Matthew Dubé

[National Security Act, 2017, May 28th, 2018]

moved:

Mlotion No. 1

That Bill C-59 be amended by deleting the short title.

Motion No. 2

That Bill C-59, in Clause 49.1, be amended:

(a) by replacing lines 13 to 15 on page 43 with the following:

“3 (1) The Governor in Council must issue written directions to all deputy heads prohibiting”

(b) by deleting line 25 on page 43 to line 2 on page 44.

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that the third motion, which pertained to one of my amendments, was not selected by the Chair, but I will still come back to the important points about it in a few moments. Just because it was not selected does not mean we cannot talk about it.

We are near the end of what has been a very long road with this government on an issue that dates back to even before the Liberals took office. Obviously, we must recognize that Bill C-59 is the result of the Liberals' approach. On one hand, during the last Parliament they supported Stephen Harper's draconian bill, Bill C-51, and on the other, they claimed that there were a lot of problems with the bill. The Liberals told people not to worry, however, because when they took office they would fix all of those problems. That was problematic for obvious reasons. If the bill was so flawed, posed so many problems with regard to national security matters, and violated Canadians' rights and freedoms, the Liberals should not have voted to pass it, and yet that is exactly what was happening with Bill C-51.

Let us fast-forward a little. After the Liberals were elected, they waited two years to introduce the legislation. They said that they had to hold public consultations. I will come back to that.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, used the power to disrupt threats bestowed upon it by Bill C-51. CSIS confirmed that in committee.

While we waited those two years for the government to consult, even though the election promise had been to consult on a specific piece of legislation, this was open consultation, or so it would seem. However the problem was, and many experts decried this, the fact that the government's green paper seemed to indicate, through some of the notions that were put forward, that some of these aspects were already a foregone conclusion. There was a definite bent more toward the side of intelligence gathering and law enforcement, and certainly a lack of substantive points being made in favour of the other side of that, which was protecting Canadians' rights and privacy.

Too often the Liberals, in the committee in particular, like to put the word “balance” forward. As we heard from representatives of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, when they presented at committee, balance implies that something is being taken away from one side or the other to achieve said balance. For us, the question of rights and liberties, and certainly the protection of Canadians' privacy, is not something that can almost be a victim of that type of compromise required to achieve said balance.

The other aspect that was not included in the public consultations, but that eventually became a central topic in our committee study, is the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE.

CSE, as members will know, is under the purview of the Minister of National Defence and its mandate is given to it by the National Defence Act. However, despite promises to no longer come forward with omnibus legislation, the Liberals have taken something that is the purview of the Minister of National Defence, something that the national defence committee has the institutional memory to study, all due respect to me and my colleagues on the public safety committee, and put it into this legislation.

That ended up taking up inordinate amounts, and rightly so, of time at the committee. These new powers being given to CSE and the huge change being made to CSE's mandate took up a lot of space and led to the most questions, not just from members but also from some of the experts who were there. Quite frankly, as far as we are concerned, many of those questions still remain without answers.

For example, there is the issue of CSE's cyber defence capabilities, as well as its offensive and active capabilities. The experts asked many questions on that subject. I introduced an amendment in committee to eliminate these powers, but it was not intended to compromise the safety of Canadians or our cybersecurity. We still kept CSE's defensive powers and capabilities in place. However, we had the right to ask questions, as I did with the senior CSE officials, though I did not get satisfactory answers, especially about what all this means for our country's military future.

CSE is governed by the National Defence Act, but it is a civilian agency, not a military one. However, Bill C-59, and now the federal budget and the legislation that the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness says will be tabled this fall, is opening the door to capability sharing between CSE and Canadian Forces to improve our cyber capabilities in a military context or even in war zones.

I posed questions to the chief of the CSE and other officials who were present throughout different stages of the study. I said that there was some debate in the context of international law as to what sovereignty meant in this digital age. An act of war is when one infringes on someone's sovereignty, but is a server part of one's sovereignty? What is the role that data is playing in this? Certainly, colleagues who work on the trade file had similar concerns that they raised.

I asked these questions in the context of information-sharing capabilities with Canadian Forces. All I was able to get as an answer was that this stuff was already being done and it was better that it be codified in the law with all the protections, oversight, and review. Pardon me for being glib, but that all comes with that. However, it is not enough. If a foreign state actor, as the bill describes, engages in some kind of activity, we are talking about the Minister of National Defence having the capability to interfere with intellectual property and to be engaged in an active way.

In this era, when the federal budget is talking about more and more capability sharing between police and intelligence services, which let us not forget is what CSE is, ultimately, as it is not any kind of offensive entity but rather deals with foreign intelligence, and then to involve the Canadian Armed Forces, we are going down a slippery slope. This is not an issue I raise. It was one that witnesses raised time and again throughout this study.

Part of the reason why I tabled amendments, which were unfortunately voted down by the Liberals at committee, was to remove these elements, not because we disagreed, although they certainly are concerning, but because they required proper study. They should not have been part of omnibus legislation. They had nothing to do with the previous Bill C-51. Nor were they part of the public consultations that both the minister did and the committee did.

That is important. I know the answer I will get is that all the issues relate to national security. That is not enough. We need to be able to examine these issues more thoroughly, and that is certainly not the feeling we got.

Lets continue to look at part three of the bill that has to do with CSE. One of my amendments was unfortunately deemed inadmissible by the Chair, because it was too similar to another amendment I had proposed and that my colleague, the leader of the Green Party, had also proposed. The motion was almost word for word what the experts had suggested. It had to do with publicly available information. We will come back to this concept.

The concept, as it currently exists, is important because it gives CSIS and CSE the power to collect publicly available information. With respect to CSE, we were told over and over again that its mandate does not concern Canadians, since the legislation explicitly prohibits it from targeting Canadians. We must be careful, though, and we have to read part three of the bill, subclause 23 and 24, and the next few subclauses.

Subclause 23 indicates that, despite the ban on targeting Canadians, the centre can collect publicly available information for study and research purposes. In short, it lists a number of things to advance its mandate. Even collecting information inadvertently is allowed. This is very problematic.

We tried to do a few things to fix that. The first was to change the definition of “publicly available information”. That is because when I asked representatives of the CSE if the information that Cambridge Analytica legally but immorally stole from Canadians and others throughout the world through Facebook would be part of publicly available information under the definition provided in this legislation, I got a one-word answer, which is rare in these parts. It was “yes”.

What does my amendment propose to do? The Liberals said not to worry, that they would deal with it. They put in the words “a reasonable expectation of privacy”. That is good. That was part of my amendment as well, as was it part of the amendment brought by the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. However, there is a whole slew of information missing from that. Allow me to read it to the House, since unfortunately it was deemed inadmissible and voted down by Liberals at committee.

It states that it would also include, along with information where Canadians have a reasonable expectation of privacy, “information that is published or broadcast only to a selected audience or information that is subscribed to or purchased illegally”, in other words, the prohibition on information purchased illegally. That is the problem with these amendments sometimes when one is reading them without the rest of the text that follows. Why is that important? It is important because despite the assurances that we got, there are a lot of questions about this. These are questions and concerns that some of the foremost experts in the field all have as well.

I also proposed an amendment for a catch-and-release principle, for information acquired incidentally on Canadians by the CSE. If it truly does not need the information captured incidentally, I understand it. That happens sometimes when one is going to study the information infrastructure in Canada. Therefore, we had a reasonable compromise, which was that if it happens, the centre has a responsibility to get rid of it. That was another amendment that was voted down by the Liberals on the committee.

I could speak at length about the CSE aspects, but I have only 20 minutes for my speech. It just goes to show how complex and worrisome the new concepts are and how we are far from having enough time to address them today. I would even say that we had very little time in committee as well. I have been in Parliament for seven years, and for the first time since becoming an MP, even though I can be quite verbose, my mike was constantly cut off and not through any fault of the chair, but because we simply did not have enough time to get into the details. I am not blaming the committee chair, who does excellent work on this study. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time for this conversation.

I want to come back to something more specific that affects more than just CSIS. I am talking about one of my amendments that were deemed admissible. Amendments that go beyond the scope of a bill can be proposed when that bill is referred to committee before second reading, as this one was, and the Liberals took advantage of that.

The Liberals used that opportunity to essentially present a new bill into the legislation dealing with the question of information obtained under use of torture, which bafflingly the Conservatives voted against. However, we do not have time to get into that today.

I voted in favour of it, for two reasons, but it does not go far enough, and we are going to get to that. The first reason is because the fact that it was even on the table was an acknowledgement that the status quo is not good enough, that the ministerial directives right now are not good enough, and that having these concepts more explicitly enshrined in law is always a good thing. Even though some of these symbolic statements in legislation sometimes seem to be only that, symbolic, they guide the decisions made and the advice given when these agencies seek legal opinions and so forth. On that front, it is a good thing. The other reason I supported it was because it is better than nothing. However, the language that remains is that the Governor in Council “may” issue directives to deputy heads. At the end of the day, we remain in the same situation we were in before. These were all recorded votes, so Canadians can check them.

Let me say for the record that I offered more explicit amendments to nearly every section of the bill that dealt with one of these agencies, putting in an explicit prohibition on using information that may have been obtained under the use of torture. Every single Liberal and Conservative on the committee voted against them. That is absolutely shameful.

Here is the motion that is before us today: that “The Governor in Council must issue written directions to all deputy heads...” At the very least, even though we are still dealing with ministerial directives, that obliges the government of the day to issue the directions, even though we already know that the directives themselves have loopholes. Even if the current directives, I will acknowledge, are stronger than the ones in the previous government, there are still holes in them, and those holes need to be addressed.

It is sad to see that my amendments, which would have at least done something to prohibit the use of that type of information, were defeated through the committee process.

Speaking of my amendments, I want to mention one thing I forgot at the beginning of my speech, since I think the Canadians watching us will find it interesting. The government said that it was open to suggestions from the opposition. I suggested 120 amendments, and just four of them were accepted by the Liberals. Three were accepted on the condition that I use the Liberals' wording, and the other was accepted because it was just a preamble. Not a single one of the Conservatives' 25 or 29 amendments was accepted. Not a single one of the Green Party's 55 amendments was accepted either.

The Liberals proposed amendments. Anyone can look at them, they are public. The Liberals put forward one amendment and decided to withdraw the others because they had an inferior one to replace them. I therefore proposed the Liberals' amendments myself, and they voted against their own amendments. That speaks volumes about the process.

I have just three minutes left, and I have only spoken about one part of the bill. I just spent 20 minutes giving a speech on the flaws of a single part of a bill that has 10 parts. That tells you everything you need to know about the flaws in this bill, not to mention the fact that CSIS retains its power to disrupt and to detain without any right to counsel, as was the case with the former Bill C-51.

Without mentioning that apart from changing the word “sharing” to “disclosure”, even though the word “disclosure” was there, what was qualified by groups like the B.C. Liberties Association, among others, as a cosmetic change at best to the information sharing regime remains in place. It was one of the biggest criticisms we had, and a reason for voting against Bill C-51 in the previous Parliament.

We will get to that through a future point of order, but hopefully we can vote on different elements of the bill. There are two parts that are good, review and oversight. Despite the fact that we tried to make changes to the review body to make it more accountable to Parliament and less to the executive, it was rejected. With the real-time oversight of the intelligence commissioner, we tried to make that a full-time position. I was not able to propose those changes, as they would require royal prerogative, which I, as an opposition member, do not have. Perhaps I can enter a final plea, although at report stage it is probably too late for that.

It is all too clear that, on the one hand, the Liberals did not want the Conservatives to criticize them for standing up for the rights and freedoms of Canadians and, on the other hand, they wanted to try to protect their progressive image in light of our legitimate criticisms that they have failed in their duty to protect the rights and freedoms of Canadians. Despite all the time we were able to dedicate to the study, despite the public consultations, questions from experts, criticisms from members, and a grandiose announcement that the Liberals were going to do things differently in committee, still, all of our amendments were rejected. The same system will remain in place and not enough improvements are being made in terms of what the Conservatives proposed.

In conclusion, it is true that we are entering a brave new world. We certainly know that in this digital age. I acknowledge that the threats are evolving and we need to address them. There is no doubt about that. However, one thing is for sure: right now, the ability of these agencies to act is outpacing the protections that Canadians have for their rights and freedoms, and their privacy.

That, for me and my party, is completely unacceptable, because at the end of the day, if we truly want to defeat these threats and what they stand for, if we truly want to stand on the other side of that terror and on the right side of history, it means standing up for Canadians' rights and freedoms. This bill just would not do that, and we will continue to oppose it. It is absolutely unfortunate, because we heard that better is always possible, but it does not seem to be with this legislation.

[Committees of the House, May 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I would love to debate the other bill. However, at the same time, the member for Calgary Nose Hill has moved a motion, and that is her right. If the member thinks she does not have the right to do that, then we have a serious problem here.

The Liberals waited until we were close to the election to table bills for election reform. They waited two years to table their Bill C-51 reforms. At the end of the day, they control the agenda of the House. If they want to whine and complain about it and not contribute, that is their problem.

[Committees of the House, May 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I sincerely thank my colleague for her kind words. I really appreciate it.

The reason I am so comfortable standing up in this place is because we are talking about what we hear, understand, and experience in our riding offices and in our work as members of Parliament. I would say that this makes it a bit easier.

What she said about employment insurance stood out to me. We are reminded that we can always do better when it comes to issues like immigration, employment insurance, the CRA, or any other department, file, or any aspect of the federal government with which Canadians interact. I am obviously eager to debate the next bill on the Order Paper. As the only MP to propose amendments at report stage, I look forward to presenting them. At the same time, there are changes to the schedule. There are opportunities to debate, and we must take advantage of them. That is what I am doing, because we do not often get opportunities to talk about the need to improve the system.

I would like to think that a government that keeps saying “better is always possible” would take full advantage of any opportunity to talk about what it can do better. We have heard about what it has done, and that is all well and good, but I want to hear about what it will do better. The government can blow its own horn and spout all kinds of numbers, but ultimately, all MPs, and I would even go so far as to say all Liberal MPs, know perfectly well that when we go back to our riding offices, things are just as difficult as ever, no thanks to the federal government and certain departments.

There is a huge amount of work to do, and I hope that, instead of slinging arrows on procedural matters, they will take this opportunity to actually address it. They could even cite some of the cases in Liberal ridings, talk about what is working and what is not working so well. There is never any harm in talking about that. Anyone who truly believes in the notion that better is always possible has to talk about what is not working so well in order to make things better.

[Committees of the House, May 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comment.

What he says is very true because many people work on these files, such as members of our team, community organizations, and many people in our riding, both in MPs' offices and in the community. One only has to work on a high-profile immigration case or a difficult deportation case to see how quickly party lines disappear. Our colleagues come to us and say that they saw what happened with someone in our riding, that they know how difficult the situation is, and they offer their support. This shows that, in the end, even though we may disagree about how to reach a solution, we want the same thing. We want to make the process as painless as possible, if I can put it that way. In my opinion, that is the goal of this report.

Once again, like my colleague, I would like to speak on behalf of the people who work with me. I can say that in reading such a report, I see all the problems we experience every day. It is high time that we solved this, and we hope to have unanimous support for the recommendations of this report and today's motion.

[Committees of the House, May 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, this afternoon we were going to be debating Bill C-59, and I am the only member in this place who has report stage amendments for the bill. Therefore, I would have been the first speaker on that bill.

Despite that, I am still very pleased to have raised the points I did in my speech. The fact is that Bill C-59 is going to be before the House this afternoon. Essentially the Liberals have tried to escape the fact that they supported Stephen Harper's draconian security bill, the former Bill C-51, and, as usual, were trying to have it both ways, having their cake and eating it too, that there were problems with the bill, but they would support it and fix it after an election.

What happened after that? We waited two years after an election campaign. The Liberals promised to fix those egregious measures. They ignored the fact that in the meantime CSIS was still using the powers given to it through Bill C-51. After that, the Liberals tabled the bill in the dying days of the spring sitting, in June 2017, and did not bring it up for debate until the fall. Then when we finally got the debate on it, we had shortened committee hearings, nowhere near enough time to deal with omnibus legislation.

I respect my colleague and I certainly respect the fact that there can be an upheaval to Parliament's schedule. I would like to be making my speech and going back to my office, or doing whatever else, but this is an important issue. I do not want to hear that somehow Bill C-59 is so urgent, because the Liberals have certainly waited a long time to do anything about it.

[Committees of the House, May 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about the ninth report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. I am going to talk about what we liked in the report and how we need to do more. I may pour some cold water on the praise that the government has been heaping on itself in this file.

Let us take a moment to seriously consider the reality and the challenges we see every day on the ground as MPs, when we are trying to help people hoping to become citizens, obtain legal status, or change their legal status. I am talking about people who want to come live here in Canada for a variety of reasons, all of them equally valid.

I think we need to get out of the Ottawa bubble a little and really consider the repercussions this has on the work we are trying to do, which is client service, the service provided to individuals by the department. I use the word “client” with apologies to my colleague from Hochelaga, because I share her aversion to the use of that word to describe these people, these human beings, who come to Canada and who quite often live in uncertainty and may not understand how to proceed with all the different applications they need to complete.

First, I would like to come back to the point I raised in my question for the member for Calgary Nose Hill, who moved the motion. One of the recommendations was to implement an online portal where both clients, meaning applicants for permanent residence, for example, and authorized representatives, who could be an MP, an MP's assistant, a lawyer, or any other person who might be involved in this type of file, could track the status of the application. That is extremely important.

As I said in the question I asked my colleague, I think it is unacceptable and appalling even that in this digital age, when I can get minute-by-minute updates on the pizza I just ordered, it takes days, even as a federal MP, to get any information on the status of an individual's application.

These applications can determine whether the applicants can start looking for a job with a work permit, move forward on a difficult personal situation, reunite with their family living in Canada or whether someone can come and visit them, whether they can attend their son or daughter's wedding, or in more tragic cases, whether they can be present for a dying family member's final days. These are the questions being asked by people applying for visitor visas for specific reasons.

That is completely unacceptable. People may think that whether or not we know the status of the file will not change the outcome, but that is not at all the case. It makes a difference to our work and the decisions that we must make to determine the next steps to be taken. Will we write to the minister? Will we approach the minister in the House? Will we go public? Will we ask a question in question period? Which tools in the MP toolbox will I use to deliver on a file and provide any help I can to the individual? These decisions are influenced by this type of information, which is not duly available as readily as we would like.

We would also like to see the duration of work permits increase from six months to one year. At first glance, this might be something that people will question. However, I have a perfect example to illustrate my point.

As you know, I have been helping a citizen from my riding for several years. I refer to her as a citizen even though she has not yet received her Canadian citizenship. Her name is Sophie Thewys and her case was highly publicized. She came to Canada after marrying a Quebecker, a Canadian. She decided to make a life here. She arrived with her son and started a family with her spouse, Nicolas Faubert. What happened then was tragic. On Christmas eve, her husband died in a car accident. Even though her permanent residence application had already been approved, the approval was withdrawn because she had not yet signed the papers granting her this status.

Now, over a year and half later, we are still trying to get her that status for humanitarian reasons. Even though this has been going on for years, and even though there were delays due to administrative errors that were IRCC's fault, not hers, she has to once again provide the same information, answer the same questions, and pay for police reports out of her own pocket to prove that she does not have a criminal record. This is a nightmare that is preventing a friend, a human being, a citizen, a resident of my riding, from grieving her loss and living her life as normally as possible under tragic circumstances.

Why is this relevant? When I started talking about this case in public with Sophie's permission, and when she pleaded with the government and the minister to explain this senseless situation, some of the headlines twisted the story a little. They said she was in danger of being deported. That was not true because she does have legal status here in Canada. She has a work permit, as does her son. Even so, we are caught up in all this stupid red tape—pardon the expression, I would not want to cross the line and use unparliamentary language. I have been trying, so far in vain, to convince the minister that this kind of case is exactly why discretionary authority exists. That permit will enable her to keep doing what she is doing, to live in the community, and to work, because she does have a job.

My intention is not to disclose all the details of her personal life. She talks about it and gave me permission to do the same. This work permit allows her to continue living with her son while awaiting the response to her application for permanent residence, which is taking a long time. It has already been approved. It would allow her to grieve properly. I have spent a lot of time on Sophie's case and we will continue to do everything we can for her, but unfortunately, with all due respect to her, she is not the only one going through this type of problem. As members of Parliament, we have many people who come to see us every day with this type of problem.

This brings me to the next recommendation, which seems appropriate to me. It would have us follow the Australian example by providing detailed explanations when applications are denied. That is very important. It is easy for an official to know which box has been checked off or not. That is part of their daily work. I say that respectfully. I do not mean to attack people who have to follow orders and deal with resources that make their work more challenging. However, someone who comes here from abroad, uproots their life to flee persecution and violence, or to flee abject poverty in order to live a more prosperous life in Canada, deserves to know more than just which box has been checked off.

We can do everything in our power as MPs, but in spite of our best efforts, we ultimately need some help from the public service, by which I mean the government. This is especially true for MPs' offices, which are flooded with requests of this kind in heavily populated ridings or ridings that are home to many new Canadians from cultural communities, people who came to live their lives in Canada in order to be with their families, for instance. God knows our assistants also deserve plenty of credit for the work they do on these files. When we travel to and from Ottawa, these people work extremely hard to support people.

Ultimately, more detailed explanations would help not only applicants, but also the MPs and other stakeholders assisting them. That is extremely important, because it will help us figure out how to proceed and how to hopefully resolve cases as quickly as possible. Some MPs get more work in this area than others, but at the end of the day, all MPs know how hard it is to deal with these systems.

We recognize all the work that needs to be done to improve the service that is being provided. It is important, because there are all kinds of factors that make life hard for a newcomer to secure a visitor visa, to visit or reunite with their family, and to become a citizen or permanent resident. There may have been extremely difficult circumstances driving them to come here.

There are many excellent people working in the community or in law to defend the rights of newcomers. We also know there are others who try to take advantage of them, and so we try to give them good advice. That is why we need more information from the government, as well as better-structured, better-funded systems. A change like that would go some way to eliminating this scourge, because we would have official sources we could rely on for this type of information. We would know that we could quickly get accurate information about a given file.

In closing, I would like to say that I am very proud of the work that was done by the committee. I am particularly proud of the supplementary report tabled by the member for Vancouver East, who just said that we like the recommendations that have been made, but that there is still a lot of work to be done.

The member for Winnipeg North said that we are trying to use obstructionist tactics because the report was tabled over a year ago. Regardless of when the report was tabled, nothing has been done about the difficulties we are facing or the recommendations that were made. There is clearly still an enormous amount of work to be done.

I am very pleased to join in this debate and talk about my experience as a member of Parliament, which I am sure is similar to that of many of my colleagues in the House. It is high time that we modernized our systems and created the tools needed to allow MPs, community stakeholders, and immigration lawyers to do their jobs. Ultimately, we need to ensure that the most important people in all of this, those who came to Canada to have a better life, whatever the reason, can benefit from a system that provides them with the information they need, supports them, and is easy to navigate. We would all be better off for it.

[Committees of the House, May 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech.

As far as report and the recommendations go, there are some positives there. As members, we are aware of most of them. For example, as she said in her speech, there is the fact that the government has to process this type of case. Unfortunately, limitations in terms of client service, if I can call it that, can make it very difficult and time-consuming to help people. One of the more interesting recommendations I spotted in the report is the one about creating a web portal so that people applying for this service, or their authorized representatives, and, in many cases, MPs, can access updates.

What does the member think of that recommendation? When I work on a case and I call my assistants to ask for an update, I have to wait days before they call me back. I am a federal MP who is trying to represent people and advance cases that are, in some cases, very complex and difficult and take a heavy emotional and mental toll. I am sure people here know what I mean.

I would like my colleague to comment on that and her experience in her riding.

[Criminal Code, May 24th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

As the member for Victoria indicated in his speech, we oppose the bill simply because it is far too flawed. Yes, it does contain some measures that have been lacking for a long time, but it also fails to include an extremely important measure, the review of mandatory minimum sentences, even though that was included in the minister's mandate letter. I would like to hear what my colleague has to say about that because the previous government is the one that established those minimum sentences.

It has been proven that mandatory minimum sentences do not reduce the crime rate in our communities. On the contrary, taking away the discretionary power of judges does nothing to keep the public safe. Republican legislators in the United States came to the same conclusion, even though they, like the previous government, were strong supporters of this policy.

Does the member agree that the minister should deal with this important issue, which is part of her mandate, once and for all?

[Natural Resources, May 24th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, that is a Liberal’s word: an election promise in 2015 and maybe we will get there in 10 years. More than two-thirds of Canadians want these oil and gas subsidies abolished. The Liberals solemnly promised to do just , as we have heard many times in this place. However, there is no plan to do that. They talk about something perhaps 10 years from now. If only they get re-elected a couple of times, maybe they will manage to get there. It is even worse, considering that they now want to compensate this same industry by giving money to Kinder Morgan.

What is their plan to finally end subsidies?

[Public Safety, May 9th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, New Brunswick is currently grappling with the worst flooding seen in recent years. Water levels are starting to go down, but the situation remains urgent, and normalcy is still far off.

Many roads are still closed, and residents are still waiting to find out when they can go home. We know the damage will be significant, and a lot of cleanup and decontamination will be required.

What is the government going to do to help the province and flood victims get back on their feet quickly?