Crucial Fact

  • His favourite word was scotia.

Last in Parliament November 2005, as Liberal MP for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour (Nova Scotia)

Won his last election, in 2008, with 39% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Department of Social Development Act June 6th, 2005

Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague's question both illustrates and emphasizes just how different the varying needs of our country's caregivers are.

He mentioned home care. One of our problems is that we have very different levels of home care depending on where we live in Canada. In my own province of Nova Scotia, for example, our home care program is not very robust. There is virtually no pediatric home care.

I recall a former colleague of mine, who had two autistic sons. I believe that at the time they were 12 and 14 years of age. Because she and her husband were working every hour they could, keeping in mind that one of them always had to be with the boys, every other hour was spent putting money into their care, not only in the present but more particularly for when the parents might not be there to take care of the boys. They got a letter from the Home Care Nova Scotia program indicating that their respite of two hours a week was being cut off because their income had gone up and was too high.

We need to recognize that these people who face these burdens--and also what was for them the joy of having these two boys at home--have a real financial burden. We have to tailor this to their needs.

In my own case when I had parents dying at home, I was one of seven children. My two sisters from Toronto moved into the family home in Nova Scotia and provided full time care to my parents. They were heroes to the rest of us. We all played a part. There were seven of us. We were not rich, but we were able to provide the care and we wanted to provide the care. My parents were sick for a short period of time and were less than six months in palliative care before they died.

Our circumstances, while sad, were not desperate at all. In fact, in many ways it was a learning experience for us, and our parents died reasonably comfortably at home. Our circumstances cannot be compared to those of somebody who has virtually no income or an employer who provides no support, or to those of somebody who cannot provide the nursing care at night.

That is why I think it is very important to have these discussions, as the minister of state is doing in going across the country and talking to caregivers in their communities and asking them what they need. In some cases, it might be a tax credit. In other cases, it might be more robust home care. In another case, it could be directly paying for benefits for veterans, children or people with special needs.

I think the key is that caregivers are individualized. There is no broad need across the country. There are just a lot of very individual needs. I am glad that the minister is going across Canada talking to these people individually so that we can provide some kind of suite of services for these people who take such a burden off the system, put it onto themselves and provide better care for their loved ones.

Department of Social Development Act June 6th, 2005

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to take part in this important debate. I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Beaches—East York.

There are many convincing arguments for the creation of Social Development Canada, which is what the legislation before us today makes possible. Surely none is more compelling than the new department's increased capacity to address the needs of caregivers, society's unsung heroes, who give so generously of themselves and their time to care for aged relatives or relatives with disabilities. Here I would like to mention Caregivers Nova Scotia from my own province, one of the most impressive caregiving organizations in Canada and a leading proponent of volunteer caregiving.

A key reason for creating SDC, Social Development Canada, is to provide a centre of expertise on social policy and programs so that Canada can maintain and surpass its international reputation as a caring society.

Nothing better reflects that commitment than the decision to appoint a Minister of State for Families and Caregivers, dedicated to identifying and implementing measures to better support these Canadians. The minister of state's new role signals the importance the Government of Canada attaches to family issues and recognizes the valuable role caregivers play in our society. The minister's sensitivity and his understanding of caregivers makes him well suited to this role.

Most unpaid caregivers are middle-aged and employed full time while caring for elderly relatives and persons with disabilities. Despite the challenges of juggling work and family life, on average these Canadians provide 23 hours of unpaid caregiving per month.

Like millions of Canadians, I have been a caregiver myself, in my case to my parents, who were dying of cancer but who were able to die at home where they lived, where they raised their family, where they were comfortable and where they were loved.

Our country would be very different and much poorer if it were not for the selfless efforts of so many Canadians who care for their loved ones, and as impressive as the numbers are, they are merely a harbinger of things to come. Today's baby boomers are fast becoming seniors. Because seniors now tend to live longer and because families are becoming smaller and more dispersed, the growing demand for caregiving has grown stronger, yet the capacity for caregiving is diminishing.

The role of the caregiver is already proving to be very difficult for many families. We understand the challenges these Canadians may face in balancing their professional life, their personal health needs, and family and caregiving responsibilities. We also know that many Canadians are faced with the dual role of raising their children while providing care to an aging parent, hence the so-called sandwich generation. In 2002, 27% of people aged 45 to 64 with children at home also cared for seniors.

I have met a large number of caregivers of varying circumstances. Each has a very compelling story. At this year's Caregivers Nova Scotia annual dinner, which the minister attended, we heard of a family, for example, whose father was diagnosed with cancer and shortly after that whose child was diagnosed as autistic. These stories are becoming far too common.

Not surprisingly, Canadians have told us that providing support to family caregivers must be a priority of the Government of Canada. There is no question that it is.

Our government currently provides a range of initiatives to assist family caregivers, including: tax credits for caregivers, infirm dependants and medical expenses, the last of which was recently enriched; transfers to support provincial and territorial programs, which include child care, respite care, and home care; the employment insurance compassionate care benefit, which offers up to six weeks of income replacement to family members who must leave work temporarily to care for a dying family member; the Canada pension plan general dropout provision, which exempts up to 15% of years of little or no earnings from a person's pension calculation and could be used to cover years spent in caregiving; labour legislation supporting flexibility in federally regulated workplaces; first nations health programming such as home, community care and adult care programs; and the veterans' independence program and respite care.

As proud as we are of these programs and services, there is a lot more to be done. That is exactly what Social Development Canada has been designed to do and intends to do.

The 2004 Speech from the Throne committed the department to consult with Canadians to find ways to improve support for unpaid caregivers. Key to this process will be working with provinces and territories and engaging parliamentarians, stakeholder groups and Canadian individuals in developing a comprehensive strategy to better meet the needs of caregivers.

Considerable progress has been made. At the November 2004 meeting, federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for social development discussed working together on a comprehensive strategy.

Both the Minister of Social Development and the Minister of State for Families and Caregivers have made it a personal priority to advance this agenda. For instance, the minister of state is currently in extensive discussions with the real experts on these challenges: Canadian caregivers themselves. He is crossing the country to consult with unpaid caregivers with first-hand experience, as well as experts and stakeholders involved in this field.

Since launching a series of round tables in January, the minister of state has heard how caregiving responsibilities often affect the caregivers' employment opportunities and income, their out of pocket expenses and their social, emotional and physical well-being. I was pleased to join the minister on the Atlantic leg of his round tables in my riding of Dartmouth—Cole Harbour.

In response to what he has heard, the minister of state has pledged to make sure that SDC develops citizen-focused policies and programs that better meet the needs of unpaid caregivers and those they care for: seniors, people with disabilities, and children, among the most vulnerable in our society.

That is the real strength of Social Development Canada. SDC was created to find more effective ways to meet the changing circumstances and expectations of families, children, Canadians with disabilities, seniors and caregivers.

By narrowing the department's focus to these key areas of social development, we can concentrate on issues that fall outside the labour market, issues that sometimes tend to be overlooked when the focus is primarily on the economy. Because of the division of responsibilities between Social Development Canada and HRSD Canada, we can better identify solutions to existing and emerging social problems, such as the pressures and stress that are faced by family caregivers, and engage a broad range of partners to support community development.

In creating Social Development Canada, Bill C-22 provides a focal point for social policy within the Government of Canada, enabling the department to become the real voice of social development. SDC's new structure helps us take a holistic approach to policy and program development. It creates new avenues for working with other federal departments, other levels of government, the private sector, the key voluntary sector and individual Canadians, and for improving the lives of children and families, seniors, and people with disabilities, as well as their caregivers.

The powers and authorities contained in this act will allow us to coordinate and develop better integrated strategies such as the one we are developing for Canada's caregivers, which will strengthen our country's social foundations and produce better results for Canadians. The example of caregiving underscores just how critical this work is to our nation. I call on my colleagues' support to carry on this vital activity by assuring this legislation passes quickly.

Forestry June 3rd, 2005

Mr. Speaker, the brown spruce longhorn beetle continues to cause hardship for woodlot owners and residents of the Halifax area. They have been unable to move downed trees from hurricane Juan outside a quarantine zone established by the CFIA in 2000. The situation is now made much more dangerous by the onset of another fire season.

In a letter dated June 2, the Minister of Natural Resources indicates that “CFIA is poised to take a more aggressive approach this coming field season”.

Could the Minister of Agriculture give us some detail on the plan and provide some help to these people who have been so dramatically affected by circumstances beyond their control?

Cole Harbour Place June 3rd, 2005

Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to and acknowledge the efforts of Mr. Michael LaGarde for his vision and leadership in directing Cole Harbour Place in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a premier and award winning facility that focuses on lifestyle and preventative medicine as a means of enhancing wellness within the Cole Harbour-Westphal communities.

Cole Harbour Place has become a focal point for physical activity, a wellness centre and community gatherings, and has been used as a template by other communities across the country.

Mr. LaGarde was the original general manager. He recently retired from Cole Harbour Place. It is people like Michael LaGarde who build communities. I wish him well as he enters his retirement and I congratulate him on his commitment and service to Cole Harbour Place.

Cole Harbour Place will continue to lead the way in the promotion of health and wellness. Mike's leadership will be felt by all who follow in his path.

Cadet Movement June 1st, 2005

Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, I was honoured to be the reviewing officer for the annual inspection of the Royal Canadian Sea Cadet Corps 24 Magnificent located in Dartmouth--Cole Harbour.

The Cadet Movement is one of the finest youth organizations in Canada and provided at no charge to parents. It allows young people to learn, to lead, to travel, to make new friends and to learn about their citizenship.

Whatever career choice these young men and women make, they will benefit from the leadership training with the cadets.

I want to pay particular tribute to two individuals who were highlighted this past weekend. Cadet CPO 2 Krista Raffel was awarded the Lord Strathcona Medal of Excellence for her above average leadership and personal commitment to her program and her fellow cadets. In addition, she was awarded a $1,000 scholarship. Chief Petty Officer First Class Scott Latham of the Royal Canada Sea Cadets 339 Iroquois Corps was named Sea Cadet of the Year by the Navy League of Canada, an award given for his dedication, enthusiasm, high academic achievement and volunteer spirit.

I congratulate all the cadets for their hard work, creative minds and love of country.

Business of Supply May 31st, 2005

Mr. Chair, I am pleased to have the opportunity to take part in the discussion this evening. I will be splitting my time with the Minister of State for Families and Caregivers and will have a question for him when I have had a chance to make a few comments. I truly do consider him to be a champion for some of the most vulnerable in our society.

I want to talk about an issue that is particularly important to me. It is the issue of voluntary caregiving. Caring for one another is a Canadian value. Across this country Canadians are caring for members of their families and for their friends and they are doing it more than they ever have before. For some people the responsibilities are manageable, but for some the demands are overwhelming.

Caregiving can be very intense for a long period of time. The personal and societal costs can be very high. There is a role for government to play in supporting unpaid family caregivers to help them meet their caring responsibilities to ensure that those who are receiving care have a high quality of life and that caregivers can provide support without significant risk to their own health and their own wealth.

Furthermore, by helping caregivers, governments are helping to relieve pressures on our formal health care system and our social services systems as well. Over 2.8 million Canadians are providing care to seniors, adults and children with disabilities and to Canadians with acute and long term health conditions.

Not all caregiving situations are the same. Caregiver situations are diverse depending on who they are, where they live, who they take care of, their level of income, their level of family support, their cultural background and a lot of different areas.

I want to talk about my own personal experience and put this in my own context. One of the most important experiences of my life was the period when my parents were dying and my family and my six brothers and sisters and I provided care so that they died at home. My father had stomach cancer and my mother had bowel cancer. From Christmas of 2002 until my mother's death on March 31 and my father's death on May 13, my two sisters, Shelagh and Brigid, gave up their jobs in Toronto and moved into the family home in Nova Scotia.

They were the primary caregivers to mom and dad. Led by them, we all provided care. We took turns. We came together as a family, quite often three times a day, to say prayers with them, to provide medication and to provide comfort and all the things that had to happen.

Of course it was a sad time for the family, but in many ways it was very rewarding as well. Not only did we grow in our faith, but we grew in our closeness as a family. There is not one of us who would be able to say that we were not enriched by the experience of being with our parents while they died after they had spent a lifetime giving to us. We never regretted being there. We never regretted the opportunity to give back to parents who gave so much to us.

But we had some real advantages in spite of this difficult time for our family. We were not a wealthy family, but we had enough financial resources. There were seven of us so we took turns, although my two sisters, Shelagh and Brigid, took the bulk of the load. We all took turns and that made it a lot easier.

It was a short period of time. I can vividly recall my father saying to me after my mother passed away, “I'm going to go into a hospital and be taken care of from the hospital and you kids are going to go on with your lives”. He said that was what he wanted to do, but we knew he did not want to do that. We knew that deep down he was just being the stubborn old man that he always was. He wanted us to convince him that we wanted to take care of him, which we did. That is what happened. I remember the day he said to us that he would let us take care of him, but the only reason he would, he said, was that he knew he was not going to live very long because he wanted us to get on with our lives.

So we had resources and it was a short period of time, but we also had employers who understood our situation. Each and every one of had companies we worked for that understood the situation or partners who understood and allowed us the time we needed to make this situation happen. We also had a lot of support from people such as Jack McNeil, a dear friend of our family and a deacon in the Catholic church, who provided spiritual guidance.

Most people do not have those advantages. What was a sad but rewarding experience for us is a very stressful experience for many Canadians who do not have the level of income that they need to be able to take time off work and care for loved ones, be they adults, a spouse or a parent, or children who may be autistic or have other challenges. Those are very stressful times for Canadians and they are times when we as the Government of Canada need to support them.

It is difficult. There is no question about it. The demands placed on caregivers decrease their own capacity to provide quality care. If we as a government do not provide support it can negatively impact not only the quality of life of the people who are being cared for but that of the people who are providing care. Caregiving involves costs to caregivers, employers and society. Caregivers can lose income and have greater out of pocket expenses. There can be costs to employers to accommodate employees with caregiving opportunities.

I want to talk a little about the minister. I have had a chance to spend a great deal of time with him. He has taken the time to come to Nova Scotia, as he has for other parts of Canada, and do round tables with caregivers, because they quite often tend to be the forgotten people in society.

In Nova Scotia, I became a little bit involved with Caregivers Nova Scotia because of my own experience and have had the opportunity to meet many other people whose burdens are almost unimaginable.

The minister was with me in Halifax last month as the guest speaker to Caregivers Nova Scotia. One of the people who was honoured that day was someone who I believe had a spouse who was dying of cancer and whose child was diagnosed as autistic and Down's syndrome. How do people cope with that? How do people who do not have a significant income cope with that kind of pressure and responsibility?

One reason why we all got into politics was to help those who need help, not those who do not. When people are doing something to support the people they love and at the same time are taking a huge burden off the system, what better cause could there be for a government to support than that?

I know that the minister has spent a lot of time on this. I appreciate it, as do people at Caregivers Nova Scotia and other people across the country. Perhaps he could talk a little about what the government is doing to help all the volunteer caregivers who give so much of their time and energy to help friends and family members.

Atlantic Accord May 19th, 2005

Mr. Speaker, recently, during the first budget vote, the three Conservative members of Parliament from Nova Scotia chose not to support the budget and the Atlantic accord, an accord that will result in $830 million upfront for Nova Scotia, a commitment on the part of the Prime Minister going well beyond his original proposal of last June. It would provide much needed relief from the crushing debt built up in Nova Scotia by the Conservatives in the 1980s under John Buchanan and Greg Kerr.

The Conservative members now want to play optical illusions with their constituents and vote for one budget bill while just minutes later standing and voting to bring down the government, knowing full well they will kill the Atlantic accord.

Recently, the students union at Dalhousie University sent a letter on behalf of 16,000 students appealing to the three Nova Scotia Conservative MPs to support the budget and the accord. These students and all Nova Scotians are asking MPs to ensure the passage of the Atlantic accord and to stand up for Nova Scotia.

Health May 17th, 2005

Madam Speaker, a new private medical clinic is scheduled to open in the metro Halifax-Dartmouth region. This proposed clinic apparently will target medical procedures that do not fall under the provisions of the Canada Health Act, such as certain cosmetic procedures, but if services provided are contingent on human resources that work within our publicly funded system, that is a concern. Our public system must be the priority.

Canadians and the residents of Dartmouth—Cole Harbour do not want to stifle innovative approaches to health care delivery, but are firm in their resolve that our health care system must be publicly funded and publicly delivered. I believe in the Canada Health Act and Canadians believe in the Canada Health Act because it goes to the core of who we are: a nation that believes that our strength comes from our commitment to provide care to all.

Access to health care must be based on need and not one's ability to pay. There can be no compromise on this issue.

An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments May 16th, 2005

Madam Speaker, what the member is suggesting is that these initiatives are brand new and were never touched upon by the Liberals until the NDP suddenly came along and said that the government had better do something in affordable house or post-secondary education.

One of the four key initiatives was affordable housing. We have put $2 billion a year into affordable housing that we want the provinces to match.

We put in $9 billion for the environment, in what was already the greenest budget in the history of this country. The $1.5 billion for post-secondary education after we had put $11 billion into research and post-secondary institutions in Canada.

I will go to the people in Dartmouth--Cole Harbour against whomever I may be up against and I will say very proudly that this is a Liberal budget.

An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments May 16th, 2005

Madam Speaker, the member raised a lot of questions. I will try to go from memory and pick them off one by one.

The member spoke about affordable housing. He asked why we needed to have the NDP to bring that money into the budget. We in this government have done a lot in affordable housing in Canada in the last few years; last year we campaigned on it. One of the problems we have had is that some provinces, including my own province of Nova Scotia, would not match the money. There was $13 million put aside for Nova Scotia that was not matched by the provincial government.

The federal government identified this as a priority. We said we would actually make it easier for the provinces to match those moneys. We said we would increase the flexibility; so perhaps rent supplements are a way to go. We are going in that direction. I mentioned the announcement we made in Dartmouth—Cole Harbour for people who cannot not afford housing, who do not have access to decent housing, and who are mental health consumers. We have now reached a deal with the province of Nova Scotia to address that.

In terms of the environment, this was already called the greenest budget in Canadian history, with huge investments in the environment: retrofitting, energy efficiency and a whole slate of initiatives. I think anyone on this side of the House would be pleased to debate the environment with anyone else in the House.

If we do go into an election soon I will certainly take the budget with me. I will be going with the environment, with affordable housing and with international development, and I will be saying that we have a record: we have made promises, we have kept them, and Bill C-48 only makes it that much better.