Debates of April 2nd, 2019

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

I have the honour to lay upon the table, pursuant to subsection 23(5) of the Auditor General Act, the spring 2019 reports of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to the House of Commons. These reports are permanently referred to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

Government Response to Petitions

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to six petitions.

While I am on my feet, I move:

That the House do now proceed to orders of the day.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

In my opinion the nays have it.

And five or more members having risen:

Call in the members.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #1277

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

I declare the motion carried.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. For the second time in two days, unfortunately, the Liberals have prevented us from getting to the emergency debate item under routine proceedings.

Canadian canola producers are counting on Parliament to talk about this crisis so that we can hear what they have to say and talk about the real issues facing Canadian canola producers.

Parliament must send a message to the government that this crisis must be a top priority and cannot be put off any longer. I request the unanimous consent of the House to return to requests for emergency debates right now.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Does the hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable have the unanimous consent of the House?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[Anne Minh-Thu Quach, NDP, Salaberry—Suroît, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I was supposed to introduce an important bill today to protect children and create a youth commissioner position, but the government cut short routine proceedings. The bill would ensure that vulnerable children are protected.

I seek unanimous consent of the House to revert back to the introduction of private members' bills so that I can introduce this important bill for Canada.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Does the hon. member for Salaberry—Suroît have the unanimous consent of the House to revert back to that item?

[Some hon. members]

No.

15th report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food

[Pat Finnigan, Liberal, Miramichi—Grand Lake, NB]

Madam Speaker, I am rising on a point of order to clarify an administrative issue related to the tabling on Monday, January 28, 2019, of the 15th report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.

In accordance with Standing Order 109, the committee agreed to a motion to request a government response to the report within 120 days. The committee agreed to the motion as it was reported in the minutes of proceedings of meeting 124 on Tuesday, December 11, 2018, which is cited in the report. However, this request does not appear in the text of the report itself. This was an administrative oversight.

I rise today to confirm that the committee does indeed wish to receive a government response within 120 days. I have signed a new copy of the report to that effect.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I just want to remind the members that we need to hear the motion before we can decide whether or not it is in order. I thank the hon. member for his intervention, and I am directing the Clerk of the House to take the appropriate administrative measures to address the situation.

The House resumed from April 1 of the motion that this House approves in general the budgetary policy of the government.

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleagues for that very rousing welcome, both for the way it lifted my spirits and also for the way it permitted me to finish writing my speech. I promise to stop procrastinating, but just not yet.

Today I rise on a very important issue, which is of course the cover-up budget. I will quickly recap how we got to where we are and then discuss how we can get where we need to go.

Let us start with what happened a year ago today. The Prime Minister introduced a budget that amended the Criminal Code in an omnibus bill of over 500 pages, bringing into effect something called deferred prosecution agreements. These agreements allow corporations accused of serious crime to sign special deals to avoid trial and conviction.

Nowhere was this discussed in the budget book, but it was slipped into the back end of the budget bill. Members of the finance committee, including Liberals, were astonished when they discovered it there at around 10 p.m. in a late-night committee hearing, when the government was rushing to get the bill passed.

A year later, we would learn why the government was so determined to introduce this special deal for corporate criminals. It came in the form of a Globe and Mail story revealing that the Prime Minister had inappropriately pressured his then attorney general to extend such a deal to SNC-Lavalin, a large, Liberal-linked corporation with a history of donating roughly $100,000 to the Liberal Party illegally. That company is charged with fraud and bribery.

The charges are that it bribed the leaders of Libya in order to steal from the people of Libya. This is not a victimless crime. The leaders of the Gadhafi family were treated to a cornucopia of gifts from this company. Some might say that is trivial and irrelevant, but the consequence was that some of the poorest people in the world were robbed of $130 million, according to these allegations. These are not victimless crimes. This is not simply how things are done over there.

We later learned from the former attorney general's testimony at the justice committee that the allegations were true. She said that over a four-month period, she experienced consistent and sustained interference and that she was hounded and bullied and experienced veiled threats. She was ultimately removed from her job because she refused to interrupt the criminal proceedings and let SNC escape prosecution.

Many called her a liar and said she was not telling the truth. They said she was simply doing it all for publicity or out of some strange vengeance. Then, of course, she released documented evidence and audio recordings proving that everything she said was true.

Members of the government, despite having a massive apparatus of researchers and spin doctors, have not been able to contradict a single, solitary fact that she presented before the committee or that she stated anywhere else.

Against this backdrop, we have a government that has provided nothing but a cavalcade of contradictions and changing stories.

In the last three weeks, the Prime Minister has killed two parliamentary investigations into this matter and has refused to call a public inquiry. This morning, the justice committee met to decide whether it would resume its earlier investigation. A quick glance at the justice committee's website appears to suggest that under the direction of the Prime Minister, the committee has decided not to proceed with its investigation.

Where do we go from here? To see forward, we have to look backward. Such has been the method of all great advancement. If we look back at the great advancements in history, we can see they were made by people who understood history.

Think, for example, of Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address. We all remember that it ends with “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”, but that is just the ending of the speech. The beginning starts with history.

It states:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.

“Fourscore and seven years ago” refers to the passage of 87 years of time. Lincoln was saying to his country that for it to go forward in freedom, a freedom that would involve the Emancipation Proclamation, it needed to look back to 1776, master its history and live up to the words of its forebears. Therefore, here today, as we discuss the ancient principle of judicial independence, we too must look backward at our history to understand where these principles originate. To go forward, we have to be able to look backward.

Winston Churchill understood this. He was probably the most prescient statesman ever to live. His incredible clairvoyance is unmatched.

We all know the famous example: Early in the thirties, he predicted the comprehensive evil of Adolf Hitler, even when many others saw him as harmless. He called for a robust national defence to prepare for what he foresaw years in advance as Hitler's forthcoming aggression in pursuit of world domination. How did he see forward? He looked backward. He understood history.

We all know that at in 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he predicted the beginning of the Cold War. He spoke of an iron curtain descending over Europe in 1946, well before the rest of the world was even thinking about a conflict with Stalin, who had been a so-called ally in World War II. How did he see forward? He was able to look backward.

He was able to look backward because he was the author of 58 volumes of Nobel Prize-winning literature, almost all of it on history. But for one or two that he admitted were failed attempts to write novels, he wrote almost exclusively about history. When instructing young people at a commencement ceremony on what they must do to succeed in life, he gave them three pieces of advice: study history, history and history.

The predictions that he made were not limited to the political realm. A lot of people do not know that in a 1931 Maclean's magazine essay, he predicted the iPad. He said that in future years, men and women would be able to hold in their hands a device, and then he predicted Skype. He said they would be able to speak to someone on the other side of the world instantaneously, as though they were sticking their head out the window and speaking to a neighbour. He said these devices would be connected by a central device in a household, which we call routers or modems today. This was in 1931. He predicted that humanity would one day unleash the extraordinary power of the atom for good and for evil. Again, this was over a decade before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He predicted the forthcoming conflict between free nations and socialist nations, which, of course, both manifested themselves in the Second World War, where we fought national socialism in Germany and Italy, and in the Cold War, where we fought Marxist socialism. However, he predicted this in 1931, decades before any of these events would actually come to pass.

What else did he do in that essay? He explained his methodology for seeing the future. He actually gave kind of an IKEA instruction manual on how one could become a fortune teller. He said there were two ways to see ahead, and both of them involved looking backwards. One is the cyclical methodology, which is used when we see events in the present that have existed in the past. We look at where they ended up in the past and then we can predict where they will again end in the future.

[An hon. member]

Gomery.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Someone said “Gomery”, pointing to the Liberal sponsorship scandal. Quite rightly as that history is now repeating itself with the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

However, he said there was another methodology for seeing the future. It was the trajectory model. It is used when we are trying to anticipate something that has never existed before. I believe this is how he was able to foretell all of the technological advancements contained in that incredible essay. This methodology involves seeing where things were, where things are and therefore projecting where they will be.

Both of these methods, where we use a circular view of history repeating itself or a trajectory to judge where things have been and where they are to imagine where they will be involve looking backwards. This methodology makes sense with what we know about neurology. The human mind creates images for its imagination out of fragmented memories of the past. In other words, the things that we imagine in the future are the things that we have stored away in our memory from the past. Thus he was capable of taking that 58 volumes of literature he had written, the millions of words he had read and the countless historic events of which he had been a part and was able to take that knowledge and project it forward deep into the future, seeing far beyond what anyone else could see.

I say all of this as a justification for delving deep into our own history in order to judge how we might proceed with this present day controversy. Some members might be tempted to jump up on points of order, as I look back at where our democracy came from, ask about the relevance and ask the Speaker that I no longer be permitted to speak about our past because the past, according to some, no longer matters. Of course, I make these earlier remarks to tell members how very much our past matters and how much it can tell us about our future.

This is a lesson that the current Prime Minister should learn. In his speech before the House of Commons sometime ago, marking a great anniversary of the Parliament of Canada, he basically omitted the entire history of the Westminster system and spoke of Parliament as though freedom and democracy were just invented by his dad in 1982. Of course, we know that kind of thinking is dangerous. We today stand on the shoulders of giants. We here inherit something great from those who came before us.

We must always remember, especially in the debate about the interference of political actors in our judicial system, that while our parliamentary civilization may be 800 years long, it is only one or two generations deep. In other words, if one or two generations decide to dispense with its hard and fast rules and replace them with some new modern invention rooted in nothing but symbolism, selfies and sobbing speeches, then we very much will be living in a house resting on sand.

Speaking of sand and sandstone, I see a lot of it all around us today. We are inside the courtyard of the former West Block building, a building whose exterior has always been clad with sandstone. Sandstone tends to be more resistant to the weathering effects of our brutal Canadian climate.

That being said, we used to meet in another place called Centre Block. When we are inside Centre Block, we bear witness to a different stone, limestone.

[Kevin Lamoureux]

Manitoba limestone.

Hon. Pierre Poilievre Limestone from Manitoba, someone very patriotically yells out from across the way. He should take great pride in that limestone. It is literally part of Canada. It is exhumed from the ground and builds up the democratic institutions we now enjoy in Canada's parliamentary system.

While we walk around that old Centre Block building, we might see a number of different substances. We might have seen, before we moved, the solid white oak desks we have here.

We might go into the Library and see the beautifully ornate and well-carved pine, polished brilliantly, resplendent before the eyes of every astonished visitor. We might look up at the gilded dome and see gold looking back down at us. We might look down at the ground and see the cherry, oak and walnut wood on which our feet walk. All of those elements are beautiful. However, for me, what matters most is the stone, the limestone.

The limestone takes us back in time. If we walk into the basement in the Centre Block building, we will walk millions of years into history. Inside those stones are skeletal fragments of marine life compressed and piled millions of times under unimaginable, nearly infinite pressure to create this stone. We can literally witness seashells in the walls staring right back at us. Those seashells would have been sliced in half by a stone mason in the 19th century or perhaps in the early 20th century, as Parliament was rebuilt following the World War I era fire. Either way, in those stones is the story of time and there are two parts to that story.

The first part is that limestone is solid and to our eyes unmoving, a perfect symbol of the institution the stone is used to build up, and it should be so. Also in that same stone is evidence that all nature, including geological nature, including the rocks and stones we see as indestructible, is always in transformation. They always risk erosion, that one object today was a different object long ago. We must always work every day to preserve what we have so that stone may never erode, that these oak desks may never be nibbled away by termites and that the institutions that took so long for us to build up shall never be allowed to disintegrate piece by piece. That is why this debate is so important.

The disintegration of great civilizations do not just happen with a sudden bang. They say Rome was not built in a day, and that is true. However, it was not destroyed in a day either. It took almost half a millennia from the time Julius Caesar converted the Roman Republic into an empire, and himself from consul into an emperor, until the Roman Empire disintegrated and was sacked and defeated. An early decision can slowly eat away and wear down the once mighty and apparently indestructible institutions that give rise to the people in the first place. Thus, we must be so vigilant and on guard whenever they come under attack.

The former attorney general has said that our core institutions faced such an attack from the Prime Minister of Canada. She testified that he personally and politically tried to interfere with a criminal prosecution. Our institutional history is one that separates court from Parliament, judge from Prime Minister, and deliberately so. We understand that as soon as the politicians start to mess with the courtroom, we will go from the rule of law to the law of rulers.

This history is encapsulated in stone. I have here a beautiful book, which I am not allowed to hold up because of parliamentary rules, by Eleanor Milne, Captured in Stone: Carving Canada's Past. If we walk through the old Centre Block building, we will find beautiful carvings chiselled in the wall that tell us where we came from. The book outlines, “East Wall, Set 1, “The First Inhabitants of the North American Continent” “Centre Stone”, “In the Bluefish Caves of northern Yukon, archaeologists have found evidence of the use of stone tools between 25,000 and 12,000 year ago.” The images of that life are carved in the wall with Inuit people carrying out their hunting traditions.

We can go forward, and there are the native people who greeted the Vikings in the year 900 and 1000. We have images in the centre stone of John Cabot holding up a scroll in his left hand and a tiller in his right. Elsewhere, we have the first merchant ships to navigate the St. Lawrence River on the centre stone. We have Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec City, when he encountered an aboriginal guide willing to lead him inland.

We turn forward and we see, on the left panel, the first colonies of 1763, and on the centre stone, a family of European settlers establishing a homestead. We see also carved in the wall, the great surveyor, David Thompson, interacting with indigenous people.

Finally, on the North Wall, Set 3, “The Long Road to Freedom and Justice” is engraved there. All Canadians who have not seen it should make haste to do so when the Centre Block reopens.

There is described, as I quote from this great book, “A strong figure is breaking chains, freeing doves. This speaks a symbolic language stating that those who come to this land to begin anew must leave all rage and bias behind.”

Why do so many people come to this land and why are they so successful when they get here? Why do so many people of the world live in such squalor over there and yet when they come here, the very same people, enjoy such prosperity? We cannot say that it is anything unique about our makeup as a species. We are just the same as the rest of the world. In fact, we are the peoples of the world, literally.

We are a reflection of the world because of our long-standing and successful tradition of high levels of immigration. That long history that brings us to this moment tells us why so many people from so many far off lands make the journey here and why it is that they are so successful here when their lives were so much poorer elsewhere.

What is it that makes life so different here than it was over there? Is there something in the water? Is the air different? Why are we, as a nation, so prosperous, when so many others suffer so greatly?

I look to the great Wilfrid Laurier for the answer. He was once asked to comment on Canada's nationality, and even then it was a seemingly impossible task. If he were in France, he would say French. If he were in England, he would say English. If he were in Scotland, he would say Scottish. Of course, here in Canada, in his time, at the beginning of the 20th century, we were all those things and much more. He could not define us by ethnicity, by language or by religion. In fact, he himself, though a French Catholic, read the King James Bible and therefore was not properly or even able to make his own identity known based on religion. How is it that he identified the Canadian nationality? He did so in these simple words: “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality.”

From whence did that freedom come, though? That was the next question he needed to answer. He was a proud French Canadian who mixed very easily with people of other backgrounds. He said, famously, about his time at school, that he had schoolyard fights with the Scottish boys and made schoolboy love with the Scottish girls. In other words, he grew up with Scottish kids, even though he was French through and through.

His identity of Canadian freedom was actually British, even though his lineage was French. He said of French Canadians, which I will never forget, that France gave us life, and Britain gave us liberty.

I say that to explain that the inheritance of British parliamentary democracy, of the House of Commons, of common law and of so many other principles of British history are the inheritance of all people who live in this land, not just those who have an ethnic lineage back to Britain. In other words, we all inherit it. Even though I am not English, I inherit these English liberties, just the way Laurier said he did.

What are these English liberties and how did they originate? They started with the Magna Carta. In May 1215, the angry barons gathered in the fields of Runnymede. They were taxed to the max after years of crusading kings pillaging and plundering. They were tired of the Crown's tyranny, and they were determined to reverse it. They forced King John, against his will, to sign the great charter, or the Magna Carta, as it is called.

Looking through the Magna Carta and its roughly 60 clauses, one might find them a bit arcane. There is talk of scutage and fishing weirs and other arcana that might not seem relevant in the present, but there is a whole lot more that is.

Let me read some excerpts from that great document.

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

What does that mean? It means no arrest without charge and no conviction without trial. That is relevant today, isn't it? Let me try another one:

He shall do this without destruction or damage to men or property. If we have given the guardianship of the land to a sheriff, or to any person answerable to us for the revenues, and he commits destruction or damage, we will exact compensation from him....

There are many important things here. One is, “If we have given the guardianship of the land to a sheriff”. In other words, only a civil authority approved by a democratic mandate must have the ability to arrest or do damage to property. In that case, there must be compensation if such damage or such arrest was not justified.

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

That, of course, speaks not only to arrest but to property rights. To this day, we state clearly that the Crown may not dispossess someone of his or her belongings, absent compensation for doing so, without the lawful judgment of equals or the law of the land. In other words, arbitrary expropriation is forbidden.

Let me pull another incredible invention out of that same statement: “except by the lawful judgment of his equals”. In other words, jury trials have their origins right here in this sacred text. Do not tell me that these old parchments are a relic of the past and we should forget about them and that Canada was invented in 1982. These are ancient English liberties that are our inheritance, and no one can take them away.

Here is one that is particularly relevant to this debate. I hope the Prime Minister is listening to this:

To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

I look first at that starting clause, “To no one will we sell”. It does not matter how many billions are in SNC-Lavalin coffers, how many lobbyists it can send scurrying about Parliament Hill, how many illegal donations it can make to political parties and how many prospective job offers it can throw around. No matter how much it flexes its financial muscle, we will not sell them justice. Justice is not for sale.

It goes on:

To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgment of his equals, we will at once restore these.

In other words, the Crown must compensate for what the Crown has taken away.

All these customs and liberties that we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom in so far as concerns our own relations with our subjects. Let all men of our kingdom, whether clergy or laymen, observe them similarly in their relations with their own men.

In other words, clergy and laymen alike, Crown or subject, all must follow the law.

I bring your attention, of course, to the most important of all:

To all free men of our kingdom we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs

We are those heirs. We have inherited this. These are our liberties. They belong to us. The people of our country, the common people, have delegated us to this chamber to protect those liberties.

Thus there is the ferocious response of the Canadian people, which has surprised so many political observers, to the scandal that currently rages inside the government. A lot of people have asked why people are so upset. It is a debate about text messages and emails, he said and she said and prosecutorial independence. How often do we hear that discussed at the water coolers of the workplace in Canada?

Why is it that Canadians have resounded so strongly to this particular scandal? It is because this scandal is not that complicated. It is actually quite simple. It is based on one simple rule that everyone understands from childhood in Canada: we are all equal before the law. This too had its imperfect origins in the Magna Carta. The moment King John signed that parchment, he conceded, for the first time in the known history of our system, that he, as the king, was no longer above the law. At that moment, the Crown became subject to the law, and no one, not even a king, was above the law.

Everyone understands that we are all equal before the law and that if a homeless man is charged with stealing a loaf of bread, he cannot simply knock on the Prime Minister's door and ask him to please make the prosecutor go light on him. He faces a trial, either by a judge or a jury, and a verdict is rendered based on the facts, precedence and the law. If it must be so for a homeless man charged with taking a loaf of bread, it sure as hell must be so for a powerful international corporation charged with corruption.

People understand that money already has too much influence in most western democracies. We do not need it to have more influence in the judicial system. We do not want two legal systems, one for the people and another for the powerful. We do not want justice to be for sale. We do not want politicians to tell the judges or the prosecutors what they can and should do. That is a basic principle dating back.

In the British North America Act, I notice that there is none of the soaring language witnessed in the Declaration of Independence or even in the U.S. Constitution. There was no Thomas Jefferson who sat down with a feather and drafted up words that we all remember, etch or repeat, other than “Peace, order and good government.” Why is that? The answer, of course, is that our founding fathers understood that they did not need to write out all our freedoms at that moment in time, because it was accepted that we would inherit those that came from the mother parliament and the Magna Carta.

It has been a positive development that we have since written them out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but that charter was merely a continuation of a then seven-and-a-half-century tradition that came before it. It was a continuation of the Canadian Bill of Rights, brought before Parliament by John Diefenbaker, but it was a continuation of everything that began in that field at Runnymede so long ago.

We are a nation not of revolution but of evolution. Where our friends south of the border spilled much blood to achieve their independence, we as a country almost had to be gently pushed out the door by the mother country. Of course, back in the early 1930s, with the Statute of Westminster, we were given full judicial independence, and yet for decades we would continue to go back to the British Privy Council as our supreme court. In other words, the British were offering Canada more independence than we were prepared to accept.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, I am sorry to interrupt my colleague. I just want to make a point of order.

A bit earlier, we had the chair of the agriculture committee in here, and he talked about a correction to a report that he wanted to make. If he had really been doing his job, he would have come here on a different issue, which is to bring forward and support the proposal that one of our colleagues has now made twice, that we have an emergency debate on the canola issue. This is an incredibly important issue for Canadians. I want to challenge the chair of the agriculture committee to come back and take up that cause.

There are 43,000 canola farmers across Canada. This has been one of the most prominent success stories in agriculture across Canada in the last decades. From the 1970s, we have seen an industry develop, basically out of nothing, that now accounts for around $27 billion of economic activity in this country every year, and so—