Bill C-3

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Canada Labour Code

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to, among other things,
(a) create an offence of intimidating a person in order to impede them from obtaining health services, intimidating a health professional in order to impede them in the performance of their duties or intimidating a person who assists a health professional in order to impede the person in providing that assistance;
(b) create an offence of obstructing or interfering with a person’s lawful access to a place at which health services are provided, subject to a defence of attending at the place for the purpose only of obtaining or communicating information; and
(c) add the commission of an offence against a person who was providing health services and the commission of an offence that had the effect of impeding another person from obtaining health services as aggravating sentencing factors for any offence.
It also amends the Canada Labour Code to, among other things,
(a) extend theperiod during which an employee may take a leave of absencefrom employment in the event of the death of a child and provide for the entitlement of anemployee to a leave of absence in the event of the loss of an unbornchild;
(b) repeal the personal leave that an employee may take to treat their illness or injury;
(c) provide that an employee may earn and take up to 10 days of medical leave of absence with pay in a calendar year; and
(d) authorize the Governor in Council to make regulations to modify, in certain circumstances, the provisions respecting medical leave of absence with pay.

Criminal Code

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

Madam Speaker, I made it very clear in my speech this afternoon just how important vaccines are. It was important for me in terms of my community and my family. I believe in the efficacy of vaccines, but the difficulty lies in the fact that there are still people who are unconvinced. I do not know what their reasons are. I use Scott as an example. His whole family is vaccinated and yet he is still a little concerned from a health standpoint.

Why are we not encouraging those people with more information, encouraging them to get vaccinated with proper information instead of this divisive rhetoric. That is the point I am making. There is too much divisiveness. Let us work to encourage people to get vaccinated. That should be the role of leaders in this country.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, qujannamiik.

It is clear now that my whole focus in my line of questioning has been to find ways to ease the burden on the health system. Nunavut has three main regions. Kitikmeot is one of them. With Kitikmeot, Cambridge Bay is the regional hub. Outlying those communities are Qikiqtaaluk, Kugluktuk, Kugaaruk and Gjoa Haven. They all rely on visiting doctors. There are no full-time doctors available to them. They do have available to them on-call physicians, who are available by phone to assist the nurses.

This bill, the amendments to the Canada Labour Code, would give the employer the power to require the employee to provide a medical certificate for any paid sick leave, regardless of the number of days—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I apologize, but I have to give the hon. member the chance to reply, and we are already over time.

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

Madam Speaker, there has been growth in the ways in which medical assistance has been provided. We have certainly seen that through COVID, where we have seen more online or phone call assessments. Those things have played a very important role throughout COVID.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to stand in the House, representing the people of Timmins—James Bay, and to be here in the House tonight as we, from all parties, attempt to pass legislation on what is coming close to the second anniversary of the pandemic.

If someone had said to me in March 2020 that we would be in the House debating the need to get 10 days of paid sick leave or to have laws in place to stop the harassment and threats of medical professionals by people who are our neighbours, I would have said it was simply impossible.

COVID has taught us, and COVID is a very hard teacher, but it has been clear from the get-go that it is something bigger than anything that was within our human imagination. Our generation has never seen anything like this. Throughout COVID, I find myself going back to Albert Camus's The Plague. I have been reading it and rereading it. He wrote:

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves.

He went on:

They disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is people who pass away, [especially those who] haven’t taken their precautions.

When we are talking about the need to have 10 days of paid sick leave two years into a pandemic, I feel like we have found ourselves in some kind of dark, dystopian Groundhog Day, that what we are repeating again and again are the same mistakes, and we are still having difficulty learning the lessons of a pandemic. The pandemic does not care whether we believe in it or not; the pandemic does not care if it is fair, and the pandemic certainly does not care about the short-term goals of various political leaders like Jason Kenney, who decided to announce that last summer was going to be the greatest summer ever, because he was simply going to ignore health protocols in order to make his party look good. He plunged Alberta into medical chaos and caused the deaths of too many innocent people.

I think of Doug Ford. As people were dying in warehouses in Peel, Brampton and the 401 and 905 areas, he was not willing to put paid sick leave in. In fact, he recently said he believed that come January there would be no need for vaccine mandates. This is a man who is still refusing to learn lessons.

We know here of the culpability of the Canadian government in fighting at the WTO against the right of the global south to create vaccines. Did anyone think that omicron would not happen, and that we would allow ourselves first-wave and second-wave boosters and protect ourselves but not ensure adequate vaccination in other parts of the globe, and that somehow the pandemic would not go there and come back? Now we are dealing with omicron.

Camus says that we have learned that the pandemic has made us all share the same collective fate. It is a hard lesson we are learning.

I remember how everyone rose up in the first wave and how hopeful it was. People took up hobbies and people were going to get themselves physically fit. Camus said, “At first, the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration.”

I think, in the isolation and difficulties, the vast majority of people carried on. This morning, when I walked through the snowstorms in Ottawa, I saw almost every single person wearing a mask. The vast majority of people have taken up what they know is going to be a difficult and maybe long-term issue. Sure, they complain. They have a right to complain, but they carry on.

In the first and second waves, people phoned our offices daily. We tried to help, we tried to give them answers and we tried to keep businesses going. Those people had legitimate fears, fears about the future of their business, fears about health care, fears about all the disinformation and falsehoods. They were all legitimate questions because we were dealing with something bigger than ourselves.

I found by the fourth wave that things had shifted to a sullen tiredness in the vast majority of people. However, a small minority of people had gone to a different place, a kind of radicalized sense of self-isolation and self-entitlement, a belief that somehow the government, the medical institutions and their neighbours were all against their right to go and do what they had always wanted to do. They were not doing their share, so the rest of the population was doing it.

Then we started seeing these terrible images that compared the mass murder of the Jewish families in Ukraine with the fact that Buddy could not go to East Side Mario's because he refused to get a vaccine. Then they began to turn on front-line medical workers. I talked to paramedics who said to me, “What is it about us?” These paramedics were out in the middle of the night on the highways at accidents, or were helping during the opioid crises, or were on the front-lines at the hospitals. They wanted to know why they were being targeted. In my region, a doctor was harassed and gave up her practice.

There is something deeply wrong when we have to come here at this point. Finally, after two years, we recognize the fundamental medical principle that if people are feeling sick, they should not go to work. That is the most common-sense way to stop the spread, particularly now with omicron variant.

The fact that we need to have a law to protect workers from harassment is deeply concerning. We will stand up for the medical workers and we will bring that law in. However, in doing that, let us not forget and let us not diminish the fact that there is incredible fortitude among the Canadian people.

I was very disheartened to hear my Conservative colleague talk about how we had to accommodate people who denied science, people who denied the need to have a collective responsibility for their neighbours, as opposed to saying no, that we stand for the right of people to go to work and be safe, that when people go to work, school or the hospital, they can go home at the end of the day even in these hard and uncertain times because they know their government is taking every step possible. That is part of what we are here to do tonight.

We need to address the need to change the TRIPS waiver. Canada has to stop being a laggard on the international stage. It has to show leadership. We are, as Camus says, all collectively in the same boat when it comes to the pandemic.

I would like to end by quoting Camus again, because what isolation has taught me is the power of family, the power of community and certainly, for me, the power of live music, which I hope comes back. Camus writes about the people in the village and says, “They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.” He said that out of the plague that affected the people in his town, that he realized there was so much more to admire in people than to despise.

Finally, and I find this so powerful because I am so tired and disheartened and hurt by what COVID has done to the fabric of our communities and our sense of confidence and our ability to see each. Camus says, “What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well”, because it helps people “rise above themselves.”

We are in the fourth wave or the beginning of a fifth wave, I do not know how many waves, but we are not out of the COVID pandemic. It is with us now, but we do not have to give in to it. We do not have to give in to fear and we do not have to give in to stupidity. There are smart ways. It is the only way we can take on COVID and restore that sense of human community and the bond that keeps us together.

I urge my colleagues to support the legislation.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I want to compliment my friend from Timmins—James Bay for an excellent speech that makes a number of really important points. I wish I had time to delve into all of them. I hope he will forgive me for using the opportunity of asking him a question to make something very clear. There have been a lot of allusions in today's debate that somehow equate non-violent civil disobedience against pipeline construction, which is an effort to protect human health and to save our planet and why I was arrested in that activity, and harassing health care workers.

I would like to ask the hon. member if he does not agree that the equivalency is around the kinds of protests and that no protest should be in any way threatening or violent to any kind of worker. That is where we draw the line. It is not about whether it is infrastructure or a hospital. It is about the activity of the protesters. For some reason, anti-vax protesters have been allowed to conduct themselves in ways that were appalling while indigenous protesters were violently arrested.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I found it deeply concerning that my Conservative colleagues throughout this discussion, where we were all coming to terms with the need to protect health care workers, have continually insinuated that there is something reasonable about anti-vaxxers and that we should accommodate them when we have threats being made against children at toy stores, and then equating that with the right to protest of indigenous peoples.

The right of indigenous peoples to defend their lands and their territories is a fundamental principle that we have to stand up for in this House. I will always stand up in this House and say the right of indigenous peoples to defend their territories is a fundamental, universal principle whether the Conservatives and some of their anti-vax supporters like that or not.

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

Madam Speaker, there are two aspects to the bill. I agree with many of the words the member has said about health care workers, the whole idea of the protests, how our health care workers stepped up to the plate and the revolting treatment that some people feel they are entitled to give them.

My question is with respect to the other aspect of the bill and that is with the paid sick days. The NDP have implied that they have some concerns in regards to it. Can the member give any indication, from his perspective, if there are some specific amendments that they already have in mind? What are the concerns that the member would have with regard to that aspect of the bill, assuming that the member does support the bill in principle?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, certainly, I think the deepest concern we had is that our leader pushed the Prime Minister 20-some times in the House on the need to have 10 days paid sick leave as the first, second and third waves were hammering people and we saw such massive deaths particularly in the for-profit, long-term care system, and we saw no action. It was not until the election was called that the Prime Minister suddenly had that come to God moment where he realized, “Please re-elect me and I will bring in something” that we had been asking for all along.

I am glad that we are bringing it in now. I am glad that we will get to committee to make sure that it works, but I think of all the people in long-term care who could have used this when the government refused to act.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague for his great speech. I just want to take an opportunity to thank all the health care workers who are in my riding and our frontline workers who have been working so diligently through the pandemic over almost two years now. On Friday, I actually had the opportunity to be in Wallaceburg where the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance has announced that we are going to be building a new hospital in the riding. It is very exciting to see great health care coming into the riding to replace the old infrastructure.

I am just wondering if the member opposite shares the same sentiment that I have of thanking health care workers and making sure that we protect critical infrastructure, whether it is hospitals or beyond, and if he thinks that we should take this bill to committee so that we can study that to make sure that we are protecting all critical infrastructure.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, let us always remember the incredible work the health care workers are doing. In Parry Sound the paramedics are going door to door right now to help people. They are doing home visits. That is how we step up in Canada. We have to be there for all our health care workers and all our frontline workers in every capacity to protect them from the kind of harassment that is ongoing.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and debate this important motion. I want to break it down because it really should be two bills. We are dealing with a Criminal Code matter and also a paid sick leave matter.

I listened with some amusement when a Liberal MP stood and said these bills should be connected because we are talking about protecting hospitals, but people also get sick and they need sick leave, so really it should just be one bill. By that justification, maybe we only need one bill in the House for the whole session because everything deals with money, so just one bill is needed. That is an aside.

This legislation is important. I will start off by saying that our doctors, our nurses, the clerks and all of the staff at hospitals work incredibly hard. I have a lot of family in health care. Both of my grandmothers were nurses and my father is a nurse. Having a safe workplace is a right for all people.

During the last election, we heard a great deal of rhetoric in this country over the issue of vaccines. This rhetoric led to unacceptable activities. People crossed the line from peacefully protesting whatever their viewpoint was on a subject. We have the constitutional right to peaceful protest protected in this country. I was pleased to see language in the bill that emphasized that Canadians have a right to peacefully protest: they have a right to take placards to events to state what they believe. That is a fundamental right in this country.

However, when someone is harassing or intimidating health care workers, and in some cases we saw that health care workers were assaulted, that really crosses the line. We have Criminal Code laws that deal with this, but it is critically important that this legislation sends a strong message that this is unacceptable activity.

Thankfully, we have not seen these protests continue in recent days and in the weeks since the election ended, but if people feel the need to forcefully protest, I invite them to come to my office. I am a politician. We are here in the House, and this is where we make the decisions. It is not the nurses and the doctors who make the decisions, it is the politicians. Whatever my stance is on a subject, come to my office. People can protest at my office. I will invite them any day. I will argue with people. I will debate with people. That is what democracy is all about. Come to my office and leave the health care workers alone. That is a really important part of this bill.

We also have to talk about unnecessary rhetoric leading into this thing. We just need to lower the rhetoric on this situation so that we can bring Canadians together again. We had a divisive election. The pandemic crisis is causing people to suffer from mental health issues. This has been talked about by all members in the House, and I think we need a lot more understanding.

A lot of times when I listen to the Liberals, it seems like they are not understanding or recognizing the fact that they say in the House all the time that there is a mental health crisis, there are people who are feeling left out, there are people feeling lonely and there are people who have lost their jobs because of this pandemic. There is not a lot of understanding coming from the government.

It does not mean that I agree with the stances that people take, but when we have a government that is raising the rhetoric and demonizing individuals, it is no surprise that we see unacceptable activity like this happen. We need to talk about uniting Canadians again. On the Conservative side, we are focused on uniting Canadians.

The second part of this bill is talking about paid sick leave. We have heard a lot about 10 days of paid sick leave in the House. I was perusing the Internet, and the wonderful thing about the Internet is that once something is on there, it never really goes away. The first time I could find the government talking about paid sick leave was May 26, 2020. For those who were not here, that was a couple of months after Friday, March 13. I remember that day. I was giving an S.O. 31. That is when the Prime Minister's wife contracted COVID.

That woke everyone up in the House to the fact that the pandemic was a really serious thing. It was starting to hit us and we needed to take action. There was a lot of scrambling. People did not understand what was going on. It was just a couple months later that it was recognized. The NDP fought for this and said that people needed 10 days of paid sick leave in Canada because people felt like they needed to go to work, but they might be sick with COVID, and the NDP did not want these people going to work and spreading that sickness around.

It was also around the same time that we were talking about bringing in a virtual Parliament. The NDP stood up very strongly and said they were not going to approve this virtual Parliament unless the Liberal government supported 10 days of paid sick leave. Here we are, well over a year later and in an entirely different Parliament, and we are debating this piece of legislation. It is literally just one page.

How difficult was it for the government to come up with this legislation? In the May 26 article, the government said it would be implementing this without delay. It has been over a year and a half. We have had an election, and we have had two throne speeches. The government has still not implemented the legislation. We are just targeting it now.

The Liberals were saying they had to work with the provinces about this. I do not see anything in this legislation to indicate why it would take the government over a year to negotiate with the provinces to get 10 days of paid sick leave. Now we have this one-page document, which is not even important enough to the government for it to warrant its own legislative number, as it has been grouped with a Criminal Code amendment. Obviously, it was not that complicated.

Why did it take the government over a year to implement paid sick leave? I think it is a bit ridiculous that it was talking about this May 26, 2020, and it is now December 6, 2021. There has been an election and two speeches from the throne. Now that we are talking about this in the House, Canadians are finally seeing action.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-3, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Canada Labour Code, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C‑3.

I must admit that this bill is a little strange because it deals with two completely different topics. It would amend the Canada Labour Code and would also amend the Criminal Code. The bill's scope goes in two completely different directions.

First, the bill would amend the Criminal Code to increase penalties on people who intimidate health care workers or patients or who obstruct access to a hospital or clinic in order to impede people from obtaining health services, such as vaccination. It is hard to argue against virtue, so it is relatively easy to support this part of the bill.

Second, the bill would force federally regulated employers to grant up to 10 days of paid sick leave to their employees. As I just said, it is hard to argue against virtue, so we will support this bill.

I would like to raise an important point about the part involving protests outside health care facilities. We are being told the bill is not intended to infringe on the right to peaceful protest and is therefore not intended to affect workers' rights, but that is not made perfectly clear in the wording.

This will require clarification. As usual, the Bloc Québécois will be thorough in asking questions, checking the facts, seeking confirmation and possibly proposing any amendments needed to protect this basic right.

The Bloc Québécois always stands up for workers' rights. Of course, we defend collective rights, but defending workers' rights is one of our core values. It is of the utmost importance to us.

In Quebec, workers' rights during a dispute are particularly well protected compared to the rest of Canada. Think, for example, of the anti-scab legislation in effect in Quebec. It is important that close attention be paid to this part of the legislation.

Furthermore, paid sick leave is a step forward for federally regulated Quebec workers, even though there are not that many of them. It is a step forward for them.

As history has shown, progress for one group of workers is always progress for all workers. A rising tide lifts all boats, and measures like this create momentum, which is always positive even if it is just for a small group of people. The Bloc Québécois will definitely support this measure.

I want to comment on the prohibition of protests. The bill would give prosecutors added powers to charge people who impede others in the performance of health care duties and interfere with access to a clinic or hospital.

Under the present circumstances, because of the election campaign and anti-vax protests, people have been thinking about access to health care facilities a lot. It is these events, in large part, that led to the creation of this bill.

Over the years, we have also seen protests by people preventing access to abortion clinics. Recognizing that every woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body and that nobody can interfere with that is one of our core values. In that respect, this measure is good because it goes some way toward ensuring that people will not be hassled while accessing health care.

This part of the law is important because it distinguishes between “freedom of expression” and “aggression”. Unfortunately, in our society, some individuals or groups often confuse the two concepts. Some think that because they have the right to express themselves, they have the right to prevent others from doing something. This is not at all the case, and such behaviour should never be tolerated. This is a fundamental and very important point.

As parliamentarians, we have a duty to protect people from all forms of aggression. This is what we started to do in the last Parliament before the unnecessary election that everyone knows about. We were working on Bill C‑205, which concerned the agricultural sector and would have prevented vegan activists from trespassing on livestock farms and other farms.

Assaulting someone or coming onto their property to express a political opinion or a point of view is unacceptable. This is a democratic country, and democracy is expressed in a peaceful and respectful way. There are public spaces for demonstrating. Once people start to be bullied, it becomes very important to intervene.

This also deals with intimidation, and that is important. When people head out to a certain place and find a threatening group there, they may turn back. The example of vaccine-hesitant folks comes to mind. This is not a judgment of someone's opinion. I am not saying that one group is more right than another. However, in order for us to get out of this miserable crisis, our duty as parliamentarians is to encourage people to get vaccinated. That means that any demonstration that might interfere with that goal obviously must be prevented without stopping people from expressing themselves. Once again, “expression” does not mean “aggression”. This is a very important point.

In my former life as a high school teacher, I fought against bullying and intimidation for many years. It was a fundamental issue that was very important to me. I will continue that fight as a parliamentarian, because our civil society must not accept that kind of behaviour.

Bill C‑3 is quite severe, providing for prison sentences of up to 10 years, depending on how the offender is charged. They could get 10 years or two years less a day. This could be a good way to make people think twice about assaulting others.

As for the rest, the bill also contains other clauses, such as release orders for people charged under the amended law, potentially with conditions. That is fairly standard.

However, I would like to highlight one very important point for my colleagues. Under Bill C‑3, any criminal offence committed against a health professional in the performance of their duties would now be considered an aggravating factor. I think this is a great approach, because it confirms the almost sacred nature of health care work. It also protects access to care for the general public, which I think is a very good sign.

The last part deals with paid sick leave, and it is positive, as I said earlier. However, the majority of federally regulated private sector workers already have access to 10 or more days of sick leave. We are talking about roughly 63% of those workers. Getting that number up to 100%, or in other words, giving everyone access to those sick days is great, but there is one aspect of Bill C-3 that could prove to be problematic, and it needs to be addressed. I am referring to the fact that the employer can require a medical certificate within 15 days of the employee's return to work. I wonder about that.

Consider the example of someone who has been sick for two days and returns to work, then after another five or six days is asked by their employer to provide a medical certificate. I think it would be hard to prove one's illness by that point. The right questions need to be asked, and I am counting on my esteemed colleague, who is the critic on this issue, to dig into the matter, but I think it is important to clarify that aspect.

As I have been saying from the start, we cannot be against this bill, despite the fact that it changes very little. It feels like the Liberals are trying to prove that they are with the times and following the trends. We are being asked to vote on this bill after we were forced to urgently vote on a time allocation motion. As a colleague from our party said earlier, however, this was brought up a long time ago.

Why was this not done at the beginning of the crisis when many people may have needed it?

Why wait 62 days to recall members to work and then shove bills down their throat?

Many areas need our swift action, such as the cuts to the guaranteed income supplement for seniors, which is a major injustice. When will we see some movement on that? I am being told that Bill C‑3 is urgent, that it needs to happen by tomorrow morning, but we sounded the alarm about the cuts to the GIS before the election campaign.

Does the government not want to introduce a bill to address that situation? It is a matter of social justice. Yesterday, we discussed Afghanistan; it is the same thing.

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

Madam Speaker, one of the things we recognize is that Canadians afforded the House of Commons a minority government. This means that the government does work, has worked and will continue to work with opposition parties as best as it can to speed up legislation, as legislation does require the support of another party to pass. In the past, we have been sometimes supported by New Democrats, and sometimes by members of the Bloc. We have even had support from the Conservatives.

The majority of members of Parliament are saying we should proceed quickly on a piece of legislation for whatever reasons, just as, I trust, the Bloc will identify an important piece of legislation. Based on that, would the member not agree that this says a lot about the urgency to get this bill through for our health care workers and for workers because it is in the best interests of both?