Learn English with Justin Trudeau. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduces a bill that would ban the government from imposing mandates on vaccines in all of the federal sector, including those related to the controversial COVID-19 vaccine. Bill C-16 is a private member's bill introduced by Conservative MP for Niagara West, Peter Tkachuk.
00:00:02.740As I said at the outset, I'm running for Prime Minister to put Canadians back in control of their lives by making Canada the freest nation on earth.
00:00:13.400And that freedom includes bodily autonomy, the freedom to decide what people put in their own bodies.
00:00:19.120And that is why I was proud to introduce a private member's bill in the House of Commons that would put an end to COVID mandates in all of the federal sector.
00:00:30.000I want to thank the Honourable Member from Niagara West for having adopted my private member's bill so that we could move it forward even faster.
00:00:40.280Now, before the Prime Minister proceeds once again to maliciously divide and attack, let me remind him that the position put forward in this bill is now the position not only of common-sense Conservatives,
00:00:58.280but it is also the position of the majority of provincial governments, of the Liberal member for Louis-Barre,
00:01:10.280of the Military Review Complaints Commission, the Tribunal responsible for hearing grievances from members of the Armed Forces,
00:01:20.280and I will remind the position of the Prime Minister that the position reflected in the bill is now his position.
00:01:27.280Now, you might question why I would say that.
00:01:30.280The reason is that he had the temerity to go on television about three months ago and claim he had never forced anyone to get vaccinated,
00:01:38.280that he claims that it should be a matter of personal choice.
00:01:45.280He wanted us all to forget the way he divided and insulted and name-called millions of people right across this country,
00:01:56.280So, if he really believes he never forced mandates on anyone, surely he'll be happy to vote for this bill to ensure that those mandates don't apply anymore and will never be reimposed again.
00:02:11.280So, let me be clear about what this bill does.
00:02:50.280This was most clear in the Prime Minister's deliberate decision to go beyond guiding and protecting Canadians to punishing people who chose not to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
00:03:02.280Let us remember that the Prime Minister originally said that vaccines would be a matter of personal choice.
00:03:08.280Then, he did a poll showing that it would be popular to target a small minority of people who chose not to be vaccinated.
00:03:17.280He flip-flopped and said he would then make it mandatory.
00:03:22.280Three days later, he called an election and attempted to exploit that political moment in order to regain power.
00:03:31.280It is funny, when he announced that the vaccine mandates would be imposed on the federal sector,
00:03:38.280he did it with such political haste, based on the advice of not public health experts but of polling experts,
00:03:46.280that even his own human resources team at the Treasury Board had put out guidelines suggesting that it would be a matter of personal choice, not mandatory imposition.
00:03:59.280So, while he was advocating for a mandate, his own bureaucracy had published rules against a mandate.
00:04:06.280That is because they were following the science, they were following the medical science, he was following political science.
00:04:13.280What this bill will do is put into law a prohibition on the government imposing COVID mandates again in the future.
00:04:26.280Now, you might wonder why the government would need such a prohibition, given that they have reluctantly agreed to remove mandates from most federally employed workers.
00:04:38.280The answer is that the government has kept open the possibility of reimposing mandates, both on federal workers and on federally regulated travel.
00:04:48.280Furthermore, there continue to be military service members who face vaccine mandates even today.
00:04:56.280It is ironic that these same military service members could legally go into a bar and French kiss with a perfect stranger,
00:05:07.280but they could not do their jobs in the armed forces.
00:05:15.280They could not, for example, go out into a field and practice with their fellow members in infantry,
00:05:21.280but they could do things that involve far greater and more intimate personal interaction in public places according to the law.
00:05:29.280How could that possibly be based on science?
00:05:33.280We know that it is not, and never was, because we also now know that the Military Grievance Tribunal has ruled that the government's imposition of mandates on service members violated Section 7 Charter rights of those members,
00:05:51.280and that that violation was not justified under Section 1 Charter, which gives the government the ability to override rights in order to uphold reasonable public interest requirements.
00:06:09.280So, the government's own grievance tribunal has found that the mandates violated the Charter when it comes to members of the armed forces,
00:06:19.280and yet, still, the mandates remain in place in open violation of the Charter rights, not according to the Leader of the Opposition,
00:06:28.280not according to the countless civil libertarians who have been advocating for an end to these mandates,
00:06:34.280but according to the government's own grievance tribunal.
00:06:38.280And according, now moving out of the military to the rest of the federal sector, to the PIPSEC, the CAPE, and PSAC,
00:06:48.280three public sector unions representing 300,000 federal public servants who have brought legal challenges against this government,
00:06:56.280saying its blanket policy was punitive, unreasonable, and an abuse of management authority.
00:07:01.280To quote the unions, there was no proper consultation nor a comprehensive process of correctly identifying the possible circumstances faced by our members.
00:07:11.280Appropriate solutions were not developed by the employer to deal with many individual situations.
00:07:33.280And I'm going to go back to quoting the Military Grievances External Review Committee on this point.
00:07:38.280I conclude that the limitation of the griever's right to liberty and security of the person by the Canadian Armed Forces vaccination policy
00:07:46.280is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
00:07:50.280Because the policy, in some aspects, is arbitrary, overly broad, and disproportionate,
00:07:55.280therefore I include that the griever's rights protected under Section 7 were infringed.
00:08:45.280My bill, and the bill now adopted by the member for Niagara, would restore that justice by putting an end to COVID vaccine mandates
00:08:55.280and ensuring that no such new mandates are reimposed in the future.
00:09:00.280Either for our brave soldiers, sailors or airmen, our public servants, or Canadians seeking to travel in federally regulated sectors.
00:09:12.280Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has withdrawn and apologized for some of the extremely incendiary and divisive comments that he made about Canadians who made different medical decisions than he would have made.
00:09:27.280And adopting this bill would be a recognition that this ugly chapter in our history of turning Canadian against Canadian and using a public health matter to pull apart our country and grab more power will be permanently behind us.
00:09:47.280Let us recognize that Canadians have freedom of choice over what they put into their body.