FINA Committee Report

Dissenting Report from the Bloc Québécois

The pandemic has worn away at the social fabric by making it harder to have healthy, open and nuanced debate. The much reviled polarization seen in various Western countries has reached our shores. In Canada, it did not help matters when Justin Trudeau’s government made mandatory vaccination a political wedge issue during the 2021 election. When the prime minister of a G7 country stokes divisions, instead of explaining his decisions and relying on public health, he fails to rise to the level his role requires. While Quebec and the provinces were developing plans to reopen at their own pace, the federal government was polarizing and sending the message that these demands were not even worth listening to, and that sparked outrage.

After weeks of letting the situation fester for Ottawa and Gatineau residents and businesses alike, the government decided to invoke the Emergencies Act to cover up their inability to take responsibility for an issue that affected them directly: although most of the health measures concerned the provinces and Quebec, the protesters were there to force Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to cave.

Instead of rising to the occasion, the government chose partisanship. And just as the situation deteriorated and people were criticizing the inaction of this government, they pulled out the legislative atomic bomb to deal with a situation that they kept blaming on Ontario and the City of Ottawa. The federal government should have taken notice and gotten involved from the beginning, not when the failure to take action became an embarrassment in Canada, in Quebec, as well as internationally and to our neighbours to the south.

This exceptional legislation is to be invoked only when it is absolutely unavoidable. Many argued that the Act was necessary to send a message to the protesters. Section 3 of the Act states that it is not sufficient that there be an emergency. The emergency must also “exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it” and must be such that it “cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.” However, the government did not demonstrate this in the statement of reasons it submitted to parliamentarians. Worse, it did not even attempt to do so, even though the Act requires it. The government remains silent on the issue. We hope that, following this report, the government will justify its use. However, in light of the testimonies in said the report, we have come to the conclusion that the government will not have any new rationales to offer us because there is none.

Here is an example of an issue that did not require the Act to be invoked. According to the order, the measures against criminal financing extend to crowdfunding platforms. This is a good idea. In fact, it is such a good idea that the current laws already provide for it. Crowdfunding platforms are already regulated by the provinces and Quebec. The laws already exist, and they work: on February 10, the Ontario Superior Court granted an injunction, requested by the province, to freeze the funds raised by the Freedom Convoy 2022 and Adopt a Trucker campaigns on the GiveSendGo crowdfunding platform. This was all done under ordinary laws, without the Emergencies Act and without government by decree.

As a parliamentary group, and based on the testimonies heard in committee and elsewhere, we would have liked to see the following recommendations included in this report to the House:

• 1)      That the government makes sure that the situation cannot be resolved using existing legislation and that this can be reasonably demonstrated to the House before invoking the Emergencies Act;
• 2)      That the government opt for a fair and effective response and act in a proactive and timely manner in order to prevent a situation from escalating, which includes showing leadership by engaging in a dialogue with the parties involved, anticipating the outcome of a situation and coming up with solutions to keep the situation from deteriorating, before resorting to a heavy-handed response after several weeks of inaction;
• 3)      That the government’s order only provides for realistic and reasonable measures, unlike the measures ordered to cancel the truckers’ insurance policies, in order to ensure the safety and financial protection of Canadians in the event of an accident, particularly in provinces that do not have an at-fault insurance system; and
• 4)      That the government not use the precedent set by the truckers’ crowdfunding campaigns to try to impose federal regulations on these platforms which, like all other financial intermediaries, are subject to private law and provincial securities authorities.