Finance Committee on March 14th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 29 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance. Pursuant to the motion adopted in committee on Thursday, February 17, the committee is meeting to study the invocation of the Emergencies Act and related measures.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of November 25, 2021. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. Just so that you're aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking, rather than the entirety of the committee.

Today's meeting is also taking place in the webinar format. Webinars are for public committee meetings and are available only to members, their staff and witnesses. Members enter immediately as active participants. All functionalities for active participants remain the same. Staff will be non-active participants and can therefore view the meeting only in gallery view. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind all participants in this meeting that screenshots or taking photos of your screen is not permitted.

Given the ongoing pandemic situation, and in light of the recommendations from the health authorities as well as the directive of the Board of Internal Economy on October 19, 2021, to remain healthy and safe all those attending the meeting in person are to maintain two-metre physical distancing and must wear a non-medical mask when circulating in the room. It's highly recommended that the mask be worn at all times, including when seated. They also must maintain proper hand hygiene by using the provided hand sanitizer at the room entrance.

As the chair, I'll be enforcing these measures for the duration of the meeting, and I thank members in advance for their co-operation.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I'd like to outline a few rules to follow.

Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either the floor, English or French. If interpretation is lost, please inform me immediately, and we will ensure interpretation is properly restored before resuming the proceedings. The “raise hand” feature at the bottom of the screen can be used at any time if you wish to speak or to alert the chair.

For members participating in person, proceed as you usually would when the whole committee is meeting in person in the committee room. Keep in mind the Board of Internal Economy's guidelines for mask use and health protocols. Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you're on the video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. For those in the room, your microphone will be controlled as normal by the proceedings and verification officer. When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you're not speaking, your mike should be on mute. I remind you that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

With regard to a speaking list, the committee clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain a consolidated order of speaking for all members, whether they are participating virtually or in person.

This meeting is scheduled for a longer duration. In consideration of the fact that our witnesses may not get an opportunity to leave their virtual set-up, I will suspend the meeting for a five-minute health break at around the halfway duration mark.

I'd now like to welcome our witnesses.

We have, from the Assembly of First Nations, National Chief RoseAnne Archibald; from Ether Capital, Brian Mosoff, chief executive officer; from Invest Ottawa, Michael Tremblay, president and chief executive officer; from Newton Crypto Ltd., Dustin Walper; from Wealthsimple, Blair Wiley, chief legal officer; and, from the Chambre de commerce de Gatineau, Stéphane Bisson, president.

At this time, witnesses will have an opportunity to make a statement or remarks for up to five minutes before we get into questions.

We will start with the Assembly of First Nations.

RoseAnne Archibald, the floor is yours for up to five minutes.

[National Chief RoseAnne Archibald, National Chief, Assembly of First Nations]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm very happy to be with you here today.

First of all, as I explained, I'm on the territory of the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam nations.

Meegwetch to the Standing Committee on Finance for inviting me to appear. I do want to talk about the far wider impact and the financial implications of the Emergencies Act, but I will also start with some larger-picture issues.

The root cause of what we're analyzing today needs to be put on the record. To put it plainly, there are serious doubts that the events of February 22 would have escalated if these protesters were first nations people. The convoy was provided with much leniency from the start because the non-indigenous participants were not initially considered or deemed a threat, and were still not until it was too late and, thus, the Emergencies Act was invoked. I do want to state that this is in stark contrast with how first nations people are treated when they are involved in civil actions, and there is a need for dignity and respect to be afforded to first nations when they are being vocal in their disagreement with government on legislation and policies. First nations people are often viewed through a different lens and met with aggression by law enforcement almost immediately, not three weeks later. In the long term, first nations defenders of land and water could potentially be severely impacted by the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and this is very concerning.

First nations people have been attempting to bring attention to this unequal treatment for decades. Canada has an overt, covert and systemic racism problem. I have said many times that the fair and just society that is proclaimed is simply not true when it comes to first nations. We only have to look at Kanesatake, Oka, Ipperwash Park, Tyendinaga and Wet'suwet'en to see the violence that is inflicted upon first nations men, women and children by Canadian police, paramilitary and military forces.

Having said that, I do see short- and long-term financial implications for first nations and their citizens. For example, the financing of the “freedom convoy” protests and blockades highlighted the vulnerability of Canada to be influenced by national and international white supremacists and far right extremist groups. I will focus my comments on the subject matter of this committee.

When it comes to broadening the scope of Canada's anti-terrorist financing laws, it makes sense to apply that to identified extremists and white supremacist hate groups. However, first nations do not fall in this category. I want to be clear that first nations are not terrorists, nor should they be branded as such when they are involved in civil actions that protect and uphold their constitutionally protected treaty and inherent rights in this country.

Many of our disputes with settler governments involve land and water rights. We have a sacred responsibility and connection to our lands and waters. As national chief, when I have travelled all across Turtle Island, I have always acknowledged that I'm a guest on various nations' territories, and I wish to remind this committee and all Canadians that you are guests of first nations on lands and waters given to us by the Creator. What's equally important is that we made sacred promises to live in peace. Therefore, any reference to first nations' finances being included in the scope of Canada's anti-terrorist financing laws is an affront to our sacred relationship with the Crown.

I am concerned about the federal government's increased ability to interfere with the business of crowdfunding websites. First nations have used these crowdfunding websites, for example, to raise legal defence funds. This will be a big step backward for Canada as it will take us back to 1927 when the Indian Act made it illegal for first nations people and communities to hire lawyers or bring about land claims against the government.

Further, in 1951 Canada amended the Indian Act to make it illegal to obtain funds or legal counsel to advance aboriginal title cases. We need to move on the healing path forward and not go back to oppressive, suppressive legislation that negatively impacts first nations.

I'm equally troubled by the ability of Canadian financial institutions to temporarily and selectively cease to provide financial services to specific clients. Many of you may be aware of the case of the first nations 12-year-old girl and her grandfather who were arrested in Vancouver for trying to open a bank account at the Bank of Montreal. This is overt, covert and systemic racism that first nations already face within the banking system.

When you add on top of that the powers provided to systemically racist law enforcement agencies to supply names to financial institutions in order to freeze accounts, you are creating a compounded, unjust situation for first nations. It's incumbent upon Canada to not only fix its systemic racism problem, but to ensure that the system has checks and balances when it comes to freezing the assets of first nations and/or their citizens.

Moreover, broadly increasing powers given to systemically racist Canadian financial institutions, particularly sharing personal information, has long-term implications for first nations. Clear guidelines and safeguards need to be put in place to protect first nation citizens from unfair targeting by banks, as well as unauthorized sharing of their information.

Banks have a great deal of power over the lives of all people, including first nations people. Some individual impacts could be downgraded credit ratings and an inability to take out a loan, a mortgage, a credit card or even to rent a home—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, National Chief Archibald. We've gone over time a bit, but there will be a lot of opportunity to make your comments through the question and answer time.

We are moving to Ether Capital and Brian Mosoff for up to five minutes, please.

[Brian Mosoff, Chief Executive Officer, Ether Capital]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me here to speak.

I am the chief executive officer of Ether Capital, one of the leading public companies in the cryptocurrency sector. We do not face retail directly, meaning crypto assets cannot be purchased through a platform that we hold. We are an access point in the capital markets for exposure to the Ethereum ecosystem and a lot of the developments that are happening in Web3.

I've been a member of the cryptocurrency community for about a decade now, so I wear two hats. I wear the hat of what I would like to believe is a good actor in the space, someone who wants to work with regulators and the government to figure out what appropriate access points are, and to be a leading access point in the capital markets. I also wear the hat of someone who's been in the space for many years, who has a lot of knowledge and experience and who understands the lexicon and complexities of this new industry.

Broadly, I'm excited to be here today to help paint a picture of an industry that's largely been marginalized and pushed to the side for the 13 years or so since its formation. There's an opportunity for Canada to lean in to this industry. It's a new technology. It's an asset class that has grown from essentially nothing into multiple trillions of dollars. We're seeing Canadians who want exposure to this asset class and directional exposure to the assets. They want to do it in appropriate ways, and there's an opportunity to provide that access.

I think most of the conversations that have happened to date have largely been at the regulatory level, figuring out what appropriate registrations would be like for platforms, how that would work, which assets are appropriate and which activities should be accessible to Canadians who want to be good actors. Recent events have kicked off a new conversation. This is the opportunity to recognize that this asset class is here to stay, and it's likely going to be orders of magnitude bigger within the next decade. Ethereum was largely incubated and invented in Canada, and the opportunity here is to lean into a technology, not push it aside and ensure that we have a seat at the table at the next iteration of the web and finance. It's something I care about deeply as a Canadian, as a technologist and as someone who wants to see Canada win here.

There is an opportunity for us to secure a seat at the table. In order to do that, we need at a national level to coordinate better communication across various agencies, a plan of how we're going to create appropriate access points and what our participation is going to be like in the space.

I will also say that there are going to be good and bad actors in the space. In a lot of the focus, the light is shone on the bad actors, the people using it to evade taxes or launder money. However, most of the activity that's taking place in the space is by good actors, the people who want to participate in a growing asset class. There are many new verticals. Some of you may have heard of centralized financing and NFTs. Perhaps none of this stuff makes sense to you, but I'm here to offer my support to anyone on this panel and to anyone in government who wants help navigating this new world.

I think we're all here today to understand how we create appropriate frameworks going forward, to see Canada win in this new sector and look at technologies that can help monitor inappropriate behaviours in these realms. There are new tools that are maybe not familiar to the traditional banking system—I'm happy to chat about them further—to monitor activities, wallet activity, wallet interactions and behaviour analytics to ensure that good actors are safe and using things in a compliant way, and that bad actors are able to be brought to justice.

Thank you. I'm very excited to have this conversation for the next few hours.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Mosoff.

Now we're going to hear from Invest Ottawa.

We have Michael Tremblay for up to five minutes.

[Michael Tremblay, President and Chief Executive Officer, Invest Ottawa]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Fonseca and standing committee members.

I'll keep to the script here, recognizing that we have just five minutes for these sessions.

I am pleased to join you here today, and I do want to acknowledge that I am on the unceded territory of the Algonquin people.

As noted, I'm Mike Tremblay. I have the privilege of acting as president, CEO and board member of Invest Ottawa.

For those who are not aware, Invest Ottawa is the lead economic development agency for knowledge-based industries in Canada's capital, facilitating economic growth and job creation in our nation's capital.

We're guided by a vision to help realize Ottawa's full potential as a globally recognized, innovative, inclusive and future-ready city delivering venture development, global expansion and talent programs and services that catalyze the growth and success of entrepreneurs and firms in the region and beyond. This includes small business training mentorship, acceleration and scale-up services for tech firms, foreign business and investment attraction, local business retention and marketing Ottawa's diversified economy and the high quality of life here as we try to attract businesses and investment.

Invest Ottawa is also the founder of Area X.O, which includes research, development and testing to accelerate the application of next-gen mobility tech. You'll see that in things like the autonomous vehicles and drones that we test here in the region.

In short, we foster and grow businesses and business interests in our region.

As a not-for-profit, we receive funding from all three levels of government, in addition to corporate sponsorships and investments; however, we are not a member of any level of government. I just want to clarify the context of Invest Ottawa.

For those who are here today, it will come as no surprise that Ottawa businesses have been deeply impacted by COVID-19, just like every other business across the country and around the globe. They've endured numerous shutdowns as a result of the ever-changing nature of the pandemic and, throughout it, have shown true resilience in the face of significant and ongoing hardship and challenge.

As we all know, at the beginning of this year, non-essential businesses in Ottawa and across the province had to close their doors once again due to the surge in omicron-related case numbers, but there was a glimmer of hope. On Monday, January 31, restaurants, gyms, theatres, museums and cinemas were all set to reopen at 50% capacity, providing a much-needed opportunity to generate income and to welcome Ottawa residents back to their businesses.

However, that wasn't able to happen. On January 28, the truck convoy arrived in Ottawa, which effectively shut down the Ottawa downtown core three days before businesses were set to open their doors once again. There were wide-ranging consequences of this demonstration, and many lessons to be learned, no doubt, but, as Invest Ottawa, the economic development agency for the capital, our focus remains forward looking and proactive and really having the single goal of helping our businesses, those that make up the very economic fabric of our city, to thrive once again. That's what we do. We're steadfastly committed to this goal, and we are working with our partners, collaborators and businesses to ensure they have the resources they need to once again demonstrate their resilience in the face of unprecedented challenges.

Thank you once again, Chair and committee members, for your time today.

I'm happy to answer your questions as this committee meeting ensues.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Tremblay.

Now we're going to be hearing from Newton Crypto Ltd. and Dustin Walper for up to five minutes.

[Dustin Walper, Chief Executive Officer, Newton Crypto Ltd]

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody.

My name is Dustin Walper, and I'm the founder and CEO of Newton.co. I will give you a bit of background about us to start.

We're one of the leading Canadian cryptocurrency trading platforms. We make it easy for Canadians to buy and sell over 60 different cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, as mentioned, Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano and many others. We're a great example of a high-growth, Canadian-run business.

Since we founded Newton in 2018, we've grown to have over 450,000 customers across Canada, with over 100 highly skilled Canadian employees across the country, making, on average, $100,000 in salary. This is everywhere from Halifax to Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Victoria. It's truly from coast to coast.

Recently, we raised a $25 million Canadian series B to further invest in our growth. That was raised from a combination of Canadian and American investors. Furthermore, we have been registered as a money services business with FINTRAC since 2019, and we're in the advanced stages of registering as a restricted dealer with the Ontario Securities Commission.

The extent of our regulatory obligations is quite considerable. They include maintaining a robust anti-money laundering program, an anti-terrorist financing program—for which we often use sophisticated blockchain analysis tools as was mentioned previously—a fraud prevention team, multiple levels of insurance to protect customers from loss of funds, a robust cybersecurity program, including external penetration testing, and a lot more. Far from being the Wild West, as some may perceive it, cryptocurrency trading platforms in Canada are becoming highly regulated businesses. They are more so than in almost every state of the United States.

I'm telling you all of this because I want to clear up misconceptions about the cryptocurrency industry. We represent, I would say, the cutting edge of fintech, or financial technology, and we're contributing meaningfully to the Canadian economy. With some forward-thinking policy, we would be really well positioned to leverage our reputation for the stability of our financial services sector in order to participate in the boom in fintech growth.

I want to talk a bit about the Emergencies Act and touch briefly on that. Ours is a retail platform, so we deal with customers across the country. We were asked by the RCMP to prevent funds from flowing from our platform to a list of Bitcoin addresses, and we complied with that request. Crypto trading platforms like Newton, however, are not able to freeze or hold funds that are being held in private Bitcoin wallets off our platform. In fact, a key characteristic of Bitcoin is that it allows users to transact peer-to-peer without an intermediary, which makes it very much like the equivalent of digital cash.

It's my fundamental belief—and we could maybe go in to this later—that property rights protected by due process of law are essential to the success of a modern democratic country, and table stakes for attracting investment like the investment we were able to raise from outside of the country. That reputation is very important to us and other financial services and fintech companies. That reputation took a long time to build—many decades, through the last financial crisis—and it can be undone if we're not careful.

The ability to hold and spend money to buy groceries, pay rent and fill up your tank with gas is a basic precondition to one's ability to operate freely in society, and our system of law exists to protect individuals from the overwhelming power of the state by imposing the burden of due process. In my personal view, we must do everything we can to prevent its erosion. It is really for this reason that peer-to-peer financial technologies play a really important role in the checks and balances that make our country work. Cash or Bitcoin are examples of that. While they can be and frequently are seized as part of a court order, a criminal investigation, a civil suit or what have you, they cannot be arbitrarily frozen without due process once they are in the control of an individual.

I would urge the committee to think strongly about the kind of country we want Canada to be. In my view, it's a country that strongly values both property rights and due process, regardless of the inconvenience they may cause to legitimate investigation. It's a country that embraces fintech innovation and pro-growth policies, and one that's fair and even-handed, even to those whom we might not ultimately agree with.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Walper.

Now we will hear from Wealthsimple, with Blair Wiley for up to five minutes.

[Blair Wiley, Chief Legal Officer, Wealthsimple]

Thank you to the chair and thank you to the committee for inviting us to attend today.

I'll start off with a few introductory remarks about Wealthsimple. Wealthsimple is a financial services company committed to helping Canadians achieve financial freedom no matter who they are or how much they have. We do that by building powerful financial tools for people to grow and manage their money. Our products are low-cost, intuitive, and available online, which we believe is essential to help Canadians adopt good financial habits.

We provide our services to more than 2.5 million Canadians. We employ more than a thousand people in nine provinces across the country, despite being founded in only 2014, when we began as an automated investment manager. Our services have since evolved to meet the multiple financial needs of our clients. We still offer professionally managed portfolios and have added self-directed trading, saving and spending, tax filing, and, as of 2020, a cryptocurrency platform.

In August of 2020, Wealthsimple became the first crypto platform to register with Canadian securities administrators. This required us to demonstrate high standards of disclosure, financial resilience and investor protection. Crypto is a legitimate and compelling emerging asset class, worth over $2 trillion and owned by millions of Canadians. We believe those Canadians deserve the same protections they would expect regarding any other investment.

Our clients' behaviour has substantiated that view. Contrary to the popular narrative regarding crypto investors, Wealthsimple crypto clients tend to invest cautiously and for the long term. Clients tend to invest small amounts. Almost half of clients who have bought crypto through Wealthsimple have never sold.

One vital piece of our crypto platform is a program of robust anti-money laundering, or AML, to guard against financial crime and the financing of terrorism. As well as being registered with FINTRAC since our launch, we have sophisticated tools, experienced AML professionals and robust processes for blockchain transaction monitoring.

With regard to the Ottawa protest, our legal and AML teams became aware in early February of media reports about fundraising efforts, including fundraising efforts using Bitcoin. On February 10 the Ontario Superior Court issued an order under the Criminal Code freezing property relating to a fundraiser for the protest on the grounds that it was related to alleged criminal activity. Later, following the issuance of the emergency order on February 15, the RCMP identified specific Bitcoin wallet addresses associated with alleged criminal activity. On February 18 we were notified of a second court order obtained by private parties freezing certain assets, including Bitcoin, related to fundraising efforts. In each case, our in-house AML expertise and blockchain intelligence tools enabled us to rapidly respond with appropriate controls.

In our view, recent events provide compelling evidence that far from the Wild West, as Mr. Walper also alluded to, that is often imagined, crypto is an important and promising technology that allows for a degree of transparency and consumer protection that is at least comparable to traditional finance. In fact, the transparent nature of a public blockchain has several advantages over conventional banking in the inherent ability to track and audit flows and transactions.

For our part, regulated crypto platforms like Wealthsimple are responsible actors committed to compliance with Canadian law. We are aware that some foreign platforms appear less committed to compliance with Canadian law despite serving millions of Canadian customers. We believe this strengthens the case for the federal government to start engaging with the domestic crypto sector to develop a clear and positive regulatory framework for crypto in Canada. It is strategically important to Canadian innovation, competitiveness and security that we have a strong domestic crypto industry. Wealthsimple is ready to play our part in helping to build it.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Wiley.

Now we're moving to the Chambre de commerce de Gatineau. We will hear from Stéphane Bisson for up to five minutes.

Mr. Bisson is president of the Gatineau Chamber of Commerce.

Go ahead, Mr. Bisson.

[Stéphane Bisson, President, Gatineau Chamber of Commerce]

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Stéphane Bisson, and I am president of the Gatineau Chamber of Commerce.

Thank you for inviting me to appear.

I would first like to specify, for those who don't know, that Gatineau is right on the other side of the river; it is the national capital's forgotten village.

During the protests in support of the freedom convoy, downtown Gatineau was literally taken hostage by sympathizers. You will remember that Ottawa's public safety officials had blocked the bridges. Only two bridges ultimately remained open to traffic: the Champlain Bridge, located westward, and the interprovincial bridge, where significant traffic jams occurred. So sympathizers arriving from the Quebec side to see the convoy would park in downtown Gatineau. They simply took the downtown area hostage.

When the convoy arrived downtown, businesses had just reopened, including restaurants and anything related to tourism. Hundreds and thousands of individuals started waving flags, drinking and urinating in public. That combination did not make restaurants very attractive to people. As a result, a great many reservations were cancelled. All merchants in downtown Gatineau suffered incredible losses, in addition to serious harm, as people came to their businesses refusing to follow health measures. That is one of the problems that arose.

I also want to highlight the absence of public servants in downtown Gatineau. Some 50,000 of them work in office buildings. So their absence represents significant losses for businesses in downtown Gatineau. I wanted to remind you of that in the context of the committee's study.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Bisson.

Members and witnesses, we're going to our first round of questions now.

In this first round, each party will have up to six minutes to ask our witnesses questions.

We're starting with the Conservatives and MP Lawrence for six minutes.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all, thank you to all of the witnesses.

Meegwetch.

I really appreciate your appearance here today.

I'm going to focus my questions on cryptocurrency and its impact on the blockade, so I'm looking forward to, hopefully, setting straight some misinformation that's out there.

To my understanding, there was a bit of a narrative out there in the press and otherwise that said cryptocurrency was a completely unregulated industry and that it was being used by nefarious actors to fund the illegal activities that were happening at the blockades in Ottawa and elsewhere.

First, you've already talked about this a bit in your testimony, but just so that we can have absolute clarity, Mr. Walper and Mr. Wiley, can you confirm that you do have reporting obligations to FINTRAC both before and after the illegal blockades and currently?

[Dustin Walper]

I can quickly address that first and he can follow.

As I mentioned, we've been registered with FINTRAC as an MSB since 2019. That includes a wide variety of different reporting obligations, most recently including large-value crypto transaction reporting. On any transaction valued at over $10,000, we have to report information.

There is also something called the “travel rule”, which is to attach information to crypto transfers moving from platform to platform. We employ sophisticated blockchain analysis tools to look at where funds are going and routinely will block funds that we perceive as going to potential high-risk destinations.

There actually is quite a wide variety of obligations already in place that predate this event.

[Blair Wiley]

I would echo that entirely. It's a very sophisticated regime that is modelled after the rules for money service businesses, which have been regulated for many years, with specific regard to the nature of transactions on the blockchain. Not only can we block money or Bitcoin that is leaving our platform, but we can also block transfers to our platform, if someone, for instance, wants to receive Bitcoin into a Wealthsimple account and then exchange that for cash to use in the course of business.

Regulated platforms, such as Newton and Wealthsimple, play a very important role as a bridge between the cash system, the financial fiat currency system, and crypto technology. Our ability to regulate and follow regulation related to transactions that occur is an important feature of Canadian AML law.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you. I appreciate those answers.

For how many individuals was information flagged and provided by the RCMP or under other regulations, with respect to potential freezing? I'm just talking about the Emergencies [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Mr. Clerk, I believe MP Lawrence froze on my screen. Do you have the same?

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Alexandre Roger]

Yes, his connection is frozen. We'll try to get in touch with him.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We're at three minutes into the Conservatives' question time. Would another Conservative member like to take up some of the questions?

Mr. Albas.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

I would, if that's all right. I'll give my time back to MP Lawrence a little bit later on.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Sure.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

National Chief Archibald, the end of your statement was cut off a little bit. Do you want to finish your statement, utilizing my time?

[National Chief RoseAnne Archibald]

Thank you very much. I would certainly appreciate that.

I believe I left off talking about some of the implications of people's credit being downgraded when dealing with banks, so I'm going to finish off two more pieces. The invocation of the Emergencies Act has long-term negative impacts for first nations. The history of Canada involving the suppression, oppression and repression of first nations people and their rights is rarely told. Canada has begrudgingly changed through human rights rulings and lengthy and costly court cases. Canada tries to portray itself as a nice, friendly place that treats its citizens well, where first nations appear to be walking toward freedom and justice; however, Canada continues to hide its oppression and its systemic genocide of first nations people.

The final comment I was going to make was that the recent invocation of the Emergencies Act is taking first nations backwards. It is the opposite of what we're calling the “healing path forward”.

I do appreciate your giving me extra time, and I look forward to additional questions on my comments.

Meegwetch. Kinanaskamitanow.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Mr. Chair, do I have any time for a question?