Alexa McDonough

[Maher Arar Inquiry, May 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the public inquiry into Canada's role in the deportation of Maher Arar has finally resumed public hearings and it is about time. Canadians can now learn who played what role in Arar's deportation and his horrific ordeal in Syria. Canada's previous foreign affairs minister tried to cook up a deal with the Bush administration to avoid this public inquiry.

Will this government finally end the stonewalling, table all documents, and allow an open and transparent inquiry to get to the bottom of this horrendous injustice?

[Alzheimer's Disease, April 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted this afternoon to have an opportunity to speak on the motion that is before us, and to indicate my personal support and that of my caucus for Motion No. 170 that addresses the desperate need for a national strategy on Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

I am delighted to have an opportunity to do so because there are a number of things that need to be said if we are serious about making this Parliament work. This is very practical and concrete. It is something that would make an enormous difference in the short, medium and long term for those who are now struggling with Alzheimer's disease. It will also assist support workers who are helping families deal with the disease and over the longer term for those who are working very hard on research to find a cure.

This is something about which I have a great deal of personal experience. My dad died of Alzheimer's disease. It was a great sadness to me. I was born in Ottawa and my father worked on the Hill as the first researcher of the CCF, the forerunner to the New Democratic Party. We moved back to Nova Scotia and lived there. He passed away just before I became the federal leader of the New Democratic Party. Had he still been alive, sadly, he would not have understood what that meant.

It is a devastating disease that literally wipes out memory and cognitive abilities. He was aphasic, could not speak and was immobilized in a wheelchair in his latter days. He was fiercely devoted to health promotion and prevention. Just as tens of thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands of people who have been struggling with this disease and lost the fight against Alzheimer's, the latter days of his life were very difficult.

That experience makes me very supportive of the cry for a national strategy for Alzheimer's disease. I want to pay credit to the member for Thornhill who introduced this motion, as well as to the health critic of the New Democratic Party who is very supportive. We know this is the kind of issue that simply cannot fall prey to divisions of any kind among members of the House.

I am very proud of the research that is being done by an outstanding medical research team in Nova Scotia associated with Dalhousie University. They are doing superb research while also offering amazing teaching to health professionals and support workers who are constantly learning about how best to support patients and families who are dealing with Alzheimer's.

Recently, the Nova Scotia Alzheimer's Society, like similar societies right across the country that have been doing yeoman service with totally inadequate resources, held a breakfast fundraiser, but probably more important than the fundraising potential of that particular event was the community education that was offered.

When I looked at the program, I groaned and thought, “Good heavens, over breakfast we are going to hear six speeches from six medical researchers and we are going to be here all day”. This was an event chaired by Bill Carr, a close friend and colleague, who is the official spokesperson for the Alzheimer Society of Canada, and speaks with enormous passion to the challenges of dealing with Alzheimer's and does it with the most endearing humour that I have never known.

It may be hard for people to imagine. Maybe one has to struggle with Alzheimer's in one's family or someone near and dear to understand why humour is such an important part of the tool kit needed to deal with Alzheimer's.

After a very humourous introduction, Mr. Carr was a very tight MC who allowed each of six speakers three minutes each. Mr. Speaker, you would have been impressed with six speakers who could speak for no more than three minutes each and in that time allotment give us an amazingly clear glimpse of the important research that is being done.

If it were not for the Alzheimer's Society working to drive this agenda all the time, if it were not for the National Advisory Council on Aging and the many others in the broad human services field who have worked together, families struggling with Alzheimer's and Alzheimer's patients today would not be living with improved quality. There have been important breakthroughs in terms of drugs.

One of the things about a national strategy is the importance of our having a national pharmaceutical program, a national drug program. As it exists today, shamefully, there are five provinces in this country that do not make those drugs available under existing drug programs. That is one of the many reasons we need a national strategy. We need a national strategy that deals with the education in the sensitization not just of decisions but all health care workers.

I have personal knowledge of how devastating it is for a family to have the spouse of someone struggling with Alzheimer's go to the family doctor and say, “I really feel there is increasing evidence that my spouse has Alzheimer's”, and have the doctor say, “Well, why do you want me to try to diagnose it? Because you can't really do anything about it anyway. Just live with it”.

That was probably the single most devastating thing that my mother had to live with in the early stages of my father's Alzheimer's. Yet, it is the person, the loved one, the family member closest to the Alzheimer's patient who always can see, usually before the evident memory loss, mood changes, behavioural changes, uncharacteristic outbursts of difficult behaviour, irritability and unreasonableness.

We need to ensure that the educational support is there and is assured across the country. It is not episodic or accidental as to whether every single person working in the health care system, in human services, has that kind of education that allows them to be part of early detection as well as providing the kind of care needed. We need to address the compassionate care leave inadequacy in the current legislation that the government has brought in.

My colleague from Sackville—Eastern Shore must take a huge amount of credit for pressing this issue to ensure that there is a way in which a family member dealing with a victim of a debilitating disease and nearing death can be supported in terms of being able to take leave from a job, for example, if that is what is required and have some income replacement. However, what the government has done is totally inadequate in that regard.

I know the member for Sackville--Eastern shore has already tried to press the government further to deal with the virtual abandonment of the promise and the commitment made. The government has made the eligibility so restrictive that there are family members who want and are able to devote themselves to the care of a victim and a dying family member, but who are outside the narrow definition of what family members can qualify.

Further, the narrow time of six weeks compassionate care does not come anywhere close to addressing the realistic needs of families. We are talking about the dying days of Alzheimer's patients and about the whole range of debilitating diseases that are resulting in death, and where that compassionate care is desperately needed. If we want to make this Parliament work and impress upon Canadians that we are serious, we will deal with the inadequacy of that compassionate care.

Finally, home care was promised in 1993 by this government and in every election since. We still do not have what is remotely adequate in the way of a national home care system. It needs to be part of the national strategy.

We are pleased to support this motion. We hope we can cooperate with early passage to send a clear signal to the government that it needs to get on with dealing with this matter.

[Committees of the House, April 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour today to present, in both official languages, the fifth report adopted by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, urging the government to send a monitoring team to Ethiopia to observe and report on the general elections taking place on May 15, 2005.

[Infrastructure, April 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of State for Infrastructure and Communities.

Before gutting infrastructure funding, the federal government contributed customarily one-third of water and sewer infrastructure costs.

Today, Herring Cove residents in my riding face prohibitive costs for long-awaited services because the federal government has reduced its contribution to less than one-sixth of the cost.

Will the minister agree to get beyond the rhetoric and ensure concretely that Herring Cove residents will finally get their service and water at a cost they can afford?

[Post-Secondary Education, April 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, during the 2004 election the Prime Minister promised to reinvest $8 billion, which he in fact had cut, back into post-secondary education core funding. In a spectacular betrayal, the 2005-06 budget did not contain a red cent toward keeping that promise. Another promise made, another promise broken, with disastrous consequences.

At Dalhousie University in my riding for example, medical, dentistry, law and international students face tuition hikes of over 9% this year. Some medical students, graduating with debts in excess of $100,000, are faced with a government that will not even extend interest relief while they are completing their residencies.

Last week Liberal members voted down my private member's bill that would have reversed Liberal imposed discrimination and at least would have allowed the most desperate students to qualify for bankruptcy relief two years after completing their studies. My plea to government members to send Bill C-236 to committee to allow MPs--

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome this brief opportunity this morning to address Bill C-43, the budget implementation bill. I want to acknowledge the member for Central Nova for giving me the opportunity to be next to speak. I am sure my constituents appreciate that.

I have to say that, as I heard the last exchange between the parliamentary secretary on the government side and the deputy leader on the official opposition bench, I ended up shaking my head and thinking no wonder Canadians cannot make sense out of what on earth is going on in this Parliament today.

I am not going to follow the rabbit tracks and use up my time to try to reconstruct the absurdity of that member, who sat first in the Reform and then in the Alliance caucus, pushing and pushing the Liberal government to cut and cut until there was nothing left of some of our most basic services, such as infrastructure, as the member himself acknowledged, post-secondary education, health care and the broken child care promise. All those things that the government promised in 1993 that it would do if elected to office, his party across the way, the ultra cons, kept pushing the government to cut further.

Now he stands up and says that they on that side will repair the damage. However he does not quite say that he had a major role in pushing for the government to make these massive cuts in the first place.

This brings me to four brief points I want to make in the few minutes available to me. On the issue of the Atlantic accord, the government members and the official opposition members keep leading Atlantic Canadians to believe that they support the speedy delivery of the resources to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia that are contained in that accord.

However it is clear that instead of making this Parliament work, instead of taking the fact that if not every member, at least the vast majority of members are committed to doing that, the government, for its own cynical reasons, has tied up the Atlantic accord in the implementation bill in such a way that it is costing the people of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia dollars that they cannot afford out of the most basic services that they desperately need rebuilt as a result of the hacking and slashing by the Liberal government, egged on by the Conservatives.

If the government were serious about making this Parliament work, it would immediately do what it has been urged to do by the New Democratic Party. In this instance, one of those rare instances where we actually agree with the Conservatives, the government must take it out of the budget implementation bill, get the commitment of dollars flowing and remove the uncertainty and the threat that the Atlantic accord may go down the tubes because of the government's cynical and ham-fisted handling of it.

I want to pick up on the government member's bleeding heart comments about how important the government's commitments are to infrastructure. In my riding a few nights ago, hundreds of people came together in the fire hall in Ketch Harbour to say that they were desperate to get the new water and sewer facilities that have been withheld from them for 40 years.

The following statement was accurately reported by the provincial daily paper, the Halifax Herald , which reads:

While the municipality is kicking in $5 million, the provincial and federal governments are giving a little over $2 million combined.

In other words, the combined contribution from the federal and the provincial governments is less than one-third.

For many years we were able to put together infrastructure projects that were about clean water and sanitation with a formula of one-third contribution from the federal government, the provincial government and the municipal government.

The reality is that what is such a disgrace about the inadequate contribution of infrastructure funding to this project in my riding in Halifax is being repeated again and again all over this country because the government has systematically decided to give billions and billions of dollars in tax breaks to big corporations and the wealthiest of Canadians over the years, still including in the budget $4.3 billion in tax cuts to corporations while people go without the basics of clean water and adequate sanitation services. Those are the priorities that are still reflected in the provisions of the budget implementation bill that we have before us.

I want to say that hope springs eternal. Last night we heard the Prime Minister basically say that we had to get on with the job and do what needs to be done. I think every Canadian wants to see the government cooperating with the opposition parties to do what needs to be done but that starts today, this hour, this moment with indications from the government that it is prepared to do what needs to be done to make changes in the budget implementation bill that is before us.

I hope the government will not literally drop the promise made by the Prime Minister last night across the airwaves and the very next morning turn its back on the commitment made. Let us see if the Liberals mean what they say, and that means changing the legislation that is within their control and the budget that is before us and begin to get the job done, which requires the government changing some of its ways.

The next thing I want to speak to is post-secondary education. During the election, the Prime Minister, in a desperate bid for votes in an all Canadian job interview targeting youth, the post-secondary education students, said he would return $8 billion to post-secondary education funding. I do not think anyone expected that he would return $8 billion of post-secondary education funding all in one budget.

We are dealing here with a Prime Minister who loves to talk about targets and timetables and who says that if we mean the commitments we make, we develop an implementation plan, develop timetables and targets and say how we will keep this promise of recommitting $8 billion to core funding and education, and at least begin to ease the burden that has been heaped on our students.

Has the government done this, even in the budget implementation bill now before us? Absolutely not. Not one red cent was recommitted to rebuild core funding for post-secondary education in the budget, and we know the disastrous results. The results are that tuition hikes continue. Students at Dalhousie University in the heart of my riding have seen almost a 10% tuition hike as a result of the $8 billion broken promise that was made by the Prime Minister on the eve of the election.

Finally, I tried to speak to what is happening locally and to what is happening nationally and internationally. It has to be one of the biggest disgraces of this budget that the Prime Minister and the government yet again have turned their backs on the long established commitment made by a previous prime minister, Lester Pearson, that Canada would lead the way in committing 0.7% of our GNP to overseas development assistance.

Again and again people before the foreign affairs committee have pleaded the case for us to honour our commitment to the millennium development goals, honour our commitment to actually be a good global citizen and commit to that 0.7%.

Not only was there no indication that they were prepared to do it in general, there was absolutely no implementation plan, no targets and timetables, to the utter disgrace and humiliation of Canada in the international community.

[International Cooperation, April 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot imagine the embarrassment of the CIDA minister in trying to explain why Canada has said that it wants to be a leader in meeting its 0.7% commitment to overseas development assistance. In the absence of an implementation plan, in the absence of timetables and targets from the Prime Minister, Canada may reach its commitment to 0.7% by the year 2035.

How can the minister defend the broken promises on this--

[International Cooperation, April 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has made speeches ad nauseam about launching a policy review on how to give the world more of the Canada the world wants.

Two years later, the foreign policy review is stillborn. Mr. Dithers has become Mr. Do Nothing with his betrayal of our 0.7% commitment for overseas development assistance.

Why, to the collective embarrassment of Canadians, has the Prime Minister gutted our commitment to meet our millennium development goals and made our contribution to making poverty history?

[Petitions, April 18th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table a petition signed by literally thousands and thousands of Canadians insisting that the government immediately implement the refugee appeal division approved by Parliament in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in 2002.

The petitioners express serious alarm that although Canada has been a signatory to the 1951 UN convention on refugees and the 1948 universal declaration of human rights, many of its recent actions have fostered a climate hostile to refugees. In particular, they point to the failure of the federal government to implement the appeal provision approved by Parliament in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in 2002, despite international recognition of the right of an appeal for refugee claimants and despite repeated public promises of implementation. It is urgent that the government act on the message contained in the petition.

[Chinese Canadian Recognition and Restitution Act, April 18th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased today to have an opportunity to speak to the private member's bill before us, Bill C-333, and to indicate that it is absolutely my position as the member of Parliament for Halifax and the position of the New Democratic Party caucus to support this bill going to committee. We will definitely be supporting the bill at second reading and absolutely supporting the objectives of it.

I want to congratulate the member for Durham for bringing forward this bill. As I am sure she would acknowledge, it is picking up where others have left off, others having done a great deal of groundwork over the years to try to get this government to move on taking the kinds of initiatives that are necessary to deal with the reconciliation and restitution owed to Chinese Canadians as a result of a very ugly chapter in Canadian history.

In congratulating the opposition member who has brought forward the bill, I think it is disappointing that the government has not already moved on this. I was listening closely to the comments of the member for Parkdale—High Park. I was hoping to hear that there is an intention on the part of the government to move on the restitution and reconciliation that have to be addressed if in fact we are going to accept collectively that an injury to one, in a society that claims to be committed to equality, justice, inclusion and compassion, is an injury to all. The way in which we can express that formally is to strengthen Bill C-333, which is before us now, and I hope that is what will happen at second reading, because it is needed and deserved.

I want to take a moment to pay tribute to others who have worked very hard over the years on this issue. They are Margaret Mitchell, who was a colleague of mine, and the former leader of the New Democratic Party, the member for Ottawa Centre. Margaret Mitchell was the member for Vancouver East. She was very much in tune with her own community, which included a large number of Chinese Canadians. She began fighting to have this issue addressed to realize the deep injury and out-and-out racist practices that we do not like to think are part of our history but in fact were, and they will remain part of a history that has yet to be corrected until we deal in a more effective way than this bill does with restitution and reconciliation.

I want to also pay tribute to my colleague, the current member for Vancouver East, who, in two previous motions that she tabled in the House, put forward a more stringent program, a more concrete and effective set of measures to outline what we need to do as a nation so that we can heal those wounds, and that means heal ourselves.

I have heard others stand and say, “I have a large number of Chinese Canadians in my riding. I know they are concerned and affected by this, so I am going to be supporting it”. Let me say that I have a small number of Chinese Canadians in my riding, but this issue matters to all Canadians and of course has particular impact and import for Chinese Canadians.

One of the flaws that I think exists in the private member's bill before us is that it singles out one particular organization that represents the interests of some Chinese Canadians and says this is the organization with which the government should negotiate. It is clear that we have more than one organization that represents Chinese Canadians. There are several. It is our view that this bill should be amended to provide for a more inclusive process involving duly constituted organizations that represent a variety of perspectives of Chinese Canadians in order to take those into account, engage in a good faith process and move on.

I think we know who we want to be as Canadians and I think we know how we want the world to think of who we are as Canadians, that is, an inclusive society, one that is free of racism and free of the ugly forms of hatred that can exist. The reality is that the chapter during which Chinese Canadians were actively and aggressively discriminated against is one that is very ugly. It speaks to who we do not want to be.

To put that behind us, to learn the lessons of the past and to keep reminding ourselves of how important it is that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, we cannot confidently and honestly say we are a society that does not tolerate the kind of hatred and injustice that was embedded in the treatment for 62 years of legislated racism in this country, from 1885 to 1947, when Chinese Canadians had to pay the head tax. It does not sound like a lot of money, but a $50 head tax at that time was a hugely onerous penalty and an ugly symbol of racism. Then, of course, between the period of 1923 to 1947, when Chinese Canadians were actually prohibited from immigrating to Canada, we are talking about a very ugly past.

We do not have a lot to be proud about in terms of not yet having redressed some of the other ugly chapters. We do not have it right yet in terms of the treatment of aboriginal Canadians. This government is still dragging its heels on dealing with the reconciliation around the hateful chapter of residential schools, which damaged a whole population, the founding nations of this country.

We have the ugliest of histories to live down in terms of what happened to European Jews who could not find their way into a supposedly compassionate Canada when they were fleeing as refugees from Nazi Germany, from extermination, from the Holocaust. One of the truly shocking chronicles about Canadian history is found in the book that was so brilliantly written by Irving Abella in order to share this chapter of our history. The title, None is Too Many , is taken from the statement made by the Prime Minister of the day, meaning that we would not be welcoming to our shores Jews who were facing extermination. In fact, we turned people back.

Today we have racial profiling going on in this country. It injures all of us. It tears at the fabric of our society when we have the kind of racial profiling that is going on, affecting particularly members of the Islamic faith and those with Arab and Middle East backgrounds.

We need to heal ourselves. It would be very much in keeping with the rhetoric we hear from the government about how concerned it is that we eliminate racism and religious bigotry from our midst if in fact the government would see fit not just to support Bill C-333 but to support a strengthening of the bill. We must do it, because until it is done we cannot hold up our heads and say that we have taken this seriously and taken our responsibilities seriously.

It was my privilege to introduce a motion in the House in 2003. I want to finish my speech by briefly quoting from it because it does give an indication of why the bill needs to be stronger. It stated that the Government of Canada should:

--(a) formally apologize to the Chinese community for the injustice imposed on Chinese immigrants by the government's Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923; (b) negotiate with members of the Chinese community, financial compensation to surviving [Chinese] who paid the tax....

That does not mean just one organization but the legitimate bona fide organizations representing the diversity of Chinese Canadians, because they are not of one mind and they do not exist in just one organization. The motion continued:

--and (c) financially support educational and cultural initiatives developed in concert with the Canadian-Chinese communities to prevent such injustices from happening again.

I note that the member for Parkdale—High Park talked about these kinds of initiatives in general, but I think we are dealing with a very specific ugly chapter in our own history which needs to be redressed. The victims need to be acknowledged and compensated appropriately as well as our ensuring that today's and tomorrow's generations are fully aware of this history and that we move toward the anti-racism kinds of measures which will indeed ensure that it does not happen again.

I want to finish by saying that we have in this country not just those we have already mentioned. We have Acadians, who were the victims of ethnic cleansing. We have Afro Canadians, who still in my own province, I can tell members, are the victims of racism, which is very embedded in our system and needs to be addressed. I hope that with this bill being strengthened we can move on to deal with some of those other issues as well. Prevention is the order of the day.