Craig Scott

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, October 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, “the world is calling”. Well, the world is being organized to call. We have to keep in mind what the dynamics of this are. This is an American-led coalition in which we ultimately will not have tactical control over our involvement.

Keep in mind that when my colleagues were visiting, Iraq and the Kurdish authorities asked for a completely different kind of involvement by Canada.

Nobody here has seen Iraq's formal invitation, and probably never will in terms of what the letter of invitation said. We have not seen the American one either, and may never. The whole question of that invitation having been put forward came only because the Americans have decided that the whole coalition has to be organized in this way.

The question then becomes: why should Canada be lining itself up to be the dog that is being wagged by the tail of another dog? That is almost the way it is.

I have already said that if you believe that air strikes are the particular thing that is necessary, then why do you think it is smart for either American or Canadian planes to be delivering the bombs? Why do you think that is a wise thing, given the history?

This is not some petty schoolyard idea that we have to do it because others are doing it, and otherwise we are not holding up our end. It is what makes sense—

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, October 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be part of this debate. I would like to start by saying that from my perspective the question is whether or not Canada's involvement in the way proposed by the government, and the terms it has proposed, is necessary. If, from a Canadian point of view, it is not absolutely necessary, is it wise? That includes the broader question of whether we can contribute in other ways that are smarter or more effective than what is being proposed by the government. That is the overall framework that I would like us to think about.

I would also like to start with a premise. The premise is that we are all on the same page about the barbaric nature of ISIS. It is important to remind everybody that there is a consensus in society, not just among Canadians and among the coalition, but also among Muslims and Muslim communities in this country.

It is important that we all hear the statement made by the Canadian Council of Imams on August 22. I would like to have this as a starting point for the consensus that we all know there is a problem. It stated:

The Canadian Council of Imams (CCI) today reiterates its past declarations condemning violent extremism.... With respect to...ISIS, we declare the following: ISIS has manifested some of the worst and barbaric human behaviour [...] They claim to establish a so-called “Islamic caliphate” but their abomination does exactly the opposite of what Islam calls upon believers to do, namely establish peace and justice and safeguard human rights. We categorically condemn the actions of this group and its monstrous crimes against humanity, absolutely and without equivocation.

Since their advent, ISIS mercenaries have caused nothing but destruction and corruption and have violated core Islamic teachings and principles such as the sanctity of life and the importance of treating others with dignity and respect. [...] we call upon all Canadian Muslims to denounce this deliberate perversion of the Muslim faith and to dissociate themselves totally from such a despicable ideology and dangerous people who intentionally use the name of Islam in their ongoing campaign of distortion and destruction. [...] Canadian Muslim communities...wholeheartedly understand and believe that it is a religious and a civic duty to promote and support peaceful coexistence and multiculturalism and to condemn bigotry, hate and discrimination against any group, here and everywhere: that is essential to being both Muslim and Canadian.

This starting point reminds us that we can all share this point of view, this horrible, almost primordial, reaction to the horrific nature of ISIS. However, it does not tell us whether or not a particular course of action makes sense, and it does not tell us whether behind the proposed course of action there is a workable strategy.

The question of strategy is important. We know that at some levels what is going on in northern Iraq, and also with ISIS in Syria, but especially in Iraq, is part of the blowback effect from the invasion in 2003 in Iraq. It is not a new conflict in that sense, but the next phase of something that was started in 2003. It is the combined effect of the incredibly wrong-minded invasion.

John Dower, who is probably the leading scholar in the world on what I would call defeat studies, how one moves from conflict to a peaceful reconstruction of a country, talks about the “strategic imbecility” of what went on in 2003. He talked about how the Americans went in with eyes wide shut, with no plan whatsoever. Despite all kinds of planning that was available, it was all ignored. Out of that emerged chaos, from which emerged an invigorated al Qaeda in Iraq, which eventually metastasized into a bunch of groups, including the current group.

As such, we have to ask what good it would do for westerners, especially led by the U.S., to get involved again in the same way, when there is no sign whatsoever of any overarching understanding of the complexity of the situation on the ground and what kind of planning would solve the problems there in the medium or the long term.

I also think it is important that we realize that air strikes have a particular cachet and a particular downside. However much they are part of warfare—I am not naive about that—in the age that we live in, we have come to understand how civilian casualties are part and parcel of air strikes as a method of war, even more so when we know that the fighters being struck embed themselves close to or within civilian populations.

This is in the context of us joining up with the Americans when they have just announced that the previously tightened rules on striking targets in the so-called war against terror have now been broadened again from a near certainty that civilians will not be harmed to the general laws of war, which, frankly, leave a lot of scope. This is at a time when commentators like Alan Dershowitz are calling on Obama to say the way in which Israel went about attacks in Gaza should become the norm for understanding how difficult it is to enforce a near certainty principle. He has actually said that Obama finally realizes how difficult it is.

Whether one thinks that Israel was engaging lawfully or not in Gaza, the reality is that civilians get in the way. Why I am emphasizing that? I am emphasizing that because of the reaction. The question is, what good is going to come from very cynically manipulated facts and images coming out of ISIS and partners about the killing of civilians on the ground? It has already begun.

As a colleague in my riding of Toronto—Danforth wrote to me,

ISIS... are not sitting out in the desert with a target painted around them. ... [T]hey are embedded in towns and cities, in buildings full of civilians. The possibility of massive civilian casualties perpetrated by the “good guys” is unjustifiable. And fuels—

—this is the point—

—further anger, an increased sense of the West v. Islam.

I was also written to by another member of my constituency, who said:

I am an Iraqi-born Canadian. My family left Iraq at the beginning of the Saddam era....

I am extremely alarmed and saddened by what is happening in Iraq. However, I don't think Canada should play a role in combat intervention. The Americans and British put Iraq in an environment that nurtured such extremist groups....

I would like to see Canada play a role but in more humanitarian and diplomatic ways. I would urge Canada in finding ways to stop groups/countries from financially supporting ISIL.

I will get to that, because if we focus on the reality, it is not just the Americans who opened up the current situation. Frankly, it is Saudi Arabia as well. It is the birthplace and the continuing nurturing source for Wahhabism of a particularly virulent kind, which easily metastasizes into exactly the kinds of groups that we see, fuelled by financing and by a government and intelligence agencies turning their eyes from the millions and millions of dollars in support coming out of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has 1,000 combat aircraft. What if we were to say that if air strikes must be part of immediately saving lives, why should they be western airplanes? Saudi Arabia has 1,000 combat aircraft. Saudi Arabia is the heart of the Sunni Islam that is causing what is going on in northern Iraq and Syria. Surely a Sunni-on-Sunni dimension to this would be far more beneficial than a west versus a fictionalized version of Islam, in the minds of these monsters.

The last thing I would like to say is that this is not the only crisis in the world. Canada has only so many resources and so much money. We know that massive help is needed in West Africa with respect to Ebola. Even the Americans are sending troops there because of that realization.

We know, at least from the NDP perspective, that we should be involved in peacekeeping and state rebuilding, if it ever existed, in the Central African Republic, especially given our experience in Africa and our French language capacities. Not everyone needs to pile onto the same crisis. We have about 60 partners in this crisis. What can Canada do where capacity is desperately needed in other parts of the world? That would be a question I would ask.

[Petitions, October 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is calling on the government to support the bill from my colleague from Nickel Belt, Bill C-356, an act respecting a national strategy for dementia.

[Petitions, October 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I stand with two petitions to present.

The first is a petition to stand up for Canadian democracy. Now that Bill C-23 has been passed, the petitioners ask for the government to bring forward genuine electoral reform to stop fraud and prevent money politics from distorting our elections.

There are hundreds of signatures on the petition.

[Petitions, October 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am tabling a petition from over 500 members of my riding of Toronto—Danforth, calling on Parliament to refrain from making any changes to the Seeds Act through Bill C-18.

I will leave it at that, even though I have many other petitions.

[Committees of the House, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to the ethics committee's report.

The bottom line is that this report, as we have heard in the speeches so far, clearly represents one of the more egregious, but unfortunately not uncommon, examples of a complete hijacking of the legislative process, in this case of the legislative committee process, by the executive.

There is absolutely no explanation for what happened in this committee and what has happened with this report other than that the Prime Minister's office and the government in general intervened not only to direct but to control what came out of that committee.

It is not at all surprising that the government's three-paragraph response to the majority report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics says simply, “The Government welcomes and supports the sixteen recommendations outlined in the Committee’s report and agrees with the intended improvements to the COIA”. Well, pas de miracle, it is not surprising. The committee majority clearly worked in lockstep with the government to produce these 16 recommendations.

When I say worked in lockstep, that is a generous categorization of what the committee members probably did. Given everything we know about the testimony that was heard and how well it was digested by the officials in the first part of the report, which was not at all reflected in the recommendations, it rather seems to me that these committee members from the government side, the Conservative Party members of the committee, either did not have minds of their own or were literally directed as to what to do and what to put in that report.

If we had a functioning parliamentary system, this committee would have done its work unimpeded by the executive branch. It would have issued its recommendations and then the government would have decided which recommendations it was comfortable with and which ones it was not. It would have had to have stepped up to the plate to say “this is what we are prepared to do”, rather than creating a complete and utter travesty of the fusion of the executive and the legislature by saying, “Oh, we like the 16 recommendations that came out from the committee; we accept them”. It is no surprise, because the books were cooked by the executive. This whole process was a waste of time for the witnesses and for the members of the committee who actually tried to make the committee work.

The dissenting report by my colleagues, led by the member for Timmins—James Bay, makes very clear how little listening there was on the part of the Conservative members of the committee, or as I have already described, the government sitting at the shoulders of or behind those members.

The ethics commissioner indicated in her own report of 2013-2014 in respect of Conflict of Interest Act that she suggested 75 different recommendations. On page 34 of her “2013-2014 Annual Report”, she said, “I was pleased to see in the Committee’s report that it agreed with a few of my own recommendations”. She is biting her tongue. “In Recommendation 6, the Committee suggests...” and she described it. “In Recommendation 14, the Committee suggests...” and then she described it.

Out of 16 recommendations, the ethics commissioner isolated two recommendations that had come from her 75 recommendations. Of the 16 recommendations the majority of the committee put forward in its report, 11 of the 16, as the NDP's dissenting report itemized, were not reflected in the evidence in terms of either written or oral testimony.

Let us look at recommendation number one, which has rightly caused such outrage, and should. It says, in the majority report:

That the definition of “public office holder” be changed to include:

Members of organizations that collectively bargain with the Government of Canada;

Frankly, this is an out-of-the-blue, gratuitous, ideological attack on the very idea of unionized civil servants, quite apart from what I am about to get to, which is the complete unworkability of this.

Contrast it with how the majority somehow manages to avoid those in a contractual relationship with the government who are not subject to collective bargaining agreements. Somehow they are not included in the regime. Certain kinds of civil servants are, and other kinds of folks who work for the federal government are not. It is a pure attack on unionization, and it is a bloody ridiculous one as well.

The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, in her own report, says at page 31:

...the Committee proposes a very broad amendment to the definition of “public office holder”. It recommends that all members of organizations that collectively bargain with the Government of Canada be included. The implementation of this recommendation would essentially bring all employees of the Public Service of Canada (some 260,000 public servants are members of the various public sector unions) under the Act as non-reporting public office holders. These employees are already covered by the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector, which sets out its own requirements for the disclosure and reporting of interests, and is administered within federal departments.

She basically says “Wow” in very diplomatic under-speak, but it is clear that she is concerned and it is clear that she cannot figure out why the government would do something so unjustifiable and brazen. On June 10, 2014, in the ethics committee, my colleague from Timmins—James Bay had the chance to question the commissioner, and basically asked about this very inclusion of, as she already told us, 260,000 additional people. He asked:

One of the recommendations that the government brought forward on the conflict of interest review was to put all civil servants under the public office holders' rules.

Have you examined how that would actually be enforced and who it would include?

Her answer:

Yes. I found that a very surprising recommendation. I certainly read the minority report, which suggested that there would be something like 260,000 additional people whom my office would have to administer. That obviously says to me that it wouldn't be the same office. I found that a very surprising recommendation.

No wonder; it came from nowhere other than the ideological mess that passes for the Prime Minister's Office.

Then my colleague asked:

Would you be able to operate if you had to keep tabs on an extra 260,000 people?

This goes to the workability. Her answer:

No, I think it would have to be a rule-making body. It would be a totally different system, and somebody else would be administering it. Two-hundred sixty-thousand is a lot of people.

Clearly the commissioner is an expert at understatement, but she has made very clear what a travesty this recommendation is.

At this point I would like to quickly touch on some of the many recommendations from her and from other witnesses that were not acted upon, as also noted in the NDP's dissenting report.

Nothing was done on the front of penalties, for example. The NDP recommended increasing the penalties on the finding of a contravention to include suspension for a specified period, a suspension of a member's right to vote for a specified period, imposition of a fine not exceeding $5,000, and reimbursement of the value of any gift, hospitality or benefit. None of these make an appearance in the recommendations.

It is very important, speaking now as the critic for democratic reform and parliamentary reform that we have also asked that the act be amended to include guidelines that can then be interpreted and acted upon by the commissioner on fundraising and dealing with lobbyists.

Ministers, Ministers of State and Parliamentary Secretaries—

I will now call them the ministry.

—should not seek to have departmental stakeholders included on fundraising or campaign teams or on the boards of electoral district associations....

[The ministry] should ensure that government facilities and equipment, including ministerial or departmental letterhead, are not used for or in connection with fundraising activities....

[The ministry] should not discuss departmental business at any fundraising event, and should refer any person who wishes to discuss departmental business to make an appointment with the [appropriate person].

Finally, it says that the ministry should ensure:

...that fundraising communications issued on their behalf do not suggest any connection between fundraising and official government business.

Indeed, the commissioner added her own suggestion before the committee on June 10. She said:

I have suggested in my five-year review document that the government consider making ministers and parliamentary secretaries not do any fundraising at all....

That certainly does not appear in the recommendations.

With that, I end my remarks, except to say that I would like to make a motion.

I move:

That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:

The First Report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics, presented to the House on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, and related to its statutory review of the Conflict of Interest Act, be not now concurred in but that it be referred back to the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics with instruction that it amend the same by removing recommendation number one and amending the other recommendations with a view to: (a) give the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner the power to administer financial and administrative penalties; (b) enshrine the Conflict of Interest Code into law; (c) allow members of the public to make complaints to the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner; and (d) make part-time or non-remunerated ministerial advisers subject to the ethics code.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have to honestly say that the proof is in the pudding. After the incident in which one of our colleagues answered in the most absurd and offensive way, the answers that later came in the same period and over the next day or two tended to be a little bit more on point. There was a sense from some of the parliamentary secretaries and ministers in the House that a boundary had been stepped over, and we have seen the beginnings of answers to the very questions that he refused to answer being given the next day.

The answers on this topic today from the Minister of Foreign Affairs were pretty direct and pretty clear, with whatever kinds of hedges and evasion that he might have felt that he needed to engage in.

I would say that when attention is drawn to a problem such as we experienced last week, there is enough good faith in the House that people adjust their behaviour. However, without a rule change and without the Speaker being empowered in the way that this rule would allow, I do not think that we could expect that behaviour to last longer than it has already.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I will give the member a straight answer. I actually do not know whether the movers of the motion have so consulted.

The fact is that this is something to do with all members in the House, and the opinion of one or two Speakers would not change what we consider to be a very small change, for the reasons that I gave in my speech. It is not as if this change would have a knock-on effect in the way that some changes to the Standing Orders would. It would simply include the answers in question period in the rules of relevance and non-repetition, as every other intervention in the House is except answers.

I honestly think that we are making too much of a deal of this proposal. On its own, it is not going to radically change question period. My colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills has made clear already the other kinds of problems that question period has, as did my colleague from York South—Weston.

I am not one to overstate what this would do on its own, but it is a start.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for St. John's South—Mount Pearl.

The motion today quite simply is to add a very brief amendment to Standing Order 11(2), which basically makes clear that answers in question period are included within the rule that interventions in the House must be subject to the rules of relevance and non-repetition.

In a system of responsible government within our Westminster system as well, the accountability of the executive branch—the ministry, the cabinet, including parliamentary secretaries—to the House is absolutely fundamental. It is primordial. That accountability extends from the House to Canadians at large. Accountability includes the right in question period to seek information and also explanations.

Question period was a Westminster parliamentary innovation. It is called “question time” in the U.K. still. It has no equivalent, frankly, in non-Westminster systems. We should be proud of it, and we should be constantly figuring out ways to improve it or fix it when it becomes broken over time.

When one has a Westminster system that essentially involves a form of fusion of the executive and the legislative branches on the government side, one particularly needs question period to emphasize the very separation of the ministry from the House.

This is all the more the case when executive domination, indeed I would say Prime Minister's Office and prime ministerial domination, of the legislature has deepened gradually since the days of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau enhancement of the powers of the PMO and has accelerated, nobody will contest, under the current Prime Minister. For example, committees have been turned into, frankly, appendages of the PMO. When it comes to questions beyond legislation, the question of accountability, our committees at the moment are certainly not occasions for holding the executive to account.

To compare us to the U.S. Congress, for example, cabinet and senior civil servants are regularly called to testify at length in the United States in hearings where hard-hitting probing often occurs, but not here.

We have all kinds of other problems about which I will not go into detail, but I will say it is ironic that the government House leader would, in the context of this debate about accountability and the role of question period unaccountability, move a motion that this question be now put, in a way that is deliberately intended, as we heard from a parliamentary secretary, to block any amendments at all, including amendments that were beginning to be suggested by members from the opposite bench during the early parts of the debate simply clarifying that the rules of relevance and non-repetition also apply to the question, which is already the case in practice as is clearly outlined in the relevant authorities and enforced.

I have no problems with that kind of amendment, but we have just been blocked from entertaining it. It will make it much less likely that the members on the other side would vote for it for that very reason. I hardly think that was a good faith intervention by the government House leader.

We have heard from the government benches throughout the debate today to be even-handed and apply the rules to questions as well, that somehow or other we are asking for something that is unbalanced.

First, I do not know how many times it has to be said, but relevance is already enforced when it comes to the questions. It may not be adequately enforced from the point of view of the current government members. Examples were just given by the parliamentary secretary, some of which I have some sympathy for. However, the fact is, we have a list in O'Brien and Bosc of some 15 different subcategories of relevance that the average speaker has to keep in mind, and that members on this side do keep in mind so that questions generally are not posed in a way that breaches those relevance rules. Yet on the other side, we have the idea that relevance is somehow completely alien to the spirit of question period when it comes to answers. I frankly find that hard to understand.

The second question is on repetition. We have had lots of complaints that there is a repetition of questions by different members in the House. We should keep in mind that often this is because no clear answer has been given. Often what also seems to be a repeated question is a slightly different take on the same question, and that often happens by way of a supplementary question, certainly from the way in which the Leader of the Opposition tries to conduct his questioning.

It is also important to note that in a bilingual country, there are questions repeated in a second language. That is something I will gladly and frankly say occurs on our side. We often do ask a very similar question in a second language so that Canadians of that other language can hear, directly, the same answer in their language. There are no excuses and no apologies to be made about that.

Right now, customary interpretation by not only the current Speaker but by successive Speakers has created a distinction between all the interventions in this House and one sub-category, that being answers in question period.

Questions themselves in question period, as well as speeches, questions and comments on speeches, answers to questions during debate, and committee debate are all interventions that are subject to the rules of relevance and non-repetition. However, answers in question period somehow are not, to the point that successive Speakers have come to assert what they see as a truism: question period is called “question period” for a reason, which is that it is not answer period.

Unintentionally, this truism has come to be referenced almost lightheartedly, and when it is not lightheartedly, it is certainly referenced ruefully when Speakers bring up this point, so much so that the problem of this disjuncture between questions and answers in question period has gotten lost even by Speakers themselves.

I think also that the reference to relevance and repetition in Standing Order 11(2) has been interpreted as not applying to answers in question period, but other rules that have no specific sphere of application in how they are articulated in the standing rules clearly apply. Sub judice, disorderly conduct, and all of these other rules about keeping the House in order are enforced in answers as well, and not just in questions. Somehow this one has dropped out of the picture, as compared to the other general rules.

Colleagues across the way, including the House leader, have raised the issue of questions being asked without advance notice as a reason to maintain the practice that precludes the Speaker from enforcing the rule of relevance. The idea seems to be that ministers or parliamentary secretaries, unlike in the U.K., are not given the chance to reflect and formulate a response.

Now, it is a valuable contribution to the debate to note the difference between us and the U.K., but frankly, this goes to the quality of the answers. What can be expected of the answers, especially to questions that take a minister or a parliamentary secretary by surprise, has absolutely nothing to do with the base, the threshold question of relevance, unless it is the case that the person has misunderstood the question as a result of not receiving it in advance, so the argument coming from the other side is truly a red herring.

That said, I would not be averse to discussion. I hear the parliamentary secretary now suggesting an all-party committee, just when we know we have not been able to make progress of any consequence on this review of the Standing Orders except for what we are calling low-hanging fruit. That is going to be a valuable cleaning up of the orders, I hope, but it will not go into this kind of detail.

Therefore, if we have in mind for the next year some kind of all-party process that will take question period seriously, bring it on. I am absolutely hoping that will transpire somehow, but it cannot happen in the procedures and house affairs committee, or PROC, because as the chair of PROC across the way will acknowledge right now, we have a docket of something like seven or eight bills or motions. Therefore, if this is going to have to happen, it has to happen differently.

There are many things we could do to enhance the question and accountability function, including, for example, having periodic sessions every two months in the relevant committee, to which the minister would be called in to answer questions. That could be a kind of hybrid that would borrow a bit from the congressional system.

Let me just say finally that I personally would be content if the rule that we are suggesting were adopted. The Speaker would interpret that to require a manifest transgression, such as repeated non-answers or answers that are clearly contemptuous of the questioner in question period. Just the fact of relevance would not be the issue; the issue would be whether it was so much of a transgression that the Speaker, in his or her good judgment and good faith judgment, had to intervene.

That is the way it would work in practice, and that is the way it should work.

[Petitions, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition in support of victims of crime. The petition is signed by about 120 members of my riding, Toronto—Danforth. The petitioners ask in particular for the government to create a meaningful country-wide system of public support for the loved ones of murder victims as well as for the victims of crimes who survive those crimes against them and to ensure adequate funding. This is in the name of Kempton Howard, who died in 2003.

I wish to also note the death by murder this weekend, in my riding, of Nahome Berhane, a leading member of the Eritrean community, who also died through public violence.