Dawn Black

[Petitions, April 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am presenting the second petition on behalf of hundreds of people in New Westminster, Coquitlam and Port Moody.

I am a proud founding member of the Greater Vancouver Gogos. “Gogo” means “grandmother” in the Zulu language. The Gogo network across Canada supports grandmothers in Africa who are raising their grandchildren who have been orphaned by HIV-AIDS.

The Gogos want to see Canada live up to its decade old pledges to increase aid from 0.7% of--

[Petitions, April 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present two petitions signed by hundreds of Canadians from all regions of our country.

The first petition calls upon the government to support a new law to eliminate the use of cluster bombs. Cluster bombs cause untold harm, mainly to civilians. Canada must work with the international community to prevent this suffering.

The petitioners strongly believe the Canadian government should show international leadership and support a law to end the use of cluster munitions.

This petition was circulated by an organization called Mines Action Canada. It plays a vital role in the battle to end the use of cluster bombs. It is a great organization. I am proud to support the petition and the work the organization does.

[Petitions, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my third petition deals with the issue of unification of families under the immigration system in Canada.

The petitioners say that unification, particularly of seniors with their families in Canada through immigration, is a core aspect of forming strong, healthy, vibrant families and communities in Canada. They believe that the current system calling for a 10 year residency requirement under Canada's income security program is wrong. They ask Parliament to amend the Old Age Security Act to eliminate the 10 year residency requirement and to work with provincial governments to waive the enforcement of sponsorship obligations in situations of genuine immigration sponsorship breakdown involving a senior.

I am pleased to present these petitions on behalf of my constituents.

[Petitions, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my second petition deals with the war in Afghanistan. I have presented many of these petitions in the past. The people who have signed them call on Canada to rebalance the mission and begin the safe withdrawal of Canadian Forces from the counter-insurgency part of the mission in southern Afghanistan.

[Petitions, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present three petitions from my people in my community.

The first petition calls on the Government of Canada to stop the deregulation of the transportation sector that has put Canadian lives at risk. Deregulation, they say, has resulted in more accidents across all transport sectors, including rail accidents in British Columbia that have involved hazardous waste. There has been a real increase in rail accidents. They support strong regulation, not voluntary regulation, and they are very concerned that the government's preference for self-regulation is putting Canadian lives at risk.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Yukon is right. The New Democrats have raised in the House, at the defence committee and at the foreign affairs committee over and over again the issue of aid to the people of Afghanistan and the imbalance of our commitment militarily where it is 10 to 1 in terms of the aid to Afghanistan. We find that to be out of whack and we need to look at ways of getting that aid effectively to the people of Afghanistan.

Right now, in Kandahar province, the increase in the insurgency, in the IEDs and in the deaths is preventing any aid from getting through at this point. All of the aid agencies have left that province. They are not able to operate because of the increased insecurity in opposition to what many government members would have us believe, which is that Canada is improving security for the people in Kandahar province. Actually, the opposite is taking place. The insurgency has grown. There are more IEDs and more suicide bomb attacks are going on in that province now than there were even a year or two years ago.

I know Sarah Chayes, who was a national public radio reporter in Afghanistan, was there right after the fall of the Taliban and has continued to stay there with a small development group that is producing soap in Kandahar province. She said that when she was first there she could drive on the road from Kandahar to Kabul, even though it was a dirt road, bumpy and a terrible road. She now says that she can no longer drive from Kandahar to Kabul on a paved road because security has deteriorated so badly that she is not safe.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am a bit puzzled by some of the comments that my colleague has made. We have been very clear, and at the beginning of my comments this afternoon, I said that we would be supporting the motion that is before the House of Commons right now.

However, he is correct in saying that the NDP members have been consistent in their opposition to this counter-insurgency mission in Kandahar province. We have been consistent on that. We have been opposed to a counter-insurgency combat mission from the very beginning. We continue to be opposed to that kind of a military mission in southern Afghanistan because of many of the comments I cited in my speech. It is not winning the hearts and minds of the people of southern Afghanistan. In fact, we believe it is fuelling the insurgency, by the aerial bombings, by the deaths of innocent civilians, by the forced eradication of poppy cultivation. These are the very things that are fuelling the counter-insurgency mission.

We believe there is a better way to work in Afghanistan, to bring help to the people of Afghanistan. We have articulated that consistently for the last many years in this House. That continues to be our position.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Ottawa Centre.

New Democrats will be voting in favour of this motion, but clearly, this is not a motion about Afghanistan or about Canada's role in the world. This motion does not speak to the 82 soldiers who have died in Afghanistan, nor to the one diplomat who died in service to Canada in Afghanistan. It does not speak to the hundreds of people who have been wounded, nor to those who may lose their lives in the future in Afghanistan. This is a motion about House affairs and the constitution of a special committee of the House of Commons. However, we do support the creation of a special committee of the House. We want the committee to look carefully into the mission. I hope that it can begin meeting very soon.

One of the main objectives of this committee will be to attempt to gather information and views on what is actually happening in Afghanistan today. Since the last election, I and members of the Standing Committee on National Defence and many others have attempted to get accurate information about the mission in Afghanistan, but we have been told over and over again that we cannot receive this information because of the requirements of national security.

My colleague from Saint-Jean moved a motion in committee in 2006 requesting that the Department of National Defence provide the standing committee with regular briefings on the status of the mission in Afghanistan. Some of the information from those briefings has been useful, but more often than not, the information was simply taken off the department's website.

Of course, it should go without saying that we do not want information to be disseminated by either the government or members of the House that would endanger the safety of the Canadian Forces or soldiers of allied states. That is not something anyone in the House wants to see happen and yet that is the answer we often get when we ask for information about the mission in Afghanistan. We do not want that risk taken. No one in the House wants that kind of risk to be taken.

What Canadians and members of Parliament in the House want is frank, clear and accurate information about the mission. This Parliament voted for the mission and, therefore, this Parliament should be responsible for evaluating whether or not progress is being made.

We need independent information to fairly evaluate the mission. Already, through public sources, we know that things are not going very well. From the UN 2007 fall assessment, and I will read some quotes from it, rates of insurgent and terrorist violence are at least 20% higher than they were in 2006.

Humanitarian access has become a growing challenge. At least 78 districts have been rated by the United Nations as extremely risky and, therefore, inaccessible to UN agencies. The delivery of humanitarian assistance has also become increasingly dangerous. Access to food has actually decreased, owing to the deteriorating security situation and poor infrastructure.

We need independent information to be able to evaluate claims that are made by the government. We have called for and continue to support increasing transparency and the ability to report on this mission. Hopefully, this committee will fulfill that role and the government will be able to share with committee members and, therefore, all Canadians accurate information on the mission in Kandahar. What we do not support is the government pouring millions more dollars into a deceptive advertising or PR campaign.

There is more independent analysis available in the public realm. In December 2007 the UN calculated that in the nine months previous, violent incidents in the south had risen by 30%, with over 5,000 local deaths in the region. In February 2008 Canadian Major-General Marc Lessard, the NATO commander in the south, stated that violent incidents in the six southern provinces increased by 50% in 2007. In February 2008, NATO statistics revealed insurgent attacks had risen 64% in the past year, from about 4,500 incidents in 2006 to about 7,400 in 2007.

If the government wishes to call these conclusions into doubt, it should introduce information in the House or in committee that can be fairly evaluated. That has not been happening over the course of the two years that I have been involved here or on the national defence committee. When I have asked for information at the Standing Committee on National Defence or through orders of the House, it has been withheld because of section 15 of the Access to Information Act which deals with international affairs and defence.

According to the Access to Information Act, the government can “withhold information, the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to be injurious to the context of international affairs, the defence of Canada or any state allied or associated with Canada or the detection, prevention, or suppression of subversive or hostile activities”.

The Information Commissioner of Canada made findings and recommendations on this section of the act in his annual reports of 1995, 1996, 1997 and 2000, and yet no changes have been made to the law. Mr. Bryden, who was both a Liberal and a Conservative MP, proposed changes to section 15 through a private member's bill which would have allowed that exemption only for current operations.

The Access to Information Act has not been amended since 1985. Since that time, technology has changed, the handling of information has changed, and even the types of threats that we face have change dramatically. It is well past time that the act be brought up to date.

There are a couple of procedures existing right now to challenge the exemptions. An individual can appeal to the Information Commissioner and if that appeal is unsuccessful, the individual can appeal to the Federal Court.

The Information Commissioner has stated that because of systematic underfunding of the access to information office and a rise in the use of exemptions by the heads of government institutions, his office is totally backlogged.

My own experience is that it can take up to a year to receive incomplete information released by a department and then another full year for the commissioner to make a determination on it. Once the Information Commissioner has spent a year looking at a complaint, if the government agency decides not to follow the recommendations of the commissioner, the only route then is to appeal to the Federal Court and then to higher courts. All in all, just trying to get information could conceivably take four years or more.

Is that how we really want information about the mission in Afghanistan to be handled? Do we have to tear every bit of information from the government through the courts? Is that the only avenue open to us? If so, it is totally unacceptable and this has to be remedied.

If the Prime Minister is really serious about the promise he made in the last election about having Parliament meaningfully involved in foreign policy and military questions, then there must be a greater culture of openness.

Today I received from the Department of National Defence a response to an ATI request that I made. The department is asking for another extension of 300 days, almost a year. It tells me that I can expect to receive a response to my request on or before January 23, 2009. And half the time, the answer is incomplete.

The committee on the Afghanistan mission should be investigating the lack of access to information from the government. I hope the committee will take on that challenge.

All of us in the House need to work together to make this committee work. I sincerely hope that once the committee is formed, it will be a venue which Parliament is intended to be, where open dialogue and debate will take place. It is incumbent upon all members to allow views to be expressed in a respectful manner even if one view does not conform with another. Half of the Canadian population has very serious concerns about this mission in Afghanistan.

I call upon members of the committee to ensure that there is productive debate that will serve well the people of Canada.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I too listened very carefully to the comments of my colleague from Saint-Jean. We sit on the defence committee together and often have very pertinent questions to ask the witnesses who appear at committee.

In fact, it was my colleague from Saint-Jean who presented a motion to the standing committee that we have the monthly briefings from the Department of National Defence on the mission in Afghanistan. I share with him the frustration, although he has expressed it much more colourfully in committee than I have, with the lack of information that we receive.

Often what we get is information that can be picked up on the DND website. I think members of Parliament deserve more thoughtful and informative presentations than we receive on an issue so important as this war in Afghanistan.

My specific question for the member for Saint-Jean deals with the increased number of American forces that will now be reinforcing the Canadian contingent in Kandahar province. I have raised concerns at committee about the 13,000 American troops that operate outside the ISAF mandate, the 13,000 Americans who are operating in Afghanistan and more specifically in southern Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom.

I would like to hear from the member for Saint-Jean his opinion of those two missions that operate concurrently, although not together, and whether he shares my concerns about the situation in Kandahar escalating when there will be probably more aerial bombings and more loss of civilian live. How does that feed into the growing insurgency in southern Afghanistan?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, April 3rd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance. I was also disappointed with the lack of vision for ordinary working families.

Canfor, in my community of Westminster, British Columbia, shut down last week. Many more across the country have closed. Good paying, family supporting jobs are disappearing, and it is a very serious situation.

He also has said that Canadians want a clean environment, and I agree with him. However, there is nothing in the budget to deal with climate change, another missed opportunity by the Conservative government, carrying on, sadly, in the tradition of the previous Liberal budget.

The budget has $500 million going into a trust for transit. When the New Democrats had an opportunity in 2005 to amend the Liberal government's budget, they managed to get $900 million for transit. In this budget it is a paltry amount.

When the government found almost $1 billion for transit in Toronto in the last budget year, why is there so little for transit and infrastructure, which is very much needed to clean our environment, in this budget?

The Evergreen Line is in my community. What was provided for the Evergreen Line, the actual cost of which is $1.4 billion, was about $64 million, enough to fund half a kilometre of that line only. This is all that has been provided by the Conservative government for the city of Port Moody and the tricities in British Columbia. Why so little? Why half a kilometre of transit for British Columbia when it has funded, in the last year, almost $1 billion for the city of Toronto?