Penny Priddy

[Railway Continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask for some advice from member.

There has been a lot of talk about workers tonight. Has she some suggestions perhaps for the Conservative government that will be saying to workers that they have no choice in what the solution will be? Also, what might the government say to those spouses who are up all night worrying because they do not believe that their spouses will be safe? They have not had enough sleep to function properly, or they work on cars that have not had proper maintenance on time or adequate maintenance.

The families of those workers worry day and night about their the safety of their family members. Does she have any advice for the Conservative Party members about what they might say to the families of those workers, where they are disregarding their rights?

[Government Contracts, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, a cancer vaccine is very important for women, but why in this case is the government letting big corporations out of paying their fair share? Why is the Minister of Health rewarding a company that has evaded $2 billion in Canadian taxes?

I am not sure if Conservative staffer turned pharma lobbyist Ken Boessenkool was the reason Merck got the money, but I do know that Merck owes Canadian taxpayers over $2 billion. Did the minister meet with Boessenkool? Did the minister consider the issue of the tax havens when making his decision?

[Government Contracts, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, every time the Conservatives talk about health, Canadians are left with more questions than answers. A lot of people are asking if the $300 million exclusive contract was awarded to Merck Frosst for the HPV vaccine because a Conservative lobbyist who used to work for the Prime Minister was on the file.

The Canadian Revenue Agency says Merck used tax havens in the Barbados to hide profits. The IRS in the United States is also investigating Merck for back taxes. Why is this government giving Merck millions of dollars and not collecting the billions owed to Canadian--

[Health, April 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the False Creek Urgent Care Centre in B.C. is back in business, charging patients hundreds of dollars for basic medical services that should be free. This American style clinic is the exact opposite of what Canadians expect from our health care system. It should be illegal, but the clinic has found a loophole that allows it to stay in business.

Every Canadian has the right to free, universal health care when they need it most, regardless of whether or not they are carrying their chequebooks. Will the Conservatives take action today and put an end to clinics that charge patients for medically necessary urgent care services?

[Summer Career Placement Program, March 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, each summer in Surrey North hundreds of students hit the streets looking for a job. For these young people summer employment is key to fulfilling their goals.

Most families in Surrey North do not make a lot of money. Without a summer job, many students could not afford the cost of tuition.

The summer career placement program helped young people pay for their education, until last year when the Conservatives slashed $55 million from its budget.

Because of funding cuts and criteria restrictions, more students in my community will have a harder time paying their tuition. More families will have a harder time making ends meet, while helping their sons and daughters.

Without this program, many Surrey businesses may not be able to hire summer students at all. The summer career placement program was an important way of helping people make ends meet.

Once again, the Conservatives have failed Surrey North.

At a time of huge budget surpluses, we should be investing in people and communities, instead of giving away billions of dollars in corporate tax cuts.

[National Defence Act, March 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to support Bill S-3.

I have supported the sex offender registry for a very long period of time, going back to before it was initiated and I certainly support this bill as well. The armed forces is a profession, and this would bring the armed forces into line with what we used to see in many other professions.

In our communities the issue of sexual offences is very top of mind for many people, partly because our media provides information to people so quickly. It is a subject which causes fairly high anxiety certainly in the constituency that I represent. Any tools that are available to help provide some level of assuredness to people are very positive steps forward.

What we have seen in the past, probably with the armed forces and certainly with other professions, is that offences have been committed and as there has been no registry there was no registration of the offence on a national registry. Therefore, the individual in practising a particular profession would simply move to another area and commit another offence. Parents and others in the public would ask how it could happen that someone with a history of sexually offences was hired.

The sexual offence registry ensured that there was a national database. Employers do a criminal records check and the police could use the national database registry.

The New Democratic Party has laid out three streams of justice policies, which are prevention, policing and punishment. This change, while simple in text, is really quite profound. It speaks to prevention and provides another tool for policing and ensures there is a database that is indeed complete.

One reason this is so important is that people in the armed forces are seen as being in a position of trust. I do not know if it is idealism, but a special respect is accorded to people in the armed forces or people who previously served in the armed forces. They are even more likely to be offered positions of trust. Given that they may be even more likely to be offered positions of trust, it is even more important that this registry be put into place.

When I talk to parents and other adults in the community, they tell me that they believe that because there is a sexual offender registry or criminal records checks they can relax a bit more. This is a very good tool and I absolutely support it, so it is not about this piece of legislation, but I always tell people that we as adults and parents or grandparents have to remain continuously alert. We must teach our children what they need to do to be safe and to report when they feel uncomfortable. Adults need to know what to do if they are uncomfortable or where they can go for help. When somebody is charged with a sexual offence, it is highly unlikely that it was the first time the person committed a sexual offence.

When a new tool is put in place, I do not want people to think that they can relax or be less alert. It is a very good tool but people still have to be very alert in their communities.

According to DND, within the last six years 20 people have been charged and convicted of sexual offences. It does not really matter to me if the number is 20 or it is two, as one is too many. I consider this small grammatical change to be a change with profound impact and matters as much as any number would matter. As I say, one offence would be too many. Anyone who has ever worked with victims of sexual offenders or have family members who have been victims of sexual offenders, and that would probably include most of us in the House, know that it affects the victim sometimes for the person's lifetime, and indeed the person's family and family dynamics. Any additional tool that will be available to the police is an important one.

The forces will deal with this as they see appropriate within the forces and in concurrence with the regulations in the armed forces. When that occurs, we must know that whatever consequences are handed out within the forces are reflected in a national database to which the police will have access.

I do not know how many times police officers have said that they wished they had known that a specific person had a history of sexually offending because they could have found the person earlier and they could have prevented future attacks and maybe even have done some prevention. This is a regulation that will allow that to happen.

[Quarantine Act, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my general experience is that if governments want bills brought forth quickly because they are important, they bring them forth quickly.

[Quarantine Act, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I was not here when that happened, but it seems that the hon. member had asked for a plane maintenance centre and something else landed in his riding that was not what was actually requested.

By the way, the lab to which the hon. member referred does superb work. I want to congratulate the people who work there. It is a very challenging job. The hon. member is right that they work with highly contagious and life-threatening diseases.

I did not hear of the incident that the hon. member mentioned. I will certainly raise the question with the Chief Public Health Officer.

At the time that the chicken farms were being cleared out in British Columbia and other parts of Canada, great care was taken. Neighbours and schools in the area were extremely concerned about the waste material, not only about where it would go, but how it would be collected. They were concerned about whether it would it be wind driven or otherwise disseminated around the neighbourhood.

People in the member's community have every right to know that not only will the viruses and microbes be treated safely when they are inside the building, but also that they will be transported safely.

There have been all kinds of discussions about transportation of hazardous materials up and down the coasts of our country. Certainly on the west coast, the transportation of very dangerous materials by water up and down the coast is a subject of almost constant discussion.

It is not just the people in the hon. member's community that should be concerned. I would assume that the microbes and viruses are being transported across the country to the lab in Winnipeg. It is a Canadian service doing a service for Canadian people. Everybody deserves to know that it is being done safely, not only at source, but along the way.

I will raise that particular incident with the Chief Public Health Officer. I will ask him what the responsibility is of his office. I will get back to the member.

[Quarantine Act, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I think it is a one line amendment and I am sure that I can talk for some time about the amendment. Although it is a very small amendment it would have a life-saving or potentially-life threatening effect if we do not carry it forward.

As I said the other day, this is really an amendment to the Public Health Act. It is a very interesting act. It was written in 1872. I do not need to give any history on it because the last time we did anything with it was in 1872.

Here we are now 135 years later. The House was full at the time and I think everybody did support it. It was probably right after a small pox epidemic which, in those times, was very frightening and killed many family members. We should never make fun or ridicule that kind of tragedy that occurs to families when there are diseases of epidemic proportions.

When this act was written people were concerned about the illnesses they saw in their countries. People died of small pox and the plague. They were concerned about what happened within their cities or their towns. They never conceived of the fact that a disease would travel to a country or a continent that they had never seen, never heard of and were never going to see. No one would have believed that a disease could be transmitted in that kind of way.

We find ourselves, 135 years later, in a very different kind of health environment. We need to take very seriously the fact that the potential for communicable diseases to move from country to country is significantly heightened.

We only need to look at the last few years and what we have seen in Canada to be reminded of that. Anyone who was part of responding to or living in a city where the SARS epidemic was so tragically seen, will know that the responses to that particular disease were late starting and we were not able to respond in the kind of quick fashion that we all would have liked.

If I were to be biased toward British Columbia, my home province, I would say that British Columbia actually led the way in many of the innovations that came about as a result of SARS.

I have a few concerns I would like to raise. I certainly support the amendment but it seems to me that there are one or two pieces missing in it.

What it does is it adds to the Quarantine Act the reporting responsibility to be expanded to include aircraft and commercial watercraft. Anyone operating an aircraft or commercial watercraft has the responsibility to report any person who has died or any person they believe has a potentially communicable disease or any cargo they believe is suspect.

What about one of the main ways in which people and products are transported around the country and into the country, which is by truck or by rail? This does not include either people or products transferred by rail.

From living in British Columbia, I know the truck traffic, and I assume it is the same in many other provinces, that goes back and forth across our border is lined up for miles. On any holiday weekend, we can turn on our radio and hear that there is a two hour wait at the border because so many cars are lined up to come into Canada from the United States.

The fact that rail and road traffic are not included in this causes me considerable concern. We have seen several times in the last year or so an alert not to buy a produce that has come across the border because of the concern it may be contaminated. I am concerned we have not covered off all of the potential ways in which a communicable disease could be transmitted.

This is particularly important in this day and age because we discover, on an annual basis, viruses that nobody has ever heard of before. I think there was a stage when people thought they had identified most of the kinds of viruses that affected particularly people. However, we now know that those viruses transmute until we have differing versions on a pretty continuous basis. Therefore, we have to be incredibly rigorous and vigorous in our actions to protect the population of Canada against in any way being susceptible to a communicable disease.

The whole issue of quarantine reminds me of what happened before people were immunized.There may be some people in the House who remember when people had the whooping cough, or diphtheria or whatever, their whole home was quarantined. Then we developed immunizations for many of those diseases for which we previously would have been quarantined.

What now has happened, which causes me concern because it is about quarantine and communicable diseases, is we do not know what our immunization rates are really like across the country. There is no mandatory reporting by any province of their immunization rates.

I know in certain parts of my province of British Columbia immunization rates of diseases, which have been designated communicable, are dropping. Therefore, we have the potential of seeing a disease we thought we no longer had to quarantine or we thought we had an immunization for it. However, if for whatever reason fewer families choose not to immunize their children, we could very well see another bout of some communicable disease that we thought was long behind us.

For a long time people thought that tuberculosis was a communicable disease with which we no longer had to deal. That is one that was quarantined for a long time. We not only learned how to treat it, but we also learned how to immunize against it. In many parts of the country, particularly in aboriginal communities and in urban centres where people live in conditions that are less than healthy for anybody, we see an increase of tuberculosis. We thought it was behind us, now it is not.

There is no mandatory reporting of that. Surely the federal government has a national leadership role to play in having that information available so Health Canada, CIHI and all health organizations, which have a responsibility for public health threats, have an ability to see a trend. If we only look at what is happening in our own provinces, we will not know if this is some kind of trend happening across the country that requires some national leadership.

We have seen SARS, the West Nile virus and avian influenza. All those things have caused the public health community to work well together, to develop better procedures, protocols and surveillance at least in the provinces, but I still am concerned that is not a mandatory responsibility of provinces to report potentially communicable disease.

This bill would broaden the coverage of the Quarantine Act, and that is a good thing. It would also help us meet our World Health Organization obligations as a signatory to the revised international health regulations. These regulations ensure maximum security against the international spread of disease, with minimum interference with global travel, and I know that is very hard to do. However, our first responsibility is to the health and safety of Canadians, but also a much more humanistic and moral way to the health and safety of people who live anywhere in the world.

Those WHO regulations are scheduled to come into effect in June of this year. This regulation would then put us in compliance, as we would wish to be, with the World Health Organization. It will know we are doing all we can in Canada to meet that health obligation.

There will be a creation of different kinds of responsibilities for people. There will be quarantine officers, which is a good step. Previously officers were designated by the minister, as was stipulated in the act. These quarantine officers will have very specific education and responsibility to collect information, to know how it should be disseminated and, wherever possible, to get ahead of something that might happen.

We are very concerned that this tool be able to be used by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It came from the report that Dr. Naylor did after the SARS epidemic.

I remain concerned about the lack of rail and truck cargo being included in this and about the fact that other communicable diseases, which are being less immunized for, are not reported nationally. There is no national database for that and we may put a next generation of children or potentially a current generation of adults, who are not immune to what we think of as children's diseases, at risk.

While I am speaking to the issue of communicable diseases and immunization, there is also a national leadership role. There is certainly a provincial role. I understand perfectly that provincial governments deliver health care services, but there may be a national leadership role that can be played by the federal government in terms of disseminating more education information or working with public health officers in each province to ensure that standardized information is getting to all the parents.

People take their new babies for their first immunization shots. Everybody does that because it is a good thing to do. A smaller percentage take them back for their second set of immunizations. If I were to go around Parliament and ask people if all their immunizations were up to date, I expect the majority would say no. We do not know the fact that we do not stop being immunized at age four. There are immunizations that we must continue to get throughout adulthood to protect ourselves from certain kinds of diseases.

There is a national leadership role that can be taken, working with public health officers in each province who have that responsibility, to ensure that we have a more vigorous initiative of getting out standardized information not only to parents of newborns, who get very good information about immunization, but to all Canadians so they know immunization should continue through adulthood in order for them to be safe. If adults are not safe, they may put their families at risk as well.

I support the amendment. I have expressed some concerns about the fact that it could go further. I also have expressed concerns about other things we could do around communicable diseases. For example, we could have mandatory reporting. Diseases we had previously quarantined may be at risk of being quarantined again if we do not vigorously address immunization like used to do, and more so under the Quarantine Act.

[The Budget, March 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to talk about what this budget did for seniors, and it was not very much. We debated and passed a seniors charter in the House and I do not see anything in this budget for seniors. I do not see any pharmacare for seniors, even a beginning. I do not see catastrophic drugs that would help seniors. I do not see home care for seniors. I do not see a transit strategy or a housing strategy for seniors.

As I reviewed the budget, I had quite a bit of difficulty finding things for the seniors who live in my riding.