Randall Garrison

[Business of Supply, February 9th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, the only thing I can say to that is there is an internal contradiction in the argument that was made when the member said that Quebec's recognition as a nation and Quebec's rights are enshrined. They are in this country, and they are recognized by virtually everyone in this chamber. I am not sure how the reference to the need for a notwithstanding clause has anything to do with the rights that are already recognized and enshrined when it comes to Quebec.

[Business of Supply, February 9th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question because he raises the concern that I was getting at. If it becomes part of our political culture that we can use the notwithstanding clause willy-nilly and pre-emptively, there will be a temptation for certain political actors and political leaders to attempt to appeal to segments of the population by offering to use the notwithstanding clause to respond to their concerns about public policy. That is very dangerous, and I would not like to see us go down a road where we consider suspending rights to be a normal part of the Canadian political regime.

[Business of Supply, February 9th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to talk about the broader topic, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and I will eventually, after a bit of a diversion, come back to the motion before us.

It is important to note that at the time of its adoption, the Canadian Charter of Rights was controversial. At the time of the patriation of the Constitution, we were not used to the idea of a written charter, something that comes from a civil law tradition, because our institutions had been founded on the British system, which revered the supremacy of Parliament. A compromise was reached when the Constitution was patriated, and the national Parliament and provincial parliaments agreed to limit themselves with a written Constitution and written Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

I would argue that, at the time, this was exercising parliamentary sovereignty and a voluntary restriction. We recognized that we had to agree on the basic rules by which we work together and that those should be difficult to change, so we have a written Constitution. We also recognized that even in a British system, a written Charter of Rights and Freedoms would help preserve the rights and freedoms of Canadians.

As an aside, my own enthusiasm for the charter at the time was tempered by what was often called the omission of sexual orientation from a section of the charter, as if it was somehow unknown or forgotten at the time. That is not the case, and I knew this well. I was very fresh out of university and working here at the House of Commons for Ed Broadbent at the time. When the Constitution Act was before the House in committee, New Democrat MP Svend Robinson moved to add sexual orientation to section 15 as a protected ground against discrimination.

This was at committee stage. There was a debate and vote on whether sexual orientation should be one of those protected rights. The proposal to add sexual orientation was defeated 22 to two, with only Svend Robinson and Lorne Nystrom of the NDP voting in favour. It took a series of court cases following the adoption of the charter to affirm that sexual orientation was a prohibited ground for discrimination analogous to the enumerated grounds listed in the Constitution.

Members will see in a moment where I am going with this. I am going to tie it to the notwithstanding clause.

Members of LGBTQ+ community continued to fight for recognition of equality rights. There was a series of court cases starting in 1992 with Haig and Birch v. Canadian Armed Forces, continuing in 1995 with Egan v. Canada and culminating in 1998 with the case of Vriend v. Alberta. All of these cases served to make sure it was understood that just because a right like citizenship or the prevention of discrimination against sexual orientation was not listed, it was a still a protected ground.

In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada noted the omission of sexual orientation from the Alberta Human Rights Act. We should remember that this is the Supreme Court deciding on Alberta legislation. What the court found was that it violated the equal protection of the law guaranteed in the charter not to list sexual orientation. In other words, the Supreme Court of Canada at the time ordered Alberta legislation to respect the Constitution and the charter by protecting against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Immediately after, there were calls in Alberta for the use of the notwithstanding clause. It was immediate. Why did the Alberta government not proceed? It was because there was a public outcry against the use of the notwithstanding clause. It was very strong at that time because the Alberta government, just months before, had brought forward a bill to use the notwithstanding clause. In that case, there had been a decision against the government, which had proceeded with forced sterilization of those with intellectual disabilities. They had won a large settlement against the Alberta government, so the Alberta government brought in a bill that proposed to use the notwithstanding clause to limit compensation for those who had been forcibly sterilized.

There was a huge public outcry about the attempted use of the notwithstanding clause to prohibit payments that had justly been won in court for this discriminatory treatment. That precedent, just a few months before, led to the same kind of debate about the use of the notwithstanding clause to get around the Supreme Court decision that forced the Alberta Human Rights Act to include sexual orientation.

This is the way those who adopted the Constitution and charter thought the notwithstanding clause would work in response to court decisions or legislative decisions that were controversial. It was not pre-emptive but in response to developments within the legal system. Ultimately, who would decide whether the use was legitimate? It was the Supreme Court of Canada, because we have a country that operates on the rule of law.

We see a motion that says, in quite simplistic terms, that it is up to the provinces if they want to use the notwithstanding clause or not, and that is clearly not true legally. It is also not true in a political sense. It is not clearly just up to the provinces. It is up to Canadians to decide what is appropriate action and to judge their governments.

I will go back to Alberta. Two years after a series of court decisions recognized the right to same-sex marriage, Alberta added to its Marriage Act a notwithstanding clause to allow it to say that marriage is only between a man and a woman. In a reference case in the Supreme Court in 2004, the Supreme Court found that, on jurisdictional grounds, Alberta could not use the notwithstanding clause. In other words, it said that because marriage is within federal jurisdiction, Alberta cannot use the notwithstanding clause to get around it. It is exclusively a power of the federal government to make this decision.

Once again, we have an example where it is not up to a province to decide if it wants to use a notwithstanding clause. There were jurisdictional reasons for why the Supreme Court found it could not do so.

After this very long detour through issues that are very important to me personally and to a large number of Canadians, we come back to where we are with the motion before us, which says, “it is solely up to Quebec and the provinces to decide on the use of the notwithstanding clause.” Clearly, the arguments I made today show that is not the case. It is not something that a government can decide to do.

We have the Constitution and we have the rule of law. However, most importantly, the three examples in Alberta illustrate how those who designed the charter and the Constitution thought it would operate. Public opinion plays an enormous role in deciding what governments can and cannot do when it comes to the use of the notwithstanding clause. That is why I think the pre-emptive use is problematic.

This is before we have had any public debate, before we have had any court decisions and before we have done anything on an issue, so for a province, and it is the provinces that have tried to do this, to insert a notwithstanding clause pre-empts all those things that should take place. It presumes outcomes. It indicates an attitude where rather than trying to find a solution to the problem in front of them, it becomes simpler to pre-empt the debate altogether and say we will not talk about this and will just go ahead and do whatever we want to do. Unfortunately, I think the Bloc motion reinforces the kind of idea that this would be appropriate in Canada in the democracy we have.

If we look at when the notwithstanding clause has actually been used, it has been most frequently used for expedience when collective bargaining fails. The 1986 use of the notwithstanding clause by the Conservative Devine government of Saskatchewan was to implement back-to-work legislation after it failed to reach an agreement with public employees.

Most recently, we had the 2022 use of the notwithstanding clause by the Ford government, which pre-emptively made it illegal for education workers to strike and imposed a contract on them. I would argue there is a right to collective bargaining, and pre-empting that right through the notwithstanding clause meant the government simply did not want to sit down and bargain fairly with the workers.

Between 1990 and 2018, there were only four uses of the notwithstanding clause, and many of us believed it was fading away. The fact that we are debating it today, as if it is an unlimited power of the provinces, is disturbing. As I have said, we already know it is limited. It is limited in time, as it can only be used for five years. It does not apply to certain sections of the Constitution. It is limited by Supreme Court decisions on the question of jurisdiction.

Hopefully, the use of the notwithstanding clause will always be limited by public opinion in this country and by the part of our political culture and our political values that say we are very proud of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and suspending any part of those rights and freedoms should not be taken lightly.

[Business of Supply, February 7th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I do not think we can emphasize enough that going down the path of nuclear power was wrong in the beginning and is extremely wrong now given the costs. That is without even talking about the production of nuclear waste that would last forever.

We need to pay attention to the corporate interests that are promoting the idea of nuclear power as a solution to climate change. It is no solution. It is expensive, and it is dangerous.

[Business of Supply, February 7th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I think there is a point on which we can agree: Whenever we see innovative attempts to move forward in the attack on climate change, like many of those we have seen in Quebec, the federal government needs to get on board and support them as quickly as it can.

[Business of Supply, February 7th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, my most charitable comment is that it is looking in the rear-view mirror to say that renewables are extremely expensive and unreliable. This does not take into account the real world of renewable energy in this day and age, where costs are dropping and have continued to drop substantially over the last 10 years.

We will see very soon that many economies around the world will be shifting completely to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, and Canada needs to get on that bandwagon.

[Business of Supply, February 7th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member gets to the real heart of the matter.

We can talk about what might happen in the future, but we know what we can do about this now. By being in the carbon market, we can provide the right signals in the economy. However, I am a bit of a skeptic about how fast that carbon market would bring about the changes we need. What I would like to see is large-scale investment right now in renewable energy projects, starting in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador, where the need to replace jobs right away for workers who face job losses as we go forward is most acute.

[Business of Supply, February 7th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak, once again, on the important topic of climate change. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, I think we have had seven motions on the carbon tax and not a single one that talks about the problem of climate change.

We know that even if we had stabilized climate change in 2015, the costs already would have taken $25 billion off of GDP growth in Canada. Therefore, the economic costs of not acting on climate change are quite large.

We can talk about economic costs all day long, but we also need to talk about other direct costs like fires and floods. We need to talk about health care costs, increased lung problems, asthma problems. We need to talk about the results of fires with respect to smoke, and drinking water quality, as toxins are released into the atmosphere and end up in our drinking water.

In all those things, we also need to talk about the actual losses suffered by families and individuals.

We had a huge heat dome in British Columbia and across western Canada in 2021. In the week from June 25 to July 1 of 2021, the B.C. coroner's office estimated that there were 619 heat-related deaths, 619 families losing loved ones as a result of an event, which the Columbia Climate School of Columbia University studied very carefully and laid squarely at the feet of climate change. It said that there were two factors that caused that heat dome. One was the disruption of the jet stream and the other was the warming of oceans and of the soil.

Instead of expecting something like a heat dome once every 100 or 200 years, the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University now says we need to expect those kinds of events once every 10 years.

During that week, the village of Lytton set a new record for a temperature in Canada, 49.6°C. The next day, after setting that record, a wildfire swept through the town, killing two people and destroying the entire town of Lytton. More than 200 homes were lost.

We can talk about large numbers in climate change, but when we actually look at what happens to individuals, to families and to communities and what will happen increasingly often as climate change proceeds, it seems misdirected to spend all our time talking about a carbon tax, misdirected for two very good reasons. One is, again, the fact that the larger impacts of climate change will cost far more than any climate-related carbon tax. I have not even talked about things like the drop in agricultural yields and the loss of fisheries that are coming up, all of these things we see on the horizon as a result of the climate change.

I forgot to say at the beginning, Madam Speaker. I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver East, so I apologize for that.

When we are talking about the Conservative motion today, the Conservatives continue to repeat and bring back their slogan, and I hesitate to repeat it myself, which has something to do with something tripling.

In fact, we know that nothing has actually tripled. In fact, we know that where families will face increasing costs directly through fires and heat-related costs, they will also face it in increased insurance premiums for their home insurance, as insurance companies attempt to recover their losses from these climate disasters.

In fact, if we look at the increase in the carbon tax, which is designed to reduce our emissions and has been proven as one of the most effective ways to do so, on April 1 of this year, the tax will increase from $50 per tonne to $65 per tonne, and I do not see any system of math where that is a tripling.

When we look at the increase of the tax on a litre of gas, it goes from 11¢ a litre to 14¢ a litre. Again, there is no tripling there. Also, that is way less than the inflated profits that the oil companies have been squeezing out of all of us during this climate crisis.

Focusing on the carbon tax seems misdirected at best, especially when over half the households in Canada are not affected by the carbon tax when it comes to things like home heating.

In British Columbia, we have a different scheme. Therefore, taking the carbon tax off home heating would nothing to relieve costs for British Columbians or Quebeckers, who also have a different scheme.

I will politely call this a sleight of hand with figures. We know right now that eight out of 10 households get more back on their rebates than they pay in carbon tax. The Conservatives like to cite a parliamentary budget office report, which talks about 2030 and about estimates of what might happen in seven to eight years from now. Again, speaking about tripling and using figures like those being used here is at best inaccurate.

What has the NDP said about things like home heating costs? At this time of inflation that is certainly a great concern. I remember that one of the times this motion came forward we asked the Conservatives to accept an amendment to their motion to support removing the GST off home heating for every household in Canada and they refused. They were so focused on the carbon tax that they refused a measure that would have helped every Canadian household meet both the costs, specifically of home heating, and the generalized squeeze that they were finding on their incomes and on their ability to make ends meet at the end of the month.

In his opening speech on this motion today, the Leader of the Opposition talked about nuclear power. I have heard some other members in the House, including some on the government side, talking about nuclear power as if it somehow provides some kind of solution to climate change. The member for Carleton said that it would be a good way to combat emissions. Let us take a look at that backward-looking, rear view of the world.

Nuclear power is far too expensive and far too slow to provide any solutions to our emissions crisis at this time. We need to reduce emissions right now. The average planning time to construct a new nuclear facility is over 10 years. That is from start to finish. We know when construction delays are factored in that the actual time for a new nuclear plant to come online around the world now is about 15 years. That is way too late to address the climate crisis we are in now. Let us say we ignore that and nuclear power were to go ahead. What would it cost to build nuclear power as opposed to renewables?

If we take the all-in costs right now, the best figures I could find for solar and wind power, including the cost of storage and the cost of the networks that must be built, is about $2,000 per kilowatt hour of production for renewables. That has dropped 69% over the last decade. Technology is improving and with economies of scale, the cost of renewables continue to drop each and every year.

Over the past decade, nuclear costs in contrast increased 25% in that same period. There is no indication that those costs will drop any time in the future. If we are talking about large-scale nuclear power projects, the costs are estimated at over $10,000 per kilowatt hour. That is five times the cost of renewables. That is five times as much energy one could produce for the same investment from renewables over nuclear, and of course it could be done now instead of in 10 to 15 years.

If we are talking about what some people like to talk about, the new technology of nuclear, which is small-scale nuclear reactors, the cost for small-scale reactors is estimated at $16,000 per kilowatt hour. That is 16% more than a large-scale project and eight times mores than renewables. Therefore, by any stretch of the imagination and by any measure we want to use, it is foolish to talk about nuclear energy as a solution to our climate crisis. Instead, we need to be talking about renewables.

The other part, which I have been interested in ever since I became a member of Parliament, is that these jobs in renewable energy use many of the same skills that workers have in the current energy industry in places like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. We need to focus on investment in those renewables and investment in creating those well family supporting jobs in renewable energy.

We cannot really ask ordinary working families to pay the cost of this transition with their jobs and with their houses. We have to ensure that those new jobs in renewable energy, those sustainable jobs, will be in place for workers as we head into a future where hopefully we can avoid the climate disaster that is on the horizon.

[Business of Supply, February 2nd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, as I have said a couple of times this morning in the debate here, I was pleased on Monday when the Conservatives put forward a very reasonable motion to have us work in the justice committee to find practical solutions that would contribute to community safety across the country. I am disappointed in the Conservatives today with a motion that seems designed to divide us in the House. Maybe the purpose of the motion today is to contribute to the Conservative line, which we hear every day, that everything is broken, and it is kind of embarrassing for them to have to admit that on this question we had actually reached agreement among all parties to work together to find solutions.

I do not believe the House is broken. I believe the justice committee can find real solutions to the two problems, and, let me say, there are two problems. One is the problem of serious violent offenders, and the other is the public disorder problems that result. Bail affects both of those, and we need to separate those two issues and look at how to solve each of those problems. I know the justice committee will do great work in doing so.

[Business of Supply, February 2nd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, that is an interesting question. It is outside the scope of the Conservative motion, but it is important. However, I would back up a step and ask us to look at why people fail to meet their bail conditions. Seriously, most of the time it is because people have mental health, addiction and poverty problems. I cited the example in my speech of someone with a mental health problem who needed their supervisor on bail to actually contact them regularly to get them to those meetings. It was not because they were evil or deliberately breaking bail conditions; it was because their grasp on reality was sufficiently disturbed that they simply could not get it together to make those meetings.

Oftentimes we also do things like say someone cannot go to an area of town. We would have a red zone, and part of one's bail conditions would be that one does not go there. It is unrealistic to ask somebody without a fixed address, when maybe all their friends and associates hang out on the streets in those areas, never to have contact with their support networks in their communities.

As such, before we ask about that, I think we need to ask whether those are reasonable conditions and why people are breaking those conditions.