Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise today and speak to Bill C-81, the barrier-free Canada act.
This proposed act aims to make Canada more accessible for all people but especially for those with physical or developmental disabilities. An act like this is essentially good. It works to ensure and enshrine the dignity of the human person. So often today we find that the inherent dignity of the human person is cast aside for various reasons, perhaps out of ignorance. More often than not, the victims of society's disregard for human dignity are those among us who have to deal with a physical or developmental disability.
I would like to share my earliest and first experience with someone outside of my house who has become family to me. I call him my brother. His name is Ian McCluskey.
Ian is 29 years old. He is a high school graduate. He is a brother, a son and in the last year, a very proud new uncle to Monrow McCluskey. Ian is compassionate and hilarious with a sharp wit. He is focused and smart. Ian also happens to have been born with Down's syndrome, but he is never less than, and he is a wonderful man. He is my brother and a really great guy. He has taught me so much about myself. Ian adds so much to the lives of everyone he has gone to school with, worked with, his biological family and his extended family, of which I am fortunate that Ian includes me as part of. He is certainly deserving of all the dignity of any person.
A society and a government's recognition of the dignity of the human person is a foundational building block for a just and moral society. This must be paired with the rejection of the idea that some people are worth less than others and can so easily be rejected and cast to the peripheries. That is why the bill before us is so important, because people are inherently good and worthwhile.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, discrimination on the basis of disability. The Canadian Human Rights Act recognizes that all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have and to have their needs accommodated without discrimination and, in particular, discrimination on the basis of disability. However, what are rights and freedoms, particularly human rights, without recognition of the value of people and their inherent dignity as human persons?
Sure, we can point at the natural law saying that as humans we have a set of universal rights that have always been dictated by our nature and the nature of the world, or we can say that we have rights because the state prescribes them to us. Either way, the fact remains that we must know the dignity of the human person if we are to be a just and moral society.
Over the last century, we have seen exactly what happens when a state throws human dignity away. We know the atrocities undertaken by violent regimes. Under those regimes, the people that this very bill pays special attention to would have been disposed of, because they were seen as worthless. Many members of the House were alive when this was happening in Cambodia. People with physical or developmental disabilities were killed wholesale. It is not like this was some far-off time. We do not have to try to imagine. The Cambodian genocide happened in the 1970s. Therefore, we do not have to think too hard or too far back. We know what it is like when the dignity of the human person is cast away. It happened, and we need to strive to make sure that it never happens again.
A massive part of making society more accessible is to remove barriers to community. People find their highest good when in community and are able to feel that they belong. Early in my life, in my own home, I learned from the greatest teachers I have ever had or will ever have, my mom Anne and my dad Chris. My mom is visually impaired and has dealt with blindness her whole life. In spite of the challenges that has presented her with, she is a university graduate and brilliant woman who has taught me more than any textbook or teacher on any number of subjects. I am sure my mom learns more and reads more in a week than I do over many months.
One very important thing my mom taught me about was this very subject: the value of community. My mom served as a director on the L'Arche board in my community. As many will know, L'Arche is the creation of Jean Vanier. He was able to experience this through his work with the intellectually and developmentally disabled before he recently passed away. He was the son of a governor general. After visiting asylums in France and seeing the suffering of the patients who were wholly excluded from society, Jean Vanier set out to build a community where people with and without intellectual disabilities could live and work alongside one another as equals.
His first community started in a rundown house northeast of Paris that was without electricity or running water. Vanier said of the two men who came to live with him in the first house, “What was surprising to begin with was Raphael and Felipe had both been terribly humiliated, pushed away, put into an institution. Their families didn’t want them anymore, and so I welcomed them. And then, this gradual discovery of how they were opening up, rejoicing, and becoming someone.”
That first house eventually expanded, becoming the first of 154 communities across 38 countries that today form the network that I previously referenced as L'Arche International. By creating a barrier-free environment where these people could work and belong, Jean Vanier created a lesson for all of us, especially in this House, that lesson brought to me very early in life by my mom, a great teacher.
This bill is a step in the right direction, but comes after years of government foot dragging. The slow pace and generally lethargic attitude of the government when it comes to important legislation is, I would say, astonishing. That has had a negative effect on many people, like the people this bill makes provisions for.
We can look at the record of the previous Conservative government mentioned by the speakers before me this evening to see effective legislation that was passed in successive years to help people with disabilities. That Conservative government established registered disability savings plans. These plans allowed parents and the families of children with disabilities to set aside money for the future in an account where it can grow tax-free until it is needed.
I see that I have just a minute left before we adjourn. I am not through all of the remarks I would like to deliver, but I will say that this bill begins to address the dignity of the human person and that this is truly important. Human beings rely on all sorts of relationships, recognizing the necessity of collaboration. The spirit of this bill is commendable and a step in the right direction. It recognizes the inherent human dignity in people with physical or developmental disabilities and it is an important step in the right direction for all of us.