Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Honourable senators, members of the House, I am pleased to be here this evening to support the work of the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency, in the aftermath of the motion adopted on March 24. I hope to be able to answer your questions about the committee's mandate and the scope of its work.
As you know, on February 14, the Governor in Council declared that a public order emergency existed across Canada and necessitated the taking of special temporary measures. This declaration was subsequently revoked nine days later, on February 23.
Like other federal statutes, the Emergencies Act provides an explicit role for Parliament in its administration,. This role is described in Part VI of the act, entitled “Parliamentary Supervision”. Subsection 62(1), under the heading “Parliamentary Review Committee”, specifically provides that “the exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to a declaration of emergency shall be reviewed by a committee of both Houses of Parliament designated or established for that purpose”. The motion to establish this committee, passed by the House of Commons on March 2 and the Senate on March 3, uses essentially the same wording as the act: your committee was established to examine “the exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to a declaration of emergency”, which has since been revoked.
Section 62 provides a number of details relating to the committee's role. However, as the motion establishing your committee passed after the declaration of emergency had been revoked, some parts of that section are no longer relevant to your work. For instance, no orders or regulations will be referred to you for revocation or amendment. Your committee will therefore focus on reviewing the government’s exercise of its powers during the state of emergency.
As some members of this committee have already noted, the wording of the act is quite broad. What needs to be determined is its scope, in practice. Neither the motion establishing the committee, nor the act itself, provide any further clarification of what is meant by “review”. Nor do they contain any guidelines or limitations as to the kind of information the committee must or must not consider or the kinds of inquiries it may or may not conduct in its review.
Were this simply a matter of statutory interpretation, I would suggest that the committee's role is to examine how any powers, duties or functions assigned during the emergency were exercised. The powers of the committee as set out in subsection 62(5) to revoke or amend an order or regulation tend to support a mandate that is focused on how the powers, duties or functions assigned during an emergency were exercised. This would include their conformity with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international human rights instruments, which are referenced in the act's preamble.
In addition, I would note the different language used in the act in sections 62 and 63. The former describes the work of this committee, and the latter describes the inquiry that the executive is obliged to convene into the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued. In section 63 the inquiry is explicitly required to examine the circumstances that led to a declaration of emergency. Section 62, by contrast, makes no mention of those circumstances.
As I mentioned, however, the committee's mandate is not simply a matter of statutory interpretation. One must always keep in mind the role of parliamentary privilege when considering committees and their work. Parliamentary privilege is a fundamental tenet of Canadian constitutional law, as you well know. It constitutes the sum of rights that the House of Commons, the Senate and their members possess, without which they could not discharge their functions. One such right is the right of each House of Parliament to regulate its own internal affairs without outside interference. This right is extended to committees, including joint committees like this one.
Accordingly, this committee is master of its own affairs, subject to any direction from the House and the Senate. It can determine what information may or may not be relevant and necessary to the task it has been assigned, and it can determine whether a given line of inquiry is or is not within the scope of its mandate. In other words, the committee is within its rights to determine, on its own, whether any given line of inquiry or piece of information is relevant and necessary to its work.
I thank you for your time. I'm looking forward to taking your questions.