Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First off, on behalf of all of my colleagues, I'd like to express our best wishes to Mr. Shugart for a speedy recovery and good health.
Madame Tremblay, I'm going to read to you an excerpt from what parliamentarians were told in 1987 when they were reviewing Canada's emergency legislation landscape from a federal point of view. It said:
The federal government has primary and ultimate responsibility to provide for the safety and security of Canadians during national emergencies. Its constitutional jurisdiction over such national emergencies stems from the power of Parliament to legislate for the “Peace, Order and Good Government of Canada” and the emergency doctrine which has evolved from it.
That doctrine invests the Parliament of Canada, during times of national crisis, with temporary plenary jurisdiction to legislate on all matters, including those normally reserved exclusively to the provinces. It operates, as Mr. Justice Beetz of the Supreme Court of Canada stated in the Anti-Inflation Reference, as a “partial and temporary alteration of the division of powers between Parliament and the provincial legislatures”...which gives to the Parliament of Canada in times of national crisis, “concurrent and paramount jurisdiction over matters which would normally fall within exclusive provincial jurisdiction”...he also observed, “the power of Parliament to make laws in a great crisis knows no limits other than those which are dictated by the nature of the crisis”....
Is that your understanding of the constitutional authority of the federal government in a time of national emergency?