A petition to end prosecutions for public nudity is one of many parliamentary petitions Canadians are using to build support for a cause and participate directly in the governing process.
Petitioners can use a paper or online petition to press the House of Commons, the government of Canada, a minister of the Crown or a member of Parliament to do something, or to stop doing something.
Filing a petition doesn’t compel the federal government to act on the issue it raises, but it does demand a reply. Since 1986, relevant government ministries have been required to issue responses to petitions within 45 days of the date when they’re presented in the House of Commons.
Anyone can visit the government’s petition website to browse the more than 60 electronic petitions now open for signatures. Parliament’s Clerk of Petitions also accepts paper petitions but they can’t be signed through the parliamentary website.
The petitions currently open address a range of political causes, from rescinding vaccine mandates to embracing proportional representation to making election day into a statutory holiday.
A petition calling for an end to laws against public nudity has almost 600 electronic signatures — a little more than the 500 required for an electronic petition to be presented in the House of Commons for a response. Paper petitions, which take a slightly different path, need only 25 signatures.
Each petition has to be sponsored by a member of the House of Commons. The nudity petition is sponsored by Elizabeth May, the Green Party’s parliamentary leader in the House. MPs aren’t required to sign the petitions they sponsor or agree with their contents.
The petition May is sponsoring calls for the repeal of Section 174 of the Criminal Code, which deals with any individual who without lawful excuse “(a) is nude in a public place, or (b) is nude and exposed to public view while on private property, whether or not the property is his own.
The petition also wants language inserted into the Criminal Code “specifying that public nudity, in and of itself, is not indecent, obscene, or a nuisance.” The petition is open for signatures until the morning of Sept. 8.
“To be clear, I am not a supporter of the petitioners’ goal. I am not a supporter of public nudity. I do support the rights of citizens in a democracy to get direct answers from their government. This is an avenue too few Canadians know is available to them,” May said in an emailed statement.
“It is a mechanism for any and every Canadian to get their views placed directly before the government and get an answer from the government.”
A call for an end to travel restrictions
To get an electronic petition up and running, a person must first write a draft petition with the support of five Canadian citizens or permanent residents and submit it to an MP. If the MP agrees to support it, they will pass it on to the Clerk of Petitions for verification before it’s put on the website.
The petitioner then decides how long they want the petition open for signatures — 30, 60, 90 or 120 days. Once a petition’s signing period has ended, and as long as it has garnered at least 500 signatures, the clerk certifies it and presents it to the House in anticipation of a response.
While electronic petitions need 500 signatures to be presented to the House, many receive more than that.
The most-signed petition of the last Parliament happened to be an e-petition demanding the repeal of Liberal firearms regulations. It received 230,905 signatures.
Passengers currently need to be fully vaccinated or have an exemption to board a plane in Canada. A petition sponsored by Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman is trying to roll that back. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)
The open electronic petition with the most signatures right now is sponsored by Ontario Conservative MP Jamie Schmale. It is calling for the federal government to introduce legislation to allow citizens to propose and repeal legislation or remove an elected official before their term is up. It has 39,993 signatures.
The open petition with the second-highest number of signatures — just over 13,000 — calls for the termination of “pointless and discriminatory federal travel restrictions as they no longer have a measurable health benefit.”
While MPs don’t have to support the petitions they sponsor, Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman has been hammering the Liberal government in the House of Commons with questions that use similar language.
Ryan Turnbull, the Liberal MP from Whitby, is sponsoring an electronic petition with the third-highest current number of signatures. It asks Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne to help ensure pensioners are getting the full benefits promised to them by their employers.
Video cameras in slaughterhouses
The House of Commons says that, since 2015, roughly 200 e-petitions and about 1,500 paper petitions have been presented every year.
During the 43rd Parliament, from 2019 to 2021, 1,284 petitions made it through the process and received a government response.
Liberal MP for Beaches—East York Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, who has a reputation as a maverick in the Liberal caucus, is sponsoring a petition that now has more than 3,660 signatures.
This petition, which is open for signatures until Aug. 24, is asking the federal government to require slaughterhouses to install video surveillance that could be accessed by Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials.
Erskine-Smith has been active on animal welfare issues in the past. His private member’s bill seeking to ban imports and sales of cat and dog fur, and imports of shark fins, failed to get the support it needed back in 2016.
Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is sponsoring a petition asking the federal government to require slaughterhouses to install video surveillance that can be accessed by Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials. (Megan Thomas/CBC)
Other petitions pursue more narrow changes to laws or regulations.
NDP MP Lisa Marie Barron is sponsoring a petition asking Canada Post and the revenue minister to introduce a temporary measure bumping up the per-kilometre allowance rates for employees by 15 per cent until the average price of gas drops below $1.75 a litre.
That petition is open until June 10 and currently has 1,950 signatures.
The parliamentary petition website lists 622 petitions, about 65 of which are electronic petitions open for signature. About 350 are closed and have received a government response; the rest remain open or have yet to get a response.
Nova Scotia RCMP say their investigation into two suspicious deaths earlier this month has concluded that one man died by homicide and the other by suicide.
The bodies of two men, aged 40 and 73, were found in a home in Windsor, N.S., on Sept. 3.
Police say the province’s medical examiner determined the 40-year-old man was killed and the 73-year-old man killed himself.
They say the two men were members of the same family.
No arrests or charges are anticipated, and the names of the deceased will not be released.
RCMP say they will not be releasing any further details out of respect for the family.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
For the first time in their history, members of the Cree community of Nemaska received a visit from a sitting Quebec premier on Sunday and were able to share first-hand the story of how they were displaced by a hydroelectric project in the 1970s.
François Legault was greeted in Nemaska by men and women who arrived by canoe to re-enact the founding of their new village in the Eeyou Istchee James Bay region, in northern Quebec, 47 years ago. The community was forced in the early 1970s to move from its original location because members were told it would be flooded as part of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydro project.
The reservoir was ultimately constructed elsewhere, but by then the members of the village had already left for other places, abandoning their homes and many of their belongings in the process.
George Wapachee, co-author of the book “Going Home,” said community members were “relocated for nothing.”
“We didn’t know what the rights were, or who to turn to,” he said in an interview. “That turned us into refugees and we were forced to abandon the life we knew.”
Nemaska’s story illustrates the challenges Legault’s government faces as it looks to build new dams to meet the province’s power needs, which are anticipated to double by 2050. Legault has promised that any new projects will be developed in partnership with Indigenous people and have “social acceptability,” but experts say that’s easier said than done.
François Bouffard, an associate professor of electrical engineering at McGill University, said the earlier era of hydro projects were developed without any consideration for the Indigenous inhabitants living nearby.
“We live in a much different world now,” he said. “Any kind of hydro development, no matter where in Quebec, will require true consent and partnership from Indigenous communities.” Those groups likely want to be treated as stakeholders, he added.
Securing wider social acceptability for projects that significantly change the landscape — as hydro dams often do — is also “a big ask,” he said. The government, Bouchard added, will likely focus on boosting capacity in its existing dams, or building installations that run off river flow and don’t require flooding large swaths of land to create reservoirs.
Louis Beaumier, executive director of the Trottier Energy Institute at Polytechnique Montreal, said Legault’s visit to Nemaska represents a desire for reconciliation with Indigenous people who were traumatized by the way earlier projects were carried about.
Any new projects will need the consent of local First Nations, Beaumier said, adding that its easier to get their blessing for wind power projects compared to dams, because they’re less destructive to the environment and easier around which to structure a partnership agreement.
Beaumier added that he believes it will be nearly impossible to get the public — Indigenous or not — to agree to “the destruction of a river” for a new dam, noting that in recent decades people have come to recognize rivers as the “unique, irreplaceable riches” that they are.
Legault’s visit to northern Quebec came on Sept. 15, when the community gathers every year to remember the founding of the “New Nemaska,” on the shores of Lake Champion in the heart of the boreal forest, some 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. Nemaska Chief Clarence Jolly said the community invited Legault to a traditional feast on Sunday, and planned to present him with Wapachee’s book and tell him their stories.
The book, published in 2022 along with Susan Marshall, is filled with stories of Nemaska community members. Leaving behind sewing machines and hunting dogs, they were initially sent to two different villages, Wapachee said.
In their new homes, several of them were forced to live in “deplorable conditions,” and some were physically and verbally abused, he said. The new village of Nemaska was only built a few years later, in 1977.
“At this time, families were losing their children to prison-schools,” he said, in reference to the residential school system. “Imagine the burden of losing your community as well.”
Thomas Jolly, a former chief, said he was 15 years old when he was forced to leave his village with all his belongings in a single bag.
Meeting Legault was important “because have to recognize what happened and we have to talk about the repercussions that the relocation had on people,” he said, adding that those effects are still felt today.
Earlier Sunday, Legault was in the Cree community of Eastmain, where he participated in the official renaming of a hydro complex in honour of former premier Bernard Landry. At the event, Legault said he would follow the example of his late predecessor, who oversaw the signing of the historic “Paix des Braves” agreement between the Quebec government and the Cree in 2002.
He said there is “significant potential” in Eeyou Istchee James Bay, both in increasing the capacity of its large dams and in developing wind power projects.
“Obviously, we will do that with the Cree,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEMASKA – For the first time in their history, members of the Cree community of Nemaska received a visit from a sitting Quebec premier on Sunday and were able to share first-hand the story of how they were displaced by a hydroelectric project in the 1970s.
François Legault was greeted in Nemaska by men and women who arrived by canoe to re-enact the founding of their new village in the Eeyou Istchee James Bay region, in northern Quebec, 47 years ago. The community was forced in the early 1970s to move from their original location because they were told it would be flooded as part of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydro project.
The reservoir was ultimately constructed elsewhere, but by then the members of the village had already left for other places, abandoning their homes and many of their belongings in the process.
George Wapachee, co-author of the book “Going Home,” said community members were “relocated for nothing.”
“We didn’t know what the rights were, or who to turn to,” he said in an interview. “That turned us into refugees and we were forced to abandon the life we knew.”
The book, published in 2022 by Wapachee and Susan Marshall, is filled with stories of Cree community members. Leaving behind sewing machines and hunting dogs, they were initially sent to two different villages, 100 and 300 kilometres away, Wapachee said.
In their new homes, several of them were forced to live in “deplorable conditions,” and some were physically and verbally abused, he said. The new village of Nemaska was only built a few years later, in 1977.
“At this time, families were losing their children to prison-schools,” he said, in reference to the residential school system. “Imagine the burden of losing your community as well.”
Legault’s visit came on Sept. 15, when the community gathers every year to remember the founding of the “New Nemaska,” on the shores of Lake Champion in the heart of the boreal forest, some 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. Nemaska Chief Clarence Jolly said the community invited Legault to a traditional feast on Sunday, and planned to present him with Wapachee’s book and tell him their stories.
Thomas Jolly, a former chief, said he was 15 years old when he was forced to leave his village with all his belongings in a single bag.
Meeting Legault was important “because have to recognize what happened and we have to talk about the repercussions that the relocation had on people,” he said, adding that those effects are still felt today.
Earlier Sunday, Legault had been in the Cree community of Eastmain, where he participated in the official renaming of a hydro dam in honour of former premier Bernard Landry.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
