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Who Said What in the House of Commons
Liberal Party
Prime Minister Trudeau said that invoking the Emergencies Act is necessary to protect families and small businesses, jobs and the economy and that the situation could not be dealt with by existing laws. He said that the measures are time limited and targeted, reasonable and proportionate, and strengthen and support law enforcement agencies so they have more tools to restore order and protect critical infrastructure. The blockades are a threat to our economy and our relationship with trading partners. While some protesters came to Ottawa to protest the public health regulations, which is their right that we will protect in this free and democratic country, this is an illegal blockade not a peaceful protest.
His remarks were echoed by Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino and Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti. They emphasized that the actions of the government do not infringe on Canadians’ charter rights but provide law enforcement with tools that they previously lacked. Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair gave two examples of the need for the Emergencies Act, the first with regard to gathering and analyzing financial transactions for funding the blockades, the second to be able to compel tow truck operators to remove vehicles.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland focused on the damage to the economy and that international confidence in Canada as a place to invest and do business has been shaken. The costs to businesses large and small made it necessary for the government to take this action, she said. “(A)s we did during the NAFTA negotiations, our government will always do whatever it takes to protect our workers and the national interest. We stood up for Canada during the NAFTA negotiations, and now we are standing up for Canadians against these illegal blockades and occupations. We must and we will continue to do so,” Freeland said.
Conservative Party
Conservative Party interim leader Candice Bergen said that the government has not shown that the threshold set out in the Act, of a situation that “seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada” or that the situation could not effectively be deal with under any other law has been met. She blamed the Prime Minister for failing to take meaningful action to de-escalate the protests that started when he imposed a vaccine mandate on truckers and is acting to save his own political skin and that his response should have been to remove the mandates.
“Many of the people who are protesting and are upset are our neighbours. They are our constituents. They are Canadians. They want to be heard and given just a little respect by their Prime Minister, but he has decided that, because he disagrees with them and does not like their opinions, he will not hear them. At every turn the Prime Minister has stigmatized, wedged, divided and traumatized Canadians, and now, without even a single meeting with a trucker, without talking through one of their concerns, without apologizing for his insults, without listening to what people have to say and without using any other tool at his disposal, he has used this overreach, the Emergencies Act, and it is wrong,” Bergen said.
Various Conservative Members denounced the government for failing to act in early 2020 against the rail and port blockades in opposition to the state attacks on the Wet’suwet’en land defenders and foreign funding of environmental groups, saying that if the Emergencies Act was not required then it is not required now. They say what is needed now is to remove the mandates.
Speaking to the press on February 16, Bergen said “The first act that he does when he has a chance to do something — he doesn’t go through step one, two, three — he goes straight to 100 and invokes the Emergencies Act. I don’t think anything that we will see will change our mind, we will be opposing it.”
Bloc Québécois
Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said that “the management of the pandemic was undermined by the federal government’s obsession with taking over Quebec’s and the provinces’ powers, imposing conditions outside its jurisdiction, and even subjecting the pandemic to multicultural values.”
“Freedom requires striking a balance between individual and collective freedoms. Doing this requires judgment, and that is not currently on display in all parties. Freedom is a test of leadership, the test of freedom. “The Prime Minister failed this test because of ideology. He sought to subjugate collective and individual freedoms, to crush the identity of a nation under that of all nations, to deny the nation and talk of a postnational state. He is continuing the work of his father. He is denying Quebec, he is completing the transformative work of trivializing the Quebec nation,” Blanchet said. “Speaking of freedom, that was the purpose of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the charter of individual rights, the charter that denies French, secularism and the freedom of education, the one that seeks to censor social networks. Though they are an alarming cesspool of profanity these days, they remain a place of free expression, except for hate propaganda. The charter denies collective rights, the collective identity and the nation. Naturally, the Prime Minister stands up for individuals and then he drops the ball,” Blanchet added.
He went on to say that the Prime Minister shows contempt for differences and fans the flame of division and now he is putting on a show, covering up his failures, that the motion is as heavy-handed as it is useless. He said that the Emergencies Act by its very nature infringes on freedoms and was not needed to end the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge or to seize weapons at the Coutts blockade and that the provinces have the tools to deal with the situation. He appealed to Members of Parliament for understanding for Quebeckers who were traumatized by the War Measures Act in 1970 and have an uneasy relationship with legislation that takes away freedoms and is the spawn of the War Measures Act, albeit watered-down.
Several Bloc members said that their reasons for opposing the motion were different from those of the Conservatives. Bloc MP Martin Champoux said, “The Bloc is against it because both the National Assembly of Quebec and the current Government of Quebec have unanimously stated they do not want the feds to interfere in their business yet again by imposing the Emergencies Act. Lest we forget, pretty much every Quebecker has not-so-fond memories of what happened in 1970.”
Blanchet told the CBC on February 16, “This is not the right tool. The federal government wanted to hide its failure behind a far too strong law.”
New Democratic Party
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, referring not just to the occupation in Ottawa but also fires, floods and other problems, said it is a failure of leadership that has created the situation, that people were abandoned by government. He said that people are concerned about the impact of the Emergencies Act and that the government might act to crack down on protests in the future but that what is happening now is not a protest, is not peaceful, that the occupiers came to overthrow a democratically elected government and are funded by foreign influence and feed on disinformation. He said that government may misuse the powers of the Emergencies Act so the NDP will be watching and will withdraw its support if they feel the powers are being misused. “Indigenous land defenders, climate-change activists, workers fighting for fairness and any Canadian using their voice to peacefully demand justice should never be subject to the Emergencies Act. The New Democrats will never support that.”
He spoke of the difference in police treatment of the convoy and of Indigenous and racialized protesters and called for a “full public inquiry into the role of law enforcement in these occupations, both in their support of the occupiers and, in many cases, in their refusal to enforce the law.”
He said that the use of the Emergencies Act is an admission of defeat and it must be used judiciously and prudently, that we don’t want a repeat of 1970, that there is no need for the use of emergency measures in Quebec. “We want the Prime Minister to guarantee that emergency measures will be used only where they are truly necessary. The NDP is prepared to use the mechanisms at its disposal to revoke the government’s powers at a moment’s notice. We are not giving the government carte blanche, and we will be keeping a close eye on it to make sure it does not overstep,” Jagmeet Singh said. He said a plan is needed to get to the end of the pandemic including the urgent repair of our health care system, global access to vaccinations, paid sick leave, addressing the housing crisis and the cost of groceries. “People are angry at the powerful who have built a system rigged against working people,” he said.
Earlier, speaking to the press on February 16, Jagmeet Singh said: “We’re reluctant in making this decision to support, we’ll listen very carefully to the debate before we place our votes but we have indicated that we are supportive of taking a serious step to respond to this crisis.”
Some NDP Mps have expressed concerns including Charlie Angus who is quoted in the National Post: “We have opened Pandora’s box here. That, to me, is a deeply concerning issue, and that’s why I want accountability. I want to know why the police weren’t ticketing from the get-go, why the mayor’s office seemed to go to ground…. if I have to vote to take these extraordinary measures to get the city safe again, then we have to take extraordinary measures to make sure this will never happen again, or that these tools will never be needed again.”
Former NDP MPs Svend Robinson and Erin Weir have publicly criticized the NDP for its position. Robinson tweeted, “The NDP Caucus in 1970 under Tommy Douglas took a courageous and principled stand against the War Measures Act. Today’s @NDP under Jagmeet Singh betrays that legacy and supports Liberals on the Emergencies Act … Shame. A very dangerous precedent is being set.”
Green Party
After indicating that she has not decided how to vote, Elizabeth May said : “There are pros and cons to the act’s use. We had a collapse of police here in Ottawa. The chain of command broke somewhere, and we are in a very different situation now than if we had acted based on the information that, it now appears, we should have had about the security threat that was implicit in the convoy.”
(Renewal Update, posted February 19, 2022)
