Rosane Doré Lefebvre

[Invisible Work, April 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday was Invisible Work Day, and today I am pleased to speak to Motion No. 500, which seeks to recognize the contribution of unpaid work.

Caregivers, parents who care for their children at home and community volunteers are just a few examples of people who do invisible work.

Motion No. 500 calls on the federal government to reinstate the mandatory long form census and include questions on invisible work, to ask Statistics Canada to hold a public consultation, and to take measures to advance the equality of people who do invisible work and improve their economic security.

I want to thank the many organizations in Laval that can attest to the importance of invisible work in our community, including the TCLCF, AFEAS, Mieux-naître de Laval, the Centre des femmes dynamiques de Laval, the Auteuil family outreach centre, and Appui pour les proches aidants in Laval.

Invisible work is essential to all our communities, and it is high time that the Conservative government recognized its valuable contribution to our society.

[Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act, March 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech. We have heard some very interesting things in the House today.

About 80% of the riding that I represent is made up of farmers. The area has a lot of farmland. We do not grow a lot of grain, but I know quite a bit about the situation and about how important it is to discuss Bill C-30 and to hear from as many witnesses as possible in committee.

I do not know how the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food works. I know more about other committees. However, I do know that, unfortunately, over the course of this session, the Conservatives have not wanted to discuss issues. This is becoming customary. I would like the member to expand on that.

Does the member really believe that the government will accept the amendments proposed? Does he think that the Conservative government will be able to accommodate the many witnesses who want to testify regarding Bill C-30?

[Privacy, March 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, quite frankly, I am not surprised to see the Conservatives stooping so low, as they typically do, on an issue as serious as cyberbullying.

This bill has been before the House for months now. Canadians want transparency on how their personal information is being handled. They do not want political games or troubling provisions on electronic surveillance brought in through the back door in a bill on cyberbullying.

Why are the Conservatives afraid of debating their own provisions on surveillance in Bill C-13?

[Privacy, March 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, no wonder Canadians do not trust the Conservative government to protect their privacy. First, the Conservatives tried an Internet snooping bill, but that was killed by the minister's offensive comments. Now they have a bill that is supposed to stop cyberbullying, but the Conservatives cannot help themselves and are trying to sneak in unrelated measures that would let them take Canadians' personal information from telecom companies.

Is that why the Conservatives ended the debate early? Did they think no one would notice?

[Neighbourhood and Family Outreach Centres in Alfred-Pellan, March 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today in the House to acknowledge the exceptional work of the employees and volunteers at the neighbourhood and family outreach centres in my riding.

In Alfred-Pellan, we are lucky to have a number of agencies that work hard to make our community more welcoming and dynamic. The Vimont neighbourhood centre, and the Saint François and Auteuil family outreach centres are a few of the agencies that support thousands of people in Laval every year.

I want to commend the Saint François family outreach centre in particular for its new community initiative, a community newspaper called La Voix de St-François. Everyone in Saint François was delighted to receive this publication in their mailbox and we are already looking forward to reading the next issue.

To all the employees and volunteers at these agencies that are so important to our communities, thank you very much. Your devotion and hard work are essential to the well-being of the people of Laval.

[Food and Drugs Act, March 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Oakville for his comments. I must say, I am very happy that the bill contains provisions to change the current system.

As I already mentioned, the NDP will vote in favour of Bill C-17, and we look forward to discussing it in committee in order to make some changes that are even more significant. I appreciate the comments from the member for Oakville.

[Food and Drugs Act, March 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, today I am honoured to be speaking to Bill C-17, An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act.

Before I begin, I would like to thank the hon. member for Oakville for the courage and determination he has shown in having this bill introduced in the House and in supporting it, as it touches him personally.

It is very important that we debate such a sensitive and important bill. The federal government must shoulder its responsibilities regarding the Food and Drugs Act. It is good that we are debating this today. I would like to assure the hon. member opposite, the member for Oakville, that the official opposition will be supporting the bill.

I understand that the minister would be open to amendments. We would be more than pleased to participate in the debate and put forward amendments to Bill C-17 so that it can be improved and so that we create the best legislation possible. In that way, we can keep cases like Vanessa's and so many others from happening in Canada.

The NDP will be supporting Bill C-17, which makes several key improvements to drug safety laws.

First, it allows the government to recall drugs or order the distributor to take corrective action to remedy the problem with the drug. That is an extremely important element, one that I will come back to later on in my speech.

Second, it allows the health minister to order a manufacturer or importer to modify the label of a drug to update the side effects or health risks associated with it. The minister can also order a review of the drug and require that a copy of the review be given to the department. In addition, the minister can require manufacturers to update Canadian information about the risks associated with their drug even if the safety risks were discovered in other countries

This bill is a good first step in establishing a comprehensive drug plan and in setting the course for our society on this issue. After calls from many health care professionals and advocates, this bill will finally grant the health minister the necessary power to pull unsafe drugs from the market and ensure better labelling of possible adverse effects of drugs.

We support this legislative measure and we hope that even more practical measures will follow. We support this bill, but there is still much to be done to improve drug safety measures. We will therefore propose amendments to improve this bill in committee.

We hope that our efforts will lead to a comprehensive piece of legislation that will include follow-up by Health Canada on adverse drug reactions, increased transparency with regard to the assessment of prescription drugs and a better system for communicating the risks associated with drugs to health care professionals and patients, in particular.

As I mentioned, this bill will make it possible for the government to compel manufacturers to recall drugs and order distributors to take corrective action to resolve problems with their products. In this regard, at the end of her speech, my colleague from Halifax gave the example of a mistake that was made in 2011 by the manufacturer of Alesse 28.

Alesse 28 is a type of birth control pill that generally works on a 28-day cycle. Women take the product for the first 21 days and then they take a placebo for the remaining seven days. The placebos are often just sugar pills. The problem that occurred had to do with the content of the pills. Rather than containing 21 birth control pills, a package of the product contained two weeks' worth of placebo pills.

Obviously, this can have a rather serious impact on a woman's menstrual cycle. I do not necessarily want to get into the details of how the menstrual cycle works, but having good birth control that works is really very important.

Since 1969, the year in which woman were given access to oral contraceptives, thousands of women in Canada and throughout the world have been using this method of birth control. I have used it myself, as many other female members of the House likely have, and many Canadian women use it.

It is an extremely important part of our family planning, for all sorts of reasons. There are various reasons why women use birth control. A drug that does not have the anticipated effect can have an extremely harmful impact on the health of women and on family planning.

These thousands of women trust in the system, in our health care system and in the drug manufacturers. The women affected by this problem experienced low hormone levels, which caused a number of problems. The main purpose of the product is to prevent ovulation. The placebos prevent that prevention, so to speak, and allow the woman to ovulate. That can have a serious impact on family planning.

Bill C-17 could do something about this. How did people find out about this mistake? Pharmaceutical companies were certainly not forthcoming about it. Pharmacists were the ones who sounded the alarm after noticing that there was a problem with the drugs they were selling. If the pharmacists had not spoken up and told people about the situation, the pharmaceutical companies surely would not have told anyone. There is no telling how far the situation might have gone.

It is good to know that with Bill C-17, new provisions will enable the federal government to do something. Currently, it cannot do anything about situations like that. The government has no power to act. It is very important to create legislation to address these situations. I am speaking on behalf of many women who believe that the federal government should have a say in the matter. We have to make sure that women have access to the best possible drugs, the best possible oral contraceptives.

Once again, I would like to thank the member for Oakville for introducing this measure in his bill.

As I said, we will support this bill at second reading, and we will probably put forward a number of amendments in committee just to make it better. That said, we do think that it is a step in the right direction.

We would like to see several more things in this bill. I know that I will not be able to go into detail because my time is almost up, but the bill ought to include a number of measures, such as optimal prescribing practices to ensure that Canadians are being prescribed the most appropriate drugs. Public disclosure of clinical trial results is also important because, in Canada, the results of numerous clinical trials are never published or made available to the public. We are also asking the government to strengthen the common drug review.

In closing, I would like to say that Bill C-17 is a step in the right direction and that the federal government has to step up to its responsibility with respect to the Food and Drugs Act. I am also pleased that the government is so open to amendments that might be put forward. I am very happy that we are talking about this bill in the House. I can assure the member for Oakville that we will vote in favour of the bill and that we will make sure it is the best it can be.

[Public Safety, March 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to answer the parliamentary secretary.

She spoke of victims' rights. Victims rights are addressed by rehabilitating inmates. If we want to have fewer and fewer victims, then we must respect what the correctional system is meant to do. One of its two main functions is to rehabilitate inmates in order to enhance public safety. Experts agree on this. In fact, one of those experts is the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, Sue O'Sullivan. By cutting inmate reintegration programs, the Conservative government is undermining the safety of our communities and hindering the correctional system. It is not by cutting reintegration programs that we are going to make our communities safer.

I am sure that the parliamentary secretary agrees with me on that.

[Public Safety, March 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, on November 28, 2013, I asked a question regarding our correctional system, which is having a very hard time rehabilitating Canadian prisoners.

The question had to do with the report by the Correctional Investigator, Howard Sapers, who revealed that a large number of prisoners who are members of minority groups, for example aboriginal offenders, leave prison without having accessed programs or having received the rehabilitation they absolutely need. The minister claimed that there was nothing to worry about and that the existing programs were quite adequate. I disagree.

This Conservative government continues to ignore the negative impact of its Safe Streets and Communities Act. By bringing in mandatory minimum penalties and harsher punishments for young people, the Conservatives have plunged us into a real crisis. The prison population is drastically increasing.

It has been established and documented that aboriginal people and visible minorities are over-represented in Canadian prisons. The number of aboriginal prisoners has increased by 46%. They now represent one-quarter of all inmates, but only 4% of the Canadian population.

The numbers are even worse for aboriginal women, who have seen an 80% rise. Nearly one-third of women in jail are aboriginal, although they represent just 5% of the women in this country.

Things are just as bad for visible minorities. The population of black, Hispanic, Asian and Indian inmates has grown by nearly 75%. Specifically, the number of Afro-Canadians in federal institutions has grown by 90% since 2003.

In his damning report, Mr. Sapers gave a detailed description of the cultural transformation occurring within our prison system and suggested that the federal government create a clearer, more culturally appropriate corrections policy to support the rehabilitation of people belonging to these groups. He recommended introducing culturally appropriate programs, hiring multilingual staff and establishing ethnicity liaison officer positions in Canadian institutions.

Despite the urgency of the situation, the minister brushed off the recommendations. Obviously, he needs a little reminder. Rehabilitation is one of the two main objectives of incarceration. If the government is truly committed to making our streets and communities safer, it has to reduce the risk of people reoffending.

Our priority should be to ensure that our correctional system can deliver effective rehabilitation programs. Aboriginal people and visible minorities have the right to culturally appropriate programs that take their identity and their community realities into account. We will not help them reintegrate into society by isolating them even more.

On the contrary, more often than not, because of the Conservative government's failure to act, they do not reintegrate successfully and end up reoffending. So many individuals left to their own devices continue to grapple with the same problems as before and end up back in court. By not breaking that vicious cycle, we end up wasting public funds.

Now that the minister has had several months to digest the numbers in Howard Sapers' report, does he understand the magnitude of the crisis?

[Employees' Voting Rights Act, March 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on behalf of many people who would have liked to speak to this bill. I will try to use my time wisely tonight to share with the House both my point of view and that of a union that is close to my heart. I am fortunate to be the NDP deputy critic for public safety. It being such a large file, one that includes police services, the RCMP and federal penitentiaries, I have the opportunity to meet exceptional people who work day in and day out to keep us safe. I salute them.

I salute the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, the UCCO-SACC, which does outstanding work every day to protect us and to make our communities, our cities and our towns safe. Their work is incredibly important for public safety because they ensure that we are safe and that those detained in our prisons are as well. These people put their lives on the line every day. I work closely with them to ensure that their voices are heard in Parliament and that we understand what they face on a daily basis.

Until recently, there were three federal penitentiaries in my riding of Laval: the Leclerc Institution, the Montée Saint-François Institution and the Federal Training Centre. Unfortunately, as a result of a Conservative government decision, the Leclerc Institution was shut down last year. We still do not understand why, though, because there was a need for it, especially in light of the implications of Bill C-10, the omnibus bill implemented by that same Conservative government.

These people are incredible workers. I worked closely with Diderot at the Leclerc Institution, who is now at the Federal Training Centre. I often work with Michel and Manon, the union representatives at the Montée Saint-François Institution and the Federal Training Centre. I know that they work hard to keep us safe. A lot happens inside our prisons that goes unmentioned. No one talks about double-bunking, which puts the work and lives of our correctional officers in danger every day. No one talks about workers' safety, the new workload resulting from the implementation of Bill C-10, the restrictive measures or the budget cuts in our federal penitentiaries. That affects them greatly.

I would like to point out that “federal penitentiaries” means “federal employees”. Bill C-525 affects them directly. I would like to quote their position on Bill C-525:

Bill C-525: an attack on union democracy. Bill C-525 is the [Conservative] government's attack on the very existence of unions in job sectors governed by the Canada Labour Code, including the federal public service, which governs the job rules for 800,000 Canadian workers. Dressed up as a way to increase union democracy by the party that brought us robocalls, voter suppression, election-expense violations and the Senate scandal, the bill in fact does exactly the opposite.

I could not agree more with the UCCO-SACC. They go on to say:

[The] Conservative MP [for] Wetaskiwin introduced the so-called Employee’s Voting Rights Act as a private member’s bill...

Important to note is the fact that private member’s bills are not subject to constitutional verification by Justice department lawyers—as are government bills—to see if they conform to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is no doubt one reason why the [Conservative] government prefers to introduce oppressive legislation of this sort via private member’s bills.

In the case of Bill C-525, [the Conservative government] is attacking our fundamental right of association by making certification of new unions much more difficult, and conversely, the decertification of existing unions much easier.

The bill does so by adding another, unnecessary, step to the tried-and-true method of the card-check system, which opens the process up to employer intimidation. The government’s anti-democratic habits come to the fore in this part of Bill C-525. It will only require a minority of members (45%) to initiate a decertification vote overseen by the Canada Labour Board, which, you will recall from a previous tract, will now be politicized under Bill C-4.

Incredibly, Bill C-525 flies in the face of basic democratic principles by requiring that 50% plus one of all employees [and I would like to add that the principle of 50% plus one forms the very foundation of our society in our electoral system], not just those who participate in the ballot, vote in favour of the union. In other words, those who choose not to vote, or who are unable to vote, would be counted as votes against the union in certification or decertification votes.

It is incredible to think that a piece of legislation would determine the meaning of the votes of people who do not vote or who cannot be present to vote for some reason or another. In a federal, provincial or municipal election, when someone does not vote, it does not mean that he or she is voting for someone; it simply means that he or she did not vote. This decision is appalling. My quote continues:

Those who are ill, vacationing or have family emergencies may be in favour of having a union, but will be considered as No votes.

This legislation is only one part of a series of attacks by the [Conservative] government intended to weaken the labour movement and the ability of workers to organize themselves in their workplace. The process of signing membership cards is the best way to protect workers from the pressure tactics of some employers. To impose a vote is to open the door to threats and intimidation. Studies have demonstrated that the government’s proposed process leads to a 10% to 20% decrease in union membership where it has been adopted.

I would like to thank all UCCO-SACC members across Canada. I would especially like to thank the Laval members, whom I know very well: union representatives Manon and Michel. They are doing an incredible job of standing up for workers' rights and the safety of their workplace.

All three of us talked about this at length. I know that they strongly oppose this bill. I am proud to be their voice in the House today. It is incredible to think that a government like the one opposite, which constantly says it wants to protect our communities, is not helping the workers in federal penitentiaries. That is ridiculous.

I am going to talk about more than just the fact that this is going to affect conditions for unions in federal detention centres. Bill C-525 touches on other aspects. I would like to cite some statistics for my colleagues opposite that might change their minds. Perhaps they will vote against Bill C-525.

Better wages negotiated by unions inject approximately $786 million into the Canadian economy every week. That is a lot of money. If we have so much money pouring into the economy, it is because of workers who got together and decided to form a union. I would like to thank them today.

Furthermore, as a woman, I am proud to say that unionized women make $6.65 more per hour than non-unionized women. That is huge.

I know that my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie wanted to talk about the World Bank, but unfortunately did not have the time to do so in his speech. Therefore, in closing, I will talk briefly about the World Bank and its views on unions.

The World Bank has pointed out the positive role unions play in domestic economies. In a 2002 document based on more than 1,000 studies of the impact of unions on domestic economies, the World Bank found that a high rate of unionization led to greater income equality, lower unemployment and inflation, higher productivity and a quicker response to economic downturns.

We should all vote against Bill C-525, which is clearly an insult to workers' rights.