Thank you, Chair.
I will continue.
As I as saying, the Emergencies Act has requirements in subsection 62(1) for a parliamentary committee. A Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency is required to review “the exercise and powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to [the] declaration” by the government.
Mr. Brock and I are fortunate and on that committee and honoured to be there, along with colleagues from all parties, along with four members of the Senate. It's interesting that we've been meeting since March of 2022, and on December 1 of 2022, the committee moved that an interim report be presented to the House. I think it's very important that this committee—which quite possibly will also be having a look at this particular decision by Federal Court to examine this overreach by government—to hear what the committee, which we affectionately call the “DEDC”, the declaration of emergencies committee, has to say.
The committee directed “[t]hat the joint chairs be directed to present the following interim report to each House forthwith”:
1. The Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency, acting as the Parliamentary Review Committee under section 62 of the Emergencies Act, and pursuant to its orders of reference from the House of Commons and the Senate, adopted on March 2, 2022, and March 3, 2022, respectively, has been reviewing the exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to the declaration of [an emergency order] that was in effect from February 14 to 23, 2022.
2. Despite a parliamentary secretary urging an interpretation of this mandate such that it “does not have a retrospective element whatsoever vis-à-vis what happened prior to the invocation of the declaration”...[the] committee, at its meeting on April 5, 2022, adopted a motion that it would study
“the options that the Government of Canada utilized during the invocation of the Emergencies Act and enumerated in the Proclamation Declaring a Public Order Emergency; [and] That in this study of each option and for the committee’s final report, the committee consider the necessity, implementation, and impact of that option....”
3. To that end, one of the areas of significant interest in the questioning of witnesses throughout the course of the committee’s work has been whether the necessary thresholds for the government to declare a public order emergency had been satisfied.
4. Given the particular relevance to the issues which will be addressed in this interim report, the committee wishes to set them out below.
5. Subsection 17(1) of the Emergencies Act provides that when the Governor in Council believes, on reasonable grounds, that a public order emergency exists and necessitates the taking of special temporary measures for dealing with the emergency, the Governor in Council, after such consultation as is required by section 25, may, by proclamation, so declare.
6. Section 16 of the Emergencies Act offers pertinent definitions:
“public order emergency” means an emergency that arises from threats to the security of Canada and that is so serious as to be a national emergency;
“ threats to the security of Canada” has the meaning assigned by section 2 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act).
7. A “national emergency” is, meanwhile, defined by section 3 of the Emergencies Act:
For the purposes of this Act, a “national emergency” is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that:
(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
8. Finally, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act definition of “threats to the security of Canada”, sometimes dubbed “the CSIS Act threshold”, which is imported into the Emergencies Act, is as follows:
“threats to the security of Canada” means
(a) espionage or sabotage that is against Canada or is detrimental to the interests of Canada or activities directed toward or in support of such espionage or sabotage,
(b) foreign influenced activities—