Ed Fast

[Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, 2023, October 23rd, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to this implementation bill for the modernization of the Ukraine free trade agreement.

I always welcome opportunities to talk about trade. It is one of my passions, which is why I was somewhat disappointed by the disparaging remarks made by my colleague from Winnipeg North regarding the previous Conservative government's record on trade, especially Stephen Harper's focus on trade as the linchpin of Canada's economic strategy.

During the Harper years, the government set an unprecedented pace for negotiating trade agreements. When the Conservative government was first elected back in 2006, Canada had trade agreements with five countries: the United States, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Israel. By the time we were finished some nine years later, we had free trade agreements with 47 additional countries, an astounding number. That included the Canada-Europe free trade agreement. It included the TPP, which morphed, of course, into the CPTPP. It also included South Korea, which was a very difficult negotiation but was successfully concluded.

One of the agreements that former prime minister Stephen Harper really wanted to get done was between Canada and Ukraine. Even back in 2010, Ukraine was facing difficult challenges. It had a very weak economy and was struggling in trying to deal with Russia. The Prime Minister at the time, Stephen Harper, said the government was going to negotiate a trade agreement with Ukraine that would be unique in that the outcome would be asymmetrical. What that meant is that the benefits flowing each way were not necessarily going to be equal or balanced, at least at the beginning. The phasing in of market access and the elimination of tariff barriers would be done on a differentiated basis so that the outcome was not a quid pro quo in the perfect sense of the term. The Conservatives did that because we wanted to give Ukraine a leg up and help Ukraine re-establish itself as economically viable and strong.

I should indicate that I will be splitting my time with the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.

When the former Conservative government negotiated the trade agreement, the negotiations started in 2010 and were concluded in 2015. We left office in 2015. These agreements sometimes take a number of years to come into force, so the agreement came into force in 2017 and has served Ukraine well. Our trade with that country has increased. It was not completely unexpected that when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, trade flows declined. In fact, the current government and Ukraine stopped negotiating for a while because of the invasion by Russia into Ukraine.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and made sense out of the fact that Ukraine still needed to move forward economically and put in place the economic structures that would allow it to be successful. Negotiations were then recommenced in 2022, and here we are, a year later, in a position to pass the implementing legislation.

The purpose of modernizing this free trade agreement is that the free trade environment around the world, the playing field, is evolving rapidly. Some things are happening that are not necessarily good. For example, the world is becoming more protectionist. We are putting up more and more tariff and non-tariff barriers.

The United States, under Donald Trump, turned inward. In fact, members may recall that it was former president Donald Trump who pulled the U.S. out of the TPP negotiations. Why? I do not know. He was running for office. I suppose he saw it as politically beneficial.

The whole premise for the TPP was to take advantage of what is called comparative advantage. Every country has its own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to manufacturing goods and delivering services. If we can take the strengths of each country and cobble them together into a coherent trade strategy, we can ensure that the outcome for partner countries is optimal.

Unfortunately, the United States has pulled out, and since that time, it has really turned inward. It is not negotiating free trade agreements. When we go to the World Trade Organization, we notice that large countries, such as Brazil, China, South Africa and India, often block consensus on trade liberalization.

This causes us to reconsider how we engage with the world and open up new opportunities for Canadian companies to do business abroad and expand exports. That is why this agreement with Ukraine, which was negotiated under the former Conservative government led by Stephen Harper, is now being modernized. Many of these factors that were not in play back when we first negotiated this agreement now call for us to update the agreement and modernize it.

For example, there are 11 new chapters included in this agreement. There is a chapter on cross-border trade in services. There is a chapter on investment, which is very important. There is a chapter on temporary entry for business purposes, to facilitate the travel of business people back and forth between our countries. Financial services are covered, as is telecommunications. There is a chapter on small and medium-sized enterprises.

There is also a chapter on digital trade, because digital trade has evolved so quickly that it has left a lot of our trade agreements behind. One of the reasons that our free trade agreement with the United States was updated is that we had no chapter on digital services. People are doing business online now. Amazon has become an obscenely profitable company. Why? It is because of online purchasing, which is digital trade. There is a separate chapter on that.

There is a new chapter on how labour and workers will be treated, and the high standards that both countries want to set. There is also a chapter on the environment.

The bottom line is this: We as Canadians need to step up and stand in the gap for Ukraine. Canada has a large Ukrainian diaspora that expects us to partner with Ukraine in its time of need. That is what this agreement does. That is what the original trade agreement did.

In my home city of Abbotsford, many Ukrainians have fled their home country and made their home, or at least their temporary home, in Abbotsford. We now have something called the Ukrainian village, which is reinforcing why it is so important for all of us to work together with our Ukrainian diaspora and with the people of Ukraine to put in place a trade agreement and structure under which the Ukrainian economy can be lifted back up. Both of our countries can benefit from that.

[Justice, October 18th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, today, this House will vote on whether to protect the mentally ill against assisted suicide, but yesterday the justice minister falsely claimed that euthanizing vulnerable Canadians was good public policy and the only way to comply with Canadian law. Meanwhile, we are hearing more and more reports of Canadians crying out for help and being offered assisted suicide instead. Is this the sorry state of our mental health system? Millions of Canadians oppose the government's fascination with assisted death.

Will the government now bring a full stop to this madness?

[Justice, October 17th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, once again, we hear reports of Canadians crying out for help with their mental health, but being offered assisted death instead.

The government refused to listen to mental health experts, to veterans, to disabled people and to indigenous Canadians. It did not listen to the family whose mother begged for help, but instead was euthanized before her kids could even say goodbye.

Canadians overwhelmingly oppose this overreach on assisted suicide. Tomorrow, we can end this madness by passing Bill C-314.

Will the government give Liberal MPs a free vote? This is for the whip, yes or no?

[Criminal Code, October 5th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I would ask for a recorded division.

[Criminal Code, October 5th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, medical assistance in dying will soon be expanded to include those with mental illness, including depression. My bill, Bill C-314, would reverse this terrible decision. My bill is very narrow and would not repeal the other provisions of Canada's medical assistance in dying laws.

There is no national consensus on expanding MAID to include mental disorders, none. The most recent Angus Reid poll found that a very small number of Canadians actually favour expanding assisted suicide to the mentally ill, somewhere around 28%.

The mental health community has raised significant concerns. A recent letter to government from the heads of seven Canadian psychiatry schools implored decision-makers to hold off on expanding assisted suicide to the mentally ill. Similarly, the Canadian Psychiatric Association does not support the expansion of MAID due to the many ethical and clinical concerns that have not been resolved. They argue that mental illness is often highly treatable and that patients should be provided with the treatment they need to manage their symptoms and lead fulfilling lives.

Stakeholders have deplored the lack of social and economic supports for persons with mental illness and how this can lead people to consider MAID. They have pointed to the fact that the federal government has not fulfilled its promise to deliver dedicated mental health and palliative care funding to the provinces, leaving Canadians without access to the support that would lead them to choose life rather than death.

Many others have joined the chorus. They note that the issues of suicidal ideation, irremediability and competency have not been resolved, ensuring that Canadians will needlessly die because we have rushed ahead with expanding MAID.

At greatest risk are those suffering from depression, veterans suffering from PTSD, the opioid addicted on our streets, our indigenous communities and those seeking to escape a life of poverty. The government has even signalled its openness to allowing children to access assisted suicide, presumably without their parents' consent.

Last year, in my home town of Abbotsford, Donna Duncan was swiftly approved for assisted suicide after failing to receive proper treatment for chronic mental health issues. Her assisted death happened so quickly and so totally blindsided her daughters, Alicia and Christie, that they referred the case to the RCMP. Is this the dystopian world we are leaving behind?

Has anyone consulted with our first nations? Meaghan Walker-Williams of the Cowichan Tribe recently wrote in the National Post:

As a Sixties Scoop survivor, my lifelong personal journey back to my community of Cowichan has also been marked by the painful consequences of policies that didn’t respect or understand Indigenous cultures. Another policy, blind to my culture, may soon join them: assisted suicide for mental illness.

She concludes by saying, “it's crucial that the narrative remains firmly rooted in upholding the sanctity of life—a cornerstone of Coast Salish teachings.”

I note that the government originally excluded the mentally ill from its MAID regime and went to great lengths to explain why that was necessary. It was only after the unelected Senate included the mentally ill in Bill C-7 that the government suddenly enthusiastically embraced the idea.

The question is this: Should Canadians be able to trust their government to act in a way that values the life of every Canadian, or do we give up on the most vulnerable among us? Someday, all of us will have to give an account.

A famous world leader by the name of Moses once challenged his own people with a choice and a promise: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live”. I want my descendants to live, to prosper, to thrive, and I want the same for our mentally ill, our Indigenous peoples and indeed all Canadians. It is time to end this experiment. With so much uncertainty, surely we should err on the side of life, not death.

I respectfully ask members to support Bill C-314.

[Criminal Code, September 27th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to engage in this debate on Bill C-295, and I want to commend the member for Vancouver Centre for bringing forward this bill. I am not sure we will be supporting it, and I will explain why in a moment, but she has brought forward a bill that addresses what is perhaps one of the most existential challenges facing not only Canada but western developed societies, which is the aging of our population.

A huge demographic challenge facing our country of course is the aging of our population. There are more and more Canadians who are becoming seniors. There are more and more Canadians who are moving out of the workforce, which is creating significant workforce shortages, and we are experiencing those today. At the same time, these seniors are requiring more and more care, which of course imposes a burden on taxpayers.

I would not for a moment suggest we should not be providing for the seniors who built our country. We owe it to them to do that.

However, the COVID pandemic, the first pandemic of its kind in over 100 years, left virtually every government around the world unprepared to meet that challenge. Here in Canada, that challenge manifested itself, among other things, by creating significant shortages of competent workforce members within our hospitals to address the increasing numbers of patients coming in suffering from the COVID virus. This became an acute problem for hospitals across our country.

There was not a province or territory that was not impacted by the fact that our hospitals could not provide the care needed. Beyond that, our long-term care facilities suddenly found themselves faced with this incredible challenge of having vulnerable seniors they were in charge of who had now contracted the COVID virus and trying to put into place protocols that were going to protect those vulnerable residents of those homes.

This bill seeks to address that by criminalizing the failure to provide the necessary care in those homes. More specifically, this enactment, Bill C-295, would amend the Criminal Code to create an offence for long-term care facilities, their owners and their managers who fail to provide the necessities of life to residents of their facilities.

I think all of us can agree that is a worthy undertaking to make sure our long-term care facilities have the kinds of services and protective protocols that would protect the residents of those facilities. The problem is we have significant labour shortages in our country. Until we have actually addressed those labour challenges, it would be imprudent to impose on these facilities criminal sanctions that effectively mean these homes could not provide the kind of care the Criminal Code would require but that our labour challenges cannot address adequately.

My challenge with this legislation is we are trying to do two things. We are trying to provide those facilities with the labour force they need to adequately protect residents and patients, but at the same time we are trying to criminalize the activities of these facilities when in fact they are in no position to comply with the law.

I would raise one other point. The proponent of this bill, the member for Vancouver Centre, has said that this is all about protecting the most vulnerable within our society. I commend her for standing up and defending the rights and the welfare of our seniors, the ones who find themselves in extremely vulnerable positions.

However, there are other seniors and other Canadians who are also in vulnerable positions who call out for protection and those are our mentally ill, the mentally disordered in our society, who are now finding themselves caught under Canada's medical assistance in dying regime, Canada's assisted suicide regime, which is being extended by this government to the mentally disordered within our society, including those suffering from depression.

I do not know how we square that, on the one hand, advocating for the protection and welfare of seniors in our homes, but, at the same time, saying that we are going to also advocate for assisted suicide to be extended and expanded to include the mentally ill.

There is something wrong with that picture. It troubles me deeply that we have found ourselves in this place where competing ideologies are taking place right here in the House of Commons.

I earlier asked the proponent of this bill if she would support Bill C-314, which seeks to extract and remove the mentally ill from Canada's MAID regime. She hummed and she hawed and she explained this way and that way.

At the end, all we could conclude was that, no, she was not prepared to protect the mentally ill against medically assisted dying but, at the same time, would be advocating for the seniors in our homes and the residents of our long-term care homes who find themselves vulnerable and could see their lives and their health impaired by another pandemic.

We can see that I am quite frustrated to be placed in the position of having to judge the member for Vancouver Centre's bill based on her inability to understand that there has to be consistency when we bring forward legislation.

When we promote an ideology that is supposed to protect the most vulnerable in our society, that does not mean we can pick and choose between different vulnerable groups. We need to address their needs in a wholesome way, in a holistic way, and we have to be consistent in how we apply our ideology.

Unfortunately, that is not taking place here. Quite frankly, I lament that our country is moving down this road, where some of our most vulnerable are going to find themselves at great risk because of the life and death policies that this government is adopting, which have not been properly thought out.

I am going to ask the member for Vancouver Centre to reconsider her position on Bill C-314, as I will reconsider my position on her bill, Bill C-295. We both have objectives to protect and defend the rights of the vulnerable.

I call for one thing: consistency. All those who are vulnerable in our society are worthy of our protection.

[Criminal Code, September 27th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for her care and concern for the most vulnerable adults in our society.

There is another bill coming through the House very shortly, Bill C-314, which is about medical assistance in dying and protecting the mentally ill against the scope and expansion of medical assistance in dying. I was wondering, given the fact that the member has concern for the vulnerable adults in our society, if we could expect her to also support that bill?

[Medical Assistance in Dying, September 25th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, next year, the government will expose the most vulnerable Canadians to medical assistance in dying. Assisted suicide will be available to those who suffer from mental illness, including depression. This is profoundly wrong and unprecedented.

There is no consensus in the mental health community that MAID can be safely and ethically administered to the mentally ill. Issues of suicidality, irremediability and competency are far from being resolved. There is growing fear among persons with disabilities over the slippery slope our country finds itself on.

Who is next? The veteran suffering from PTSD? The poor who have no escape from poverty? The addicted on our streets with no hope of accessing timely treatment? That is why I have tabled Bill C-314, the mental health protection act. It repeals the portion of Canada's MAID laws that captures the mentally disordered, while preserving the remaining elements of the government's MAID regime.

I encourage my colleagues to vote in favour of Bill C-314.

[Immigration and Refugee Act, June 13th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Battle River—Crowfoot for that excellent summary of Bill S-8 and what it means to Canada, how it falls short and how the government falls short in meeting the challenges of the geopolitical landscape as it is playing out around the world. As the member mentioned, this is simply some amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The bill addresses the issue of sanctions. It would make sure that individuals who have been sanctioned and should not be admissible to Canada do not actually make it into Canada.

The bill is most specifically a response to what happened in Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was illegal and immoral. It has devastated a country that was simply looking for peace. As someone who has family roots that are at least in part vested in Ukraine, I, like so many Canadians, was exceedingly angry at what we saw Vladimir Putin do to a country that was struggling to develop the prosperity and security it deserves. Now, with the actions that Russia has taken in Ukraine, the whole global geopolitical and geosecurity environment has been turned on its head. The bill before us purports to tighten Canada's sanctions regime to ensure that no one implicated in illegal foreign acts of aggression and illegal foreign acts of war could enter Canada.

However, right off the bat, I have two comments to make. First, there is no indication right now that foreigners who are inadmissible to Canada are getting into Canada. Therefore, it appears that our current sanctions regime is working. I do understand efforts to be proactive and plug gaps that might exist. That is the first point that I will make. There is no indication that foreigners who are inadmissible to Canada are getting into Canada.

Second, it is troubling that this bill emanates not from the House, but from the Senate, which, as members know, is unelected. One would expect that the Liberal government, if it considered our national security and global security to be that important, would table that bill here in the House first and then let it go to the other place for further, sober second thought.

Since the bill intends to strengthen our ability to prevent persons who have been sanctioned from actually entering Canada, it does so first by establishing a distinct ground of inadmissibility based on those very sanctions. That is the first part of it. The second part of the bill proposes to expand the scope of inadmissibility to include not only sanctions that are imposed on a foreign country, but also sanctions that are imposed on a foreign entity or organization, or a foreign person, because we want to capture everybody who would be implicated in foreign acts of aggression.

Third, the bill would expand the scope of inadmissibility based on sanctions that are made in section 4 of SEMA, or the Special Economic Measures Act. Finally, the bill would amend the regulations to provide that the Minister of Public Safety would have the authority to issue a removal order on grounds of inadmissibility based on those very sanctions under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

That may all sound very complicated, but the bottom line is this: All this bill does is purport to plug existing gaps. I would suggest to the government, rather than being in reactive mode, why is it not proactive in addressing the challenges that Canada faces on the security front?

For example, why is the government not actively addressing the issue of foreign interference in our elections? Why is it not actively addressing the issue of intellectual property theft by the regime in Beijing? Why is it not addressing those individuals who were implicated in the acts of terrorism and intolerance in the country of Iran, who have now found a safe haven in our country and are seen walking the streets of our cities such as Toronto? Why will it not be proactive in addressing geopolitical security issues, rather than always responding in a reactive way and missing the boat?

We will be supporting this legislation, but it does not reflect a thoughtful, proactive approach to the very real challenges that face Canada today.

[Canadian Open, June 12th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, “Good pace. Are you serious? Oh my goodness! Glorious and free!” That was the call by PGA announcer Jim Nantz as Abbotsford’s Nick Taylor made history yesterday by becoming the first Canadian in 69 years to win the Canadian Open golf championship, and he did it in spectacular fashion.

First shooting a course record 63 on Saturday, Nick then survived four sudden-death playoff holes and drained a 72-foot eagle putt to win his third PGA tournament. He joins Mike Weir, Brooke Henderson, George Knudson and others in the pantheon of Canada’s great golfers.

Nick and his wife Andie call Abbotsford home. In fact, he is proud of having honed his golf skills at our own Ledgeview Golf Club.

Other notable Canadian players in this year’s Canadian Open were Corey Conners, Mike Weir and Abbotsford’s Adam Hadwin.

I thank Nick Taylor for inspiring us. Oh, Canada, glorious and free, indeed.