Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre addresses caucus during a meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ended the fall sitting of the House of Commons by saying he shares the New Democrats’ concerns about health care, as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre instructed his members of Parliament to stand on the side of “common people.”
Members of Parliament agreed to begin their holiday break late Wednesday afternoon, after all parties delivered tributes to Jim Carr, a Liberal MP from Winnipeg who died earlier this week. A vase of flowers sat on his empty seat as they spoke.
MPs are scheduled to return to Ottawa at the end of January.
Before wrapping up, the House of Commons passed the Liberals’ online news bill, which would create a framework to require tech giants to pay for the news content that they share on their platforms.
MPs also unanimously passed a Senate private bill that amends the Criminal Code to create new offences related to the trafficking of human organs, and updates immigration rules to render foreigners or permanent residents inadmissible to the country if they have engaged in such activities. It will become law after receiving royal assent.
And the government tabled two new bills on the final day. One, which would amend the Indian Act to add new registration entitlements, saw the Liberals narrowly avoid breaking a promise to introduce such measures by the end of 2022. It will not come up for debate until Parliament resumes. The other would update the federal employment insurance board of appeal.
The end of the fall sitting will allow the minority Liberals to regroup after recent statements from NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who said he was willing to pull his party’s support from the confidence-and-supply agreement over the government’s approach to health care.
Trudeau, speaking to reporters before he entered the House of Commons for the final question period of 2022, brushed off the comments from Singh.
“The reality is we’re ambitious parties that are progressive in our values in trying to get things done for Canadians,” he said.
He said the country is facing a tough time, adding that “we’re all worried about the state of health care in this country.”
The confidence-and-supply agreement would see the NDP support the minority Liberals on key votes until 2025 in exchange for action on key policies. To that end, the House of Commons passed two marquee government bills this fall: one to double GST rebates for six months and another that gives lower-income Canadians money toward rent and children’s dental care.
It was also the end of Poilievre’s first sitting in Parliament as the Official Opposition leader after his landslide September victory in the Conservative party’s leadership race.
In a speech to his party’s caucus earlier in the day, Poilievre painted a picture of a Canada that is hurting and told his MPs it’s their job as the official Opposition to transform that hurt into hope.
“To inspire people that a real improvement in their lives is possible, that the dream that brought them here as immigrants, or the dream with which they were raised when they were born here, can be rekindled,” he said.
He also repeated his attacks on Liberal government spending, which he said is driving up inflation.
Poilievre’s meeting with his caucus came two days after the party lost a byelection in the Greater Toronto Area to the Liberals.
The government is heading into the Christmas break buoyed by that unexpectedly large win in Mississauga-Lakeshore, a riding in the vote-rich 905 district around Toronto where many analysts say elections are now won and lost.
Charles Sousa, a former provincial Liberal finance minister in Ontario, took more than 51 per cent of the vote in a seat the Conservatives targeted heavily in the last general election.
The Tories are downplaying the loss given that they have only won in the riding once in the last 20 years, but it is still the kind of seat the Conservatives need to hold if they want to form government.
The Liberals’ explanation for the win gives a glimpse into what their strategy may be against the Conservatives going into 2023: to paint Poilievre as sowing seeds of anger and supporting anti-government movements, such as the “Freedom Convoy.”
Trudeau has recently said good government policy doesn’t “fit on a bumper sticker.”
On his way into his first Liberal caucus meeting in Ottawa on Wednesday, Sousa said the message from voters in his riding is that they want their representatives “to be positive, to show some unity, to work together for the ultimate goal of serving them effectively.”
“They’re not into the reckless stuff or the gimmicks, or the sowing of division or feeding of anger,” he said.
The House rises as the Liberal government still has two pieces of contentious legislation that have yet to pass.
One is the proposed new law on gun control, Bill C-21, which MPs on the committee for public safety have been studying.
It has received widespread criticism, including from the Conservatives, over a recent amendment added by a Liberal MP that seeks to enshrine the definition of an assault-style weapon into the legislation.
The proposed list of firearms that would fall under that label, however, include popular hunting rifles – a move that has angered hunters, sport shooters and Indigenous groups like the Assembly of First Nations.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Trudeau have both said it’s not their intention to outlaw hunting firearms and are open to tweaking the bill.
Still in the Senate is the implementation bill for the government’s fall economic statement and Bill C-11, the online streaming bill designed to update broadcasting rules to reflect platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and TikTok.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 14, 2022.
– With files from Mia Rabson.
