system. The legislative summary of the bill is quite clear:

This enactment amends the Income Tax Act to reduce the second personal income tax rate from 22% to 20.5% and to introduce a new personal marginal tax rate of 33% for taxable income in excess of $200,000. It also amends other provisions of that Act to reflect the new 33% rate. In addition, it amends that Act to reduce the annual contribution limit for tax-free savings accounts from $10,000 to its previous level with indexation ($5,500 for 2016) starting January 1, 2016.

These changes will benefit Canadians, so naturally, they are looking forward to them.

I also want to congratulate my colleague from Louis-Hébert on his speech. I rose to reply to him a couple of times, but better members were recognized before me. The life of an MP is complicated.

I would like to point out that the member for Louis-Hébert alluded to the fact that budget 2016 provides for a deficit. He also said that his government was responsible for all of the good things that came out of the last term of office. He is very happy to take credit for all of the positive results, while saying that his team had nothing to do with anything that went wrong.

Investments in the middle class and economic growth for ordinary Canadians are very important to me, the government, and the millions of Canadians who will benefit.

The member for Louis-Hébert also said that the Conservatives left the House clean. That is not completely true. The Conservatives sold the house to pay off the mortgage. They waved the cheque from the sale in the air for all to see before giving it back to the bank to pay the mortgage. The house was not really clean. It was gone. There are now deficits in the middle class, in infrastructure, and in all levels of government.

My colleague from Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques is a bit more reasonable. He presented fact-based arguments about our policies. I really enjoyed listening to his speech. I do not agree with him when he says that these tax cuts do not help the middle class. I agree with my colleague from Mount Royal, who asked why the New Democrats did not promise to cut taxes in their platform but did promise to balance the budget.

With the exception of the members of the former government, who still think that they left a massive surplus, even though that is not quite true, I think it is clear to all of us that it would only be possible to balance the budget this year if we used extreme measures, such as austerity, which is a very unpopular policy in any country.

In short, I am not worried about these deficits because they are investments. That is the case with Bill C-2. I would like to give my colleague from Louis-Hébert a little bit of background on deficits. Almost 100 years ago—

Reference to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to share my time with the member for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex.

I am very troubled, like many today who have stood up to speak. What I would really like to do is perhaps set the table a bit on how we found ourselves in this position. I think more than one incident has created this really unfortunate position we are in today.

I would like to start with the election of October. The Liberals were given a strong majority. In part, their message to Canadians was that they represented change, a new voice, and a change in our democratic process. Canadians listened to that, they watched, and in October provided a strong majority for the Liberals.

I want to quote a part of the Speech from the Throne, which was just five months ago. It states:

Canada succeeds in large part because here, diverse perspectives and different opinions are celebrated, not silenced.

Parliament shall be no exception.

In this Parliament, all members will be honoured, respected and heard, wherever they sit. For here, in these chambers, the voices of all Canadians matter.

The Speech from the Throne is a very critical document. It is the road map that the government is providing and sharing with Canadians on what its plans are.

The speech also indicated, “give Canadians a stronger voice in the House of Commons, the Government will promote more open debate and free votes, and reform and strengthen committees”.

Those are very important commitments.

In every minister's mandate letter, this is included:

I made a personal commitment to bring new leadership and a new tone to Ottawa. We made a commitment to Canadians to pursue our goals with a renewed sense of collaboration.

Again, every minister has that in their mandate letter. It is in the Speech from the Throne. It is the tone that was committed to by the government to be set in the House.

The government is not very old. It is only six months. Of course, we did not sit until January. We had a small sitting in December and then we had a sitting that started in January after Christmas. Perhaps the first month or two, the Liberals lived up to the commitments they made to Canadians. However, starting in the last few weeks, there has been a significant and noticeable change. The hon. opposition leader, the member for Sturgeon River—Parkland, said it best when she said that the Liberals apparently now wanted to have an audience and not an opposition.

We can look at items like democratic reform, which is fundamental. The Liberals do not want all voices heard; they only want their voices to be heard. If we do not agree with them, they will do things like move opposition days to Fridays, which is a very short time and there is not much opportunity to debate.

Everyone in the House recognizes that Bill C-14 is very important legislation, and we need to look at this because it is very important. We returned on Monday, and the understanding was that we would spend most of the day talking about Bill C-14.

I have been in the House for seven years, and I have one of the furthest ridings, which is usually 12 hours door to door. I always make that trip on Sunday night so I am here ready to be present in the House when it opens on Monday.

It is also important to note that the House only sits 26 weeks of the year. There are 26 weeks where members can be in their ridings or cabinet ministers can do some of the important work they have to do outside the House. We know the government wants to get rid of Friday and does not want to show up to work on Monday.

It is very simple math. The government has 184 members, and they need to have 169 in the House on Monday morning. How many were here? There was 139. Even at 169, it means we can still have a few people who are away, or some ministers off doing some of the work they need to do. However, they need to have their people in the House. They were shy of that 169 by 30 members.

The fact the Liberals almost lost the vote is not the responsibility of the opposition; it is the responsibility of the Liberals and their need to show up to work.

Instead of debating Bill C-14, what did we do? With respect to Bill C-14, we hear from the Minister of Health that it has a critical time frame, that it has to get done. Did we debate Bill C-14 on Monday? No. We debated Bill C-10 all day. Although important legislation, it did not have the criticalness to it that Bill C-14 has.

What did we do Tuesday? We debated Bill C-6, the citizenship act, which is important legislation. All legislation is important, but it was not Bill C-14 with its critical timeline.

Then we went back to the debate on Bill C-10, the Air Canada Public Participation Act. Then we debated Bill C-11, the Copyright Act, again, important legislation.

Essentially, we offered to debate Bill C-14 until midnight for two days, but the Liberals had us debate other legislation instead. More important, not only did they have us debate different pieces of legislation, they failed to even provide a parliamentary calendar. That has never been done in the whole time I have been here. We are given the agenda for the week so we can prepare. The Liberals did not even have the respect to provide a parliamentary calendar. All of a sudden we were debating the Copyright Act. That is a profound disrespect to the opposition and it has never been done in Parliament.

Then we hit yesterday, which was Wednesday. We were again ready to debate Bill C-14, which had important amendments from the committee and we needed to debate them. It is important to debate. Debate matters, especially in this instance. At second reading, I had a profound compliment when one of my colleagues said, “Listening to your words in the debate changed my mind in terms of how I'm going to vote”. We are debating life and death. We are debating amendments. What did the Liberals do? They put closure on the debate, maybe one speech at report stage on something so critical. We could have been spending Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday debating the bill.

On top of that, the Liberals introduced Motion No. 6, which was so aptly described this morning as looking at every possible tool the opposition has and taking it away.

The member for Wellington—Halton Hills said:

The fundamental responsibility mechanism in the House is the confidence convention. The 20 or so members of Parliament who are part of the ministry who are the government sit there because they have the confidence of the majority of members of this chamber. It is that confidence convention that is undermined by the motion that the government has put on the paper.

By giving members of the ministry the unilateral right, at any time, to adjourn the House...

We can certainly see a whole host of measures. Certainly we were debating a closure motion. The NDP delayed things for, I understand, less than a minute when the incident happened where the Prime Minister lost control.

As I head toward the end of my time to speak to this important issue, there are a few things that I would like to see.

First, the Prime Minister's apology was appropriate. He also needs to look into his heart to see what created that anger within him and why he responded to it in such an inappropriate way.

More important, I think we all expect him to live up to those standards and commitment he made in the Speech from the Throne to respect all members of the House. This would include removing Motion No. 6.

Bill C-14—Time Allocation Motion

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Mr. Speaker, earlier this week when the Speaker was ruling on whether to allow us to consider amendments at report stage, he declared this to be a once-in-a-generation piece of legislation and opportunity for members of Parliament. Rather than embrace that, the government is shutting off debate at every stage for this once-in-a-generation piece of legislation.

There are many different views on all sides of the House. However, earlier this week, out of spite for having almost lost a vote with its huge majority, the government called Bill C-10, Bill C-6, and debate on the Copyright Act. After less than one-third of the members of Parliament in the House had been afforded the opportunity to speak, it cut off debate. It moved it on a Wednesday so there would be even less time for debate than on any other day in the House. There will be less than an hour of debate taking place on this bill, this once-in-a-generation piece of legislation, due to the tactics of the government House leader and the Liberal government.

Is the minister proud of the government using procedural tactics to shut down debate after less than a third of the members of Parliament have had an opportunity to pronounce on behalf of their constituents on a once-in-a-generation piece of legislation?

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as a new member of the House I am extremely disappointed with respect to the government's actions. Like all new members in the House, the expectation among my residents in supporting me to come to this great place was that I was going to be able to extend my voice in the debates. As we have seen by the actions of the government, what amounts to effectively a basic dictatorship, debates have been stifled in the House.

I want to remind Canadians and I want to remind the government exactly what it said, what it handed to the Governor General in the throne speech. It is proving not to be worth the paper it was written on now. The throne speech said:

Canada succeeds in large part because here, diverse perspectives and different opinions are celebrated, not silenced. Parliament shall be no exception. In this Parliament, all members will be honoured, respected and heard, wherever they sit. For here, in these chambers, the voices of all Canadians matter.

Further on in the throne speech, it says:

And to give Canadians a stronger voice in the House of Commons, the Government will promote more open debate and free votes, and reform and strengthen committees.

Four times now, with Bills C-6, C-10, C-15 and now C-14, we are seeing debate thwarted. Why the hypocrisy on the part of the government? All Canadians deserve to know.

Air Canada Public Participation Act

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Mr. Speaker, despite an overwhelming majority, the Liberals nearly lost a vote in the House of Commons yesterday. Unfortunately, the member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley flip-flopped on his promise to represent his constituents and instead supported Bill C-10. The member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley—

Copyright Act

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to this subject. I will be splitting my time with the member for Lethbridge who also serves as our party's critic for disabilities. She is doing a phenomenal job in that role, standing up for vulnerable people.

This is a great bill. It is a bill that all parties as well as unrecognized parties agree on, but it is important to express some disappointment about the reality of the process and how this debate has come up today. We had Bill C-14 on the Notice Paper. Then we had a vote to concur in Bill C-6. Then we had closure on Bill C-10. Now we are on to Bill C-11 without notice.

I say this precisely because of the importance of the bill. It is a bill that we should all be coming together not only on substance but on process. Had we the notice, had we been able to plan this debate at a time when all parties were ready and organized for it, we would have been able to get so much more out of this conversation. There would have been an opportunity to bring in stakeholders perhaps, to listen to and to observe this debate. This would have given all parties the opportunity to ensure that those who really wanted or needed to speak to this were in a position to do so.

Instead, this very important substantive legislation is being used as a procedural weapon, it seems. The government tabled the bill on March 24. As much as the minister has mentioned the urgency of moving this forward, the Liberals could have at least given notice that they were going to do it today. We could have had the bill debated earlier. This is a missed opportunity.

In the previous time slot, my colleague from the NDP, the member for Windsor West, wanted to split his time and a government member blocked that from happening. We have these missed opportunities of collegiality, missed opportunities to work together to put our best foot forward as a House. It is unfortunate, because we agree with the issue and can work together on it. Yes, there are times for partisanship in this place, but the bill should not have been one of those times.

I do not blame the minister for this. I have spoken to the minister at committee and I know she is committed to working across party lines on important issues. However, this speaks to the House leadership on the government side and how it views absolutely nothing it seems as beyond partisanship.

I want to get that out of the way because it is important to put on the record.

Let us talk about the bill. I am very proud to be speaking in favour of it.

Just to highlight for those who may be just joining the debate, the bill has three substantive different parts to it.

The bill would allow not-for-profit organizations acting on behalf of a person with a disability to convert books and other works into an accessible format without first seeking the permission of the copyright holder. It would instantly allow books that were currently not in accessible format to be converted into those formats. That is an important change, one that would make a positive difference.

Also, as part of the treaty that the bill would operate under, the Marrakesh treaty, which was signed in 2013 and would now through this legislation be ratified, it would allow the sharing of those works between different countries participating in that treaty. There is the domestic element of allowing people to have access to this important information. There is also that international element, encouraging sharing between different countries of this vital material.

Finally, the bill would make important related amendments to digital lock provisions.

Obviously we are going to support the bill. It is getting a lot of consensus. This is the conclusion of a prior process of which the previous government was certainly a part. Budget 2015 set out a plan to implement this treaty. Page 286 of budget 2015, stated:

The Government will propose amendments to the Copyright Act to implement and accede to the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled.

The ability to access printed information is essential to prepare for and participate in Canada’s economy, society and job market. According to Statistics Canada, approximately 1 million Canadians live with blindness or partial sight. The Government will propose amendments to the Copyright Act to implement and accede to the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled (the Marrakesh Treaty).

Aligning Canada’s copyright limitations and exceptions with the international standard established by the Marrakesh Treaty would enable Canada to accede to this international agreement. Once the treaty is in force, as a member country, [Canada] would benefit from greater access to adapted materials.

It is worth nothing that this process has been in place. Certainly, this was the plan laid out in Canada's economic action plan 2015. However, we are very pleased to see the new government continue on with this important work. This work needed to be done.

I would like to specifically motivate the philosophy behind the bill. It is essential that every person has access to books. Books are a major part of all of our lives, and they are an important part of every child's life.

My daughter, Gianna, and I read books all the time. I read books to her on Skype when I am in Ottawa. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have a child who has a visual impairment and who is unable to get books which he or she can read. My daughter is a voracious reader. I brought four books with me and we went through them all in one evening. I need to bring more books with me next time I come to Ottawa, clearly. It is great to see how important books are to us all, especially kids. We need to ensure that people of all ages, including children, have access to reading material of all kinds.

As has been discussed in the House, people's reading decisions are not limited by the availability of books.

Again, I cannot imagine what it would be like to really want to read a particular book, whether a novel or a work of non-fiction, and be told that because of a disability, I cannot read that book, that the book is not available to me, that the knowledge is not available to me. I think that would be a very difficult thing for anyone to deal with. That is why this legislation is important for ensuring that everyone has access to books, that there can really be the full sharing of knowledge that takes place.

Everyone in every situation should have access to as much knowledge, as many books as possible. There can be nothing but good that would come from more access to books for more people.

I also want to talk about the international dimension of this. One of the things we know about Canada is that many people maybe have come here from other places or maybe were born here, but who like to read books in other languages. They might be more comfortable in a language other than English or French, or they simply enjoy reading works from a range of different languages. Specifically, the international dimension of this treaty would allow Canadians to have greater access to books in other languages that may be in a better format which they can make more use of.

Some of the countries that have signed the treaty so far are Argentina, El Salvador, India, Mali, Paraguay, Singapore, UAE, and Uruguay. In a multicultural Canada that likely means more access to materials in languages like Hindi, Punjabi, and Spanish. It is important that through those international sharing takes place for all Canadians, not just those who want to access things in English or French, have access to them.

Noting the countries that have signed the treaty so far, it does not look like there are that many Francophone countries. In addition to us ratifying this, there is a lot of value in Canada playing a role, encouraging other countries to ratify and, in particular, seeing if we can use our relationships through the Francophonie to encourage more Francophone countries to ratify this and therefore ensure we have good access to more French-language materials.

We need to get to 20 countries. It is important that we get those 20 countries ratifying. I understand from the minister that we only have three more to go. This is an important leadership role Canada can play and the continuing advocacy we have to do.

I mentioned this during questions and comments, but I have had a constituent raise with me the importance of ensuring those tools people access that allow them, as people with disabilities, to operate in the world, to read, and to do other things, it may be an iPad or a speech app on a phone, are tax deductible. I see measures that address those issues as aligning well with the measures in this legislation.

I look forward to supporting the bill.

Bill C-10—Time Allocation Motion

[Kate Young, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, Premier Aviation, which now conducts aircraft maintenance for Air Canada, is in favour of Bill C-10, and the Government of Quebec has written to the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities to show its support for Bill C-10.

I see why the minister says there is support for Bill C-10, so my question for him is this. Why is the opposition playing procedural stunts with such an important bill?

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, so many things have been said in the debate on Bill C-10 that I am not sure where to begin. I want to try to make the government understand that this is absolutely not an urgent bill. Quite the contrary. I think that, today, the government is playing cheap partisan politics.

Two ministers from two governments are asking our Parliament not to act too quickly on Bill C-10 because the bill may adversely affect the agreements with Air Canada. These are the same agreements that the government is boasting about in the same empty and meaningless answers that it has been giving since the debate on Bill C-10 began. These same agreements, which are supposed to create jobs, are at risk because this government does not want to listen to the request of two provincial governments, two provincial legislatures. First, Quebec's minister of the economy has asked the federal government not to act too quickly because the bill could undermine or put an end to the agreement. Second, the deputy premier of another province appeared before the parliamentary committee to ask the federal government not to pass Bill C-10 because it does not contain any job guarantees.

Since all we are hearing is rhetoric and we have not been given any explanation or justification for this bill, could the government spokesperson stop repeating the same message and explain to us why the government wants to move so quickly on Bill C-10, so much so that it felt the need to impose another gag order? That is unacceptable. Why are the Liberals behaving like this?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, my question is related to why we have Bill C-10 before us today. It is because of Conservative government neglect a number of years ago. As a direct result, we had provinces taking Air Canada to court. What we saw in that was a number of stakeholders coming to the table where a consensus was built, where we are seeing, as the minister pointed out, a centre of excellence going to Manitoba and the province of Quebec. We are seeing guarantees of jobs, which is far more than the Conservative government ever got out of Air Canada.

Would the member not agree that Bill C-10 does set a framework that ultimately is part of a larger package that demonstrates that ours is a government that genuinely cares about our aerospace industry in all regions of our country?

[Jean-Yves Duclos, Liberal, Québec, QC]

Mr. Speaker, a broad sector of our economy and our citizens do support the bill because it is in the broader context in which we want to promote growth and strong jobs for Canadians and for our economy in general. In particular, Air Canada's commitment to retain maintenance of its aircraft in Quebec and in the rest of Canada for 20 years will create important economic opportunities for individuals seeking to or already qualified to work in the sector.

I further commend Air Canada's intention to facilitate the creation of a centre of excellence on aircraft maintenance in Manitoba, as well as in Quebec. That will create additional employment opportunities in this very important sector for our economy. The Government of Canada is pleased with Air Canada's announcement of its intention to purchase up to 75 Bombardier C Series aircraft. As I mentioned earlier, this is good news for all of Canada.

Finally, I would add that the C Series is a major advancement in aviation, and all of the industry is aware of that. All efforts, including those made by Bill C-10, that promote the advancement of the aerospace industry in Canada are most welcome by all members of the House and a large number of people outside the House.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Mr. Speaker, what the bill does is kill thousands of aerospace jobs in this country.

The government should not be proud of bringing forward the bill, but I have to comment on the absolute chaos we have seen from the government this morning. In 60 minutes, we have now gone through three pieces of legislation. We were told today was to be reserved for Bill C-14. That was what was placed on the projected order of business. We arrived this morning and the government said no, it would bring in Bill C-6, and then it switched rapidly to Bill C-10.

We know why the Liberals are bringing in Bill C-10. They are trying to provoke closure and bulldoze this through, because yesterday parliamentarians tied in their vote on Bill C-10. The bill is so bad, the legislation is so destructive to aerospace jobs in Canada, as you know, Mr. Speaker, you had to break the tie. It was 139 to 139. That has only happened 11 times in Canadian history, and in fact, it is the first time that a majority government and a government bill has seen a tie vote broken by the Speaker.

Is that not the real reason why sunny ways have turned into dark ways and why the Liberals are trying to bulldoze the bill through? It is because they are embarrassed by the results from yesterday.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question for the minister.

The federal legislation that the Liberal Party was defending only four years ago stipulated that Air Canada had to keep its maintenance and servicing activities in Montreal, Winnipeg, and Mississauga.

The workers who lost their jobs four years ago began legal proceedings. They have rights. They took their case before the Quebec Superior Court, and they won. The case then went before the Quebec Court of Appeal, and they won. Their case is currently before the Supreme Court, and if the law does not change, they will win again.

I would like to know whether the minister plans to infringe on our rights as parliamentarians by imposing another gag order in the House to make it easier for the Liberals to trample all over the rights of the Aveos and Air Canada workers, who were going to win before the Supreme Court.

Is the minister in such a hurry because he wants to get Bill C-10 through as quickly as possible given that the Supreme Court is supposed to return to this case on July 15? Is that what he wants?

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the right to use both official languages is a fundamental feature of the House.

Yesterday, during the debate on Bill C-10, the members for Pierrefonds—Dollard, Mount Royal, and Laurentides—Labelle spoke only in English. Today, the member for Québec is speaking only in English.

I would like to know if there is something preventing people from speaking in French.

[Jean-Yves Duclos, Liberal, Minister of Families]

moved:

That, in relation to Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures, not more than one further sitting day shall be allotted to the consideration at the third reading stage of the Bill; and

That, 15 minutes before the expiry of the time provided for Government Orders on the day allotted to the consideration at the third reading stage of the said Bill, any proceedings before the House shall be interrupted, if required for the purpose of this Order, and, in turn, every question necessary for the disposal of the said stage of the Bill shall be put forthwith and successively, without further debate or amendment.

Business of the House

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, this afternoon, we will continue with the Conservative opposition day. Tomorrow will be a further allotted day. Monday, we will begin report stage and third reading stage of Bill C-10 concerning Air Canada until 2 p.m. After question period, we will move on to Bill C-14 concerning medical assistance in dying.

I have had productive and optimistic discussions with my colleague House leaders. I am hopeful and optimistic that we will have an agreement on the handling of the debate at report stage and third reading of Bill C-14 next week.

Provided we are able to complete debate on Bill C-14 next Wednesday, the House will debate an NDP opposition motion on Thursday.

Finally, pursuant to Standing Order 81(4), I would like to designate Monday, May 16, for consideration in a committee of the whole of the main estimates for the Department of National Defence.

Transport, Infrastructure and Communities

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, Humber River—Black Creek, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the third report of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, in relation to Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures.

The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House without amendment.

Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, an aspect of this budget that I think we can really treasure is the fact that the Government of Canada believes in rural Canada. There are a number of initiatives to support rural communities. One of the biggest things is recognizing the importance of the Internet to rural communities, whether for private use or small business use. There are ways we can expand that and look at diversifying rural communities so that they are not as dependent on one or two businesses.

We believe that we need to invest and to be there, and that is one of the reasons the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food has spoken so avidly about the importance of supply management. It is one of the reasons for some of the changes in Bill C-10. It is not just the city of Montreal but the entire province that is incorporated in terms of the potential for our aerospace industry, and that same principle applies for Manitoba and Ontario.

It is a different attitude. It is an attitude that shows we understand the importance of rural Canadians and their way of life. We want to be there to support them in a very real and tangible way.

Air Canada Public Participation Act — Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I am now prepared to rule on the question of privilege raised on April 22, 2016, by the hon. member for Montcalm regarding alleged misleading statements made in the House by the Minister of Transport and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport with respect to Bill C-10, an act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures.

I would like to thank the hon. member for Montcalm for having raised this matter, as well as the Minister of Transport for his comments.

In presenting his case, the member for Montcalm alleged that both the Minister of Transport and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport deliberately misled the House by repeatedly providing inaccurate information with respect to Bill C-10 in response to oral questions and during debate.

In particular, the member claimed that the statements, which pertained to the status of litigation regarding Air Canada’s obligation to keep aircraft maintenance operations in the province of Quebec, had been refuted by the government of that province. The federal government’s assertions, he argued, led members of the House to make decisions in relation to Bill C-10 based on false information.

The Minister of Transport, for his part, stood by his statements, while pointing out that the federal government was not privy to the negotiations between Air Canada and the government of the Province of Quebec. He concluded that, in his opinion, the matter raised did not constitute a question of privilege, but was more a question of debate.

The House of Commons is a debating chamber where opposing views are passionately held and vigorously defended, and where opposition members have a duty to hold the government to account. Consequently, the need for members' access to truthful and accurate information is primordial and goes to the heart of their role and privileges as legislators.

In fact, feisty exchanges during debate and disagreements as to facts are not infrequent; the member for Montcalm acknowledged this when he stated that he understood “that disagreements between members are to be expected and are fodder for debate”.

Not surprisingly then, the allegation that a member deliberately misled the House is a most serious one. In adjudicating such matters, the Speaker has a defined but very limited role, one which prevents the chair from judging the content or accuracy of statements made in the House.

As Speaker, my role is strictly limited to determining whether, in the course of debate, a member has deliberately misled the House.

Successive Speakers have clearly set out the three conditions that must be demonstrated in order for a Speaker to arrive at such a finding. My predecessor outlined them in his ruling of April 29, 2015, when he stated at page 13197 of Debates:

…first, the statement needs to be misleading. Second, the member making the statement has to know that the statement was incorrect when it was made. Finally, it needs to be proven that the member intended to mislead the House by making the statement.

As members can appreciate, the threshold is very high, purposely so given the seriousness of the allegation and its potential consequences for members individually and collectively. From this, it stands to reason that a finding of a prima facie case of privilege is an exceedingly rare occurrence in cases with respect to disputed facts.

Speaker Jerome understood that such situations are rarely grounds for finding a prima facie question of privilege when he stated on June 4, 1975, on page 6431 of Debates that:

...a dispute as to facts, a dispute as to opinions, and a dispute as to conclusions to be drawn from an allegation of fact is a matter of debate and not a question of privilege.

In the present case, no evidence has been brought forward to demonstrate either that the Minister of Transport knew that the statements he made were misleading at the time that they were made or that he intended to mislead the House.

Therefore, while the member for Montcalm has illustrated that there is a difference of opinion as to the interpretation of certain facts, it is clear to the Chair that the threshold for determining that the House was deliberately misled has not been met. As such, the Chair cannot conclude that members have been impeded in the performance of their parliamentary functions. Accordingly, I find that this matter is a dispute as to facts and not a prima facie question of privilege.

I thank hon. members for their attention.

Air Canada

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, on the contrary, I am in no hurry. In fact, I will speak very slowly to explain to my colleague.

We decided to change the legislation through Bill C-10, as I have been saying from the beginning, because the governments of Quebec and Manitoba decided to drop their lawsuit against Air Canada. This gives us the opportunity to clarify the legislation and give Air Canada more flexibility in making decisions regarding the maintenance of its planes.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Not at all, Mr. Speaker.

Because Quebec and Manitoba decided to drop their lawsuit against Air Canada, we were able to make amendments to the Air Canada Public Participation Act, through Bill C-10. That is what we are doing.

However, I remind my colleague that Air Canada is still required to perform maintenance in Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Quebeckers and Canadians are very concerned about the government's position on support for the aerospace industry, which is extremely important to our economy.

When we recently asked the Minister of Transport why he had pushed through Bill C-10 under a gag order, he said that it was to make Air Canada more competitive.

Will the minister finally admit that he is leaving the door wide open for Air Canada to sacrifice good-quality jobs here in Canada?

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that was not a clear or specific answer.

This government shows no interest in supporting aerospace workers and their families. It would rather give Air Canada carte blanche with Bill C-10, which sacrifices the jobs and quality of life of 2,600 families. The government does not even have the courage to let us have an in-depth debate on this issue in Parliament.

Is the Prime Minister not ashamed of abandoning the workers like this, especially after he joined them in their protest?

Air Canada Public Participation Act

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am raising a question of privilege in the House of Commons with respect to misleading information that the Minister of Transport and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport gave to the House about the litigation involving Quebec and Air Canada and arising from the Air Canada Public Participation Act.

Here are the facts. On Wednesday, the House made two decisions with respect to the Liberal government's argument justifying the rush vote at second reading on Bill C-10, the Air Canada bill. It was the same argument the government has been making for months, but the facts on which it based its argument are inaccurate. The Government of Quebec refuted them yesterday morning.

In question period yesterday, the Minister of Transport continued to supply the same false information that the Government of Quebec had refuted just that morning.

On Wednesday, the House made two major decisions, decisions that could lead to the permanent demise of 2,600 jobs in the aerospace sector, including 1,800 in the Montreal area, most of them in the riding represented by the member for Saint-Laurent.

First, we voted on a time allocation motion to end debate on Bill C-10. As a result, Quebeckers represented by Bloc Québécois members were silenced at second reading in the House, which is why I have chosen to speak up now.

Then, the House voted on the bill at second reading. The government claims that rushing the vote was essential because the NDP had moved an amendment to withdraw the bill.

We understand that the NDP tabled its amendment to demonstrate its opposition to Bill C-10. Government bills rarely receive unanimous support in the House of Commons. Does the fact that some members oppose a bill justify time allocation?

To answer that question in the affirmative would be to deny parliamentary democracy. We understand very well that fallacious arguments are part of the debate and that disagreements between members are to be expected and are fodder for debate. The House made those two decisions in good faith, and I have no doubt about that.

This brings me to the vote on Bill C-10 at second reading. The House voted based on two pieces of false information that had been presented by the Minister of Transport.

On Wednesday, at 4:25 p.m., he said, and I quote, “Air Canada, the Government of Quebec, and the Government of Manitoba have stopped their litigation”. At 4:30 p.m., he added, “the Province of Quebec...decided, after discussions with Air Canada, to drop the lawsuit”. At 4:35 p.m., he said, “the Government of Quebec and the Government of Manitoba have decided they will not pursue Air Canada”.

Then, at 4:42 p.m., during his very last intervention, the minister closed the debate saying, “the reason we have proceeded with the bill is very simple. It is because the provinces of Quebec and Manitoba have come to an agreement with Air Canada, and they are dropping their litigation.”

I want to emphasize the word “reason”. The minister gave the House false information. Quebec did not drop its litigation. Quebec never decided to withdraw from the lawsuit. Litigation between the Government of Quebec and Air Canada is ongoing.

That is essentially what Quebec's minister of the economy said during her status update on the issue, which contradicted the information presented by the minister and the parliamentary secretary.

In response to our question yesterday, the Minister of Transport decided to stay the course and keep contradicting what the Government of Quebec said, and I quote:

“We decided to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act precisely because the governments of Quebec and Manitoba decided to drop their lawsuits against Air Canada.”

These are repeat offences of making false statements over the course of several weeks. In reoffending, it seems clear to me that the government deliberately misled and continues to mislead the House by providing false information.

The request that the Government of Quebec filed with the Supreme Court on February 23, is further proof of this, and I quote, “An agreement has been reached between the parties to postpone the decision on the application for leave to appeal until July 15”.

I am almost finished. I was told I should present the facts and that is what I am doing. I imagine that your ruling, Mr. Speaker, will be more informed if I complete my argument, even if you find that one of the arguments may not be the best.

Since the decision on the application for leave to appeal will not be rendered until July 15, 2016, the lawsuit is still ongoing. The Government of Quebec simply asked the court not to rule on the issue before mid-July, and with good reason. It wants to retain some bargaining power in order to negotiate Air Canada's purchase of Bombardier planes and its establishment of maintenance centres in Quebec.

That brings me to the second piece of false information. On April 15, at the beginning of the debate at second reading of Bill C-10, the government, or more specifically the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, explained to the House that it was a good time to pass Bill C-10:

In light of Air Canada's investments in aerospace in Canada, including aircraft maintenance...

However, we learned yesterday morning that Air Canada still has not decided to invest in aerospace and aircraft maintenance. That is why the Government of Quebec still has not dropped its lawsuit and why this matter is still before the Supreme Court.

The government misled the House by providing it with false information. As a result, it is possible that, acting in good faith, the House was led to commit an error when it adopted the time allocation motion and supported the principle of Bill C-10. That is why, Mr. Speaker, I ask you to find that the government violated the Standing Orders of the House, which casts doubt on the legitimacy of Wednesday's votes.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, if you find that there is a prima facie question of privilege, I intend to move the following motion: “That the House acknowledge that the government deliberately misled the House and that it reconsider the vote on the NDP amendment and the vote at second reading on Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures.”

Mr. Speaker, I rely on your good judgment to propose the best way to proceed.

Air Canada

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Madam Speaker, it is always nice to hear someone on the government side talking about Paul Martin, who, unlike the current government, hated deficits.

Moving on to another issue, the Minister of Transport has been doing a lot of improvising with regard to Bill C-10, and that is putting it mildly. Yesterday morning, he was accusing the NDP. In the afternoon, he was saying that the Quebec minister did not understand, and in the evening, he had another answer.

Will the minister at least give us a clear and solid explanation today? Why is he imposing a gag order on Bill C-10? Is he going to rattle off yet another answer?

[Louis Plamondon, Bloc, Bécancour—Nicolet—Saurel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this morning, even the Government of Quebec asked the Minister of Transport to settle down with his unacceptable Bill C-10.

This minister, who has been bragging for weeks about the agreement between Quebec and Bombardier and the creation of centres of excellence, is about to sabotage that agreement and cause more job losses in the riding of his own colleague from Saint-Laurent.

Does the minister realize that his closure motion is not only awful but also dangerous for the future of Quebec's aerospace industry?

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, this gives me a chance to repeat what I said.

The reason we imposed closure yesterday was very clear. Last Friday, the NDP tried to kill this bill. In our fine democracy, we know full well that there are still many stages for Bill C-10 to go through before it reaches the end of the process. We are going to move to committee stage where we will listen to witnesses. Then there will be report stage, followed by third reading. The bill will then follow the same process in the Senate. There is still a lot of time for everyone to be heard.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Minister of Transport said that we must move quickly, and he moved a time allocation motion for Bill C-10. One of his arguments was that the Government of Quebec decided not to sue Air Canada. However, things are not going the minister's way because, this morning, Quebec's economy minister said that the federal government must not hinder her negotiations with Air Canada.

He is saying one thing, but Quebec's minister is saying the opposite today. That is not good. I am sorry to bring the minister back to earth, but why did he really impose closure? Why is he hindering the discussions? What are the Liberals trying to hide?

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a solution to suggest to the government to help the dairy industry: enforce the law.

Dominique Anglade, the Quebec minister for economy, science and innovation, has been asking the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount not to hurt the Quebec economy with his bill, Bill C-10.

Would the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount be kind enough to listen to the Quebec government and give up on his ridiculous plan to let Air Canada off the hook retroactively? Will he show some respect for the Quebec economy?

Opposition Motion—Canadian Dairy Industry

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will share my time with my esteemed colleague from North Island—Powell River.

Perhaps I could begin my speech by responding to the member from the Conservative Party who asked us what we in the NDP are doing for this debate. Let me tell the member that we are the ones who brought this debate today. It is we, and it is my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé, who are asking the government to come up with a solution.

Unfortunately, the Conservative members did not put forward an opposition day motion on the issue, and they are asking very few, if any, questions about it. Their new awakening to the issue, which just began with the debate today, is quite sudden.

Still, this does not let the Liberal government off the hook. The Liberals were quite happy to listen to our questions, and they applauded us when we criticized the Conservative government.

Now they are the ones in power, they are now the ones with the ball, and it is up to them to take up the responsibilities of governing. On this I agree with my colleague from Lévis—Lotbinière, because ultimately, the Liberals have been here for six months. They can certainly quote what the industry said in December, but that took place almost five months ago.

All we are asking for with regard to diafiltered milk is a regulatory change. It does not require a large bill or any studies, as the parliamentary secretary tried to tell us. This is not a complex issue; it is a very simple one.

Some American companies are producing diafiltered milk and are taking advantage of a loophole in the regulations to flout the spirit of the law and export products that are putting our farmers at a disadvantage. It is as simple as that.

All the minister has to do is enforce the law and, if necessary, make a small change to the regulations. That is it, problem solved. It is not very complicated, but it appears to be too much for the Liberal government.

Maybe the government should open not only its eyes, but also its ears, because Canadian producers are protesting today on Parliament Hill and outside some offices.

For example, some producers are protesting outside the offices of the member for Shefford, the riding next to mine, because he will not even answer their calls, and they are wondering why the member is not standing up for them.

The good news for these producers is that the NDP will continue to stand up on this issue, as the member for Berthier—Maskinongé not only has done in this Parliament, but also did in the previous Parliament.

This is nothing new. The problem goes beyond diafiltered milk and extends to supply management and to the lack of respect for our producers. Loopholes are now being created in this system, which ensures the survival of our local economy and our agricultural producers.

I will give a few examples.

The first example involves my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé, who stood up for producers when the Liberals and Conservatives refused to do so.

The Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which was introduced during the previous Parliament and which the Liberals were prepared to support before even reading it, was negotiated by the Conservative government of the time. The Conservatives told us not to worry, that they were committed to supply management, and that they would defend this system. What happened? They got to the bargaining table and put everything on the table, despite all of their rhetoric in the House in response to our questions.

My colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé therefore moved a motion calling on members of the House to support a compensation package.

The Conservative government promised financial compensation to the producers who would suffer losses as a result of the agreement negotiated, which created loopholes in the supply management system.

During the last election campaign, the Liberal Party promised to respect this agreement, since all members had voted in favour of the motion moved by my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé. This motion, which would allow for financial compensation to producers, was unanimously passed by the House. I was flabbergasted to hear one of my Conservative colleagues defend supply management a few days ago, when the Conservatives did everything they did to undermine this system for 10 years.

This compensation is yet another betrayal by the Liberal Party. This is about more than supply management and diafiltered milk. This is about all of the commitments made by the Liberals.

With regard to compensation, the Liberals said during the election campaign that they would honour commitments made by the former government. At the time, we extracted answers, with great difficulty, from the Conservative Party. It said that it would provide compensation, but that it could not tell us when or how much. When the Liberals came to power, there was nothing about this in their budget. The Liberals were unable to tell us whether they would honour that commitment. They are unable to tell us anything.

This creates not only a continuity problem for farmers, but also uncertainty. That uncertainty would be eased simply with a few words. We are only asking the government to tell us, one way or the other, whether it will honour the commitment regarding financial compensation, regarding the cracks that have appeared in the supply management system.

These are not the only nice promises we have heard from the Liberals. We have also had promises about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That was another issue on which the Liberals said one thing in the election campaign and, now that they are in power, they are saying something else. Once again, that agreement undermines the supply management system. During the election campaign, the Liberals promised to study the issue and to listen to the stakeholders and farmers who would be negatively affected by the negotiations, which, it should be noted, were conducted by the Conservative Party. Once again, we see that the Liberal Party is content to complete the Conservative Party’s work, to the detriment of our farmers.

Now, despite the promises made by the two ministers concerned, the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of International Trade, when all is said and done, we are simply told that we have to sign anyway and we will see afterward. That does nothing to reassure farmers who are in an increasingly difficult position. Moreover, the farmers feel that the government is not standing up for them. It is very disappointing. It is really a betrayal.

During the entire election campaign, and even before, I heard nice words and fine promises from the Liberals. We were told not to worry, because a Liberal government would have a plan and would stand up for those people. What is happening today? The government is not even capable of making a simple regulatory change to enforce the law and prohibit the importation of diafiltered milk. Those imports are causing losses of millions of dollars for dairy farmers throughout Quebec and Canada.

The government is incapable of living up to its commitments and holding real public consultations on the trans-Pacific partnership. It is also incapable of keeping its word concerning the financial compensation to be provided to our farmers.

I keep up with the news, and I asked myself some serious questions when I heard the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture. He tells us that the matter needs to be studied, that it is a very complex issue. Yesterday we voted on a time allocation motion for Bill C-10, and the government told us that it was not complicated, that we should move forward and debate was over. It is so comical to see how little time it has taken for the Liberal government to resemble the old Conservative government. Liberal, Tory, same old story, that's the phrase that comes to mind, because the Conservatives pulled the same stunts.

Indeed, the Conservatives brought us their own time allocation motions. They would tell us that it was urgent, that we had to move quickly, that debate was over, that we were going in circles and repeating ourselves. They would gag us and ram bills down the throats of parliamentarians, without offering them the chance to speak and without listening to stakeholders. On other issues, however, they would tell us to allow them the chance to study and fully grasp the matter, because it was very complicated. This is exactly what the Liberal government is doing today: time allocations and gag orders, when it suits them to do so. They tell us that the issue is very complex, not having the gumption to simply rise and admit that they have not been equal to the task and have not met their commitments.

All that we are asking of the Liberals today is precisely that: to rise in the House, to say that the matter is very simple and they are going to enforce the law and the regulations to prevent the importing of the diafiltered milk that is harming our dairy producers. We are also asking them to say that they will meet their other commitments and will offer this financial compensation to the dairy producers. They should also add that, when they negotiate agreements, or rather when they wind up some negotiation carried out by the Conservatives behind closed doors, they will at least have the political courage to consult the people who will be affected, namely the farmers. Clearly, the Liberals have been unable to listen to them and to keep their promises. That amounts to a betrayal of those producers.

However, I am happy to rise today in support of my hon. colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé.

We will continue to stand up for them. We shall not relent until this government honours its commitments toward farmers, our communities, our producers, and, ultimately, our economy. That is what is at stake.

Bill C-10--Time Allocation Motion

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Madam Speaker, the hypothesis that was presented is false. The only reason we decided to introduce Bill C-10 to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act is that the provinces of Quebec and Manitoba indicated that they were going to drop their lawsuit. The amendment allows us to clarify the act and ensure that there will not be any litigation in the future.

Opposition Motion — Political Fundraising Activities

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we just heard a notice of closure motion. That is timely because I was going to start my speech by saying that this is a fine debate that reminds us of the old saying, “Liberal, Tory, same old story”. That is what we have here.

Today's debate is on political fundraising issues, which often come up in the news and never for good reasons, unfortunately. We are in a situation where the Conservative Party opposition motion calls on the Minister of Justice to apologize and return the money.

She is being asked to follow the example of a Conservative Party minister, Shelly Glover, who, in a similar situation, returned all the money she collected. If we are setting the bar to meet a standard created by the Conservatives, then that bar is not very high and easy to jump over. I would hope that the Minister of Justice will be able to do so.

I want to talk about a number of points raised in this debate. First, with regard to political fundraising, I heard the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons answer questions in question period by saying that every member participates in political fundraising, that there is nothing unusual about doing so, and that we should not worry about it. We are talking here about ministers, and their responsibilities and requirements differ from those of ordinary members.

I am not trying to minimize the responsibilities of individual members. However, there is a big difference between a minister responsible for justice sitting down with lawyers and me being given $20 by a woman in my riding because she thinks that I do a good job and she wants me to have the resources I need to get re-elected. It seems likely that, in the case of the minister, she and the lawyers will be talking almost exclusively about subjects related to her portfolio and her department. There is a very big difference there. That is where we get into the matter of appearances.

The code of conduct that the Prime Minister himself imposed on his ministers, for lack of a better way to say it, indicates that they cannot engage in partisan or fundraising activities that give the appearance of preferential access, the appearance of conflict of interest, or the impression that one can pay to obtain access to a minister. That is the problem. Perhaps it is the eternal optimist in me who is talking, but I would like to believe that the minister does not just lend an attentive ear to people who are prepared to pay to attend fundraisers. Once again, the problem is the way it is perceived. People see that and wonder whether someone has to be able to pay $500 or $600 to meet with the minister.

I almost forgot. Before I continue, I would like to indicate that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona. I was so outraged to hear the government House leader move a motion to invoke closure after only six months in office that I completely forgot. I hope I will be forgiven.

I will come back to the matter before us. We now find ourselves in a situation where Canadians have doubts and questions. There is already too much cynicism about politics and the political system. The problem is now being exacerbated by this type of fundraising, which gives the impression that one can pay to obtain preferential access. I find that absolutely unacceptable.

When going door-to-door during and even before the election campaign, we inevitably meet people who say they could not care less about politics. I dare say this is the experience of all MPs from all parties. When you ask these people to explain why they feel that way and you try to talk about the files you are working on, the good work that MPs can do, the difference one can make as an MP, and the difference one can make in the community, quite often they will say that politicians are all dishonest and that only people with power and money have access to elected officials. It seems that the average person cannot get this type of access, nor make a difference and communicate with an elected official, an MP or even a minister, as in the situation we find ourselves in today.

This is what happens in situations like this. Although I make no assumptions about what the minister will do and what access she will provide, she has nevertheless created the impression that she will give her attention and her time more readily to those who are prepared to donate to the Liberal Party of Canada. That is unacceptable and it creates a problem for all of us. It is a big black cloud that will settle over Parliament and the political system, and it will follow us everywhere.

I am not a member of the Liberal Party, but when I knock on doors in my riding, citizens inevitably talk to me about this situation or that situation. I reply that it is the good old Liberal Party that we all know, and I personally promise to do politics differently. However, that does not change anything, because people say that it does not matter, since politicians are all alike. As elected representatives, we have a responsibility to do better, and ministers have 10 times as much responsibility. After all, they are not just representatives of their constituencies, because they also represent institutions. Ministerial responsibility is even greater for the Minister of Justice.

What is happening is, unfortunately, the current trend. That is not limited to the Minister of Justice. We are dealing with another case involving privileged access; just consider the case of the Minister of National Revenue. We are right in the middle of income tax season. Some people are quite happy, because they will be getting a tax refund. Others will have to write a cheque to the government. It is a happy or unhappy time of year, depending on whom you ask. Ultimately, it does not matter how those people feel; they pay their fair share, with the exception, of course, of the millionaires and the people who do business with KPMG, because they can have nice agreements with the government and benefit from tax evasion. That would not be a problem if we had not learned this week that there are cocktail buffets for senior public servants and managers who oversee investigations to combat tax evasion. Here we are again in a situation that feeds public cynicism. We are creating the perception that preferential access is possible.

The Minister of National Revenue, much like the leader of the government when he was defending the Minister of Justice, stood in the House and said that the people who work in the department are members of the same professional association as the people facilitating tax evasion. Therefore this was not about tax evasion; it was an opportunity to attend an event with fellow accountants.

The problem is still one of perception. Who knows what happens at those meetings? Who knows what is discussed? Essentially, the members of the public who pay their fair share of taxes think that we have enough money to attend a little cocktail party or pay the big fee of an accountant at KPMG, which has a nice network that includes a manager or maybe even an elected representative. We hope not, but this type of situation creates a very problematic perception, because it undermines people’s confidence in their public institutions and their elected representatives. It is a completely unacceptable situation.

In the end, this is why we will support the Conservative Party’s motion.

In conclusion, I would like to say that although we support the motion, I would hope that we will find more urgent situations to discuss. Yes, what happened is scandalous and appalling on the part of a minister. However, when I think about the people who are losing their jobs, the debate on Bill C-10, an act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures, and the hypocrisy of the Liberals on this issue, and when I think of the people who do not have access to employment insurance, despite the government’s lovely words about changing the system, and of the issue of tax evasion, I firmly believe that despite the ethical problems that are eating away at both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, which have succeeded one another in power, when all is said and done, there are real people who need us to stand up in the House. People need us to hold debates on the issues that affect them personally. That is what we should be doing. We will support the motion, but we have to get back to real business and tackle those issues. It is very important to do so.

I would like to tell everyone listening not to throw up their hands at such behaviour. They must not let cynicism control their relationship with politics. If they consider it a deplorable act, that is one more reason for them to get involved in changing the attitudes of elected representatives.

In 2019, a government that does not keep its promises of transparency and openness, not to mention all the other broken promises, may well be replaced. That is what we are hoping and aiming for.

Bill C-10—Notice of time allocation motion

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to advise that an agreement could not be reached under the provisions of Standing Order 78(1) or 78(2) with respect to the second reading stage of Bill C-10, an act to amend the Air Canada Public Participation Act and to provide for certain other measures.

Under the provisions of Standing Order 78(3), I give notice that a minister of the Crown will propose at the next sitting day a motion to allot a specific number of days or hours for the consideration and disposal of proceedings at the said stage.

Business of the House

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I have good news. I have no documents to table, and thus there is no need to worry.

This afternoon will conclude the fourth and final day of the budget debate.

Tomorrow we will commence second reading of Bill C-10, the Air Canada legislation, and continue that debate on Monday.

Next week, we will have opposition days on Tuesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, we will begin debate on Bill C-14 on medical assistance in dying, introduced this morning by my colleague, the Minister of Justice.

Air Canada

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, after years of pretending to be champions for Air Canada workers, the Liberals tabled legislation that gives Air Canada free rein to ship the good-paying jobs of 2,600 workers and their families right out of Canada.

The Prime Minister once stood alongside protesting maintenance workers. He was chatting about solidarity and probably throwing in the odd Kumbaya for good measure, but where is that solidarity when it could actually do something for workers?

Will the Prime Minister stand up, apologize for his cynicism, and withdraw Bill C-10?