Madam Speaker, I am rising on the question of privilege that I rose on earlier. It is about the occupation that took place in the Confederation Building this week. You may have heard by now, Madam Speaker, that a group of 100 protesters, in an orchestrated and coordinated fashion, entered the Confederation Building and undertook an occupation of it.
While the events occurred on Tuesday, it is in the subsequent days that additional details have come to light, which I would respectfully submit as a means to my question of privilege with respect to its satisfying the timeliness requirement.
According to the news report published, on CBC's website even, on Tuesday morning:
The demonstration started around 8:45 a.m. The protesters said they would allow MPs with offices in the building to pass through the crowd, but those MPs would have to listen to the demonstrators' demands on the way in.
Officers of the Parliamentary Protection Service (PPS) and Ottawa Police were on the scene, asking people if they had any business inside the building before letting them in.
By 10 a.m., protesters removed from the building were chanting outside. Police and PPS members intercepted and then released 14 protesters without charges.
However, in the subsequent days, additional news reports featuring additional comments and confessions by the protest's organizers came to light. On Wednesday, Politico published a piece with an interview with a protest organizer named Rachel Small, whose “goal was to interrupt the daily business of Parliament ‘by not letting MPs walk through these marble hallways’”. The Globe and Mail—