New Democratic Party leader and Canada MP Jagmeet Singh was on Wednesday, 17 June, ordered out of the House of Commons for reportedly calling a fellow MP racist and refusing to apologise for his comment.
The NDP brought forward a motion to take concrete action on “systemic racism in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and calling for a review of its budget.”
Jagmeet Singh says Bloc Quebecois house leader MP Alain Therrien made a brushing-off hand gesture after refusing the necessary unanimous consent for this motion.
According to reports, Bloc Alain Therrien and Singh got into a verbal argument over lack of support for the Bill.
Anthony Rota, speaker of the House of Commons, ordered Singh out of the House for “his use of unparliamentary language and his refusal to apologise”.
In a statement, the Bloc reportedly said that racism in policing “should be studied by a parliamentary committee and that it was “inappropriate” for the NDP to preempt its conclusions.”
Jagmeet Singh also released a video testimony recounting what transpired.
“That gesture represents what racism is: that people don’t matter, that their lives don’t matter,” Singh said in an interview Thursday.
“It was symbolic of what we’re up against when we’re trying to challenge systemic racism … Policing that has caused violence and death to Indigenous and Black people needs to stop and that’s why that gesture to me represented exactly what Indigenous, Black and racialized people feel every day — that they do not matter.”
Singh’s accusation that Therrien is a racist boiled over into a second day of tense exchanges in Ottawa Thursday as Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet defended his MP and called the charge “stupefying” and misguided.
He also suggested he felt Singh’s remarks were aimed more broadly at his party, and he called for Singh to apologize for painting his party as discriminatory. He said the Bloc Quebecois had been fielding accusations of racism on social media since Wednesday afternoon.