Thank you.
I've closed some windows. Hopefully I wasn't consuming too much bandwidth from the Internet that might have been making this a slower, choppier experience.
I was getting to what my constituents asked, and that's what I'm elected to do: address their concerns.
As I was saying, since being re-elected in 2019, and even after the prorogation of Parliament in 2020, I have had maybe two people, at the beginning, who wanted to know why, who actually wanted to know the semantics of it. Otherwise, I've had no concern about it. In fact, what my constituents have been asking about is how to get vaccines. How do we get vaccines into our arms? How do we get businesses back? How do we save jobs? I think that has been the focus of the government.
Then I look back at the history of when prorogation has been used. I hate to say this, but it's funny to see who's calling the kettle black, or however they say it. prorogation was used before to save a government from falling apart when three parties actually opposed it. In this case, it was a very contrarian version. We have a pandemic, which, as my colleagues Will Amos and Mr. Turnbull have said, nobody has seen in the last 100 years. I think 1918 was the last time. To go back, I've had to jog people's grandparents' memories, and even they have only heard about it, or when they were very young had very vague memories of it to actually relate that experience.
To continue in government as if nothing has happened and as if nothing is going wrong, with commitments that were made in a particular direction in an election just months earlier would be very unfair. It would be very inappropriate. It would not be what prudent Canadians would expect a government to do. Prudent Canadians would expect a government to be nimble, to quickly change, and to quickly figure out what needs to be done on the fly, immediately. They would want a reset.
If there was ever a time when prorogation was justified, was needed, was essential, that was the time. That was the time when Canadians wanted to forget about everything else. They wanted to know how they were going to be safe, how their children were going to be safe, how their kids would go to school, how they would be able to continue paying their mortgage or rent, and how they were going to put food on the table.
The government had to reposition and rethink things. This was front and centre for me.
Then we look at the length of time and the actual number of times. I think this committee has hashed over the length of time and the number of times that the previous Conservative government used prorogation as a tool for their own personal benefit when it was convenient. This time it was done in a pandemic.
Just look at the days that were postponed. There were months, the time before, that Parliament didn't sit. In this case, I think it was maybe 10 days or about a month of prorogation. In actually sitting days it was just 10 or 12 days.
What we came back with and what was given back after that period was a great reset. There was a fall economic statement that painted a blueprint or a road map of how we were going to survive this tenure and how we were going to sustain our businesses, jobs, and economy. Also, the question was how we were going to do a road map into recovery afterwards.
If you talk to any Canadian, anybody on Main Street, on Bay Street or in the airline industry, as well as the thousands and thousands or workers who are unemployed, that's what they wanted to hear us debating. They did not want us to debate other motions that were there from the past. Nobody cared about those at that time. They wanted us to debate how we were going to help.
The first calls I got were what most of you got: “What's happening with my job? Is the government going to be there for us?”
The second calls I received were from employers, who said, “I know I'm going to go through a pretty rough patch, but please don't let me lay off my employees. I barely got them. These are some of the best workers I've had. It takes a long time to nurture them. Can you figure out a way whereby I can still pay them a little bit? I want to and am continuing to pay them, even if I don't have much work. It would be great if the government could assist me in that way.”
The government responded in that way and was able to keep millions and millions of employees working even though revenue had dropped in those businesses. After that, when I brought up with my constituents, who would call, or call via Zoom, because we couldn't meet in person, whether they were having an issue with prorogation, or had any concerns on this, they said no. They didn't want to talk about that. They wanted to know what we were doing about their rent. Their businesses had been closed down.
In Surrey Centre we have a lot of banquet facilities. We have a lot of other facilities that were shut down, gyms and whatnot. They said, “Who's going to pay my rent? I have a huge footprint. Who is going to support us in this?” That is what they wanted to hear the government discussing at that time. That's what they wanted to hear in the debates in the halls of Parliament, or on the screens of Parliament, which we have switched to. That's what they wanted to see, and we came through. We said we'd give 65% to those who were hurt financially, but 90% to those that were shut down by public health notices. Right now the calls I get from them are thank yous and about the optimism going forward.
Prior to March we were on track. We made a million jobs, had the lowest unemployment rate prior to the pandemic in 2020.
I'm not in an affluent neighbourhood. I probably have one of the lowest family mean incomes in the Lower Mainland. If you turn right or left out of my office door, you would see “help wanted” signs in the windows of London Drugs and Starbucks. In fact, I have a non-profit employment centre next door that helps people get employment. Quite frankly, they had very few to send over there because everyone was getting jobs and everyone was doing better.
I think prorogation is a very important tool. It should be used very scarcely. This government has only used it once, only for a few weeks. It was a time to have cabinet, have government, have the Prime Minister rethink. In this case it was a minority government, so everything had to be done with all of the other parties. You had to have them on board. This was not a unilateral execution of power or abuse of power. This was something that you had to work on in co-operation with the parties, House leaders, opposition leaders, because you could face an election at any time. All of the measures were done in that pattern prior to prorogation, and after that, and every party virtually voted for almost all of those measures.
What were those measures for? They were measures for Canadians to get through this. They were measures that we needed at that time. They were not Mickey Mouse, as my colleague Mr. Amos just said earlier. We were able to hedge the most procurement of vaccinations in the world for every single person. My skeptics, family and friends, all of us, have interesting Zoom conversations or chat groups where people are saying, “Are you really going to get vaccinated? I'm not going to get vaccinated until 2022.” I think our colleague, Ms. Rempel, the health critic, has said a lot of things about children getting vaccinated, the third world getting vaccinated, before—