moved:
That,
(a) pursuant to subsection 62(1) of the Emergencies Act, a special joint committee of the Senate and the House of Commons be appointed to review the exercise of powers and the performance of duties and functions pursuant to the declaration of emergency that was in effect from Monday, February 14, 2022, to Wednesday, February 23, 2022, including the provisions as specified in subsections 62(5) and (6) of the act;
(b) the committee be composed of four members of the Senate and seven members of the House of Commons, including three members of the House of Commons from the governing party, two members of the House of Commons from the official opposition, one member from the Bloc Québécois and one member from the New Democratic Party, with three Chairs of which the two House Co-Chairs shall be from the Bloc Québécois and the New Democratic Party and the Senate Co-Chair shall be determined by the Senate;
(c) in addition to the Co-Chairs, the committee shall elect two vice-chairs from the House, of whom the first vice-chair shall be from the governing party and the second vice-chair shall be from the official opposition party;
(d) the House of Commons members be named by their respective whip by depositing with the Clerk of the House the list of their members to serve on the committee no later than the day following the adoption of this motion;
(e) the quorum of the committee be seven members whenever a vote, resolution or other decision is taken, so long as both Houses and one member of the governing party in the House, one from the opposition in the House and one member of the Senate are represented, and that the Joint Chairs be authorized to hold meetings, to receive evidence and authorize the printing thereof, whenever five members are present, so long as both Houses and one member of the governing party in the House, one member from the opposition in the House and one member of the Senate are represented;
(f) changes to the membership of the committee, on the part of the House of Commons, be effective immediately after notification by the relevant whip has been filed with the Clerk of the House;
(g) membership substitutions, on the part of the House of Commons, be permitted, if required, in the manner provided for in Standing Order 114(2) and may be filed with the clerk of the committee by email, provided that substitutes take the oath of secrecy pursuant to paragraph (h) of this order before participating in proceedings;
(h) pursuant to subsection 62(3) of the act, every member and person employed in the work of the committee, which includes personnel who, in supporting the committee's work or a committee member’s work, have access to the committee's proceedings or documents, shall take the oath of secrecy set out in the schedule of the act;
(i) every meeting of the committee held to consider an order or regulation referred to it pursuant to subsection 61(2) of the act shall be held in camera pursuant to subsection 62(4) of the act, and that the evidence and documents received by the committee related to these meetings shall not be made public;
(j) Co-Chairs shall have the ability to fully participate, including to move motions and to vote on all items before the committee, and any vote resulting in a tie vote shall mean that the item is negatived;
(k) all documents deposited pursuant to the act shall be referred to the committee, and documents referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights since February 16, 2022, in accordance with this act be instead referred to this special joint committee;
(l) until the committee ceases to exist or Thursday, June 23, 2022, whichever is earlier,
(i) where applicable, the provisions contained in paragraph (r) of the order adopted on Thursday, November 25, 2021, except for those listed in subparagraphs (r)(iii), (iv) and (vi), shall apply to the committee, and the committee shall hold meetings in person only should this be necessary to consider any matter referred to it pursuant to subsection 61(2) of the act,
(ii) members, senators, and departmental and parliamentary officials appearing as witnesses before the committee may do so in person, as may any witness appearing with respect to any matter referred to it pursuant to subsection 61(2) of the act,
(iii) when more than one motion is proposed for the election of the House vice-chairs, any motion received after the initial one shall be taken as a notice of motion and such motions shall be put to the committee seriatim until one is adopted;
(m) the committee have the power to:
(i) sit during sittings and adjournments of the House,
(ii) report from time to time, including pursuant to the provisions included in subsection 62(6) of the act, to send for persons, papers and records, and to print such papers and evidence as may be ordered by the committee,
(iii) retain the services of expert, professional, technical and clerical staff, including legal counsel,
(iv) appoint, from among its members such subcommittees as may be deemed appropriate and to delegate to such subcommittees, all or any of its powers, except the power to report to the Senate and House of Commons,
(v) authorize video and audio broadcasting of any or all of its public proceedings and that they be made available to the public via the Parliament of Canada's websites; and
That a message be sent to the Senate requesting that House to unite with this House for the above purpose and to select, if the Senate deems advisable, members to act on the proposed special joint committee.
Mr. Speaker, it is good to rise again to speak to this matter.
I will start by talking about the incredible importance of parliamentary oversight, particularly when we are using something as extraordinary as the Emergencies Act, which was written in 1988 and has never been used in this country. We have lived through a period of the utilization of this act for the first time. When we are talking about establishing a parliamentary review to take a look at how that act was used, it is important that we move quickly. I appreciate the discussions we have been having with other parties, but we are at a bit of an impasse, which leads us to where we are right now in the House.
I think it is important for the context of this motion to talk about the events that led up to the enacting of the act, the period of time that the act was in place, how its powers were used and what the act then demands after the provisions of the act are completed.
For a period of three weeks, all of us who came here to Ottawa witnessed something that was without precedent in Canadian history. The streets of Ottawa were gripped not by a protest but by an occupation that seemed to have no end. Many of us have had an opportunity to go and talk to residents who lived in the red zone or with businesses that were shut down and affected by what happened there. It was totally and utterly unacceptable.
When I came into Ottawa to be back in this place on the Sunday night at the very beginning of this protest, I had seen something on television, but I never really had any sense of the full character of what was going on until I came and saw the streets blocked and talked to folks who owned businesses. Despite having gone through incredible difficulty over 10, 20 or 30 years, they said this was the hardest thing they had ever endured. There were residents who were afraid to leave their homes. Those who did were witnessing harassment, defecation, urination and just a complete upheaval of their day-to-day normal lives.
If that was not enough, we saw homeless shelters attacked. We saw the desecration of national monuments. We saw swastikas and Confederate flags being flown. This continued ad infinitum: honking horns, disruptions of people's ability to sleep, a complete terrorizing of the local population. What then began to happen was that it spread elsewhere to blockades that blocked critical border crossings, meaning that hundreds of millions of dollars in lost trade were now affecting businesses across the country with further actions being contemplated.
There is no doubt that everyone suffered in this pandemic, some far more than others. For every human on this planet, we are forever going to be united in the collective trauma of having lived through a global pandemic. For me, I am an incredibly social person. I love to be out in the world. It is how I get my energy, being with friends and family. Like everybody else, being cut off from that was exceptionally painful. However, many of the people in the red zone in Ottawa certainly suffered a great deal more than I did over those two years: people who were frontline health care workers and people who lost loved ones. Thank God I did not. I think one of the things the folks who came in protesting forgot was that the lives they were shutting down and the people they were terrorizing had gone through something really hard too.
That takes me to one of the things that was desecrated, which was the memorial to Terry Fox. It makes me reflect upon the nature of freedom generally. Terry Fox was somebody who was diagnosed with, at that time, terminal cancer. He was going to die, and he had a choice about what he was going to do with the days left to him, what he was going to do with the freedom that he had while he still drew breath in this world. Terry Fox made the decision not to be angry, not to shake a fist, not to scream about the injustice of his condition, but to ask the question of how he could lift others from suffering, how he could use his suffering and his pain as a vehicle so that others may not suffer and so that others may not feel pain.
As he raced across the country, he captured the imagination of all of us, appealing to our greatest nature. When we suffer greatly our instinct often is to turn to anger and malice, but there is a deeper part of us that connects to something that I think is more spiritual, that calls for us instead to use our suffering as a way to stop the suffering of others.
I have to reflect that I am sure the people who came here protesting were suffering. I am sure they had gone through very hard things as many across this country have gone through many hard things, but did they think about the people who were around them, the businesses that were suffering, the people who have been toiling on the front lines of this pandemic, the people who were as desperate as they were for a return to normalcy? I do not think they did. Certainly their actions did not indicate that they did.
That is the thing that bothers me the most about, and I understand that we see this very differently, the disposition of the official opposition on this matter. Cheering on this type of behaviour, this type of lawlessness, this lack of regard for the suffering of others or lack of kinship with trying to lift others out of pain instead of demanding that their pain be heard and felt beyond all other pain regardless of how much more pain it caused, was concerning.
There have been many times when I have seen protests and have sympathized with many of the points that the protesters were making, but then I see the way the protests are being handled or conducted, or I see some of the imagery that some of the people in that crowd have. We have to make a decision not to go among, even when there is a large group of people that we support, when there is lawlessness or affiliation with causes that we disagree with. Some of those choices have been really hard for me because some of those causes that I saw I believed in and I wanted to be among those people.
However, when I saw a flag flown or an image of something that I disagreed with, I understood that my presence there would be confusing. Sometimes some of my colleagues made the other decision to go out among those people where photographs were taken and the Conservative Party pointed out, “What do you stand for? There is somebody in that crowd who stands for this, do they stand for that?” They were attacked on that basis. I had to reflect that it was a fair criticism.
We are at a tenuous time in this country. We are at a tenuous time in this world. We see the events unfolding in Ukraine and we realize that our enemy is not the people at whom I am staring across, as much as we may have vociferous debate and differences. Our enemy is those who would seek to undermine our institutions and throw out our very democracy. There is no doubt that there was sedition in the groups outside. There were those who sought to topple a democratically elected government and replace it with I do not know what.
I do know that the folks who came here and occupied the city for three weeks did not talk a lot about the fact that an election had happened just months ago, where the issues that they were demanding be taken action on had been decided in that very election with the vast majority of parties supporting the measures to fight the pandemic based on science.
I take no joy in not being able to go out to a concert. I take no joy in not being able to go to some of my favourite places with some of my favourite people. We looked at that and said that we had to do it to protect our neighbours, to protect those we loved. We had to make those sacrifices.
It is disappointing to me when I hear the member for Carleton talking about standing with what is going on outside and keeping the momentum going, the interim leader of the Conservatives saying that she does not think we should be asking them to go home, the member for Yorkton—Melville saying it is a show of patriotic passion, or the member for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex saying what she saw were patriotic, flag-waving Canadians and that it was like Canada Day times a thousand. We have a problem. We have to step back and really consider what we foment. There is in our dialogue the need to look at science and hard decisions and come together, but to support this kind of lawlessness is totally unacceptable.
The Emergencies Act had to be brought to bear to deal with this situation and create a restoration of order, and in its being brought to bear in this unprecedented situation there were three pillars. One was to restore peace and order so that people could resume their normal lives and so that their freedoms were not impugned. Second was that it be done correctly, that it be geographically targeted and that it be used with the minimum amount of invasiveness as possible to achieve its results. Third was that it be time-limited.
We are now seeing a return to normalcy. We are seeing the blockades are over. We are seeing life in Ottawa feeling normal again and people being able to work and live in their communities in a way they were accustomed to. Now that it is over, the act requires two things of us. One is that an inquiry be set up within 60 days to independently verify the use of the act and its appropriateness, and the other is that a joint committee of MPs and senators be established to independently take a look at the actions of the government in the use of this act.
There are two things, then, that would seem like important principles to me in establishing a committee of this nature. One is that given that it is, in fact, the government itself that established the act, I concur the government should not, itself, chair the committee. That is a supposition I support. Secondarily, given the actions of the official opposition and its support and cheerleading for the illegal activities that occurred outside this building and blockades across the country, it would be equally inappropriate for the official opposition to act as a chair in reviewing the matters that occurred. Instead, what I think is a fair and reasonable proposal is that the chairmanship be shared by the two other opposition parties, one that did not support the use of the act and one that did, and as this is a joint committee of both the House and the Senate, that the Senate be given the opportunity to appoint one of its members.
In this instance, the committee that we have suggested would actually dial back government representation. We have proposed three Liberal members, two Conservative MPs and one Conservative senator, so that is actually three Conservatives who would sit from their caucus. We have also proposed one member from the Bloc, one from the NDP and one from each of the recognized groups in the Senate. I will just say that the Conservative proposal to only have one senator is completely inappropriate to the other chamber.
We have to understand, in 1988 when the act was written, the intention of a joint committee of the House was that there would be appropriate representation from both Houses. In 1988 there was a Senate based on parties. The Senate has now moved to a different place, and we know as legislators that the spirit of an act is the most important thing we must focus on, so ensuring there is one representative from each is fair and balanced. The Conservative proposal to only have five members, of which two would be Conservative, one would be Bloc, one would be NDP and one would be Liberal, and for it to be chaired by a Conservative MP and co-chaired by a Conservative senator is not appropriate.
It is essential as we move forward and look at this chapter of history that parliamentary review be done and that this committee be both balanced and impartial in its deliberations. I think what we have put forward demonstrates exactly those principles, and I would say it is time we get to work on that committee.