Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I think you would recognize that it would set a very dangerous precedent for us not to be allowed to quote Simon & Garfunkel. I know my hon. colleague is upset that I did not quote Nickelback, but I just have not heard them enough. It would be a very dangerous precedent to say Simon & Garfunkel is somehow insulting to Conservatives. I think they can rise above that. I trust that you would understand, Madam Speaker.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I know the Conservatives are against so many things, and now they are against Simon & Garfunkel. I quoted a lyric. I said, “All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and he disregards the rest.” That perfectly sums up my opponent. I never called him a liar. The member is just disregarding the facts.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, this is a profound question that Canada is going to have to confront.

I think it is very unfortunate that the Conservatives have decided to use this as a motion to divide people by saying they “condemn the radical activists who are exploiting divisions”. The Conservatives are exploiting the divisions right now. That is what is happening.

As for the signed agreements, I would refer to Senator Murray Sinclair. I have worked on resource development projects. I have been involved in resource development projects. I have helped sign agreements. This can be done in very good faith.

However, as Murray Sinclair said the other day, when dealing with impoverished communities that are being given promises, as the Paul Simon quote goes:

...pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises

I would then go to the next line:

All lies and jests
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

I find the Conservatives' use of numbers on the Wet'suwet'en that they will support and the Wet'suwet'en they will not to be pretty much—

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I do not lose any sleep over angry Conservatives heckling and shouting. They are the same kind of people who are on Twitter, and they probably have their own troll farm giving them messages.

We need to deal with a way to end the railway blockades. I want to talk about how we move forward on that, because I am very concerned that this issue could spiral out of control very quickly. To see the language from the Conservatives about the mob and the radicals and the professional protesters and the eco-terrorists is putting us on more and more dangerous ice.

I was absolutely shocked that Peter MacKay would post a tweet of an ugly confrontation of some guy in a truck shouting at young indigenous people and telling them to drop dead, and that Peter MacKay would promote that vigilantism. That is not what we do in Canada, and we cannot allow that to happen.

I would urge my Conservative colleagues to remember what happened at Oka and Elsipogtog. I remember with Ipperwash Mike Harris standing up and saying, “I want the g.d. Indians out of the park.” Dudley George died and an OPP officer's career was ruined.

Never again would the OPP take those kinds of orders from a government, and I am very pleased today to see that the RCMP is offering to step down in Wet’suwet’en. That is a good first step.

I would like to take a minute here to recognize two important people whom I have come to know. One is the late Wayne Russett of the RCMP, whom I negotiated with many times. He was an incredible diplomat in defusing situations on blockades.

I got my political start on a railway blockade. The Conservatives make it seem like it is just people who are lazy and do not want to go to work, but when people are on a blockade it is because they have no other choice. They have been betrayed by a process and betrayed by a system. It took the people of northern Ontario standing up on a railway blockade to get the issues of environmental protection on our land recognized, and it brought Canada to a better place.

One of the key negotiators besides Wayne Russett was officer Jim MacDonald of the OPP, who came in with the subpoena and the injunction. Officer Jim MacDonald is a big man with a big voice. We became very good friends because he knew what we were doing was right, and he knew that the OPP was being put in a very difficult position.

We need to start looking at how to defuse the situation. The Prime Minister's plan to replace the RCMP with indigenous police is showing a continued lack of leadership. The Prime Minister needs to move beyond saying we are here to talk and here to listen. I appreciate the minister's talk about how we are going to move things forward over the next number of years, but we have a crisis now.

When I see young indigenous people walking in the streets with signs saying that reconciliation is dead, it is heartbreaking, but it is something I have heard again and again in the communities as their frustrations grow. That frustration is real and it is up to us to say that reconciliation is not dead because it is the obligation of the government and settler state.

Indigenous people have nothing to reconcile. It is their lands that were taken, their children who were taken, and it is their rights and their rules of law that have been undermined time and time again. When they are walking in the streets saying that reconciliation is dead, it is up to us to raise the bar.

The Prime Minister has said he is willing to listen. That is a good sign, but he needs to be willing to listen and to meet. He needs to show leadership. What is happening in the Wet’suwet’en territory now has touched off something much bigger, much more tense and much more complex. The possibility of something going wrong at one of those railway blockades is very real. There is the possibility of someone getting hurt. The possibility of some idiot driving a truck through a crowd is very real.

That is why the words we say in this House matter. We have to be able to de-escalate this. These blockades are putting enormous economic pressure on our country right now. That is why we need to be able to put an offer on the table. In order for people to step back from a blockade, they need to know that something is going to change.

This morning, the RCMP said that they were willing to step out of the Wet'suwet'en territory. I think that is a very good step.

To do that then we cannot just, as the Prime Minister suggested, replace it with indigenous police and have life carry on. We need a time for discussion. We need to ask Coastal GasLink to suspend work and suspend moving into the territory while this negotiation takes place. It is not that radical a thing to say, because nothing is going to happen in that territory until this gets decided anyway.

Third, it needs to be the Prime Minister himself who goes to Wet'suwet'en territory to sit down and meet. I am very pleased that the Minister of Indigenous Services met with the Mohawks in Belleville. I think that is a very positive step, but it is the Prime Minister who needs to show leadership. He needs to put on the table that we will deal with these issues between the hereditary chiefs and the elected band councils.

I have nothing negative to say about the people who signed the agreements. I have nothing negative to say about the political leaders and business people who moved forward believing they had an agreement. However, clearly, within the indigenous community, there is a deep divide that needs to be addressed, and we need the Prime Minister there.

Fourth, I would say that the Prime Minister needs to meet and appoint a special emissary to start building trust. I cannot speak for Senator Murray Sinclair, and I have spoken with him on this issue, but it should be someone like Murray Sinclair or someone of a stature that is respected. Then we would agree that nothing happens until we go through this. Are we then going to say that the pipeline just moves ahead? No, we are going to sit down and talk with the Wet'suwet'en people and find out where we go next.

Then I would ask the Prime Minister, following an agreement, to set up those meetings to reach out to the Mohawk people who are on the blockades, because we need to get the trains moving, and urge the Mohawks to recognize that there will be huge impacts on all of us. However, they are going to want to see good faith, because they are not just going to walk away at this moment.

There is a fifth issue, which is probably the most difficult for the government to agree to. We need a coherent plan to deal with the catastrophic climate change that is coming. The days when it was just business as usual, and we could keep pumping up greenhouse gas emissions without any credible plan, have hit a brick wall.

I was out on the street seeing young people marching everywhere. They get it. They get that the promise of getting another pipeline, planting some trees and then getting another pipeline and planting more trees is not cutting it. They want to know why our carbon footprint is getting bigger and bigger every year.

We need to have a credible plan, and certainly that is going to be a discussion about Teck Frontier right now, because Jason Kenney has put that front and centre. This has become the Conservative proxy war, which I believe is destabilizing the issues that we need to address in order to get this blockade issue dealt with.

On the October Thanksgiving weekend in 2000, when I had never dreamed of becoming a politician, I was standing at the blockade when the OPP came at night and set up cars to come and arrest my neighbours, who were farmers and miners, Algonquin and Ojibwa people standing to defend the watershed of the region.

I got a call from the Crown prosecutor's office. I will not say who it was in the office, but someone called to say that they had just gotten a call from Mike Harris and he wanted 100 people arrested.

I asked the person from the Crown prosecutor's office what they were going to do. He said that there was not a judge within 300 kilometres who would sign a mass warrant for arrests, because they knew this was a tense situation. All they were asking the demonstrators to do was to not escalate.

We actually had this dance of negotiations between police and the protesters, who both understood that we needed to find a way out of this without it spiralling, because it could have spiralled very fast.

Having that experience of negotiating with police, I understand the tensions they are put under in this situation, so it is very unhelpful to have the Conservatives speak again and again about enforcing injunctions. There are so many rail crossings across this country. There are so many ways that people can rise up, and they are rising up.

This is a moment when Canada could recognize that this crisis could have been the LNG project, it could have been Teck or it could have been any number of things. This crisis has been 150 years in the making. This young generation of indigenous people is going to be heard.

It is up to this Parliament to say that we have to find a way to rise to this challenge, to recognize that it is bigger than all of us, to recognize the dangers of allowing this thing to spiral, because if it spirals and someone gets hurt, then there will be no trains running. The impacts and the divisions between Canadians would be enormous.

I have been talking with some of the young indigenous people. I have to say that when they were marching in Ottawa, a number of people waved and showed support. That is what Canada is.

Canada is a country that is coming to terms with a colonial past that we never understood we had, but we have it. It is there. It is real. It is being lived in the lives of young generations of first nations children.

I saw a sign that one young person posted. It said, “First you tried to take us off our land, and now you are trying to take our children.” The Conservatives might think that is apples and oranges, but we have a $10-billion class action lawsuit being brought forward by the AFN. We have a government that has spent millions of dollars fighting the principle that there has been systemic and reckless discrimination, not historical but ongoing, against first nation children.

What is the most important relationship to first nations people? It is not with a pipeline, I can tell members that. It is with their children. They have never seen a commitment to address the fact that the destruction of their children, families and identities is ongoing.

When members on the Conservative side talk about the rule of law, that does not really pass the nod test in indigenous communities that know that when they sign agreements with the federal government, those agreements last just as long as the government wants them to last and then they walk away.

I saw that in Barrière Lake. There was a beautiful agreement to rebuild that community. The government walked away. I saw that in Kashechewan, where they had a plan to move them off. There was a signed agreement, and the government walked away from that. We had commitments to end the fights on child welfare, and the government walked away from that.

For the government to be nice, saying that it is going to listen and saying, “Take down the barricades and blockades,” is not going to cut it with indigenous people who have been lied to time and time again.

There is an urgency right now to try to de-escalate the situation. I am not saying anything less about the Wet'suwet'en and what is happening in the Wet'suwet'en territories and the discussion that needs to happen. We need to get this thing addressed.

However, we need to get the trains moving and to give Canadians certainty that we are apprised of the seriousness. That is going to come from leadership from the Prime Minister.

We also need to send a message to the indigenous youth and their allies who are marching across Canada that the issue of reconciliation is not dead. We just have not done a very good job on it. The issue of environmental crisis is real. The planet is burning, and Canada has failed.

When we address that, then I think we will be moving to a better place because there is nothing better, there is nothing more hopeful in this country than this young generation of indigenous people who will transform this nation for the better.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

We need to say we have a much bigger crisis. We need to start to untangle this and find a way to de-escalate, because—

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, as always, I am extremely honoured to stand in this House, the people's House, to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay on unceded Algonquin territory. Let us just reflect on that a moment. This is not just some nice thing we Canadians now say, when we do the land recognition. It is a statement of understanding that there are outstanding historical rights and land issues running across our country, and we need to acknowledge that. That is one of the reasons we are here today.

We are at an unprecedented moment in Canada's history, a moment when we can all come together and rise up to meet the challenge, or we can give in to our lazier base motives of political machismo and spite. I believe we are now dealing with a crisis that has moved from Wet'suwet'en territory out across Canada, and it requires leadership. It requires us, as parliamentarians, to recognize it and be honest with each other. This is bigger than all of us, but if we do not rise to the task, the risks to our nation right now are very serious.

We can come together and try to untangle this extremely complex Gordian knot, or we can play to the usual base in this House of division. I find this opposition motion from the Conservatives to be very telling of their political tactics. This motion has us standing in this House today to “condemn the radical activists who are exploiting divisions within the Wet’suwet’en community”.

It is our job to recognize that there needs to be a conversation not only with the Wet'suwet'en people, but also with indigenous people across this country. It is not for us to say that if they support a gas line, we will support them, and have Parliament come down in the middle of a very tense motion.

I point to the other motion the Conservatives brought forward. They were willing to use this national crisis to try to bring down the government and save the opposition leader's political career, who has been rejected by his own party. That is not leadership. That is more of the same kind of joker chaos politics that we do not need at this time.

This past weekend, I joined thousands of young people in the streets of Ottawa. People were also marching in Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver. It was extremely inspiring to see these young people, young indigenous leadership, stepping forward at the front of the march. I spoke to many of them and asked where they were from. They were from places such as Kanesatake, Kitigan Zibi, Fort Albany and Barrière Lake.

I think of the Leader of the Opposition who told these young indigenous people to check their privilege. I know he was not serious. I know he was just doing it as a dig, a slur, a spite, but that is not leadership. The message it is sending to this young generation is that this Parliament is in opposition to their hopes and dreams, and that is not Canada.

I think of the young woman I met from Fort Albany, and the Conservatives would tell her to check her privilege. Her grandparents were at Federal Court this week for the St. Anne's residential school crisis, where some of the worst crimes in history committed against children happened. Her grandparents in Fort Albany are still fighting, and Conservatives would tell this young woman to check her privilege.

I think of Kanesatake and the Mohawk people who have been there since long before us and who will be there long after us, and the Leader of the Opposition is telling the woman I met to check her privilege. Of course he has a $900,000 slush fund for treats and perks. That is quite privileged.

I also think of the amazing young woman I met who spoke up from Barriere Lake, Quebec. Barriere Lake's territory has been stripped of forestry and has been flooded out time and time again by massive hydro dams, and the people have received nothing. Her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have fought just to stay on that land. To tell her to check her privilege is not on.

Then there is Kitigan Zibi. There are so many young people from Kitigan Zibi. Kitigan Zibi is not very far from Ottawa. It is an incredible Algonquin community right beside Maniwaki. Maniwaki has clean drinking water, but Kitigan Zibi does not. The Conservatives tell the world that they can drive a bitumen pipeline through the Rocky Mountains, but we cannot get clean water to a community that close to Ottawa. This is why people are marching.

What we need to do here today is to not play games with these kinds of motions that the Conservatives are using to divide the Wet'suwet'en people.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest and I want to say that I am very pleased that the Minister of Indigenous Services went to meet with the Mohawks. That is a very good step.

What I am not hearing, though, is the sense of urgency. That is one thing I agree on with the Conservatives. We really need to address this situation before it starts to spiral. This is crucial. I am very pleased that the minister is ready to meet with them, but we need the Prime Minister at the table. We need to put a clear offer on the table in order to show negotiations in good faith and de-escalate things so they do not spiral.

Will the Prime Minister be ready to meet with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs and then set up a process within those communities, perhaps with a mediator like Senator Murray Sinclair, so that we can offer a good-faith solution to the indigenous protesters across the country to show that the government is serious about addressing their concerns?

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, it seems to me a little rich that the Conservatives are demanding that police go in with injunctions when we are in such a tense situation.

I was on railway blockades. I negotiated with the OPP and the RCMP. I can tell the member that the OPP in Ontario knew very well what happened at Ipperwash, and they remember Mike Harris saying to get those damned “Indians out of the park”.

Dudley George died and a police officer's career was ruined. I spoke to members of the OPP after that, and they said that they will never be dictated to by politicians who tell them to go in and enforce an injunction with native people, but that they will sit down and negotiate.

We need to de-escalate this, my friend. The member's call to send in the police to enforce this will create chaos across the country. I am asking him to think of Dudley George.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, what is happening on the ground is that the future leader of the Conservative Party, Peter MacKay, is boasting about vigilante action and having a pickup truck threaten indigenous people. We see the footage of the swearing, insults and degradation. It is the same kinds of comments we hear from the mob, who say the bums need to get a job.

Does my friend support Peter MacKay's call for vigilante action? If that is the case, this member is going to see a lot of trouble across this country from the actions and language his party is promoting.

[Privilege, February 18th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if I have had the opportunity to do so, but I would like to congratulate you on your excellent position as my neighbour and as Speaker of the House.

As we are talking about the relationship between first nation people, I rise on a question of privilege pursuant to Standing Order 48, to state that I believe my parliamentary privilege was violated by the Minister of Justice and his staff.

It is my belief that the minister and his staff misled the House on a fundamental issue, which is the legal cost of fighting indigenous children at the Human Rights Tribunal and in Federal Court. I consequently believe that, because they have provided this misinformation, the minister should be held in contempt of Parliament.

We have had a lot of talk this week about the importance of the rule of law. I find this issue especially pertinent when we are talking about the actions of the justice department and the Attorney General, who apparently believe they are above Parliament when it comes to their obligation to respond to Order Paper questions on fundamental questions of fact, not opinions on facts. If you will indulge me, Mr. Speaker, I will present the facts of this case as succinctly as possible.

On December 9, 2019, I gave notice pursuant to Standing Order 39 of a written question seeking information regarding the legal fees for the hours and the associated costs the government has incurred due to legal proceedings related to Human Rights Tribunal cases against first nation children between 2007 and 2019. The Department of Justice provided a written response to this question in late January 2020 stating, “Based upon the hours recorded, the total amount of legal costs incurred amounts to approximately $5,261,009.14, as of December 9, 2019.”

As a stand-alone figure, the idea that the federal government would have spent $5.2 million fighting the rights of the most vulnerable children in this country is shocking. However, it has come to my attention that these numbers are extremely misleading. I have brought this forward because evidence contrary to the justice official's came out last week when I was representing Canada in Washington, so this is my first opportunity to address this.

Ms. Cindy Blackstock, who has been involved in this case from the beginning, has tabled documents she has received through multiple ATIPs from the justice department about the costs incurred between 2007 and 2017. The number Ms. Blackstock has provided, through the justice department's own documents, is $9.4 million spent fighting indigenous children in court.

APTN has analyzed the numbers and has come up with a slightly more conservative figure of $8.3 million as of 2017, but that is still substantially higher than what the Minister of Justice stated the department has spent up until now. This does not include any of the costs incurred after 2017.

I will remind the Speaker that when the government was found guilty of reckless discrimination against first nation children in 2016, the Prime Minister made a solemn vow that he would respect the rulings of the Human Rights Tribunal. He said he would address this and would not fight this.

However, there have been nine non-compliance orders, as well as a battle in Federal Court attempting to quash the ruling and deny the rights of children who are in the broken child welfare system. It is clear the numbers we have up to 2017 from the Minister of Justice's office are higher than $8.3 million and higher than the false $5.2 million he provided through the Order Paper.

How can the House make sense of these contradictory numbers? We are not talking about opinions. The issue goes to the heart of the Prime Minister's promise on reconciliation to create a new relationship based on trust. It must also be based on the trust of parliamentarians, when they use tools like the Order Paper question to get factual responses so they can do their jobs.

This ongoing legal battle against first nation children has had a corrosive effect on the Prime Minister's brand and it would appear to me that it cannot be explained away as a matter of opinion attempting to downplay the numbers.

Page 111 of Erskine May: A treatise on the law, privileges, proceedings and the usage of Parliament explicitly states that misleading the House can be considered an issue of contempt. It states, “The Commons may treat the making of a deliberately misleading statement as a contempt.”

Similarly, page 82 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice quotes the United Kingdom Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege in listing various types of contempt, which includes “deliberately attempting to mislead the House or a committee (by way of statement, evidence or petition)”.

We know being wrong is not a matter of privilege, but misleading the House is. That is why various Speakers, your predecessors, have used the test laid out in page 85 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice. It states:

...the following elements have to be established when it is alleged that a Member is in contempt for deliberately misleading the House: one, it must be proven that the statement was misleading; two, it must be established that the Member making the statement knew at the time that the statement was incorrect; and three, that in making the statement, the Member intended to mislead the House.

I believe these tests can be met in this case.

First, if we review the criteria that I have just read, the statement given to me was misleading because there exists in the public domain, in the documents of the Minister of Justice, conflicting information regarding these documents. The minister only provided me with the costs of the hours recorded, but not with the associated legal fees.

Second, the minister knew that his statement was misleading since the ministry with which he is charged provided different information to Ms. Cindy Blackstock, yet his signature on the document was tabled in the House.

Third, the minister intended to mislead the House since he intentionally avoided answering parts of the question that would provide clarity, a point made clear by the fact that the minister omitted to mention all additional legal fees and only provided the cost of hours.

This is not about being wrong; this is about the fundamental question of the obligation of the government to speak truthfully in this chamber.

I note that previous Speakers have ruled that in the event of contradictory information, the matter can be brought to the House to be dealt with.

For example, the Speaker, on March 3, 2014, stated:

...the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Accordingly, in keeping with the precedent cited earlier in which Speaker Milliken indicated that the matter merited “...further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air”.

I believe that the same situation exists today and that the remedy should therefore be the same.

The fact that the Canadian government even spent a cent fighting the most vulnerable of its own citizens in court to deny them their indigenous rights and human rights is callous and shameful. However, the fact the government misled the House and provided incomplete or inaccurate information regarding the amount of money that it has wasted on such reprehensible actions is unacceptable. I asked the government to answer these fundamental questions. We need to know that the government will respond with true and accurate figures to an Order Paper question about how much money was spent at the Human Rights Tribunal.

That is in accordance with page 63 of Erskine May's Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, which states that “...it is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.”

Also, I am demanding that the Minister of Justice explain to this House and the Canadian public why the information that was provided in response to the Order Paper question differs so much from the information that was provided to Ms. Cindy Blackstock through multiple ATIP requests in his own department. The Canadian people have a right to know.

I will wrap up here. In conclusion, this matters because what we are dealing with are the lives of children. It mattered to Kanina Sue Turtle, Tammy Keeash, Tina Fontaine, Amy Owen, Courtney Scott, Devon Freeman, Chantell Fox, Jolynn Winter, Jenera Roundsky, Azraya Ackabee-Kokopenace, and all the other children who have been broken in this system that failed them. Parliament needs to know that these children were loved. We had an obligation to do better.

The Parliament of Canada called on the government and the justice minister on December 11, 2019, just after we learned the horrific details of the death of Devon Freeman, to end his legal battle against the children. He has ignored the rule of Parliament. He has ignored the obligations under the Order Paper question. I ask you to address this.