While the eyes of the world are focused on Vladimir Putin as he swallows Ukraine, political business goes on as normally as possible in national capitals. In Washington last week, it was President Joe Biden’s maiden State of the Union address. In Ottawa, “normal” meant another unnecessary confrontation, replete with volleys of unparliamentary language, between the Conservatives and Liberals over the deployment of the Emergencies Act.
It was absurd – a battle to closure over a question of no significance beyond the combatants: who would get to be the chair of a committee? Not an ordinary committee, admittedly. It’s the Parliamentary Review Committee, a special joint committee created by the Emergencies Act, to discharge two important tasks. The first: to report within 60 days on the Liberal government’s decision to declare a public order emergency and on whether it used its emergency powers appropriately. The second: to conduct an inquiry, and to report within 360 days, into the circumstances that caused the emergency and into the ability of existing legislation to deal with similar situations in the future.
The real problem with the act is its age. It is woefully out of date. Introduced by Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government in 1988 to replace the War Measures Act, but never used until the “Freedom Convoy” had taken over the capital, the EA does one thing well – it protects civil rights by making the exercise of emergency power subservient to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
This is from the preamble to the act: “WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency; NOW THEREFORE, Her Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House of Commons of Canada, enacts as follows:”
Contrary to a conspiracy theory peddled by some Conservatives, it would be nearly impossible for Justin Trudeau or a future prime minister to use their emergency powers to turn Canada into a dictatorship.
For the rest, the Emergencies Act is a captive of the 1980s. It was born just as the early iterations of the internet began to appear; it would be another decade before “social networking” (or “social media,” as we call it now) entered the communications picture, and a decade after that before the inception of crowd funding with CreateAFund, now known as GoFundMe.
The Liberals followed a formula set out in the act for the review committee (11 members: seven from the House – three Liberals, two Conservatives and one each from the NDP and Bloc Québécois – plus one senator from each of the four groups in the upper house). Shortchanged! claimed the Tories.
But the big fight was over control. The Conservatives desperately wanted one of their MPs to chair the committee, or at least to co-chair it with a Liberal MP. The prime minister had a different idea. To lower the temperature and, hopefully, reduce partisan polarization, he proposed that the position be neutral, with three co-chairs: one NDP, one Bloc, and one senator.
The Conservatives fought for three days against the neutral-chair committee until the Liberals, with the support of the New Democrats, used closure last Wednesday night to force the motion through the House and on to the Senate.
The committee has work to do – to bring the Emergencies Act into the 21st century and make it responsive to the today’s realities – from the misuse of the internet and social media to foreign money sponsoring Canadian protests to the takeover of peaceful protest movements by the kind of violent agitators who stormed the Capitol in Washington in January 2021 and who advertised their presence during the occupation of Ottawa (and now have done so again in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital).
The committee needs to get on with it. More mudwrestling won’t score political points. By law, committee meetings must be in private, and its members are sworn to secrecy. They can’t even leak to the media, poor things.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is a former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. He is the co-author of Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com