Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to address the House today concerning this important piece of legislation, Bill C-41, the trigger of which is the crisis in Afghanistan, but which, more broadly, seeks to establish a framework for allowing vitally needed short- and long-term development assistance to get into areas controlled by terrorist organizations.
I want to start my remarks today by speaking about the legislative process more generally, because I think the process we have been through on Bill C-41 has been quite effective and may be instructive for other kinds of engagements going forward. Our primary role as members of Parliament is to be legislators, and naturally we get drawn into a variety of other activities that are also important but are not as central. We are here to legislate. We are here to make law, understand laws that are before the House, debate them, propose changes to them, try to make them better and represent our constituents specifically in the law-making process.
The process that bills are supposed to go through is this: They are presented by the government as items for consideration without being perfect or approaching perfection at that point. Then they are debated in principle and members vote on the principle. Then they are analyzed in detail at committee. There should be meaningful consideration and back-and-forth discussions among parties, oriented toward making the bill as good as possible. Then we come back to the House for report stage and third reading.
Very often, sadly, bills are presented in a way that presumes they are in their final form, and the discussion in the House treats them as if the legislative process is a necessary evil instead of a vital process of refinement. Too often, there is pressure to push legislation forward as is and to accept it as a good bill, so we pass it instead of actually digging into the meat or substance of it. I think also that, too often, we see cases of legislation that does not have detail in it but, rather, provides an enabling framework for the government to simply do whatever it wants afterwards. All these cases involve a minimization of the important role legislators are supposed to play in the process of making good laws for our country.
I think, with respect to Bill C-41, though, the process worked very well. The government put forward a piece of legislation that was very flawed, and the need for the legislation was clear, based on advocacy from various stakeholder organizations, including, in particular, people from the Afghan Canadian community and from the development sector. Opposition parties had been asking for this. There were a number of motions at the foreign affairs committee calling for legislation that would allow humanitarian and longer-term development assistance to get into Afghanistan, so the advocacy that happened led to the government's putting forward legislation, though legislation that was flawed.
We debated it in principle, then we brought it to committee and had lengthy, painstaking and detailed negotiations among different parties. The conversations were multidimensional. They were all motivated by the sincere desire of everyone to make the bill better and recognized the urgency of resolving the challenge we have of the legal impediments to getting vitally needed humanitarian assistance into Afghanistan. Those conversations happened; they were constructive all the way along, and, as opposition members, we were very grateful as well for the hard work and involvement of our non-partisan public service.
I think there is an important interplay that happens, as well, between legislators and the public service, which is that we should not simply take or be expected to take as given the products we are given by the public servants; it is our job to challenge, question and say that we want them to come up with a different solution to problems. Public servants were responsive to those issues and questions, and we deferred to their expertise when there were technical concepts that needed to be understood.
I think there was very good interplay between the parties and between legislators and the public service, which led to substantial improvements in the bill.
My only complaint about the process is that, increasingly, we are seeing committee chairs make relatively narrow rulings about the scope of bills. I think that is a trend we should watch, because when the House endorses a bill in broad principle at second reading, committees need to have the space and the scope to be able to make amendments without too narrow an interpretation of the scope parameters. That said, we solved that problem by having a unanimous consent motion in the House to deem an amendment in scope that might not otherwise have been deemed in scope. We were thus able to achieve a workaround here, but, in general, I think this is just a point of caution for committee chairs and for those who are informing these decisions to think about: that we would risk getting to a point where the kinds of improvements to a bill that are required at committee cannot be made if the interpretations of scope are too narrow.
That said, I think this was a constructive process, and we have come back with a bill that is still not perfect but is substantially improved and substantially changed as a result of members of Parliament from all parties doing the work they are supposed to be doing in terms of engaging the legislative process. I enjoyed working with all my colleagues on the committee most of the time, I would say. I enjoyed working with all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, to paraphrase an old line. It was good to be able to work with members with whom I have substantial disagreements on other issues, but with whom, nonetheless, I shared a common framework for approaching the bill.
What would the bill do? The bill engages a complex area of law, which is anti-terrorism law, and seeks to create opportunities for exemption within our terrorist financing law that would allow organizations to deliver vitally needed development assistance to areas controlled by terrorist organizations, while seeking to minimize any kind of interaction with terrorist organizations. When we brought in Canada's terrorist financing regime, the principle, essentially, was that this was the most extreme sanction available for any organization, and that, when an organization is on the terrorist list, there should be absolutely no truck or trade whatsoever with this organization. This is a good principle to start from, but when terrorist organizations control territory, there may be instances where there need to be certain kinds of minimal engagement. If we do not have a nimble enough framework that allows that kind of minimal engagement, then the likely outcome is simply that fewer organizations would be listed as terrorist groups.
Our view is that we need to be able to list terrorist organizations as terrorist organizations and keep them on the terrorist list even if they control territory. It would be perverse to have terrorist organizations taken off the terrorist list simply because they became militarily successful. We need a framework that allows us to list and to maintain the listing of terrorist organizations even while they control territory, but also that allows organizations be able to provide assistance to people in those areas, a framework that allows certain kinds of minimal interactions, such as paying a bridge toll or using space in a building to deliver food aid. Naturally, these exceptions need to be quite limited, but they should exist. I have not heard anybody say that people who, through no fault of their own, happen to live in areas controlled by terrorists should be condemned to not receiving any kind of assistance or support.
I want to respond to an objection raised by an NDP member, because I think there is an important distinction to be made here. The NDP member who spoke a few minutes ago said that the bill would criminalize certain activity that might be undertaken by development organizations. The bill would not do that. The bill would create a potential for a general exemption in the case of humanitarian assistance, and a potential for an exemption through an authorization regime in the case of other development assistance. The bill would create an exception to existing criminal law; it would not create that criminal law.
Today, and as the law has existed for a long time, an organization that is seeking to do humanitarian assistance, but in the process gives money to a terrorist organization, could well run afoul of criminal law. Much could be said about that reality, but that is the existing legal reality. Today, Canadian development organizations in many cases have not been able to work in Afghanistan because of the existing criminal law that means that their risk calculation is that there is some risk of prosecution if they are engaged in Afghanistan, even if they minimize their interactions with the Taliban.
I think it is wrong to measure this bill against some abstract standard of perfection. What we should measure this bill against is the status quo that it improves upon. This bill does not criminalize anything. It creates exemptions and the possibility for exemptions to existing criminal law. As far as I understood the position that, for most of this debate, the NDP were articulating at committee, even they would or should regard this as an improvement on the status quo. It seems that they have now chosen to oppose a bill that does not improve enough on the status quo. I think it is fair to say that this bill, in certain respects, does not improve enough on the status quo but, from our perspective, it does not make sense to oppose a bill simply because it is not perfect, or simply because it does not go far enough in the desired directions.
We have to recognize that there are important complexities on the other side of this. Some amendments were proposed, for example, that would limit the definition of a terrorist group to only listed terrorist entities. That would be a substantial change to terrorist financing law and it would allow organizations that have, for instance, a terrorist purpose, but are not listed as terrorist entities, to be able to receive financing from Canada. Our approach was to try to strike an appropriate balance to protect the integrity of our anti-terrorism regime, to improve on the bill as much as we could, to provide greater predictability for humanitarian organizations, but also, recognizing how quickly we wanted to move on this bill, to not have kind of broad substantial changes to terrorist financing law that would have all kinds of other impacts outside of the area of development assistance.
I am proud of the role that Conservatives were able to play in those discussions. I think we took a reasonable approach that improved the bill and that will provide us with a framework that will facilitate the continuing listing of terrorist organizations even if they control territory, while also being able to be engaged constructively with the people of those areas.
I want to share just some of the amendments we supported or proposed at committee. We supported an amendment on providing a humanitarian exemption that has already been discussed during debate today. The previous version of the bill said that, in effect, any development activity would require authorization if it involved that kind of activity in terrorist-controlled areas. Now the bill says that for emergency humanitarian relief, an exemption is not required. There is a general exemption but for longer-term development assistance, likely in cases where there is actually time to make this application and consider it, that there is an authorization regime in place.
We put forward an amendment that would allow organizations to ask if they need to apply. There has been a lot of discussion, rightly, about the Afghan context, but there are many cases where it is much more ambiguous. There might be a group that could be considered a terrorist group but is not a listed terrorist entity, that partially controls sort of semi un-governed parts of the country, and then organizations have to make the judgment call of what kinds of interactions would be required and whether this organization is a terrorist group or not. We felt that it was not appropriate to put the onus on development organizations to make these kinds of calls. They should be able to ask the government to get feedback. This was an area in which there was a great deal of discussion. I think we came to a good compromise.
We also supported amendments around the protection of personal information and Conservatives put forward the amendment on moving up the review clauses. This reflects our belief that this legislation has problems. It is not perfect and needs work, but it also needs to pass. Having a one-year review will allow us to see how the government is doing in terms of implementation and how the regime is working.
I would like to speak more broadly to the situation in Afghanistan. I want to be clear that this bill is not in any way softening our denunciation of the Taliban. In fact, this bill and the accompanying conversation have reinforced our denunciation of the Taliban. In the absence of a bill like this, a government has to consider either maintaining a terrorist listing and, therefore, the associated restrictions on development assistance or lifting a terrorist listing with all the attendant problems with that.
This bill would allow us to maintain the listing of terrorist organizations that ought to continue to be listed as terrorist organizations. It would allow us to list other organizations, such as the IRGC or the Wagner Group, that have close relationships with government and may, in certain instances, be conceived of as controlling territory. It would allow us to list government-affiliated entities without fear of negatively impacting the flow of development assistance. This would, therefore, strengthen our ability to denounce and hold accountable terrorist organizations like the Taliban.
It is very important for this House to remain seized with the situation in Afghanistan. A humanitarian crisis is ongoing there, but there is also the fundamental crisis in human rights and recognition of universal human dignity that is not happening, needless to say, by the de facto authorities.
Canada has had a long-running commitment to Afghanistan. Over 150 Canadian soldiers died fighting for the freedom of that country. We need to honour the sacrifices of those Canadians, as well as Afghans and other allies who fought along with them, by continuing to work on the advancement of freedom and democracy in Afghanistan. There are ongoing efforts under way by the Afghan people in Afghanistan and in the diaspora to build up the necessary institutions in exile, to challenge the Taliban and to work toward the restoration of freedom and democracy.
The Afghan people want us to be firm in sanctioning the Taliban, in condemning its human rights abuses and also in looking for ways to support and engage with opposition groups across the spectrum, different types of opposition groups doing different kinds of things. We heard yesterday at the foreign affairs committee from one of those groups, speaking about the hope that, because of the Taliban's general ineffectiveness due to the problems, the Taliban could be on its way to a kind of structural collapse earlier than many people expected. We can hope for that collapse and the restoration of freedom and democracy in Afghanistan, and we should not give ourselves over to undue pessimism as it relates to Afghanistan. We need to continue to be engaged, thinking and proposing ideas for a brighter future for Afghanistan when this dark night is over.
Canada has been there in the past. The abandonment of Afghanistan in the recent chaotic pullout and the failure of the Canadian government to evacuate those who needed to be evacuated are sad points in terms of our engagement, but we need to work together as parliamentarians to build for a brighter future for Afghanistan.
I want to commit to all those listening in the Afghan community that it will continue to be a priority for me to think about and work on how Canada can honour its commitments to Afghanistan and continue to work with the Afghan diaspora, the people of Afghanistan, to address the immediate humanitarian crisis, but also to work for the restoration of freedom and democracy and the expansion of pluralism that includes ethnic and religious minorities. This is possible, this is realistic and we must continue that work going forward.