Government Response to Petitions
Date: 2023_04_24
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner: I would just note that, when the Liberal-NDP coalition was trying to shut me down on this, I was barely a minute into my speech. These members need to let me get to the point I am trying to make, instead of just trying to silence me, as the government is doing with its censorship bills. This is what we are dealing with here, being silenced. Instead of debating the budget, as we are supposed to be doing, the NDP put something forward called a concurrence motion. That is what we are debating right now. The concurrence motion is to deal with a very tricky bit of Liberal-NDP machinations, which is actually really harming people and delaying the help that Bill S-245 would provide. Instead of debating the budget, we are debating a concurrence motion on something that happened, and I want to break down what happened. Bill S-245 is an act to amend the Citizenship Act. It went through the Senate. It was introduced by Senator Yonah Martin to deal with a very narrow scope, dealing with something called "lost Canadians". It was very narrow in scope, and because it was so narrow in scope, it sailed through the Senate, on the understanding that it would stay narrow and it would go through the Senate. It came to the immigration committee. What ended up happening was that, first of all, before moving this in the immigration committee, the member for Vancouver East went and did a press conference, pre-positioning herself to do this. The Liberal-NDP coalition got together and did two things. It moved a motion to extend amendments to the bill by 30 days, which delayed action for people who would have been impacted by the bill, and then it also moved a motion to extend the scope of the amendments that would be debated well past what was in the bill itself. For those who are watching who may not understand what this does, it allows members, in a private member's bill, which is supposed to be very narrow in scope, to put forward any amendment they want. What that does, in effect, and the reason why I do not think we should have done that, is forces the bill to go back to the Senate yet again. This is going to delay justice for the people who we had non-partisan, all-party agreement to deal with. That motion itself, to do what the NDP-Liberal coalition wanted to do, passed in the citizenship committee with its support. Even though it passed, it introduced this concurrence motion in the House of Commons today, and it is doing what? It is eating up time to debate the deficit budget issue because it doesn't want to talk about it. If it is saying, oh no, nobody should talk about this and then we go back to the budget, we actually gave it an opportunity to go back to debate. My colleague from Calgary Shepard rose to move a motion about an hour ago to move on from the debate, yet it voted against that. That is the agenda here. The agenda here is to curtail debate on the budget while it is supporting the passage of Liberal censorship bills Bill C-11 and Bill C-18 . These are the types of tactics that we are going to see over and over and over again from this Liberal coalition because it does not want to stand up for what Canadians need, either in the budget or in Bill S-245 . When the Liberal and the NDP coalition decided that it was going to delay the passage of the bill through the committee and delay justice for people who were in that bill, who we all support justice for, and open up the scope of the bill, it forgot one thing. It forgot that, if it opened up the scope of the bill for its one issue, which the senator and the Senate did not want because they agreed to sail it through on a small amendment, it forgot that maybe other people would want to put forward amendments too, such as me and my colleague from Calgary Shepard . It then had the audacity and the gall to stand in this place during this debate, which it did not need, and which it put forward to waste time on debate on the budget because it does not want to talk about how much deficit spending money it puts forward, which has caused an inflationary crisis in Canada, all while it is putting forward censorship bills. Because it does not want that debate to happen, it puts this debate forward. Now it is saying that it is because the Conservatives want to put forward amendments to the Citizenship Act. Well, guess what? What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If the NDP-Liberal coalition, which is supporting censorship bills Bill C-11 and Bill C-18 to shut down conversations in the Canadian public, are using a concurrence motion to shut down debate in the House of Commons, we are absolutely right that Conservatives will be putting forward motions beyond the scope of the bill. It is as simple as that. If the NDP-Liberal coalition wants a statutory review of the Citizenship Act, then let us giddy-up and do it. I have a lot of great ideas, which I will definitely be bringing forward. This does nothing to help the people who could have been helped if the NDP had just let this go. The other thing I can show is why we should not be delaying this bill and why the scope of the amendment should not be put through. It is not just because it delays justice for people within this bill; it is also because the NDP is propping up a government that has refused to do this in its own government legislation. If the government had actually wanted to do anything else, it has had nearly eight years to put forward, through its own government legislation, what my colleague from the NDP wants to do. The NDP is actually in a coalition with the government. I do not know if the NDP wants to go to an election, but I know the Liberals do not. Considering what the polling numbers show today, I do not think there are a lot of people on the Liberal backbench who would want to go to an election today. The NDP could be using that coalition agreement to say that, within a piece of government legislation, we need to do this. However, they do not actually have the leverage they claim to have over the government, so what they are trying to do is sneak through committee what they cannot get the government to do in the House. To people who are watching and are impacted by this bill, I say that the Liberals delayed the passage of the bill because they did not understand what they were doing. That is brutal. It is terrible. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe they would not do what we all agreed to do in a non-partisan way, as the Senate did, which is to get Bill S-245 through. Today, we are debating the concurrence motion and the substance of the motion, and we are using House of Commons time that we could have used to debate the budget. The Liberals moved this concurrence motion even though the bill has already passed through the immigration committee. They actually ate up hours of critical, precious House debate time, which we could have used to talk about the budget. This is a path to ruin that the government, the Liberal-NDP coalition, put us on by inflationary, deficit spending in the budget bill. That is critical. People cannot eat. People in Vancouver, the member's home riding, are eating out of dumpsters because of the inflation crisis and the affordable housing crisis. Today, she moved a motion that would essentially cut off debate on the budget today, even though it has already passed through the House of Commons. If my colleague wants to open up the scope of the bill so that it is going to have to go back to the Senate anyway, through her actions, not mine or those of any of my Conservative colleagues, then we will be putting forward other amendments as well. One of the amendments I would like to put forward, given that we are now reviewing the citizenship bill, has to do with the fact that the Liberals said they were going to do away with the need to have in-person citizenship ceremonies. This is something that has received wide, cross-party condemnation. I have an opinion piece published in the Toronto Star on April 10. The title is "I'm horrified by the suggestion of cancelling in-person citizenship ceremonies". It goes through quotes from non-partisan people, including Adrienne Clarkson, a former governor general; a Syrian refugee; and others who are saying the government should not be doing away with the requirement for in-person citizenship ceremonies. I would like to amend the Citizenship Act to ensure that, rather than doing away with the ceremonies because the government cannot figure out how to get services to where people want them, the government would actually be required to make sure new Canadians have the right and the ability to go to an in-person ceremony, take the oath with fellow new Canadians and be welcomed into the Canadian family in such a glorious way, instead of doing what it is doing now. Members in this place have used up precious House time. I am speaking here because members of the Liberal-NDP coalition voted against a motion to end debate on this and move forward. They gave me an opportunity to speak. For once, instead of speaking on Bill C-11 or Bill C-18 , the censorship bill, I am, they are darn right, going to speak in this place. I am certainly also going to be putting forward amendments. I do not know if they have forgotten how this place works or have forgotten that each of us has our own individual rights to work within the process that they put forward. They stand up and say that one person can put forward an amendment that is completely out of scope, but they are going to use that to justify delaying justice for the people in the bill and use that to delay debate on the government's inflationary budget deficit crisis bill. Therefore, yes, I am going to put forward amendments that make sense for my constituents. My constituency is a diverse community in north central Calgary where the Citizenship Act matters. If the member for Vancouver East is going to use her Liberal-NDP coalition position to try to get the Liberal government to extend the scope of the bill and, in doing so, delay justice for people, while delaying debate on the budget, then yes, I am going to be putting forward amendments to amend the Citizenship Act. To the people and stakeholders watching this, this bill could have been through our committee already. It could have been sailing through the House. However, what is the Liberal-NDP coalition doing? Instead of the government putting forward its own legislation to address any additional issues, the NDP is proposing a motion to extend this by another 30 days, plus have a statutory review of the Citizenship Act. It is plus, plus, plus. They did not think through the process. I am sure that when they were talking to stakeholders, they did not talk to them and were not honest with them about what could or might happen if this path were undertaken. If I had been meeting with those stakeholders, I would have said that this is something we need to lobby the government for in different legislation, because the senator who put it forward in a private member's bill had agreement among her peers on a narrowly defined scope in the bill in order to get it through and get justice for people. If we do what the member for Vancouver East is suggesting, we would delay it for another 30 days. Then it would probably have to go back through the Senate. The Senate takes a lot of time to look at things. Then it would have to come back here again. That would be months and months of delay, when it could have been done maybe before June. Now we do not know when it is going to be done. That is why I opposed the approach in committee. Frankly, it is why I oppose using all this time in the House to continue a debate that the NDP-Liberal coalition settled at the immigration committee, an unwise course of action, only to vote against it. They just voted, an hour ago, against moving forward. Also, as we saw at the start of this debate, time after time my colleagues were getting interrupted by points of order, with members saying we should not be allowed to raise the issue of the budget. Absolutely we should be able to raise the issue of the budget, after the NDP-Liberal coalition voted against a Conservative motion that would allow us to move forward to debate the budget. However, here we are, and if members have given me the opportunity to speak by not moving on that, absolutely I am going to speak about it. Of course, the Liberal-NDP coalition does not want to talk about that inflationary budget, that big, expensive nothing burger that would cost Canadians more, that would lead to food inflation and that is not addressing the core issues facing this country, because it is an embarrassment. They do not want an election because they are all afraid of losing their seats. Canadians are on to them, just as I am on to them right now. I am tired of this. I am tired of these games. We did not need to have this debate in the House. This could have gone forward to the immigration committee. What we have done, in effect, is delay justice for the people in Bill S-245 , delay debate on the budget and, in doing so, delay justice for all Canadians, who are dumpster diving in Vancouver East to eat and who continue to not be able to afford places to live. This is a hard truth. It is an inconvenient truth for everybody in this place. However, it is time coalition members are confronted with it. There are consequences for the actions of the coalition and its backroom dealings. They lead us into places like this, where they make mistakes on parliamentary procedures and where they do not explain the implications of their actions to stakeholders who are advocating for change in this bill. Again, the government could have done this.