THE INVOKING AND PASSAGE OF THE EMERGENCIES ACT

On February 19 Vancouver Centre MP The Honourable Dr. Hedy Fry spoke in the House of Commons on invoking the Emergencies Act. This is the text of her speech, as published on openparliament.ca

The Honourable Dr. Hedy Fry, MP for Vancouver Centre.

Mr. Speaker, I must say that I have been embarrassed for a long time about what has been going on in the country, especially in Ottawa. I have had a lot of friends across the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe who have been calling me, asking, “What is going on in Canada? You guys are such a great democracy; what's happening?”, and so I have been embarrassed. They were in shock at what was going on here.

In many countries, there were copycats doing what the protesters were doing here, and I must tell members that those copycats were quelled immediately with water cannons, guns and tear gas, to keep them in line. However, what makes me proud of my country is that, in the last two days, we did not do that. The police in this country were restrained; they were professional and they were patient. They were taking abuse, both verbal and physical, and they also had people reach in to try to get their guns. They were mindful of the children in the group; children who were being used as frontline shields. I have no idea what kinds of parents would do that, but this was a way to make everybody see that they were nice and that they had little children. The children were in the front lines, though. Those are the kinds of things we saw going on here, and the police were very careful and worried about the children.

We are asking the question: Why use this Emergencies Act? I have to say that it is pretty easy to see why when we saw the city of Ottawa being occupied for 22 days, and not just by peaceful people who were sitting down singing Kumbaya, but by people who were threatening, verbally harassing and physically intimidating people wearing masks and people of visible minorities, who were scared. Some protesters had volatile materials like gasoline and diesel and were wandering around the city. They were setting off fireworks in a city that has huge high-rises without care or worry whether they would ignite something in the city. They were lawless, and that is the only word I can use. Well, if that is not enough reason to invoke the Emergencies Act in this country, then I do not know what is.

We talked a lot about the rule of law, and I have heard everybody invoking the rule of law. Canada is doing exactly that. This is a country of various jurisdictions under our Constitution. The federal government does not, like a great, wondrous matriarch, walk in and impose on every single municipality or province whatever its will is. It cannot do that. Therefore, what it had to do was to try to give the municipalities and provinces the tools they needed to empower them to be able to deal with the lawlessness, and that is exactly what this Emergencies Act is doing: It is helping municipalities and provinces to have the tools they need.

I have listened to the mayor of Ottawa saying today that they could not get tow trucks. The tow truck drivers did not want to come, because they were scared. They did not want to come in and tow the rigs that were hanging around. However, with the Emergencies Act, the tow trucks were told that they had to come and do that. Now, that is one simple example of how the resources and tools that the police needed had to come through the Emergencies Act.

The Emergencies Act also helps provinces and municipalities take on certain roles that they would not normally take on; for example, the ability for police to come from across the country, including from my own riding, the Vancouver Police Department, of which I am inordinately proud, to help Ottawa. There is the ability to follow the money, find out what foreign entities were funding this anarchy that was going on in our city for 22 days, find out who was sending money to whom and follow cryptocurrency, which was an important part of finding out that there were foreign entities behind all of this.

I heard people on the streets, when the police were moving them back, talking about their First Amendment rights and saying, “You cannot arrest this person; you did not read them their Miranda rights.” Come on, guys, do people not watch enough television to know that we do not do that in Canada? That is not Canadian, so we know that there were foreign entities in this country, manipulating what was going on.

Who is funding them? Who is paying for them? Where does a person get money to spend 22 days, with food, drink and everything they need? Somebody is paying for that. We have to find out who that is.

People talk about sovereignty. Part of that sovereignty is that Canada cannot allow foreign entities to dictate what we do in our democracy. This is a democracy, and in a democracy we have elected governments. I do not care what stripe the government is, but it is elected according to free and fair elections, which is a major part of a democracy. To try to overthrow duly elected officials by mob rule of law, threats and intimidation is anarchy. It cannot be allowed. If these people do not want the government anymore, they have the right to vote against the government in an election. That is what a democracy is about.

A democracy has free media and freedom of the press. The press has been intimidated, harassed, pushed, shoved, threatened and frightened, and I want to take my hat off to all of the press, who have been doing the yeomen's work, who have been unafraid and who have been doing what they need to do, because if the media is shut down, we really do not know what is happening and we are prone to listening to disinformation and false news.

These are some of the things we are talking about here, and I have to say that when the police kept saying to people to move on and get the children out of here, I looked at what was going in Coutts and at some of these border protests. At the Ambassador Bridge there was a line in front of the protesters, of children linking arms. What country are we in when we do that to children and use them as shields to protect so-called “protesters”. There is a dual reason for it. Not only are children shields, because they know nobody will harm children, but also it makes them look nice, quiet, family-oriented and all that kind of thing. That is not what is true. We are seeing this kind of manipulation and intimidation of media.

I must say that we know how much money there is. We look at the border crossings that have been blocked by the trucks, and 95% of our truckers are vaccinated and are going back and forth, bringing food, medicines and everything. We have the ones who did not want to be vaccinated, but freedom applies both ways. Freedom of choice means if someone does not choose to get vaccinated or does not choose to wear masks, they accept the consequences. I taught my kids that. My parents taught me that. We have a choice, but with a choice comes consequences. If, by doing it, it is felt that someone is actually harming others by exposing others to infection, then this is something the government must hear about.

When people say they are blocking truckers who are trying to get across the border to bring food and medicines and to keep trade going, which I think was about $511 million a day when we count all the crossings, this is intimidation. This is not about truckers. This is not about vaccine mandates. This is about anarchy, and I think we need to remember that. For someone to say they will bring down a duly elected government and to use language that is threatening to our Prime Minister, who is duly elected, and when people hug and stand there taking photographs with these people, they are also agreeing that it is okay for mob rule to take down a duly elected government.

It is not a democracy when people do that. We can look at the judges. We have an independent judiciary, and the independent judiciary is now issuing all kinds of writs against the people who have broken the law. Again, we come back to the rule of law. It cannot be had both ways. One cannot talk about rule of law on one hand, and then, when we impose rule of law because of the jurisdictional issues that make us have to do that, say we are breaking the law or imposing a dictatorship. That is not true. A dictator is someone who stops other people from having their freedoms. The protesters did that. They stopped everybody else from having the freedom to wear a mask, the freedom to go to a hospital to get care, the freedom to take their children to school and the freedom to go and shop. Occupiers closed down businesses. Businesses had to close their doors. They were walking into restaurants, intimidating and roughing up, both verbally and physically, waiters, waitresses and the people who were there.

This is not a lawful, peaceful protest, and today, when everyone was singing the national anthem and saying to the police, “We love you,” this is part of a propaganda machine, saying, “Look at us; we are nice people. Look at us; we have a bouncy castle and our children play. We are nice people.”

All of us sitting in the House of Commons must know this not to be true. We know what is happening—