Cathy McLeod

[Lobster Fishery Dispute in Nova Scotia, October 19th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, a top-down approach is absolutely not negotiation. Negotiation is a conversation. It is being at the table. I am someone from British Columbia who has travelled back and forth to Ottawa a number of times. Yes, we have a pandemic, but we also have critical work that we have to get done. My colleague from West Nova just finished his isolation period after spending time. Yes, there is a bubble, but sometimes we have to be there. We have to have the hard conversations face to face. We have to say we are going to get this job done.

No, it is not top-down, but it is negotiation and it is conversation. It is making sure that we have found a way for everyone to contribute to the discussion, so we get to the win-win-win instead of the win-lose.

[Lobster Fishery Dispute in Nova Scotia, October 19th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Tobique—Mactaquac.

Like many, I have become increasingly concerned over the last couple of weeks as we watched the escalating dispute and violence in Nova Scotia. As members may be aware, the Crown signed peace and friendship treaties in 1760 and 1761, and this of course included a right to fish, hunt and gather in pursuit of a moderate livelihood. These rights were affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Marshall decision of 1999, and there was further clarification on November 17, 1999, that this right was not unlimited and regulations could be introduced if it was justified for conservation or other important objectives.

It is important to note that history, and I know many have repeated it. This is a right that has been around for many long years and has been reaffirmed. The Sipekne’katik fishers in southwestern Nova Scotia launched a moderate livelihood fishery last month and protestors were concerned about this. Protests have become increasingly violent, with tensions rising. We have all been witness to some very dramatic footage over the last few days in particular, and of course we are very concerned.

This current dispute is a failure of the Crown, and in this case the Liberal government, which had promised to do better. Five years ago the Liberals were elected and had a majority government. They promised to do better. I have been in conversation with the member for West Nova for many weeks, knowing he has been very concerned and has been calling for serious action.

What do we have instead of serious action? We have four ministers taking the unprecedented step of calling for an emergency debate. Do they not realize that they are government? They have the ability to resolve this crisis and they have the responsibility to be on plane, rather than being in the House. Lives and livelihoods are at risk and they matter.

The minister has said there is a pandemic. The intergovernmental affairs minister can have an exemption to do a meet-and-greet with the new Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. I would suggest this is much more important. Not everything can be done by Zoom. Sometimes people have to be there and put that energy and time into saying that this is going to be resolved. They have to put some urgency to it. Let us not just talk about it in the House. The government is asking for a domestic debate on an issue it has the ability to resolve.

Canada must fulfill its obligation under the Marshall decision and a negotiation around what a moderate livelihood means is probably one of the important steps. The Minister of Public Safety must ensure Nova Scotia has the resources it requests to effectively manage the escalating tensions, fully investigate criminal activity and keep everyone safe.

We all know Canadians have a right to peacefully demonstrate or protest. That is constitutionally protected. However, we are also a country of rule of law and those laws must be respected. Anyone who has crossed the boundary from peaceful protest to criminal activity must be held to full account.

Failed policies and unfinished business of successive generations truly is our shame and the results for indigenous people across Canada have been catastrophic for too many. We must do better. With realizations and court decisions, there is an understanding from Canadians from coast to coast to coast that we have much work to do toward reconciliation. Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I have seen a real understanding from Canadians that we must do better.

As we are working toward reconciliation and correcting the injustices of the past, we cannot create new injustices. The government needs to have a process that includes third parties in the conversation.

I will go back to the treaty process in British Columbia in the 1990s. It was a very flawed process, but one of the things they did right was that they had five tables of people who had a special interest. Whether it was hunting and fishing or other areas, they had a special interest in terms of what was at the table. They created a win-win-win as opposed to a win-lose.

That is certainly something that the government has not done. The Liberals go out to meet with the Wet'suwet'en and they do not bother to include the elected chiefs in the conversation. There are many examples where their failure to have a conversation with third parties, to let them know what was happening, why it was happening and perhaps seek some advice, has been to the detriment of communities that have worked and lived side-by-side for generations. Certainly I am very concerned with the current government's failure. In the past, there was a Liberal government that had a better process.

The conversation tonight is very difficult and is very concerning. As I go about my work, there is something that I am very proud of and that I reflect upon often. It was that some of the first nation communities, when I was first elected, had me read something called the “Memorial to Sir Wilfrid Laurier”. This was in the early 1900s, but the sentiment is something that we all need to look at. In B.C., we did not have treaties. There were many unresolved issues and they went to the government at the time. Some of the words that stand out in my memory are to the effect that:

We have no grudge against...the settlers, but we want to have an equal chance with them of making a living.... It is not in most cases their fault.

They have taken up and improved and paid for their lands in good faith.

There was very clearly a recognition that it was not the people living side-by-side in communities; it was the government that had been the failure. The other piece that stands out very importantly in these comments is that, when the white settlers arrived, it was said:

...These people wish to be partners with us in our country. We must, therefore, be the same as brothers to them, and live as one family.... What is ours will be theirs, and what is theirs will be ours. We will help each other to be great and good.

If we look at those sentiments, we know that government has important work that it must do. We need to be great and good together, and that is only going to be through sitting down at the table, having those difficult conversations and coming to a resolution.

[Lobster Fishery Dispute in Nova Scotia, October 19th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I would suggest that the minister is forgetting that the government has the responsibility and the ability to be out there resolving this issue. I know in past crises, ministers have hopped on planes and put their energy and focus into getting a negotiated solution, and getting it done now.

Therefore, why is the minister sitting in her home talking to Parliament tonight instead of being in Nova Scotia, saying they are not going to leave and will go through sleepless nights until they have a resolution and have de-escalated the situation?

[Judges Act, October 8th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, when trying to fix the system, every piece of the system is important, including prevention. One of the areas I did not get to speak to, which we debated in the House last year, was the parole system. A very violent criminal was released and a horrific murder happened. We debated that at length. We have system-wide issues and they are all important.

[Judges Act, October 8th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, we took some extraordinary measures during the COVID emergency, whereby we moved things through debate at all stages very quickly, and I would say, reluctantly, because I know that mistakes have been made as we spent billions and billions of dollars.

I would suggest that this debate we are having today would not go on for all that long, and the justice committee is going to have a lot of opportunity to do the scrutiny it needs to do. However, I am glad to have the opportunity to participate in this debate today, and I know that my other colleagues are very glad to add their points of view. That is what we are here for. We are here to debate bills. The government put the bill up for debate today, and I think we need to enjoy the opportunity. If we are not going to debate the bills, and the government just wants to put billions and billions of dollars through, which it has done regularly, what is the point—

[Judges Act, October 8th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, that is a very important question and I will answer it in a few ways.

First of all, the justice committee is not up and operating yet, so even if the bill passed, we would not be able to deal with it because there is no committee to send it to. The second thing is that we know that the Senate is not sitting until the end of month. Again, there is nowhere the bill could move quickly through this process.

Also, out of all the times the bill has been put through rapidly as a private member's bill with very limited debate, this was my first opportunity to stand up and actually speak on it. I am very honoured that I have had this opportunity and that we are having this extra debate to really have an opportunity to look at the broader issues within the scope of the bill before us and what we could perhaps do better.

Again, this debate is not slowing the bill.

[Judges Act, October 8th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to rise to talk about Bill C-3, a bill that is going to make a small difference in what is really a larger system failure in dealing with sexual violence and sexual assault in Canada. It is certainly important. As members of Parliament we come to the House with very different experiences and exposures to violence or assault in our professional and personal lives. This really frames our understanding of the issue. It also is important in terms of the debate that is happening.

In reflecting about the bill today and about the broader issues, I went into my memory banks and thought about things that have happened throughout my life. I thought I would share some examples, first of all, to look at the larger systemic issues that are not addressed and then to look at the issue of the bill in particular.

I want to first talk about the emergency responses by our police officers. I can remember, as a young nurse with very limited experience, working in a small first nations community. One day I arrived at the little clinic office. Across the road from it was a baseball field. When I arrived at the clinic at about seven o'clock in the morning, there was a woman in the baseball field. She was completely nude and had a number of bruises. Obviously, she was a victim of a sexual assault and an assault in general. No one else was around so we covered her up. She was intoxicated. We called emergency services to transport her to something more than what we had available, and we also called the RCMP. I remember, again as someone who was young and new to this business, that they made it about her being drunk and “Who knows what happened?” They were very dismissive of that horrific crisis.

There was some work done by Robyn Doolittle in 2015 that was called “Unfounded”. What she said was that police would find the complaints as baseless and there would often be no investigation, so the example I just gave certainly fits into my initial experience. The numbers in 2015 were quite incredible, where 25,000 incidents were reported to the police with only 1,400 convictions. Clearly, we have an issue with the emergency response system.

The next experience I would like to share is my move from the small community to a larger health centre that had an emergency room and an emergency response. It was still rural. Typically there was a nurse and doctor who were available during that time. Nurses in rural communities have to respond to everything that comes through the door. It might be a three-person motor vehicle accident, the delivery of a baby or a victim of rape.

One night we were called in. There was a very shaken woman who indicated that she had been very violently sexually assaulted. We had to do an examination. If anyone is not aware of what those examinations are like, it is very, very intrusive in terms of taking swabs and plucking samples from the pubic area. It is very detailed and very intrusive. I had never used a rape kit before. I had never been trained in using a rape kit. We had to read the instructions. We tried to hopefully be compassionate and kind, but we certainly were not proficient in what we needed to do to put this case together.

I talked about the police response and now I am talking about the health care response in a rural community and the ability of nurses and doctors to have the expertise that is needed.

The next experience is not a professional one, but an experience within the judicial system. It is the only time I have ever been close to the court system in my entire life. I had never been in a court. I was a support system for two young girls who had been sexually assaulted, and my support role was to be in the courtroom to listen.

I remember the morning of the trial. This is going back in my memory, but this is what stands out. There was an overworked Crown counsel who went to these young girls and asked them if they could get hold of the witnesses from when the preliminary interviews were done and bring them to the court. I was stunned that the Crown counsel did not have the witnesses planned out in terms of the people who would corroborate the stories of these two young women. These two very young women gave compelling and heartbreaking testimony. There was no question in my mind that it was very real testimony. The person who was accused, his only response was that it did not happen. He denied it.

I looked at the bravery of these two girls who had decided to pursue this case in spite of all the challenges to get to that point. They had to hear the person they knew had done exactly what they said he had done deny it, and then the Crown counsel, without an appropriate case ready to present, talked about their bruises. It was absolutely awful. The result that came out of that particular court case was a finding of not guilty. The judge at that time said that, although the testimony of the girls was very compelling, they did not feel there was enough proof so they found the person not guilty.

That is the experience we have. We have system failures throughout. I talked about the rape kits. We did learn a little bit more over time, but I was never called to be a witness for the Crown in terms of the mental state or in terms of what happened. Other than the rape kits, the notes we kept were never brought into the court system when dealing with it. We have so many flaws, more than what are in this bill, that are still happening today. We still have so much to do.

As many people have indicated, this bill has a history. The history starts with the passion of our former leader, Rona Ambrose, who introduced it as a private member's bill. We all know it is very difficult for private member's bills to meet the finish line. There are many people in here who probably have never had an opportunity to even introduce a private member's bill. She did get it fairly far along the system, which took four years. As I said, there are very few private member's bills that make it to the finish line, and I know she was very delighted when the government decided to take up the bill, as it appears were most members in the House.

It speaks also to the process, which becomes important, because there were amendments that had been suggested to the private member's bill, which have now been incorporated into the version we see in front of us. We talk about this as maybe a simple bill that we could skip all the process with, and I know that two weeks ago we spent $50 billion without having a committee process. However, what it shows is that, even with the simplest of bills that seem like they should just receive unanimous consent and move through the process, Parliament is there for a reason. It is there to scrutinize. It is there to make things better. The fact that we have some process for these measures, and of course I still profoundly—

[Petitions, October 8th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition for a number of Canadians across the country who are very concerned about the Uighur situation in China. They are looking for Magnitsky sanctions, among other mechanisms, to deal with this horrific issue.

[Indigenous Affairs, October 6th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, Sisters in Spirit vigils were held across Canada to honour murdered and missing indigenous women and girls. This is an ongoing and devastating tragedy.

It has been 16 months now and the government has been sitting on the results from the national inquiry's final report. The Native Women's Association gave it a resounding fail and stated that we did not have an action plan; we had a lack of an action plan.

When can we expect a plan or is this just another failure to deliver?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 6th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I agree that the deaths of seniors in our homes is a national tragedy. However, the Liberals' solution to this is that we are going to create some national standards that are going to take probably years and this area is in provincial jurisdiction.

Is the member aware that the Canadian Medical Association has done a report that looks at research on the differences between Ontario and B.C., what they did right and what they did wrong? It is about protective equipment. It is about infection control. It is about training. There was nothing in the Speech from the Throne that offers federal assistance to the provinces in a short-term way, even if it is just money, to do the things that are going to matter for the second wave. Great, we can talk about national standards or not, but they are not doing the things that are practical. The government is not doing the things that are going to make a difference as we head into the second wave.