Debates of Feb. 4th, 2020

International Trade

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians take great pride in the peacekeeping and development work we do, but while Canadian aid organizations are drilling for water, international mining companies are flying the Canadian flag and poisoning the wells.

The Liberals said their ombudsman would solve this problem, but they gave it no teeth and are still inviting these companies to register here without fear of consequences.

When will the Liberals keep their promise to Canadians, to indigenous peoples, to human rights defenders and to communities around the world and give the ombudsman the power to do the job?

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Small Business]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians and our global partners should be able to trust that our businesses are accountable and operating lawfully, responsibly and at high ethical standards. That includes our strong commitment to corporate social responsibility and the respect for human rights of workers and local stakeholders both in Canada and around the world. This is why we created the first-ever ombudsman for corporate social responsibility, to help reflect our core values in the world and to deliver on our trade agenda.

The Environment

[Jenica Atwin, Green, Fredericton, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome comments from the environment minister that his government expects provinces to take responsibility for their emissions.

Last week, during oral question period, the Prime Minister stated that the government's decisions are based on facts and science.

Knowing that science is conclusive to the effect that we need to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions without further delay, can the minister confirm to the House that Canada supports an international emissions credit regime based on real, verifiable emissions reductions, and that hypothetical proposals, such as those proposed by New Brunswick regarding Maritime Iron, would never be allowed?

[Jonathan Wilkinson, Liberal, Minister of Environment and Climate Change]

Mr. Speaker, certainly the issue of climate change is one on which I think we share a lot of common views with the hon. member's party. It is an existential crisis. We need to work very quickly to address that, both through achieving our targets in 2030 and exceeding them, but also with respect to moving toward net zero by 2050.

An international emissions trading regime is certainly part of that conversation. We were very clear at COP in Madrid that any international emissions trading regime would have to have integrity, would have to be transparent and would have to have no double counting. It would have to be able to show that emissions reductions were actually emissions reductions. That is our position.

Oral Questions

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to draw your attention to the conduct of the member for Spadina—Fort York during the question from the member for Lakeland. The member for Spadina—Fort York was mocking and mimicking the voice of our colleague, making fun of the way she speaks in the House. This member has worked hard to get here. She stands up for women across the country. The member should stand in his place and apologize for mocking the way she speaks.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families]

Mr. Speaker, I apologize for whatever I did during question period to anger the opposite side.

[Jagmeet Singh, NDP, Burnaby South, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I believe if you seek it, you will find consent for the following motion: That notwithstanding any standing order or usual practice of the House, Bill C-5, an act to amend the Judges Act and the Criminal Code, be deemed read a second time and referred to a committee of the whole, deemed considered in committee of the whole, deemed reported without amendment, deemed concurred in at report stage and deemed read a third time and passed.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

The House resumed consideration of the motion.

Opposition Motion—Instruction to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security

[The Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Before we continue, I want to remind hon. members the debate is beginning and the hon. member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge has three and a half minutes left in his speech.

The hon. member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge.

[Marc Dalton, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Mr. Speaker, why is it that tragic crimes keep happening with criminals on parole? Madam Levesque has paid with her life. What is going on that we are putting our public at risk? Perhaps it is because of the changes the government made to the Parole Board in 2017. It is not just my colleagues and I who think this; Quebec Justice Minister Sonia LeBel is also demanding answers. She also questioned whether members of the Parole Board were sufficiently equipped to handle these cases.

According to Dave Blackburn, a former member of the Parole Board, of the 16 members appointed since 2017, only two experienced members were reappointed. That means there were 14 new people in these positions. In other words, most of the members had no experience in risk assessment and were not familiar with the parole process. That is an appalling situation that must change. That is why we introduced this motion.

The Parole Board members appointed by the Liberals showed a serious lack of judgment in this matter, and they must suffer the consequences.

Past Parole Board members also said that Liberal changes in 2017 resulted in the majority of board members being replaced with people who had no prior experience.

Dave Blackburn, a former board member, told CTV, “If you don't have experienced board members and just new people, some mistakes can happen, some issues can happen.” Obviously, a very serious situation did happen.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, first and foremost, a great deal of members on all sides of the House have expressed their condolences to the family and friends of the late Ms. Levesque. I would like to re-echo those comments from this morning and earlier this afternoon.

Having said that, we have talked a great deal about the board that will be reviewing the internal board. It will come up with some tangible items that will add to the value of what has been recommended in this motion.

Could my colleague comment on the importance of having that internal review and the commitment by the government to ensure that it also becomes public information?

[Marc Dalton, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Mr. Speaker, one challenge is that we believe this needs to go beyond the Parole Board examining the Parole Board. There needs to be outside examination by the committee so we can look at what led to this.

I would like to bring up a couple of points. The first is the watering down of what the Liberals are doing about public safety. Here are a couple of statistics they have tabled in the House as their goals. One is on the percentage of individuals or victims who are satisfied with the quality of service and timeliness of information provided. Right now it is 92%, but their goal is 80% for victims. There is less of a concern for victims as opposed to the perpetrators. Another is on the percentage of offenders who are on parole, but who have not committed a serious crime. Right now it is at 99% and the Liberals' goal is 96%.

Therefore, we have a watering down and a lack of concern. We are concerned as the opposition and as members of Parliament about the direction in which the government is taking Canada.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned that the appointment process was changed in 2016-17, and it meant that all the experienced board members were not renewed in Quebec. Basically, 10 board members from Quebec sent a letter to the Prime Minister and Michael Wernick in November 2017, expressing their serious concern about these changes. There also was a published opinion piece in Le Devoir.

Could the member comment on how important it is to immediately get going with this transparent, open process? The Liberals have voted in the past, unanimously, to do something, for example, putting Iranian terrorist organizations on the list, but they do nothing about it.

Could the member please explain how important it is that we move ahead with this independent review process as soon as possible?

[Marc Dalton, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is important because lives are at stake. There needs to be a real evaluation of our Parole Board and how criminals are being released oftentimes way ahead of even what the judges have said is not only a minimum sentence, but the minimum time before parole. Therefore, this needs to be examined and strengthened, not for political reasons but for the safety of Canadians.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to join in the debate today on this very important subject in the motion before us.

I want to recognize the excellent work of my colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles. I know he works very hard on a wide range of public safety issues and he has played a key role in bringing this issue to the attention of Canadians and colleagues for an effective response to this tragic situation.

I will start by going over what we are talking about and then identify what the key issues for us as a Parliament are to grapple with coming out of this case.

The case is that Mr. Gallese was serving a sentence for murder. He was considered at risk of reoffending, but he was still released on day parole. In the context of that parole, he was given permission to have contact with women, but only for sex. He murdered a woman, Marylène Levesque, who herself was a victim of prostitution. She was murdered while Mr. Gallese was on day parole.

It is fairly obvious to anyone approaching this case that the Parole Board made a terrible decision and a woman died as a result of that decision. We are now having a debate in Parliament about what we can do specifically around reviewing and responding to this case and, in particular, trying to restore public confidence in the Parole Board's process.

We expect the Parole Board to make difficult, finely-tuned decisions in response to the situations that are in front of it. Declaring that someone is not at risk of reoffending, if someone has been effectively rehabilitated, then it is in the public interest for that person to be released and reintegrated in society. However, if people remain a risk of reoffending, if there is a risk to people in society of them being out or if there are specific conditions that need to be imposed on them when they are released to ensure they are not a risk to other people, then the Parole Board needs to be aware of that and impose those conditions.

All of us entrust our safety and the safety of our families to the hopefully expert people who are part of these Parole Board hearings. We need this process and we need to be able to trust and have confidence in this process. We need to know that the people who serve on the Parole Board are able to consider the evidence, consider the information and make good decisions. That means they have the required amount of experience, background, qualifications, etc.

When we confront a decision that was made by the Parole Board that was clearly very bad, the implication is that this criminal was being advised to engage in criminal activity, that is the purchasing of sex, that part of his release plan involved a direct admonition to or an implied direction to commit criminal activity. As a result of this failure by the Parole Board, a woman lost her life.

If we are to talk about the Parole Board and how to address these issues, we have to hold the government accountable for the appointment decisions it make. The government was not directly responsible for this decision, but it was responsible for the process and the appointments to the Parole Board that led to this decision being made.

When we talk about how the Liberals arrived at the appointment decisions, did they make decisions about Parole Board appointees that, all things considered, anyone would have made under the same circumstances, or did they fail to consider important factors? Did they make decisions that were not in the public interest in the context of appointments that led to this decision?

Personnel is policy as we all know as members of Parliament. The Liberals' decision to appoint certain individuals and to have a certain appointment process led to a policy, which was the release of someone who should not have been released, especially with direction and in the context where women would be put at risk.

It has been interesting in the context of the debate that has happened so far today, the discussion about the Parole Board's process and the appointments. Certainly on our side of the House, we have suggested that part of the problem is in the changes the government made to appointments. A couple of years ago, the Liberals made the decision to not reappoint the vast majority of the people on Quebec's Parole Board, who were experienced, and instead appoint 14 out of 16 brand new members to that board.

The government established the conditions in which we had a Parole Board that was lacking in experience. We have challenged them on that. This was a boneheaded decision that resulted in somebody losing their life, and it followed a decision by the government to change the appointment process dramatically, removing experienced people and replacing them with inexperienced people. Maybe we should consider the role that the changes in the appointment process played in the tragic outcome.

The government's response has been to trumpet the alleged greatness of its appointment process. It has said it brought in an open and transparent process, based on merit, increasing diversity, and that it is great, better than the previous system, which was all about appointing, allegedly, partisan hacks to these positions.

I would say any evaluation of the merit of an appointment should consider the quality of the work and the decisions that are made, in other words, the government might profess to have brought in a great appointment system but we can only evaluate the quality of that appointment system by the outcome of that appointment system, namely, did the people appointed to the Parole Board make decisions that were in the public interest?

The government's decision to replace experienced people with inexperienced on the Parole Board, and that being followed by the decision that we had here, suggests that the government was not as effective at identifying merit in appointments as it claims to be. It suggests that perhaps there were other things going on.

I would respectfully encourage the government to approach this with a little humility, not to say, out of the gate, that everything is fine with the appointments process, but to actually acknowledge that, following a bad decision of the Parole Board, a person being killed, maybe it needs to go back and ask if it made sense to replace the entire Parole Board. The outcome of the appointments the government makes should be the basis on which we evaluate the quality of those appointments.

The other point that the government has made in the context of the appointment process is that it is about diversity, that it wants to make these organizations more diverse and maybe that is the justification for not reappointing people who were there before, to try to make these organizations more diverse.

I would say that kind of rhetoric actually does a great disservice to the genuine importance of making our public organizations more diverse. On this side of the House, we agree in the importance of having diversity in public appointments. When that is used as an excuse, when that is the rhetorical basis for appointing 14 of 16 people to this board who did not have the experience, and the result of that being this bad decision, again, I think a little more introspection of the policies and processes is needed.

What we are calling for as a result of this situation, in this motion, is:

That the House: (a) condemn the decision of the Parole Board of Canada.

Again, when the Parole Board is sending the message to somebody who is being released that they should go and commit illegal activity, namely purchasing sex, it should be fairly obvious that there were many problems in the process of that person being released and the instruction they were given.

Any expert, anybody who had spent substantial time working on these issues, would tell us that telling a person who had a history of violence against women to interact with women in this context was the kind of advice that really lacked any kind of wisdom, knowledge or experience. It lacked a connection with the kind of evidence-based policy-making that we would expect in this place.

The motion starts by condemning the decision of the Parole Board, and then it instructs the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security to conduct hearings into this matter, and particularly to look at the issue of the nomination process. The idea being then, as our motion states, “to recommend measures to be taken to ensure another tragedy such as this never happens again.”

Part of it is the government needs to do much better in the area of appointments. Maybe the government wants to throw out people who were appointed previously and be able to appoint their own people, but when, after these appointment changes, a person loses their life, the government needs to be held accountable for those appointment decisions.

We, as an opposition, call on the government to do much better in the future.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I listened to the member's speech today with interest. I was particularly struck by his comments about the partisanship of the appointment process and how he tried to characterize it as though that was not the situation with the former government and that he is concerned about the way it is being done now. I am not going to disagree with all of the points because at the crux of what he is getting at, there is some merit when talking about making sure that people are properly qualified.

The reality of the situation is that what we saw under the previous Conservative government, as an example, in Quebec, was that six out of the nine full-time commissioners were Conservative Party supporters. Can he at least not recognize that there is some concern when six of nine of the permanent full-time commissioners are supporters of the Conservative Party?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, I do not know if what he says about the previous Parole Board is true, but the public would expect a parole board that does not make the kinds of absurd, boneheaded, dangerous decisions that the current Parole Board has made. We should ask the public to choose between a parole board that had more or fewer supporters of one party and a parole board that made the kind of decision that was made in this case.

Whatever criticisms the member might have had about the previous Parole Board, it did not make this decision. This decision was made by 14 of 16 brand new Parole Board members, some of whom clearly lacked the experience, the background and the wisdom to make the right decision. The proof is in the pudding on the appointments process. If the appointments process were working, there would not be decisions like this.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, to pick up on the point, the regional vice-chair was a Conservative appointment and a Conservative candidate. That person is responsible for the training. Before new individuals are handed the case files, that individual is responsible for ensuring that they have been sufficiently trained to do what is expected of them.

As opposed to trying to blame the Government of Canada and say it is at fault, which is what the Conservatives are saying, would they not acknowledge that instead of blaming the government, which is not at fault, we should try to prevent this from happening in the future?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, let us be very clear that a person lost her life because of a terrible decision by the Parole Board. That decision was made by inexperienced Liberal appointees to the Parole Board. The parliamentary secretary is heckling me to remind me of his question, which I just heard, that apparently was that a Conservative candidate served on the Parole Board. We did not have decisions like this under that Parole Board.

It really shows the shamelessness of the parliamentary secretary, that when we are having a discussion about somebody losing her life as a result of bad decisions made by Liberal appointees, the member turns it around to try to criticize Conservative appointees, who, in reality, did not make the kinds of bad decisions that forced us into this conversation today.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member talked about the proof in the pudding. Day parole revocations for violent offences in 2012-13 were six and the parole revocations for violent offenders in 2017-18 were two, not six. Similarly, with full parole, there were seven in 2012-13 and only three under the new process. Therefore, the proof in the pudding is that there are fewer revocations under the current system than the previous.

Could the hon. member comment on that, please?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, as the member should know, just because someone's parole is revoked, it does not mean that the individual committed a violent crime against another person. It may be that other conditions of the person's parole were violated. In this case, somebody actually lost her life because of a bad decision by the Parole Board. The member is using numbers to make a point that those numbers do not actually make at all. That should be quite clear.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to pick up on where that conversation was leaving off. Perhaps part of the problem here is that on this side of the House, we do not look at them as political appointments. That is why the previous member is saying things such as “a Liberal appointment”. It would take somebody who is used to being in that system of appointing people from their own side, as I will talk about in my speech, to look at it through that kind of lens but—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands has the floor. I would ask members to write down their questions and comments they may have, as opposed to shouting them across the room and laughing through the process. This is a serious matter and I would ask members to provide the respect to the person who has the floor deserves.

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.