Adam Vaughan

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, November 25th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we heard in some of the speeches earlier today that there is a disconnect between the provincial Government of Ontario and the federal government, and I am curious as to whether or not you are aware of any attempts to get the two governments together. Perhaps the Premier has written to the Prime Minister and is looking to meet, or maybe ministers are having those connections.

If there is a disconnect between these two levels of government, what steps are you aware of that have been taken by the government to try to bring the sides together to reach consensus on this important issue?

[Aboriginal Affairs, November 20th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, my question was very specific and has not been addressed with the answer that has been provided. In fact, it is almost exactly the same answer that was provided to me the first time I asked this question.

I asked about cities. I asked about urban settings. During the debate on this issue that was brought forward under a different motion, we heard a member, I believe it was the member for Sault Ste. Marie, talk about the fact that 30% of the women had disappeared at the hands of strangers.

In our criminal justice system, we know that the rate for the general population of stranger violence is 0.4%. In other words, 0.4% of the people who die violently in our country in a criminal act die at the hands of a stranger. However, for aboriginal and first nations women, it is 30%. That tells us very clearly that this is not a family violence issue. What this tells us very clearly is that when these women are looking for safety, they are not finding it. Where they are not finding it in horrific numbers is in urban settings, in cities.

Everything you just talked about is on reserve and traditional lands. What are you doing in cities to protect women?

[Aboriginal Affairs, November 20th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, when I first took my seat in Parliament, the first question I asked was related to the tragedy that has befallen this country, in particular the missing and murdered indigenous women. My question was when would the government spend as much effort finding what happened to these women as it had spent searching for the Franklin expedition.

The response was that new money had been put into the program and that steps were being taken to protect these women's lives and that all was in order because this announcement had been made just days before I took my seat.

The trouble is that the minute we start to do the research on this issue, we find out that it is not new money. It is existing programs bundled under a new name, which have quite clearly failed both this country and, more particularly, the women involved in this horrible tragedy.

My question for the government is, where is the new money? One of the issues for those of us who represent urban ridings and ridings that do not have treaty lands or traditional territories identified is that the shelters we have for these women do not get a penny of federal funding. We know that when women are escaping violence, they quite often flee to major urban centres for safety, but there is no place for safety; there are no spaces being created to house that safety. There are no programs dealing with the dynamics that happen on our city streets, which are deadly.

When will the government deploy meaningful resources, new dollars, to deal with this issue and provide us with a real response to a real crisis that we see on city streets every day in places like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, Halifax? The list is sadly so long. I do not have all the time in the world to name them.

[Housing, November 20th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, National Housing Day is Saturday, and across the country, events and rallies are being planned. They are asking—in fact, they are demanding—a very simple thing from Parliament: Canadians want a national housing strategy.

Last week in Vancouver I attended a national conference on ending homelessness, and a new report pegs the number of people who are sleeping on the streets at 35,000 people. The junior minister for housing spoke at that conference, and she stated that once we get people off the street, the next thing we need to get them is a job.

This is a bizarre statement. In Calgary, 80% of the people sleeping in the shelter system have a job. They do not need a job; they have one. What they need is housing.

In Vancouver, the fastest-growing cohort of homeless people is seniors, most with disabilities, yet what they get is a sneering response from the government: get a job. Really?

In Toronto, most of the people sleeping in shelters—in fact, half of them—are children. Is the Conservative government's response to the housing crisis to get children into workhouses? Is that what it has come to?

We need to get a national housing program. We need it now. Listen to the mayors. Listen to local leaders. Canadians want a national housing program, and if the Conservative government will not deliver one, the Liberals will.

[Infrastructure, November 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, a bridge collapses in Montreal, and the government offers a tax break. Public housing built in Toronto by the federal government starts to fall apart, and it cuts the program. In Calgary, the city gets flooded, roads are washed away, and the government says, “Wait until the budget is balanced before we help.” Vancouver needs transit, Halifax needs a water system, Iqaluit needs housing, and the list is getting longer and longer.

When will the government finally answer the calls of cities and towns across the country? When will it fund the programs now? When will it deliver the money now? Why will it not stand up for Canada's cities and towns?

[Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act, November 18th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we all share a desire to make our country safer for our families and all Canadians. I do not think that is in dispute.

If we look at the laws that are on the books, for example, it is illegal to go abroad to participate in a terrorist organization. Those laws already exist. What has been extended is the ability of judges to use their discretion and police forces to use their investigative techniques to prosecute those individuals differently. That happens under a cloak of judicial discretion and there is no way of checking to see whether discretion is being applied properly.

A cornerstone of good lawmaking is civilian oversight. It is why we are here, yet we find ourselves in a situation of being asked to support legislation that makes it extremely difficult to get a passport, while at the same time contemplating making it easier to get assault weapons. Individuals are deemed too dangerous to get a passport, but not dangerous enough to be prevented from getting semi-automatic weapons. In fact, the party opposite is actually proposing to take the RCMP out of the equation when it comes to accessing very dangerous weapons.

Why is a passport more dangerous to the safety of Canadians than semi-automatic weapons?

[Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act, November 18th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, there is a fundamental mischaracterization of some of the challenges we are facing. This notion that people come to this country to create some of the challenges we are facing is not borne out by the fact that Canadian-born citizens have become responsible for some of the issues we are trying to deal with here.

The member opposite spoke about the Constitution being fundamental to this issue. He described this bill as something that would strengthen citizenship by in fact undermining its basic tenets—to take away someone's citizenship is to weaken the meaning of citizenship completely.

The issue that concerns us most is this way in which the Conservative Party speaks out of both sides of its mouth on the issues of judicial oversight. The Conservatives complain about activist judges, and they complain about judges who use too much discretion, yet now we are supposed to rely on those very same judges to use their discretion in a way that makes us safe.

I would like the member opposite to clarify his remarks. Does this party trust judicial discretion? If it does, why is it such a big fan of mandatory minimum sentences?

[Child Poverty, November 17th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for the motion, which speaks to a number of aspirations, hopes, and goals that a number of us in the House share.

I note that neither the member nor I was a member of Parliament back in 2005-06 when a budget was presented that gave the House the opportunity to invest $2.4 billion in public housing and to move forward with a provincially approved deal on a national daycare program that was signed, sealed, delivered, and ready to be executed. That budget also included the Kelowna accord, which would have been a massive step forward in the defence and promotion of the rights and responsibilities of indigenous people and first nations.

I have a question specific to the member's riding. Right now there is a motion in front of city council that governs the area of Toronto known as Scarborough. It calls for rooming houses to be licensed and legalized in that community. We know that rooming houses are an extraordinarily important part of the housing continuum. Rooming houses are part of human rights and we cannot zone against people. I am wondering if her party supports licensing and legalizing rooming houses in Scarborough.

[Committees of the House, November 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the statistical unpacking of the financial supports that back up the veterans budget.

I met a veteran coming back through upstate New York because he could not afford to travel through Canada on his way to Alberta to work. He told the story of a young 19-year-old who had fallen off scaffolding in the oil patch and was getting more compensation after working six months of his life on a job site than he was getting after serving 24 years in the military and encountering an explosion in Afghanistan that resulted in hearing loss, a disability in his arm, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

He said that after 24 years of serving his country, he could barely get a meeting with veterans affairs, and when he did, he barely got enough compensation. He said he had to go and work in Alberta to save the family farm in Nova Scotia.

How does the member opposite reconcile that life with the statements he just made? How does he reconcile that suffering with the supposed generosity of the government, especially when it is backdropped against the scores and scores of veterans who have protested the inadequacy of the government response to the very real life conditions they are facing on a daily and yearly basis?

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 2, October 30th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we might see consensus emerging on some of these items if they were presented one at a time in front of us as members of Parliament. The trouble is that quite clearly a game is being played. We can almost see the campaign being written by members across the way. We voted against X, Y and Z. What they do not tell the public is that we have to vote A, B and C to get there. That is the problem. It sets up a deceitful way of making members of the House express and represent their constituents views, and that is just fundamentally wrong. It also leads to the bad lawmaking that requires 10 corrections.

There is great consensus in the House on things like an urban agenda, and yet we see nothing.

The one thing the Tories have done is raise taxes on condominiums and made housing more expensive. That does not help anybody in the country except for the folks who draft bills like this.