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Results: 211 - 240 of 370
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
This is a very important issue to me, MP Gazan, so I'm glad to answer it at a later date, but it's something that requires a lot more discussion—
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I think as Canadians we need to look only at the examples of Poundmaker, Big Bear, or Louis Riel to understand that sometimes invocation of the rule of law has been used against indigenous peoples to perpetrate historic injustices. That should be clear to everyone in this room and to all Canadians.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I agree with the historic nature of UNDRIP, and I want to recognize the contribution of Romeo Saganash in putting forward that bill. It had the full support of our government, and it is something that we are resolutely committed to as a government. I commend Minister Bennett for achieving in four days what couldn't be achieved in 23 years. It's very important for everyone—
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I can confirm with the member that I'm on the committee and participating fully. I'll leave it at that. We have a meeting today, and I will be updating members on the issues. I'd be prepared to update you on the issues with respect to our engagements in indigenous communities and our reaction and preparation for coronavirus, which is a very serious issue.
I would preface my following comment with the fact that I don't think that the introduction of UNDRIP and the work the government and the NDP did on it, fostered by and put forward by Romeo Saganash, is storytelling. I think it's very important. It's very important for Canadians to realize that.
With respect to coronavirus, indigenous communities are more vulnerable for a number of reasons: historic socio-economic gaps, overcrowding and lack of access to clean and safe drinking water. These are all issues that we as a government on a long-term basis—and on a short-term basis with respect to the long-term water advisories that we are committed to remove by March 2021.... There are also systemic issues with respect to cultural approaches with medical facilities and health care, and issues with access and remoteness. These are all factors that have contributed, for example, to the unacceptable rates of tuberculosis in those communities.
We have our experience from the H1N1 virus. I have a dedicated team that is working on surge capacity. I'd absolutely be more than glad to update this committee or anyone willing to engage with me on this issue. Foremost, it's to indigenous communities that we are striving to reach out to, and have already done, but we'll be increasing that capacity in the short term. Thank you.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I can't pick and choose who shows up at a barricade. I have to deal with the cards that are dealt to me and engage in that dialogue and figure out why these solidarity movements are popping up. You can only do that through conversations, some of which are difficult, and I have no choice but to respect the views that are communicated to me at that point in time. Whether I agree with them or not, it's very important to continue that dialogue and have a path and a game plan towards peaceful resolution.
Everyone wanted peaceful resolution, but that game plan and that step plan is very important, and that includes dialogue. We do engage. The whole point of my department is to close that socio-economic gap so that indigenous peoples have substantive equality with non-indigenous peoples. That, in and of itself, is a huge catalyst for economic growth. There are economic development portfolios in both my and Minister Bennett's departments.
We know that when self-determination is achieved, indigenous peoples are driving resource development in many communities. You need only look at Treaty 8. You need only look at the Cree in northern Quebec. Those projects are key to the development of our country, but that takes catching up the gap in education, health, infrastructure, emergency management, all those precursors that in fact you and I probably take for granted.
These are very important. We will engage with all actors, resource development actors included. I meet with them all the time.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you.
Let me add on to what Carolyn said. My greatest concern, when I heard from the leadership in Kahnawake, was about the 200 kids who study off-reserve and how they are being targeted. Our concern in all of this is the safety of all Canadians, and particularly those most vulnerable, but when you hear stories like that, it really brings home what this means and the need to achieve a peaceful resolution.
Building trust sometimes means being vulnerable and going on a playing field that isn't yours, exposing yourself. Nine hours of transcript for a minister is a significant amount of exposure; it's minimal compared to the vulnerabilities the people who accepted to meet me face. I feel safe around police forces; they don't. That insecurity was palpable in the room on many occasions. This is systemic, ongoing and documented. It isn't something that people just throw out there; it is documented in reports.
That trust has been broken for decades, so it isn't someone like me who is going to repair it or something like this government that will repair it simply in one year, with a bunch of programs that are historic in their investment quantum. It will take a long time to repair these bonds that have been broken, and probably more mistakes will be made. It's just something we have to be relentless about. It's about building relationships. In any community, even across this committee you build relationships and that builds a modicum of trust—
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
—and confidence. It allows you to move on. It's systemic. We can work at it as a country. I'm confident.
Thank you.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton í:se néne kèn:’en sewatia’tarò:ron. Kwe kaweienón:ni.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
I thank you all who are gathered here. Hello Kaweienón:ni.
Ms. Margaret (Kaweienón:ni) Peters:
[Witness spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Kwe.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
Hello.
Mr. Marc Miller:
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
oh niiohtonhátie?
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
How is it going along?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wenhniserí:io wáhi!
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
It is a nice day isn’t it!
Ms. Margaret (Kaweienón:ni) Peters:
[Witness spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Nahò:ten?
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
What?
Mr. Marc Miller:
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wenhniserí:io.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
It is a nice day.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I first off want to acknowledge the two fluent language speakers here who are members of Parliament, members of the NDP who have spent a good part of their lives in the struggle to preserve indigenous languages. I'm just a learner. I do want to underscore that.
Kaweienón:ni, could you speak briefly? I'm going to give my colleague Kent Hehr my last couple of minutes, but I want you to speak to your struggle in your community to preserve the language.
I visited Akwesasne Freedom School. It's a school that is built out of armed struggle over treaty rights, and out of that came a school that was able to preserve and underscore language, culture, tradition. What is your experience in ensuring that people actually become speakers?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton ní:se ne kèn:’en sewatia’tarò:ron. Òn:wa ken’ wenhniserá:te wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton katsi’tsákwas, Amos, tánon Claudette ne kí:ken kanonshakwe’niiò:ke. Í:kehre ó:ni taietewatenonhwerá:ton tsi ionkwatia’tarò:ron tsi ionhwentsá:te ne ratirón:taks.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
I thank you all who have gathered here. Today I thank you Katsi’tsákwas, Amos, and Claudette who are here, at main house. I want us too to thank those that have gathered here in Algonquin land.
[English]
I want to acknowledge our presence on traditional Algonquin territories.
Thanks for coming.
I want to focus on one specific issue that I want to take up with people working in grassroots organizations.
Katsi'tsakwas, I know your work: I know you fought tooth and nail in Kanesatake to revitalize the language. I want to focus on the funding repercussions and the issues surrounding the scope of the ILA funding, the criticisms you have with it, and the necessity for persistent, consistent and wide-scope funding, and then focus on some of the challenges that students, particularly in the immersion stream, have with getting from non-fluency to a stage of fluency that allows them to start perpetuating or at least self-learning. Can you touch on those specific aspects as they touch on the financing and the flaws with the current ILA funding?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Amos, Cayuga is a language that is in a much more threatened state, even compared with Kanien'kéha. How would the question I posed to Ellen apply to Cayuga, particularly in its current state of vitality? What do you think the additional measures would be to even begin to close a gap, if that's even the proper comparison?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Okay. I'd like to note that Gordie is colour-blind, which explains the pink jacket. Actually, it is an initiative to underline efforts against bullying. There is a reason for the colour.
What's always confounded me in this legislation is the imperfect attempt to try to encapsulate the diversity and richness of 60 or 70 languages into a piece of legislation, with imperfect consulting. Money may be attached in a budget conferred to people who know best how to do it, who are outside legislators in Parliament. By the nature of the legislation itself, it's always been an imperfect endeavour, while important symbolically and important in terms of real rights.
Mr. Joffe, you have much more experience in this field as a lawyer than I have. In a vacuum, absent money and cognizant of the fact that governments are catching up with courts and there is much work to do, what is the value in and of itself of the rights recognized under this piece of legislation—all in a minute?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Exactly, so I represent a slight slice of the St. Lawrence—
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I'd have to ask the CFO.
Voices: Oh, oh!
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I can guarantee that I'll wield the immense power that I hold within government to move this forward.
Thank you, Mr. Christopherson.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I'd like you to speak briefly regarding your concerns with the drug trade in the northern triangle states, and the effect it's having geopolitically, particularly on a society level with respect to those states, and your organization's ability to further the human rights agenda.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you.
The question to both of you is, how do you choose your priorities? Let me explain.
The frustration we feel as a committee, as politicians, is generally that there seems to be an obsession with capturing the one-off successes, the release from jail, and obviously one person sweltering unjustly in jail is one person too many. The human rights agenda writ large seems to be, from a popular perspective, inherently individualistic—for a number of reasons, and with cause—but sometimes the sense is that there is an impossibility to capture, advocate, or push for systemic changes in countries, pushing for a simple thing: one country observing one clause in their charter of human rights that would save 1,000 lives we've never heard of, or don't necessarily have to hear about, but it would save those lives.
I guess, Professor Cotler, you faced this first-hand as Minister of Justice, that tension between systemic change—the desire as a progressive country to achieve systemic change throughout the world with other states—and this seeming obsession. It's obsessive in the media, and I don't blame the media for that. I blame the human mind, focusing on one person who has been released or on one success story in a country that has a systemic record of human rights violations.
My question to you is, how do you choose your priorities? I think you answered why: it's because you're optimistic. Sometimes you must feel like Sisyphus. How do you address your daily activity with helping individuals who desperately need it, and advocating for systemic and progressive change?
Professor Cotler, perhaps, could answer first.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you both. It's great to have Canada's foremost human rights defender in front us, together with the world's greatest chess player. It's a true honour to be able to ask questions to you about this extremely compelling case and the bodies of legislation that we are studying.
For your benefit, there's no conclusion yet. We haven't finished our report and we haven't completed the witness testimony, but what we have been able to identify clearly is a gap in the ability to freeze assets of foreign nationals who have committed gross human rights violations. Now, proceeding from that premise or conclusion to putting that into effect is a lot more difficult than it seems at the outset. There are grave concerns in a pluralistic democracy with respect to the rule of law as understood in many facets, one of the facets being gathering evidence of those gross human rights violations. In the case at hand that you've mentioned, obviously there was a sufficient determination that those occurred. I'm not contesting that.
What I'm trying to ask, I guess, is about placing those into a body of law. We're concerned, obviously, with the rule of law, the ability of someone who is accused of these acts to appear and be able to plead their case. You are asking us to freeze assets of someone, assets that may be ill-gotten, in which case there's already a law in our Criminal Code that deals with that, or they may simply be assets that were acquired in a different manner. There are valuable arguments for freezing them as a deterrent, or as a moral imperative.
Mr. Cotler, you're a jurist and a pre-eminent lawyer. Essentially, what I would like to hear are your concerns for the rule of law.
Then Mr. Kasparov, what do you think the effect...? You mentioned earlier, when you responded to Mr. Kent, about the impact on Russia of this type of sanction by a country such as Canada, and the countermeasures that we need to be aware of if we're to enact this legislation vis-à-vis such a country, or indeed other countries.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
With your colleagues present, and on behalf of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, I had the honour of announcing a grant of $1 million in the light of your civic engagement. I was able to see your colleagues in action and to have your activities well described to me.
I would like to come back to your domestic activities, because here we are talking mostly about civic engagement in Canada.
In our study on the Yazidis, a witness mentioned that most human rights violations are committed by people known in the villages, when they were experiencing social disintegration, an erosion of the social fabric.
How can your action help to strengthen the dialogue between the parties who may be threatened where their society is being weakened, such as with the Yazidis and those around them?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Absolutely.
In terms of education and awareness, which specific steps have to be taken in a program in a third-world country, a developing country?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
You work with state players, not just with civil society specifically. Have you been able to bring awareness to the authorities, telling them, for example, that they cannot use the fight against terrorism as an excuse to brush aside human rights? That is certainly a very hard discussion, I agree. However, the excuse is often used by state players in order to justify human rights violations.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Do you feel that there is progress or do you feel that the state sometimes uses you as an excuse to somehow justify its actions with respect to human rights? Is there any tension on that front?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
My next question is about the involvement, education and awareness of Canadians. When I spoke with your colleagues, we mostly talked about raising awareness of human rights among Canadians.
Could you briefly explain the usefulness of that initiative?
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you both for coming. This study has gone off on a bit of a tangent. If we were purists about the bodies of legislation we are studying, you wouldn't be here, although I think, Ms. Fenner, you raised an extremely important point. The relevancy of your presence here today is that corruption causes the behaviour that we are, at the basis, examining today, whether it's violations of international law or human rights violations or different reprehensible practices by governments, or by corporations in this case. It hits on an extremely important point, which is that corruption is at the root of a lot of behaviour.
The question I had generally was on deferred prosecution agreements and what their impact is on recovering the assets. The U.S. has them. It has gone after a number of corporations. Those corporations are listed on a website. Their guilt, their culpability, is clearly stated. The idea behind it is that once a corporation makes a payment, that money is gone to the official in question. However, in prosecuting the corporation in question, at the end of the day, more often than not it isn't so much the shareholders or the beneficiaries who will pay, but the employees, because business will be lost.
I'd like your view on that as it applies to Canada with respect to deferred prosecution agreements.
Perhaps Professor Ferguson can go first.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Ms. Fenner, do you have a couple of words? I don't want you to miss your flight.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming today.
I want to continue on the human rights path, although on a different tack. Richard, perhaps the first question is for you.
Generally, the realm of sanctions, whether unilateral or multilateral, has been reserved for areas of high politics, nuclear interests, interests where the behaviour of an actor in question to be sanctioned has threatened international peace and security. The migration towards sanctioning individuals and not states on the basis of a level of human rights violation that is deemed to be intolerable generally answers to a call to condemn based on a moral imperative, as Mr. Levitt alluded to.
I'm wondering what the limits to that approach are intellectually, and even from an idealist perspective. We have disagreements with our closest ally as to the death penalty. We have disagreements with the way certain European countries behave. I'm not talking about a relativist moral slippery slope. I'm simply talking about where we draw the line. Effectiveness is one argument, but it doesn't necessarily counter the moral imperative.
There is also a beauty in freezing someone's assets that are situated here where they have committed a gross indecent act. It would be reprehensible to let them derive gain from those assets.
I'd like you to take a few minutes to reflect on that sort of tension that we're facing, from a geopolitical and trade perspective.
Thanks.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you.
Mr. Juneau, you said that closing the consulate and our sanctions against Iran have hurt us a great deal, particularly with respect to trade with that country. You said that we are practically behind the wall.
Can you elaborate on this with examples of the negative impact this has had on Canada?
I would also add that you can sign up for a membership on our party's site at liberal.ca, and it is free. Just joking, of course.
I will let you answer my question.
Results: 211 - 240 of 370 | Page: 8 of 13

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