Adam Vaughan

[Business of Supply, June 3rd, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I may share a profession with my hon. colleague across the way, but I certainly do not share his perspective.

When Unifor is identified as only representing journalists, it does not tell the story that Unifor also represents the caretaking staff, librarians, editors and camera operators. It also represents receptionists and all of the personnel who make up media organizations in this country.

To suggest that Unifor represents only journalists does not only elevate journalism in a way that is very telling from the other side, but it also completely misrepresents and under-represents, in fact I would say obscures the reality, that newspapers, radio stations and television stations across this country are so much more than just the journalism. They are the heart and soul of so many communities, and they are disappearing person by person, city by city, town by town every single day.

Anyone who has spent a lifetime in this industry knows the families who are affected, and to simply put this down to the defence of journalism so massively oversimplifies this problem that it is horrible.

The member said that he is afraid that journalists can be bought. That seems to be the implication of what he is saying. Could he perhaps tell us the journalists he thinks can be bought and list them by name?

[Poverty, May 29th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I honestly want to thank the member opposite. She has a been a strong, steady and consistent voice on the issues of social justice and, in particular, on eliminating poverty not just in her riding but in ridings right across the country. I have a great deal of respect and affection for her persistence and dedication to this.

I also have a concern that has to be spoken to, because as good as our government has been, as hard as our government has worked and as strong as the investments in child care, housing, poverty reduction and the Canada child benefit have been, we have provincial governments now in power in this country, in particular in the province I come from, that have literally declared war on children's services.

As we step forward as a federal government and do all the good things we are doing, we have a government in the province I come from that has cut teachers and classrooms, cut libraries for students, cut meal programs for children and cut the child advocate, the very person who advocates for children in the province of Ontario. It has cut program after program. The party behind this slash-and-burn campaign to wipe out services that support kids in vulnerable situations is the Conservative Party of Ontario. If Mr. Ford continues—

[Poverty, May 29th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot for giving me the opportunity to talk about poverty in Canada.

This gives us a chance as a government to discuss the first-ever poverty reduction strategy in the country, and we need to do that. Poverty affects all of us, regardless of the socio-economic circumstance in which we find ourselves.

Poverty affects all of us.

It affects children, seniors, Canadians with disabilities, men, women, visible minorities and recent immigrants as well as indigenous people. The unfortunate thing about poverty is that it does not discriminate.

Our first-ever poverty reduction strategy commits to reducing real poverty by 20% by 2020 and 50% by 2030. However, these numbers are never going to be good enough until they reach 100% . Until it is entirely eliminated in this country, no government has the right, let alone the opportunity, to rest on its laurels. It has to work harder. We have to eliminate poverty in this country, in particular for the issue that was raised by the member and my colleague opposite, the poverty that confronts children. No child in this country, or on this planet in fact, should live in poverty. We are committed to finding and using every tool of government to eradicate poverty wherever we find it in this country and to work with the leadership of affected communities to make sure that, whether they are living in rural Canada, on the coasts of Canada, in the centre, in the cities or in rural communities or self-governing reserves in provinces or territories, we work together to eliminate poverty.

The opportunity for all program builds on a number of the flagship measures this government has implemented and invested in since the day we took office. We have made significant investments for children, seniors, low-wage workers and other Canadians who find themselves living in vulnerable circumstances.

For example, the Canada child benefit has helped to lift more than half a million people, including 300,000 children, out of poverty in Canada. Single mothers have seen their poverty rates decline by 30% since 2015. In the city I represent, the city of Toronto, which has one of the highest rates of child poverty in Canada, 52% of single mother-led households are now living above the poverty line as a result of investments we have made directly in their lives, in their children's lives, in the housing system, in the transit system, in the day care system and the health care system. We have made a profound difference, but we are not at zero. Until we are at zero, we have work to do and sleeves to roll up.

We have also introduced the guaranteed income supplement, which targets single seniors, primarily women. For women who did not earn enough in the workplace and were discriminated against historically in this country over generations, we have made sure that their Canada pension plan and guaranteed income supplement are boosted to help lift them out of poverty as well.

There is now the Canada workers benefit.

As well, we have made a series of other investments, including a $55 billion investment in the national housing strategy, which aims to lift 500,000 Canadians out of core housing need within the next 10 years.

We are making progress beyond, I think, even the expectations of the parties opposite. We have made substantial progress. However, as I said, the work must continue. I can assure the member opposite the work will continue, because even though we have hit our 2020 targets a year early, that does not mean we cannot get to 2030 even sooner.

[Pride Toronto, May 29th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I am here to spill the tea.

Pride season in Toronto is coming up and our city's very own Brooke Lynn Hytes has made it to the final four in RuPaul's Drag Race, the reality TV show. This Canadian has done us proud in the competition, which has been the starting point for a lot of important conversations about trans rights, not just in Canada but around the world.

Conversations about the effects of homophobia, transphobia and biphobia are critical to building resiliency in these communities. Our government knows that it is our role to support them more. In fact, this week our government announced an investment of $4.3 million through the national housing strategy for the Egale Centre, Canada's first housing facility exclusively dedicated to homeless LGBTIQ2S youth.

The theme for Toronto Pride this year is “Freedom”, and it builds on having a safe place to call home because that is the foundation for all forms of freedom and free expression.

I look forward to marching this year in the Pride Parade. I look forward to seeing Brooke Lynn in Toronto and I look forward to making sure that our community is safe, housed and that the youth, in particular, are thriving.

[Accessible Canada Act, May 28th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I addressed that directly in my comments on the way federal legislation is drafted. Quite often we are dealing with legislation that straddles jurisdictions. When we use instructive language like “must” or “shall”, as opposed to “may” or “should”, we sometimes end up in constitutional battles with provinces, who think we are enforcing federal standards in areas of provincial responsibility, and we fight in court about what should and should not be done.

With respect to the right to housing legislation and the amendments that are coming forward, we sat in on that process with the drafters, both at the Privy Council Office and within the Department of Justice, and also with lawyers from the various housing departments. We have struggled with what the language needs to be. The prevailing view within the federal legal system is that permissive language keeps us out of court and jurisdictional squabbles and puts us in a much better operational place. Where we get more specific is in the regulations, and I think they are going to be the most important part of the bill.

ARCH is a legal aid clinic in Ontario that is now threatened with having its funds cut because the Ford government is cutting legal funding right across the board, particularly for clinics that do class action support and work. I happen to know this because my mother was part of the legal aid system in Ontario and started that clinic. I have also worked very closely with that clinic as a city councillor.

We cannot allow the legal voice of this community to be silenced, and I hope the Conservatives opposite will talk to Doug Ford—

[Accessible Canada Act, May 28th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, as we evolved and conducted hearings and consultations around this, the learnings were shared across cabinet and shared across caucus. It started to inform our approaches to other policies we were developing, because we knew that this legislation was coming.

What we are seeing is an all-of-government approach that has not been perhaps as surfaced or as easily identified as intentional, but I think we are seeing it there. The housing policy is a really critical one.

My father was an architect, my sister is an architect, and my daughter is in the process of becoming an architect. Of the three of them, only one has ever been taught universal design as a requirement of getting an architecture degree. The very profession that defines the space we live in does not teach accessibility as a standard requirement in any architecture school in this country, except for one, the Ontario College of Art and Design. They did it, not because they were thinking about training future architects, but because the design courses there are for everybody. As a university that has embraced a whole series of very progressive approaches to how we bring culture to life, that is one of the cultures it is bringing to life, and it is the only architecture course in the country that teaches universal design as a requirement for graduation.

Every architecture school should do that, because every building that is built in this country should accommodate every Canadian who is going to use it, especially the public ones.

[Accessible Canada Act, May 28th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, what we know, and we know it through this Parliament in particular, is that language is culture. Culture is expressed in language, but also human experience is defined by language.

When the member raised the point of how important it is to be able to communicate with people in their culture, in their language, as a way of not only recognizing the value of the community that speaks with this technique but also recognizing the culture of the community as it presents itself to itself, this is fundamental to the dignity of the people who identify as such.

I have no personal problem with the suggestion. However, working that into the way in which we have worked today, occupying a seat in the press gallery to make sure that those who are with us today get the services they deserve, we have not thought all of those things through, and the complexities of those thoughts require us to do much more work than simply passing legislation. We have to change the way we practice the delivery of government.

As technology arrives, as the communities gain their full place, politically in our communities, as much as they do through legislation, that is a conversation that will grow and become stronger, and we will see it become not an accommodation but rather part of the fabric of our country.

I wholeheartedly support the initiative, but the complexities of it give rise to concerns in terms of full implementation.

[Accessible Canada Act, May 28th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, this illustrates exactly the complexity of the challenges we are dealing with. It sounds like this is a provincial college that is making a decision as to what constitutes reasonable accommodation, and we do not have jurisdiction over how provincial governments provide the service. That is a provincial issue, and that is why there are many provincial accessibility acts across the country.

That being said, it also clearly illustrates that as we understand and broaden our comprehension of not just what constitutes a disability but what constitutes proper reasonable accommodation, we are going to have to have a program that is as flexible, dynamic and diverse as the community of people with disabilities. In this case, there are learnings at every opportunity for us to do better. When we talk about this process, one of the reasons we did not lock everything into legislation was that to make changes like that on the fly would require us coming back to Parliament, introducing a bill, getting it through the Senate and having it come back for royal assent.

That is why many of the things around the flexibility and fine-tuning of accommodation, the assessment of what constitutes reasonable accommodation and how we provide that accommodation systematically across the country are left to the regulations in this bill so that we have a much more fluid and dynamic way of remedying situations like the one the member referenced, which deserve to be remedied in the terms that he identified.

[Accessible Canada Act, May 28th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to what I think is one of the most important pieces of legislation that this term of Parliament is managing. I pay my respect in particular to David Lepofsky, a lifelong friend who I first worked with when I was the chair of the accessibility and advisory committee at the City of Toronto. We tried to push forth as many progressive and enlightened ideas about how to make sure that people with disabilities, in the full range of what that means, had access to not just the city and city government, but participation in our communities in ways that we can only learn about if we sit in concert with people with disabilities to understand the various challenges that are required.

I would like to say this. If this was the only piece of legislation that our government had dealt with regarding disabilities, it would be a good piece of legislation. However, I also want to bring to the attention of the House all of the other measures we have taken across other forms of legislation and other forms of programs that I think are contributing to a change in this country and give people with disabilities the absolute place of citizenship they deserve simply by being Canadian.

For example, one of the requirements of the national housing strategy is to overshoot and make accessible housing a stronger requirement than it is in any provincial or municipal building code across this country. Of all units built as affordable housing in this country, 20% must be built to a universal design standard. A universal design standard is something that often brings to mind people who use mobility devices. However, the reality is, and we have heard it from the members opposite, that disabilities are much more complex, diverse and subtle than simply the ones that spring to mind in a stereotypical way. Therefore, a universal design is being brought to bear through the national housing strategy, which is also enshrined in a human rights approach to housing so that we make sure that we build housing for everybody when we use public dollars to create affordability. In the housing sector itself, some of the most progressive organizations in this country have pushed back against it for being too expensive. The cost of not doing it is what is too expensive. The cost of not making sure that when we use public dollars to build housing we build it for everybody is critically important to understand.

Additionally, when we look at other issues, such as the passengers' bill of rights, there is a nod to it. When we talk about the income supports that are designed to lift individuals out of poverty, we know that poverty impacts people with disabilities in ways that are far more complex and far more serious than simply addressing poverty for poverty's sake. Therefore, some of our programs have been intentionally designed to make sure that those programs are also stepped up.

I will provide an important example around public transit. Our investments in public transit are designed on a per-ridership basis and are invested into communities that provide transit right now. As well, they are designed to make sure that accessible transit is spoken to, not only in terms of providing new service, which is critical, and making sure things like elevator programs and subway stations in the city of Toronto are eligible to receive federal funding, but also that repairs to accessible buses are eligible.

We know that many communities have made the initial investment to get accessible community buses or DARTS into various parts of this country. Some of those communities were investing the first time with new dollars, but without the operating dollars for investment, they were losing that service to disrepair. One of the reasons we changed the infrastructure program to include state of good repair for public transit was specifically to address the issue of the fragility of some of those accessible buses. We need to make sure that accessible transit is available in many more communities right across the country.

We have also included active transportation in the infrastructure fund. This is important because we have built cities and communities across this country that do not accommodate mobility. Not every city in this country has a dipped curb at every intersection, which should be a standard design right across the country. There is also the retrofitting of traffic lights and intersections for people who require audible assistance to get across intersections. All of these things are part of what active transportation now funds. It is not just the big-ticket items of big subways, big pipes or big sewer plants, it is also the fine-grain infrastructure of cities that have to be built to accommodate everybody in this country. Our national infrastructure program accommodates that.

To speak specifically to the legislation here today, I want to explain, from the perspective of someone who is a parliamentary secretary and has to manage the flow from parliamentarians to minister's offices and manage the way in which amendments come forward, why it appears sometimes that an opposition amendment that is accepted eventually by the government is not accepted in its written form and has to be woven into the legislation because legislation often covers more than one bill and more than one form of federal regulation.

If the legislation is not written in a particular way, gaps are created within the system and those are the loopholes that quite often create the cracks that people fall through. For example, when we talk about the words “shall” or “must”, in drafting when I was a councillor at city hall we always looked for the words that were operative or provided permissions as opposed to instructions and tried to tighten legislation as much as possible.

With the federal drafting guidelines, because of the shared jurisdiction in many components of this bill with provincial, federal and municipal jurisdiction, and sometimes indigenous governments, we cannot force federal laws into those areas. We have to literally fit federal laws into those areas. That is why some of the language had to be fine-tuned to make sure it was consistent. We could not get to that in time for the committee. As the opposition has said, there have been 70 amendments. It is good in spirit, except in principle. We had to workshop and wordsmith them into the legislation to make sure they were operable across all the clauses, all areas of federal jurisdiction and all the intergovernmental realities this legislation governs.

On that point, when the legislation went forward to the Senate, we were still working with the spirit of those amendments knowing that senators were going to be working on them as well. We were having dialogue with senators about what amendments might be coming forward and how to fine-tune them to better fit them into the legislation, as well as looking at what legislation might come back to this House and whether it would have to be fine-tuned after having gone through the screen of the Senate.

It is a complex process of forming the language around the legislation. If it is not done properly, unintended consequences can have real impacts. On this issue, impacting people with disabilities unintentionally is doing harm to a community that has already suffered enough. Getting the law right was just as important as the timing of that legislation.

I do not really care who puts the legislation around the deadline to make sure that some of the elements of this bill must be enacted by a certain point in time. It does not really matter to me whether it is an opposition member, a Senate member, a government member or a bureaucrat who comes up with the notion. The idea is that we have to work together to evolve it into the right language and the right legislation.

We have taken the good advice of the opposition, the stakeholders and the senators and come up with an excellent bill that moves this agenda forward in a progressive and smart way, in the right way for people with disabilities.

As part of this process, the opposition has asked why it has taken so long. When one is in government, one is criticized for doing one of two things by one of two ways. One is either told that this was rushed to the House and time was not taken to consult, and one should have slowed down and consulted with stakeholders before bringing the legislation forward, or else one is criticized for consulting too much and not getting it to the House fast enough.

On this particular issue with landmark legislation, our government deliberately chose to consult widely across all of government. We chose to consult with provincial, municipal and indigenous governments. Fundamentally and most importantly, at the centre of every one of those consultations were the people with lived experience. We decided deliberately that because of the complexity of the community, the difference in geography of this country and the different reaches and federal regulations that had to be addressed through this legislation, that consultation ahead of introduction was critically important.

In fact, my conversation with David Lepofsky first started when we began to look at this legislation three years ago. It was not even a responsibility of the file I was carrying at the time. However, having come from the city, I had some experience with how legislation moves forward with government and I knew some of the experts in the field, people like Sandra Carpenter and others we had worked with previously with the city. I knew that if I could establish those relationships, bring them into the consultation, make that conversation robust, check with ministerial staff and my colleagues, monitor the work on committee and do the consultation properly, that we would get as big and strong a bill, as well as the most robust set of changes possible. That is why I thought consultation was important.

The opposition asks why we are waiting until the third year of our term to get through the House, and it is for that reason and that reason alone. It is not a sense of not having an urgency to address these issues. It is important to address them and the urgency is important, but getting it right is just as important. It is about having time to make sure that the Senate can give it a second look, that the committee has a proper process and that people with disabilities are involved. It is also about taking a look at what the committee did and the lessons that were learned. For example, making sure we had an inclusionary process, sign language, Braille and all the different forms of accommodation, including time for people with intellectual disabilities to speak without having the clock run out on them. It also includes making sure we had different ways of reaching out to these communities. This was the work of a Parliament seized with this issue and a government that seized this issue. As a result, it has the legislation here today.

The last point I want to address is this notion of why the Liberals are not all standing up and speaking one at a time. Every one of us has a story we could tell about the experience we have had in our families, our communities and our political life as we have come to a stronger understanding of some of the challenges we face or others face in our communities or in our families. There are disabilities in so many of the stories of people who sit in this legislature and it is one of the reasons why so many people are engaged in this file the way they are engaged. It comes from a very good space.

The reality is that as a government we are trying to get this to a vote. The longer I speak, the further away the vote is. We know that we are coming to the end of a term of Parliament and we know that things can happen that interrupt any single process, so we are nervous that we would not get this to a vote. We want this to come to a vote as soon as possible. We know that there are people in the galleries who have come here to watch the vote so that they can be present at the time when this historic legislation is passed.

The reason we are not standing up to repeat the points and to go on with the points endlessly and make the same point over and over again is not because we are afraid of the opposition. None of us on this side of the House is afraid of the opposition. We have dealt with the opposition members for four years and we know exactly where we stand with them. There are good voices, good questions and good points to be made and listened to and the legislation can always be made better; no one is saying that is not true. At the end of the day, we want this vote to happen and to happen in a way that shows that the whole country is behind the transformation of the approach to the rights of people who have disabilities. The whole country is behind the response that we all share to make sure that accommodation is not just reasonable but is progressively realized in a way that respects the dignity and the human rights of all the individuals involved.

I know that we will be revisiting this issue because disability and approaches to disability change over time. We need a fluid and flexible law that allows us to do that. Many of the elements that the community wanted in the legislation are going to be captured in regulation so we do not have to go through a three-year process to make changes to do the right thing, in the right way, in the right time frame. Ministers will be able to do that after the community and people have come forward and asked for those changes. The regulations can be changed without going through a robust, time-consuming and expensive parliamentary process. I am very proud of the fact that the legislation is good, but I am equally proud of the fact that the regulations are just as strong and provide that flexibility and ingenuity to make sure we can respond to the needs of these communities and the individuals as quickly and as effectively as possible, but from a perspective of the Human Rights Commission.

I said that the last point would be my last one, but I failed to address this in my general comments and I want to address it.

There are two approaches that are contemplated when looking at how one adjudicates or forces the government through complaint to respond to shortcomings in our system. One is to have the one-door approach; the other one is for everybody to have shared responsibility.

If, for example, the CRTC does not properly regulate new technologies to make sure they are accessible to and usable by all Canadians, we could have a single office that people go to in order to complain and then the office would have to manage the conversation and the process with the CRTC, or people could set it directly at the door of the CRTC and the CRTC could respond.

What we have in the design of this legislation is the best of both worlds. We have clearly an advocate that is housed at the Human Rights Commission that is part of the process of evaluating the implementation of this bill and the corrections to this bill and creates a living office to make sure this legislation is living and responds in real time to people's needs. However, they also have charged every single federal authority that touches the lives of Canadians with the responsibility that all of us have, which is to make sure the accommodations are progressive, beyond reasonable but effective to make sure people's human rights and dignity are fully respected. I do not think we are going to get a slower, more bureaucratic response. What we will get is a faster, more effective response by having the process established at every single federal institution, because every single federal institution has a responsibility to make sure all Canadians' rights and dignities are respected.

I am proud to be supporting this legislation. I am proud that our government has taken the time to get it right and to work with the communities, the individuals and the advocates involved. I am glad that we have had good input from the opposition and robust debate. Better is always possible. On this file, better must be achieved as a possibility because that is the goal here: how to make sure the rights of every Canadian, regardless of the physical circumstance he or she is born with or acquired, be respected with dignity and how to make sure the federal government responds to complaints and concerns effectively, quickly and in a progressive way.

I am proud our government is the government that has brought this forward. I am proud that we will be passing this legislation, and I am proud to be sitting in the House to vote on it.

[The Environment, May 27th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that was accomplished in Ontario was the elimination of coal and using coal to generate power for electricity. That effectively was how the Harper government claimed it reduced its greenhouse gas emissions in the last decade.

Does the member opposite now support what the Province of Ontario did by eliminating coal? Does the member opposite now recognize that providing tax cuts for upper middle-class transit riders instead of providing transit is the wrong way to get people to use transit? It does not matter how many tax credits we give people, because if there is no bus, they are not going to use transit. They are going to drive. Would the member opposite agree that providing transit is an incentive to use it and therefore not drive?

Would the member opposite also agree that when premier Wynne eliminated coal power as a source of energy, and when Dalton McGuinty did the same, that was the actual accomplishment the Conservatives like to hang their hat on?