Adam Vaughan

[Petitions, October 24th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to table a petition from concerned Canadians with regard to the government's legislation for the Rouge national park.

The petitioners are very troubled about the government's current plan for the creation of the park because it ignores the ecological vision and policies approved for the Rouge Park plans and provincial greenbelt legislation. As well, it ignores the long-standing plans for a 600-plus metre wide forested Rouge Park main ecological corridor between Lake Ontario and the Oak Ridges Moraine.

[Multiculturalism, October 24th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, several candidates running in Monday's municipal election in Toronto have had their signs and campaign offices vandalized. They are being targeted because they are Muslim.

Today, a young candidate, Munira Abukar, was assaulted and pelted with garbage. Her brother is a member of the Canadian Armed Forces.

These attacks are unacceptable. They too are an attack on democracy. What steps is the government taking to assure Canadians that not only are individuals, mosques, and places of worship safe, but will Conservatives join us in condemning these attacks on Muslims?

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, October 23rd, 2014]

The hon. member for Trinity--Spadina.

We are speaking about whether or not legal arrangements overseas are recognized here in this country. As I said, when a Rhodes scholar goes off to Oxford and his or her credentials are mocked, when somebody teaches at Harvard and his or her credentials are mocked, it is no wonder that people who come to this country with credentials from elsewhere, whether they are marriage certificates or university degrees, feel so alienated when they arrive in this country and have to take extreme measures to get their legal reality recognized. It is a shame.

Those of us whose parents come from other countries or have family members who were trained in other countries are appalled when the laws of this country are not applied evenly to all Canadian citizens and people are mocked for their international experience or the documents and information they bring to this country.

I would ask the members opposite to bring forward motions that are clear, that are named appropriately and that address the issue they are trying to bring resolution to because when they confuse us or mock us, they do not do a service to this House.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, October 23rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin my remarks, I wish to note as many members today have the deep gratitude we have in particular for the folks we affectionately call “the blue shirts”, the parliamentary precinct security guards with whom I spent most of the day yesterday in their lunchroom under lockdown. They were professional, courteous and in good spirits in very trying times and put themselves in harm's way with the bravery that all of us are indebted to and I would like to thank them and pay my respects personally from the floor of the House.

Our thoughts are also of course with the six-year-old boy whose father has been lost. The flags are at half-mast across the country in respect, but our hearts are held high and our love for that young child and our support for him remain as high as possible and stream straight into the night tonight as we remember a soldier who lost his life in the line of duty.

I now turn my attention to the motion in front of us. It is a confusing motion. It is a piece of legislation that comes forward with a name and intent to go in one direction, but it heads off completely in the opposite direction. It focuses its language around the issue of trying to prevent proxy marriages, but it really seeks to try to address the issue of forced marriages. It is this confusion that makes it a difficult motion to debate because we are not really sure what the intent of this private member's motion is. It would be much clearer if the government would simply bring forward legislation that changes our immigration act and changes our Criminal Code in a way that was much clearer, much more direct in its intent, but also sought to ban a practice that was not already illegal.

My question for the motion's sponsor indicates that proxy marriages in many provinces, in fact all provinces, are not recognized. Therefore, we are seeking to make illegal something that is already illegal and redundancy is at the heart of where our concern about this motion lies.

We understand and support moves to prevent forced marriages and to prevent forced marriages from being the pretext for immigration or any other legal follow-up in this country. We understand that and we are in total support of the concerns that have been raised by all members of the House in speaking to this issue about how seriously a forced marriage violates the principles of what we see as both a spiritual and a legal arrangement that deserves much greater respect.

We note that forced marriages have a disproportionate impact on young women, on women who have been subjected to violence. The evidence presented by the South Asian Legal Clinic is very clear on this. This is a concern that the House should be concerned with and the Canadian government and Canadian law should deal with and in fact does.

The issue of proxy marriages is what the motion seeks to sculpt and limit as a legal reality, and we have concerns there. Many members may know that I was a city councillor and as a city councillor one becomes a public notary while holding the office. I remember getting instructions from our city clerk's department but also in conversation with legal colleagues about the absolute importance to be present to witness all the documents. One is part of the legal process and must bear witness to the person signing and presenting the identification.

The same is true for marriage. It is very easy to understand it and see it as simply a spiritual or religious exercise, the joining of two families as an emotional or romantic conclusion to a courtship. It is also though fundamentally at its core a legal arrangement. When that legal arrangement is extended and blended with technology, problems start to arise, in particular, if forced marriage is involved. However, when we extend or use technology to record or codify or make legal that union, there are concerns that are raised. The idea of a marriage by fax is one of those areas where we share a concern, but we do not think this is going to deal with the pretext of the motion, which is about preventing forced marriages.

A fake marriage, a bad marriage, a marriage made out of convenience to do an end run or circumvent the laws of the country are a serious matter and we share those serious concerns. None of us want to see marriage or any legal arrangement used to circumvent laws. That is not appropriate.

This is an issue where we must also accommodate modern realities, where borders change quickly, where family situations and a profoundly dysfunctional immigration system in this country prevents people from being next to each other even when they are properly and legally married. It is a concern that we all share.

I will give members an example. Without naming names, there was a case that came into my constituency office of a Canadian citizen, a professor with a Ph.D., who was working overseas in one of the Commonwealth countries and married a colleague, another recipient of a Ph.D., another person with highly-prized skills. When she came back to Toronto to teach, her partner was told that he could wait two years before rejoining her or could come here for two years and not travel or work. That is absurd. This was a legal marriage that was not forced or done by proxy and nonetheless was not honoured here.

As I listened to some of the remarks that were being made here, I noted that the members opposite denigrate people with real credentials from somewhere else with great ease. No wonder foreign-trained professionals have such a difficult time getting recognition of their citizenship, their intelligence and their capacity in this country when people with degrees from Ivy League universities are joked at for having gone abroad to receive them. Shame on the members opposite. Shame.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, October 23rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, is the member opposite aware of any province that legally recognizes proxy marriages in Canada?

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, one would hope and one would have expectations and good faith that those are the sorts of answers that we would receive with the sorts of questions that we have composed and tabled in the House as questions that need serious answers.

However, my speech focused not just on the emergency response and the reactive capacity of government, but we need to also start to probe and start to put together a program that is proactive and is actively engaged in creating capacity in countries in Africa but also in Latin America and Southeast Asia. It is not good enough to simply keep responding to crises, whether it is the housing crisis, the crisis in the Middle East, or whether it is crisis in Liberia and Nigeria and the countries of West Africa.

This country knows that if we prepare for problems ahead of time, we mitigate the impact of disasters. We may not be able to prevent them, but preventive action is just as important, in fact even more vitally important to invest in, especially in developing countries. Yes, there are questions about the reaction of the government, but we also want to steer the government back into a role that traditionally Canada has played, which is being proactive and anticipating the need to build civil capacity in developing countries. It is something we have done proudly in the past, but seem to have abandoned in favour of a trade-based foreign policy.

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, one of the great challenges in the modern world is effective communication. While we have sometimes pat answers to very complex questions posed in question period, the inability to follow up and get detailed answers beyond talking points is frustrating many of us who are trying to communicate with our constituents but more importantly to communicate with all Canadians.

The committee allows for us not necessarily to communicate directly, not to frustrate the rank and file and the members of the public service that are doing the work day in and day out, but to talk to the leadership from the parliamentarians of this country specifically about ideas, strategies and emerging issues, as well as to explore new courses of action, which are cropping up around the world and are being presented to us from different locales right around the globe. This allows us to focus efforts, communicate and explore the issue, and also to create more effective policy.

The problem with simply relying on a website or relying on sitting down in private with the minister and talking about this is that new ideas do not see the light of day and as a result of that our approach stays locked in a process that, quite frankly, has failed these countries and has failed this country in terms of its international reputation.

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support the motion. I do this based on my experience, largely based in Latin America and doing development and aid work, primarily in El Salvador.

The experience that I had in El Salvador informs the approach that I think is missing on this file, and it highlights some of the challenges that we have when we look as a country at what is happening. It is one of the reasons why bringing responsible ministers to committee and probing them on this issue is about more than simply addressing the immediate, important and vital concerns around Ebola, its spread in Africa, and the possibility of its spread to other countries. It is also about trying to figure out how we can change our approach to these situations so that we stop finding ourselves in a position of constantly responding to crisis. Instead, we should rearrange, restructure and rethink our foreign policy and our support of developing countries in such a way that we are practising preventative measures so that we protect populations from crisis and prevent these situations from arising.

I do have some experience with friends who have done work in Africa. One in particular has run several large refugee camps in Africa and is now working for an aid organization out of Washington. One of the things that the western countries continuously do, including Canada and other developed countries, is to decide what is in their best interests as their approach to foreign policy and development work, instead of taking a look at what is working and what is effective in the countries where they are trying to do work.

Particularly in Africa, what was found through research was that western countries in Europe and North America were more focused on saving money in the delivery of aid than actually delivering aid effectively. Particularly around food, where Africa has had huge challenges with malaria and AIDS, the drought and famine dynamic in Africa has fostered the spread of disease. Because we have not built a transportation infrastructure to deliver aid to where people need it and where people are living, what we have done is create centres to which people have to come to get food and medical resources. They get concentrated around these aid camps, pick up diseases, share them among different people from different regions of the affected area, and then go back to their smaller communities and spread those diseases.

We have become agents of contaminants and disease precisely because of the way in which we deliver aid. This is a significant problem and it needs to change. The way it needs to change is by switching our foreign policy from one of purely economic development and looking for opportunities to exploit economically on behalf of Canadian companies, to one that gets back into the process of developing the social and physical infrastructure required in these countries to manage their public health, local government and social capacities in such a way that we prevent the problems from spreading.

I am a new member, and I neglected to inform the Speaker that I will be splitting my time with the member for Random—Burin—St. George's. I apologize for that.

To return to the issue at hand, in this current situation, we need to develop an aid policy that builds capacity. If we take a look at the on-site conditions in places such as Liberia, there are no public ambulances. Not a single ambulance in that country is operated by a public entity. I recognize that perhaps there are some on the other side who think that all health care should be privatized, but the trouble with having a privatized health care system like that is that there is no effective way in an epidemic to deliver patients to hospitals safely. There is no way to deliver medicines and goods to hospitals across a country safely if there is no effective public intervention in the transportation system. This is a problem.

With the ravages of AIDS and the dynamic of depleted professional populations through these various epidemics, we have also seen that doctors and the intellectual capacity of some of these countries have been significantly challenged by the way in which they have to manage these crises. As a result of that, doctors and laboratory assistants, the very expertise that we need to combat this on the ground, are not present in some of these countries. The hopes of developing this expertise are extinguished when we invest not in universities and training but simply look to exploit minerals or other economic opportunities.

We need to change the way we do foreign policy, share our intellectual knowledge and financial capacity, and reinvest our dollars and capacity as a country into restructuring, rebuilding and reinvigorating the social capacity of these countries. That is not happening.

When we have a foreign policy driven by trade and not by development, what ends up happening is that when one of these tragedies emerges, the capacity for the country to respond is not there.

That is why we send a field laboratory into Africa rather than simply facilitating the construction and arrival of a permanent laboratory in this part of the country that could do other work after Ebola, hopefully, disappears. It is also why we see in these sorts of catastrophes in a country such as Liberia, one of the largest producers of rubber, it has no capacity to manufacture its own rubber gloves or protective gear. It is mind-blowing in terms of the simplicity that we could drive into a situation like this by moving to create capacity in these countries.

Canada has other things it can share beyond simply sending drugs here, there and everywhere, and sending temporary support to these countries. For example, with the SARS epidemic, which took root in Toronto when the epidemic spread to our country, we have developed some of the finest public health protocols. Those health protocols are contained within our borders.

We have not set up the capacity to train public health workers in other countries. We have not used our acquired intelligence on these things to pursue a policy of developing capacity in these countries. Again, we return to a trade-based foreign policy instead of a social development policy. As a result of that, these crises emerge and they emerge unchecked in countries that are struggling to provide basic services to their people.

As I said, I worked in El Salvador. I have delivered aid directly to municipalities there. It was not a program supported by the federal government. It was a program supported by the City of Toronto. It was a city-to-city initiative that saw us taking decommissioned ambulances, repairing them, driving them to El Salvador and building the only public ambulance capacity in that developing country.

As a country, we have the capacity, the resources and the expertise to build and develop this capacity in Africa in places where not only Ebola but other diseases and famine and civil war are destroying civil society. We need to reinvest in our capacity to create civil society.

One comment that was made across the aisle that I think is an important one was about bringing more than just the health ministers to bear. Bringing the development minister and the foreign affairs contingent of the executive branch of government is critically important because we need to start reorienting our approach to foreign aid in such a way as we build capacity. That is missing from this debate. A focused and sustained conversation through committee is the way to start to change the way the government and our country responds to international dynamics.

We need to do this and we need to do it in a way that allows for our country's capacity and talent to shine on the international stage, rather than to simply respond and deliver the same message time and time again, that it is all about trade. It is as if somehow trade is going to stop a disease from spreading or that somehow trade is going to build capacity in a country where quite clearly the capacity has not been built, despite the fact that Liberia's gross domestic product has been outpacing most of Africa's, growing at a rate close to China for the last five years. That growth is now significantly threatened.

This is the direction in which the Liberal Party hopes to take foreign policy. This is the direction in which we hope to focus debate through committee. That is why we are asking members of the House to support the member's motion.

[Housing, October 20th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened with interest during my first month in Parliament to the grossly inadequate housing announcements by the federal government across the way.

For Canada's largest city, Toronto, these agreements mean, wait for it, that 60 new units of affordable housing a year will now be built. At this rate, with Toronto's wait list at close to 90,000 people waiting for shelter, people are being told they would have to wait for 1,500 years to get housing.

Do the Conservatives really think this is a reasonable amount of time for a person waiting for a house, 1,500 years? Or, do they think they can fool Canadians by simply announcing $800 million over and over again?

[Business of Supply, October 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I was recently engaged in a by-election and was led to believe that the NDP policy on Canada east was that it supported it. It was not the candidate I was running against that delivered that information. It was the leader of the party, after meeting with the Premier of Saskatchewan.

Assuming that we are going to build and support Canada east, which still has to go through several regulatory processes, where would the NDP like that pipeline to land, and is it prepared to accept it being shipped from any shoreline in the Gulf of St. Lawrence?