Madam Speaker, over the last several weeks, all of us have had the opportunity to think about why this place needs to function. This debate has been precipitated because the government has refused to respect the will of this place. This place needs to function as it was designed to function under the Standing Orders and under all the rules and privileges that we are afforded here in this place because, in a lot of ways, democracy can be an illusion if this place does not function.
We are each imbued with power of people. For me, it is close to 120,000 people; I represent that many people. I sometimes think in my head of a Saddledome filled several times over and the responsibility that I have to be the voice of that many people. The rules that we have in this place allow me to speak on their behalf and also prevent Canadians from feeling like they have to settle conflicts or differences or get action through violence. We have to ensure that so many things work here in order to keep our democracy functioning.
My colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills mentioned an article in The Globe and Mail this week. It was written by the editorial board. It is entitled “A Parliament that is dead on the inside”. In establishing its thesis, the article states as follows, “The House has, as established through the Constitution, the absolute power to order the production of government documents—in this case, documents related to the disgraced Sustainable Development Technology Canada agency.” The government has not complied with an order of the House. Therefore, the Speaker found a breach of members' privileges. Now the way to end this, the way to respect the will of Parliament, is for the government to comply with the order, period.
I want to put why this place has to function in a slightly different context. I gave that why, perhaps not explicitly, in a speech that I gave last week at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 284, the Chapelhow legion. I would like to impart to colleagues today why this place has to function and why the government must comply with the House order.
Recently, one of our younger colleagues, the member for Battle River—Crowfoot, stood in the House to deliver a tribute to his father, who had passed away unexpectedly. He closed with a call to action, “my hope is that everyone can remember my dad, Jay, by living with the strength, generosity and faith he showed us.” In response and in a rare show of unity, all members of this place rose and gave him a standing ovation. My colleague's hope and the reaction it evoked among us, a divided people often, exemplify a phenomenon I have often seen in moments of grief. Eulogies of remarkable people are never mere lists of accomplishments. Instead, they challenge us to ensure that their work to improve the human condition endures beyond their lives, uniting us to carry their mission forward.
More than a century ago, Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae wrote one of the most blunt and enduring calls to action ever contained in a remembrance. In 1915, his friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, fell in combat during the Second Battle of Ypres. After his funeral and noticing the poppies springing up among graves of the fallen, McCrae wrote an elegy entitled In Flanders Fields:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
In his poem, McCrae, who later died in the war, left a solemn charge to future generations: “You will face the same foe we did and you must engage with it, lest everything we, the war dead, have sacrificed for you be in vain. If you succeed, there shall still be beauty and we shall rest easy, but if you fail, there will be no rest for any of us in this life or the next.”
If McCrae's mandate to us was clear, the enemy he called us to face was left undefined. One could interpret it as a call to defeat enemy soldiers, but this view seems overly narrow to me. McCrae's words transcend literal war. They speak to a more insidious, pervasive threat.
In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned that Canadians spend too little time reflecting on McCrae's lament's true meaning, even on Remembrance Day. With division and unrest spreading through our communities, schools and places of worship, I fear many have grown complacent or naive about the foe McCrae identified.
Years of peace and prosperity have lulled Canadians into thinking the foe can neither take root here nor harm us. Some even see the foe as a friend, believing it worthy of protection rather than something to root out. These are lies that we, particularly in this place, are duty bound to reject if we are to complete McCrae’s task. However, what exactly is the enemy McCrae asked us to confront?
Through my time in public service, I have seen first-hand the worst that humanity can inflict upon itself. I have walked through homes reduced to blackened rubble, where the fresh stench of death and blood spatter were all that was left of families who once inhabited them. I have walked over mass graves. I have met survivors of genocide and sexual slavery, and listened as world leaders attempted to diminish the crimes committed against them. I have witnessed mothers whose starving children limply clung to them in refugee camps, displaced by warfare and disease. I know that all who serve in our military have seen far worse than I have.
I know our foe is real, pervasive and intent on our destruction, but I also know the horrors of war, though perhaps its most visible manifestation, do not constitute the foe itself.
If it is not war, then what is it? I believe the foe germinates in complacency and the false belief that Canada is immune to external threats. It spreads by erasing the hard-learned lessons of past conflicts and convincing us that others will defend our freedom, rendering us unprepared and unwilling to defend it ourselves. It fosters divisiveness and denies the existence of a Canadian identity. However, this assumption that the foe can be ignored or that Canada lacks something worth defending is fatally flawed. In that place of folly, of ingratitude, decadence, arrogance and naïveté, we meet McCrae's foe: the desire to subjugate others and strip away their freedoms.
It terrifies me that the foe so obviously lives on in Canada despite McCrae's cautionary words and the sacrifices made by so many who have fought to defend our nation in armed combat. That is because the foe, left unchecked, inevitably leads to the downfall of a free people like us in Canada. If we are truly to honour those who have fallen in defence of our nation, we must accept that opposing the foe is a battle each of us, particularly in this place, is currently engaged in. We must view remembrance as a lifelong charge, a sacred duty to prevent the foe from eroding Canadian freedoms, democratic institutions and our national unity.
Like mould spores, the foe lives on every surface of human nature, constantly probing for new hosts to infect. It seeks to divide us and strip us of our birthrights: freedom of speech, the choice of our own path, the right to worship without persecution and the ability to love without consequence. It attempts to deceive us, suggesting that to preserve these freedoms we must abandon our most fundamental responsibility: to do no harm to another.
We must be vigilant on these matters. The foe cannot be appeased and it will not de-escalate. Thus, we must resist the foe within our minds, in our relationships, in our workplaces and in civil society. This is a challenging task. The foe often disguises itself as a virtuous ideology that is wrong to challenge, masking its true intentions. It often attempts to convince us that the only way to protect our freedom is to take away or limit the freedom of others, and yet, hope lies in Canada's history.
When McCrae penned In Flanders Fields, Canadian soldiers were fighting for one of the first times as a unified force. During the First World War, soldiers of diverse backgrounds, including over 4,000 indigenous people, fought side by side under the Canadian banner for the goodness our nation represents. In that war, and others that followed, men and women of all faiths fought alongside one another to liberate others from the foe. This unity, the miracle of people setting aside differences to protect the freedom found in our nation, is the foe's greatest fear. That miracle, thankfully, remains alive and well today.
We must thank those who have fought for Canada, but we also must renew our commitment to confront the foe here ourselves. How do we quarrel with the foe, as McCrae charged us to do? What must we do to hold it at bay? The foe responds to hard power, making it essential for our nation to be capable of self-defence and for military service to be respected. However, civilians too must bear the responsibility of keeping the foe in check.
We know the foe is deathly allergic to freedom and equality of opportunity, and so we can starve it of the fuel it needs. The foe's oxygen is religious hatred, rigid caste structures, petty jealousies, intellectual laziness, selfishness, political cowardice and autocracy. The foe cannot thrive in a nation in which anyone, of any background, belief or origin, can live without fear of persecution and prosper by the work of their hand.
Canada and other countries committed to traditions of freedom, democracy and justice, and the rule of law, are humanity's best and only defence against the foe. It is only within those nations where institutions exist that allow us to solve society-scale grievances through words and democratic action instead of with violence that humanity has been able to hold the foe at bay for any length of time.
We must remember that the foe confronts us every day in small moments, like when we choose to empathize rather than judge, when we bear witness to suffering rather than ignore it and when we temper anger with understanding, but also when we work to correct injustices. Fighting the foe means shedding ideologies that undermine our freedoms. It means thinking critically, challenging the status quo and forgiving when we can. A shared commitment to freedom and decency can transcend many divides, a reminder that the foe seeks to silence us, and it seeks to silence us here, but that we must protect open dialogue as a safeguard against our democracy.
Perhaps the most potent weapon against the foe is pride in Canada. Canada is the embodiment of freedom from the foe, a shining example of peaceful, democratic pluralism. We weaken the foe each time we feel pride for our country singing in our blood. Every time we sing the national anthem, every time we wave our flag, wear the poppy or thank a veteran, we strike a blow against it.
Proud of our nation we should be. Canada offers a promise of freedom and prosperity that tens of millions of people from around the world have migrated to experience. It is the promise Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae fought and died for and the promise he threw the torch to us to protect.
Today, the foe seeks to extinguish this pride and make us feel ashamed of the goodness that can be found in our shared Canadian traditions. The foe understands we will not fight to protect something if we do not value it. That is why it tempts us to cancel Canada Day celebrations and seeks to normalize shouts of death to Canada and the burning of Canadian flags in our streets.
That is why it wants us to view the Canadian military uniform as a symbol of oppression instead of the proud armour of liberators it always has been. That is why it seeks to have us erase our nation's history instead of celebrating the good while fixing the bad. It gives me hope that many Canadians of differing political viewpoints, religions and ethnic backgrounds are coming together to reject these lies and defend the institutions that protect our national identity of freedom. People united in freedom, as we can be here in this country, is the foe's undoing.
When we stand together as Canadians, united in our love for our nation, our freedoms, our democratic institutions, we, the true north, strong and free, truly honour those who have fought and died to protect Canada's promise. When we do this, we defeat the foe. To Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae and to all those who have served our nation across time, we are thankful for what they have done and we give our promise today: We remember, we will take up the quarrel with the foe and we will prevail. God keep our land glorious and free. O Canada, now and always we stand together proudly on guard for thee, lest we forget.
I believe this place has forgotten. I believe it has broken faith with those who died. If we do not protect the democratic institution that is Parliament, then we have broken faith. We have let the foe into this institution and it is insidious. We are supposed to think this is not a big deal. It is not a big deal that the government is not respecting the will of the House. We are supposed to believe that the Liberal government does not have a duty to comply with this, that we should just send this to a committee, that we should just let it go, that it is not a big deal.
At the end of the day, reading the Globe editorial from yesterday, and my colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills read the quote at the end, the government is honour bound and duty bound to respect the will of Parliament. If the government does not do that, then our democratic institution is broken. This is a lie. How are we supposed to uphold the principles of democracy that allow our pluralism to thrive, that allow us to solve quarrels without violence, that allow us to uphold freedoms? If we cannot do that here, it is impossible across the country.
That is why we have parliamentary privilege. It is my privilege to stand in this place on behalf of over 100,000 Canadians. If the government is not complying with the will of Parliament, then that privilege has been violated. It is not just my privilege; it is the privilege of every single Canadian. That is the gravity of the situation here. This, to me, is a hill to die on.
There is a reason we are demanding that the government hand over these documents, and there is a reason we are asking our colleagues in the other opposition parties to hold the line. There is a greater principle at play here. That principle is whether or not we are going to allow McCrae's foe to seep into our business here, in our naïveté, in our comfort, our decadence and our arrogance, that what happens here does not matter.
Many people have said this place does not matter anymore, bureaucracy runs everything and there is no ministerial accountability. That may be, but for what I will do, and in the promise I make to people who serve in Canada's military, people who serve abroad, people of all walks of life who have decided to take up the quarrel with the foe, who have caught the torch from failing hands, I will not let that pass. Nor should anyone in this place, regardless of political strife, members of the government backbench particularly.
This is the time for political courage. Our democracy is under attack. It is no less than that. There is no amount of hyperbole in that statement. It is the time for political courage. It is the time to hold space and to honour those who have sacrificed to protect the democratic institution in which we are so privileged every day to speak.
