Alex Nuttall

[Business of Supply, March 1st, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, certainly all of the issues we have been talking about surrounding this attestation are important. In my own riding, the government recommended that the Gilbert Centre, which works with individuals in the LGBTQ2 community, receive only half of the funding it had applied for. Our office ensured that all of the funding that was applied for by the Gilbert Centre was given to it.

At the same time, the work that is done by different organizations in the community to help those who are struggling to find a home, to help those who are struggling who need shelter, to help those who do not have food, and to help those who do not have access to summer camps are just as important. These are all incredibly important issues.

The reality here, and what I believe, is that we live in a country where we do not leave anybody behind. However, what this attestation is doing is that it is leaving literally tens of thousands of Canadians behind by cutting the funding to organizations that will help those who are marginalized in our communities.

[Business of Supply, March 1st, 2018]

Madam Speaker, what we have here is the member saying that he is going to navigate groups through an application process with the Government of Canada. That may be what the government is doing here. It is trying to force groups and individuals to go down the road of its beliefs. It is trying to get everybody into this one group. The reality is that Canada is a diverse country with many different faiths, religions, and points of view. When I work with the organizations in my community and across this country, we ask them; we do not tell them. The government needs to step back, consult with Canadians, and consult with the organizations that are providing services to people who are going through such severe situations.

I would call on the government again to stop telling Canadians and start working with them.

[Business of Supply, March 1st, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I know the people from our region appreciate the opportunity for their member of Parliament to stand today. I would like to start by saying it is an honour to split my time with the other member for Barrie—Innisfil, some would say the better member for Barrie, or at least better looking.

Oftentimes when we get the opportunity to speak in the House of Commons, it is on motions and items where we see very positive changes happening. Unfortunately, today is not one of those moments. I think I can speak for every member in the House when I say that every summer I look forward to seeing the different organizations applying for Canada summer jobs money. They are applying to put students into the workplace to give them experience and ensure they are ready either for the studies they are going back to or eventually the job market.

Unfortunately, this year we have had a change introduced by the Liberal government. The Prime Minister and his team have decided that in order to qualify for funding, organizations would need to sign a new attestation. Focusing on the meat of the attestation, it states:

Both the job* and my organization's core mandate* respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability or sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression;....

When we look at this on the surface, it is something perhaps many people would immediately jump behind. When we look deeper into this and the effect the attestation and verbiage put forward by the government is having on society, we can see major issues. We have seen organizations across the country come forward and state that they have issues getting these summer students, who will be providing services to Canadians, to sign the attestation. They cannot, in fact, sign this attestation based on the one of the items outlined in the attestation, either freedom of religion or freedom of speech.

The Toronto City Mission, in the riding of Scarborough—Agincourt, helps literally thousands of people. It helps widows, kids in government housing, those who do not have a place to live, the homeless, those with disabilities and mental health issues, those who are seeking employment, food, and shelter. Dave Addison, of the Toronto City Mission, says the following about the attestation:

The mission is already operating at a deficit, having decided last year to offer the camps [for children] for free because many of the families they serve can’t afford to pay any fee [at all]....

We love the widow, the orphan, the refugee, [and] the poor. We ask the government to remove the attestation and allow us to do our loving work.

That is the crux of the issue we have in front of us today. There are thousands upon thousands of organizations across this country that just want to love and help Canadians who are in need. In my own riding of Barrie—Springwater—Oro—Medonte, the Hope City Church in downtown Barrie helps those who are trying to get out of prostitution rings or out of human trafficking. It offers support services to help people get their lives on track, to help those dealing with mental health issues and addictions, yet this year it will not be able to provide those services because it is unable to sign this attestation.

The government would have Canadians believe that this is somehow about some sort of side issue that it would like to bring up. The reality is that this attestation, no matter what the intent was by the government, is about the Canadians it affects. It is about the widow that the Toronto City Mission helps. It is about the children in government housing who would not have a summer camp to go to without the Toronto City Mission. This attestation and its effects, this entire debate, is about seniors who do not have access to health care, yet there are organizations in each of our communities across the country that step up and provide these services.

This attestation and this entire issue, this debate today, are about Canadians who are marginalized who no longer will have the services that they had last year because the government decided to introduce this attestation. This entire debate is about supporting those in our community who need help, and it does not matter where in the country they come from. It does not matter whether someone is a Liberal MP in Atlantic Canada, a Conservative MP from Ontario, or a New Democrat from B.C. These issues are affecting us all the same.

We are seeing organizations in our communities pulling back from the entire process for summer students, which means they are pulling back from the services that they are providing Canadians or trying to find ways to come up with the funding. It is terrible. I never thought that I would see the day when we would have a government double the amount of funds going to this program, which is literally training young people to help those in need and actually helping those who are in need, and at the same time as doubling the funding it is cutting the services to those who need it most. It is incredibly shameful.

It is not about one religion or one faith. This is affecting everybody. We saw in the National Post an article where there was an imam from the Muslim community in Mississauga speaking about this issue. We saw leaders of the Sikh community stepping up on this issue. We saw members of Catholic and Christian communities stepping up, of the Coptic Christians, and of many different faiths across our society because it affects everybody equally. It affects a Muslim kid's help phone line. It affects churches who are on the streets doing mission work. It affects Project Ramadan, which provides food and support to many different communities. Just because the organization is of the Muslim faith and has a Muslim faith basis, it does not just help Muslims. It helps everybody, anybody who is in need in that community.

This attestation is getting in the way of these organizations being able to provide those front-line services that government fails to provide. It is getting in the way of people being able to access shelters. It is getting in the way of our young people being taught the lessons and being given the experience and learning the empathy to deal with those in our society who just do not have what we have, who do not have the same access to the things that we in the House have. To say that we are going to marginalize, as a House, that the government is somehow going to marginalize not just the groups that provide these services, not just the students who work with the groups that provide these services, but those people who are in need and who are accessing these services day in and day out, is incredibly disgusting to me.

How could this be where the government has ended up? Maybe it was not the intent. Maybe the intent of this action was not to have those people hurt. Maybe the intent of this action was to try to do something good, but that is not what we are seeing. At first, the minister said that this is great and not to worry. Just a few weeks later, the Liberals had to walk out and say that, actually, the wording is not what the wording means and this is actually what they mean now, but they are not going to change the wording. Then we have organizations across the country saying that they cannot apply even under this changed wording because the verbiage is still the exact same as it was before. The minister, the Prime Minister, and the government have failed to listen and they failed to consult and they failed to learn what the issues were with this attestation that they put forward, which is infringing on the faith and religious beliefs of Canadians.

I did not come to the House and I did not run for election to cut off services to those who are most in need in our community. I can say, as somebody who has grown up in government housing, who has accessed food banks, who has dealt with many of the issues that we are seeing these organizations that are being cut off deal with, that these are life and death matters in many situations. What we need to do today, as a House, is to call on the government to back away on the attestation and stand up for Canadians who have been marginalized.

[Canada Summer Jobs Program, February 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, in December, the Prime Minister decided to force a values test for organizations applying for Canada summer jobs funding. There are thousands organizations that will not be receiving funding this year because of their faith, but the loss to Canadians is not about these organizations. It is about the students who serve in soup kitchens, work at street centres, are camp councillors in government projects, like the one I grew up in, and provide health services to seniors the government does not provide. It is about the thousands of at-risk Canadians they serve. It is about feeding the homeless through places like the Toronto City Mission, supporting mental health in shelters, ensuring that underprivileged children have access to summer camps, and ensuring that seniors below the poverty line are receiving necessary health services.

When the Liberal values test wins, marginalized Canadians lose.

[Youth Achievements, February 7th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to stand today and speak about our country's greatest resource, our youth. I, too, was young when I got into politics as a student mayor, and still a youth when I was first elected to Barrie City Council at the age of 21. People would say, “You're going to be a great leader one day.” That is the biggest lie that we tell our young people.

They are leading us to be more environmentally conscious, to protect our lakes, streams, and rivers. They are leading us to ensure competition in the marketplace with apps like Lyft and Uber, which are disrupting tired, old government systems. They are shaping new technologies and creating new jobs. Their social ideals are shown by people like Zach from Barrie, who ran all the way to Ottawa, raising awareness of youth mental health. They are clean from the notions of trading ideals for access and insulated from the worst of our politics.

I would like to recognize our young people across this country, who are vehicles of change and leaders, not a year from now, not a decade from now, not a lifetime from now, but today.

[Department of Employment and Social Development Act, January 30th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to speak to this bill today. I just wanted to compliment the member who brought this forward because of the issues facing Canadians who are living with disabilities and dealing with issues on a day-to-day basis that certainly I have not had to.

We need to ensure that we are doing everything we can as a government and as parliamentarians to ensure that we are making life easier. This bill will continue the work done under the previous Conservative government to centralize information across government and to reduce red tape as a whole. This is incredibly important and is something very close to home.

When I was about 10 years old, almost on this date, January 30, my mother was walking across the street, and she was struck by a vehicle. She was disabled, probably permanently, in many ways, with both mental and physical disabilities. She has healed in some ways since then.

I can tell members about the difficulties families and individuals face when they first start to figure out how to re-evaluate their situations when there are major life changes. It is not all people with disabilities. Some are born disabled, and some deal with similar types of occurrences. However, there are life-changing incidents that happen, whether it is to those who support persons with disabilities or others who come in and out of their lives, that affect the person's ability to move forward.

This bill would bring all the information the Government of Canada has to one place to ensure that all the forms a person needs to fill out are in one single place. It would do nothing but help those people who are on the ground.

Often we think that we come up with better ideas and solutions here in Parliament or as a government than what is requested on the street by people who are dealing with these issues, the people who are living with disabilities. As we have travelled across the country, whether we were in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, or other places, meeting with groups that are advocating on behalf of persons with disabilities, the number one thing we have heard is that it is too complicated. People have to go here for this and have to go there for that. Getting it all in one place at one time is a very difficult thing to do, specifically for people who are dealing with these types of situations. On top of that, a person may have a mental or physical disability to deal with, which can often get in the way of being able to accurately fill out the information or interpret the information and return it.

It is a very important matter to make the process as easy and simple as possible for those people who are dealing with disabilities, as well as their family members, support workers, etc. Red tape is a major issue for families and those who are dealing with a disability.

I have one personal story that aligns with this bill. It is something that affected my own family. When my brother was 18, he decided that he wanted to go to college and he wanted to work. He was in high school, going every day from 8:00 until 2:30 and then going to work every day, from 3:00 until 11:00, at Pizza Hut. Every day he would go to work and come home.

Where I am from, we respect those people. They are working hard to break the cycle of poverty. They are working hard to create a future, to create opportunity for themselves. The result was that the funding for my mother was cut off, because my brother was saving too much money to go to university or college. Therefore, we ended up in a situation where the cycle of poverty was essentially enforced by the same government that intended to end it. The intent was to provide support, not break it.

What we end up with in government are rules made, regulations created, and responses made off the cuff to situations that bureaucrats or government members see.

The result is that those regulations are enforced by those who work for the Government of Canada, the provincial governments, the school boards, or municipal governments, and in doing so, they are merely enforcing regulations or other things that are in place, which end up enforcing this cycle of poverty or allowing these injustices to continue. Therefore, it is very important that we get the obstacles out of the way and ensure as much ease as possible for those people who are seeking to improve their situation.

This bill would begin to make life a bit easier, making sure that all information can be found in one place, by creating a single, comprehensive application that accesses all programs for the federal government. My hope is that through this process we will be able to align not just all of the federal government application processes in one place, and it is not just about the rejig of Canada.ca and everything coming in through one portal, etc., but that we work with our provincial and municipal counterparts to ensure that there is a process for persons who are dealing with disabilities.

A lot of these funding formulas have overlaps between federal and provincial jurisdictions and the effects of one application process and result will end up affecting the ability of another government to proceed. Even within the federal government we have programs that depend on one another. If people are accepted for one program, then they can be accepted for another, like the disability tax credit and the savings plan. In order to be able to pull up the savings plan, one has to first be accepted for the disability tax credit.

This bill would continue the work of the previous government, which introduced a landmark registered disability savings plan that helps parents and grandparents of children with severe disabilities contribute to their child's financial security. The previous government also invested $218 million per year for labour market agreements for persons with disabilities to assist provinces in improving the employment situation of Canadians with disabilities.

It is important to remember that we need our federal government to continue to implement, hand in hand, with other jurisdictions to ensure that the taxpayer, as there is only one taxpayer, is able to access all programs equally. The previous government invested $30 million annually in the opportunities fund to help persons with disabilities prepare for and obtain employment. It supported caregivers by recognizing their enormous contribution through tax incentives.

Canadians with disabilities are already struggling because of the increased cost of living under the Liberal government. We have seen it already with the changes it made to the disability tax credit. We know that the cost of living is going to continue going up with the introduction and implementation of a carbon tax across this country. Those two items will have a debilitating effect on the ability of persons with disabilities, specifically those who are struggling in terms of financial means, to respond to and create a future that is full of opportunity.

I wanted to finish with some of the things I heard when we were out meeting with groups across the country.

Persons with disabilities are not looking for the government to provide everything for them. They are looking for the opportunity to succeed, the opportunity for employment, and the opportunity to access the programs that will help them reach the successes they are looking for. What we see here is a bill being introduced that will do just that. It will simplify. It will make it easier. It will make it a better process for persons with disabilities to be successful and to work with their government in the future. For that, I know we will support the bill, and I thank the member for introducing it.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 29th, 2018]

With regard to applications for the Disability Tax credit by persons with mental illnesses or mental health conditions: (a) for each month since October 2012, what was the percentage of approvals, disapprovals, and incomplete applications returned to applicants respectively; (b) with respect to rejections of applications in (a), what percentage of rejected applicants appealed the rejection decision; (c) with respect to rejections of applications in (a), what percentage of appeals were granted or declined respectively; (d) with respect to rejections of applications in (a), has any part of the government withdrawn or withheld funds, bonds, and grants from the Registered Disability Savings Plans of any applicants; (e) with respect to withdrawals or withholdings in (d), how many applicants who were previously approved for the Disability Tax Credit have had withdrawals or withholdings made from their Registered Disability Savings Plan accounts since May 2017; and (f) with respect to withdrawals or withholdings in (d), what is the total value of funds withdrawn or withheld from Registered Disability Savings Plan accounts since May 2017?

[Questions on the Order Paper, December 11th, 2017]

With regard to meetings or communication between the Office of the Prime Minister and David Livingston, Laura Miller, Patricia Sorbara and Gerry Lougheed, since November 4, 2015: what are the details of any meetings or communication, including for each the (i) date, (ii) type of communication (i.e. meeting, phone call, email, etc.), (iii) location, (iv) purpose or summary of communication?

[Business of Supply, November 23rd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, when we look at what has transpired over the last couple of years, it is difficult to take from the governing party that it wants us to focus on some sort of side issue. There is a real issue here. That issue is the trust between the Government of Canada, including the parliamentary secretary and the finance minister, and the people of Canada. When the conduct that we have seen by the finance minister over the last couple of years puts that into question, it is incumbent upon the opposition parties, not just my party but all of them, and members of the governing party to ask questions to try to understand. Until we have the information, we cannot do our jobs fully, so we need the finance minister to provide that information. We are calling on him to provide the information about the other numbered companies so we can see what is there and determine if he has, in fact, done other things for companies he owns and maybe regulates in his position as finance minister.

[Business of Supply, November 23rd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I obviously cannot comment on what the intentions were of the finance minister at the time, but what I can say is we can look at what the evidence is. The evidence is $20 million held in a private corporation, not in a blind trust, that reaped somewhere around $5 million in growth over the time period. The question that needs to be answered by the finance minister is why this happened.

The second question that needs to be answered by the finance minister is what is left in these other numbered companies? What other assets are there that perhaps have an interest in companies that the finance minister is personally regulating as a minister of the crown? Those are the questions that we need to hear answered through this motion. Hopefully we will get the support of the governing party, the support of all of the opposition parties to ensure that the finance minister is held accountable to Parliament and the people of the country—