Alupa Clarke

[Veterans, November 3rd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, this November, as members of Parliament, we have the duty and privilege to say a few words in the House to acknowledge the extraordinary dedication that our veterans and active military members show to our country, day after day, from one military conflict to the next.

We must not forget that these men and women in uniform often serve on Canadian soil, as we saw most recently during the unfortunate flooding last spring.

Therefore, in addition to remembering their many sacrifices, we must also develop legislation that helps improve their lives. I have taken action, and in May, I introduced Bill C-357 to fix a bureaucratic injustice that affects veterans.

During this time of remembrance, I urge my colleagues from all parties to take a serious look at this bill and to help me pass it, to guarantee that our veterans will be respected in their transition to civilian life.

[Regional Development, November 2nd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, it is no secret that the Liberals are centralists. They centralized decision-making on regional economic development in Toronto, and they centralized political decision-making on issues such as the elimination of the political lieutenant for Quebec in Ottawa. They are now preparing to centralize the arts by transferring a wide range of artifacts from Quebec City, the bastion of the Canadian francophonie, to the nation's capital.

Will the member for Québec promise us that he will fight in cabinet to reverse this decision?

[Transportation Modernization Act, October 31st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, it is significant because it is an amendment coming from the official opposition. That is for sure. At committee, as well as in debate at the House of Commons, if the bill had been separated, because it touches on very large, different sectors of activity in Canada, probably we would have had 30 amendments. Probably the Liberal government in opposition did not want to see us, in this great House of Commons, opposing, debating, and introducing dozens of amendments. We would have been able in committee to analyze the details of each component of this bill. It is very sad.

Members on this side have never had any issue with this kind of omnibus bill. We assume it. However, the Liberals said during the election campaign that they would never go to this kind of practice. This does not change much, actually, in hastening the process of the House or increasing the number of bills going forward.

Also, why do they give us only four or five days to debate such an important bill, when we spent the past three days overseeing Bill C-24 to change a minister of state's title to that of a minister? It is a ridiculous bill that does not give anything more to Canadians, which is what we should be doing: giving something more to Canadians. Rather, Bill C-24 gives more to ministers and the government benches. That is ridiculous. We should spend more days in debate on serious bills and stop joking around in the House, which they do.

[Transportation Modernization Act, October 31st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I do not agree.

There has been this kind of pattern with the Liberals for 40 years. It is a paradigm of always increasing the rights of people by creating and enhancing a judicial relation between individuals and companies, between individuals and the state. I think we should let the market regulate problems between citizens and companies. If people are not satisfied with the services given by a company, we can certainly count on them to stop using the services.

Again, the Liberal government wants to implement this kind of relationship of judicial protectionism. Will the Liberals introduce protection for bilingualism respecting Air Canada in this bill of rights for consumers?

[Transportation Modernization Act, October 31st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by mentioning the 60 or so seniors in my riding who suffered a tragic loss two days ago. There was a major fire in a retirement home in Beauport Sunday evening. The people on Joncas street, who are older than those living in other retirement homes, had to leave in the middle of the night and get on a bus. Incidentally, I would like to thank the city of Quebec for sending buses as quickly as possible. My thoughts are with these seniors and their families in these difficult times. I hope that most of them have family who can take them in. I have visited the home twice since I was elected.

I would now like to express some of my general concerns about this government, which has shown time after time that it is serving special interests, be they Liberal interests or multinational interests. The small and medium-sized business tax hikes it announced this summer are just one example of that. Another is the current crisis concerning the Minister of Finance's conflict of interest, which involves $20 million worth of shares in his family company, Morneau Shepell, that he was supposed to sell off two years ago.

Yesterday, we found out that five more government ministers apparently used the same technique as the Minister of Finance to avoid selling their shares or putting them in a blind trust. I hope we will all keep asking who those ministers are today. I am beginning to have some serious doubts about the behaviour of this government and the Prime Minister. The latter is responsible for ensuring that his government is complying with the law and is not using all kinds of loopholes to circumvent the spirit of the Conflict of Interest Act. I am very concerned about this.

This government is not working for Canadians; it is working for the multinationals. We saw a good example of this this morning in a Radio-Canada article written by Philippe-Vincent Foisy. It says that the government and the Minister of Canadian Heritage met with representatives of Amazon 99 times in the past 12 months. They met 37 times with representatives of Google and 16 times with representatives of Netflix, including 5 meetings with the Minister of Canadian Heritage a few months before she announced her extremely controversial agreement with Netflix.

In contrast, the minister met only once with representatives of ADISQ, whose gala I attended as a representative of the Conservative Party of Canada on Sunday evening. The minister met only twice with representatives of the Association québécoise de la production médiatique, and did not even meet once with representatives of ACTRA. This really gives the impression that the government is giving priority to the multinationals and that it has no time for organizations and Canadians.

Since we began debating Bill C-49, the government has boasted that it wants to focus on railway, aviation, and maritime safety. I, too, believe that railway safety is important, but 90% of this bill has nothing to do with railway safety.

Here is what I have done about railway safety since I was elected. First, I met with authorities at CN, since there is a railway serving Limoilou, in particular the port facilities in my riding, the port of Quebec and the Quebec railway station. I had a great meeting with a CN police officer. The CN has dozens of police officers that ensure railway safety. The police officer answered all the questions and concerns raised by citizens in my riding. My constituents wanted to know why trains often stayed at the two railway yards for several days, and they were also concerned about the trains' speed. It is very important.

If railway, aviation and maritime safety is so important, why was discussion in committee constantly stifled, and why were the amendments proposed by the official opposition rejected out of hand?

Most of the amendments proposed focused on the improvement of certain aspects of safety and competition.

The omnibus bill includes amendments to 13 different acts affecting the three main modes of transportation in Canada and the rest of the world. As I said, most of the content of this bill has nothing to do with safety, despite the fact that the parliamentary secretary’s speech was all about transportation safety. It is unfortunate.

Last night before I fell asleep, I happened to be reading the Canadian Parliamentary Review, a very interesting review of everything happening in all provincial and federal legislative assemblies across Canada. An academic wrote that he had conducted a study of the past 30 years and that, over the past two decades, there was a pattern of using, more often than not, time allocation for bills, in particular omnibus bills.

His study shows that efficiency and a need to act quickly are often cited as the reason to use omnibus bills. Parliament needs to be more efficient, since Canadians expect the House to act efficiently. In reality, in the past 30 years, the use of omnibus bills has not increased the number of bills passed in the House, regardless of the government in power. The academic goes so far as to say that we should let Parliament follow its natural course and allow members to thoroughly debate each bill. Thus, Bill C-49 should have been split into several bills so that we could get a more detailed understanding of every change the government is trying to make, as the hon. member for Mégantic—L’Érable so eloquently argued.

This being said, there are five aspects of the bill that caught my attention and that I would like to mention. First, with respect to allowing airlines to form international joint ventures, the bill will enhance the role of the Minister of Transport. How? Consider Delta Airlines and Air Canada, for example, each of which offers flights between Toronto and Atlanta. For the purposes of productivity, operations or efficiency, these companies could decide to merge the Toronto-Atlanta route in order to provide better service.

Normally, when two companies decide for form an international joint venture on a given route, they must obtain the approval of the Competition Bureau. With this bill, the Minister of Transport will have far more influence, because, at the end of the day, he will decide for the commissioner of competition whether the two companies can move forward with the international joint venture. The minister will act in the public interest. So far, neither the Liberal members or the parliamentary secretaries have been able to define the public interest in the context of the minister’s analysis.

The second issue I am interested in are the new security fees. The Minister of Transport has often mentioned the problem at Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport, where there are very long lines because there are not enough gates to ensure the safety of passengers as they embark on their flight. He said he wanted to make sure that there were more security checkpoints to make the lines shorter, but he will allow airports to charge additional fees. It is an open secret that the customers will end up paying these additional fees.

This specific clause of the bill shows us right away that Canadian consumers will have to pay more for their plane tickets when this bill comes into force. That is interesting because, every time the Liberals want to solve a problem, in this case wait times at airport security, they solve it by making Canadians pay more. The Liberals wanted to address the problem of climate change, so they created the carbon tax. They wanted to reduce their huge structural deficit by $20 billion, so they cut tax credits for Canadians, including tax credits for public transit, school supplies, sports, and arts.

Third, they want to change the act to give international shipping companies access to coastal trade thereby creating competition for Canadian shipowners between Halifax and Montreal. This will create an enormous amount of unfair competition for our shipowners because Canadian employees receive decent wages while other foreign companies do not pay their workers very well at all. This will create a lot of unfair competition for our shipowners.

This bill should not have been introduced as an omnibus bill. We should be given the opportunity to carefully examine each measure, which is something that we cannot do today. That is shameful.

[Transportation Modernization Act, October 31st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Mégantic—L’Érable has done a good job of listing all of the unintended consequences of this bill. We cannot be certain these will occur. I think that the hon. member once sat on the Standing Committee on Transport, but I do not know if he still does. If he was on the committee, he may have seen this bill beforehand. I would like him to tell me what exactly happened in committee. I was told that all of the amendments proposed by the opposition, whether the Conservatives or the NDP, were flat-out rejected and that there was no collaboration on this bill.

[Transportation Modernization Act, October 31st, 2017]

Madam Speaker, some provisions of the bill attempt to respond to a specific situation. Sometimes, two airlines may be compelled to streamline their operations. For example, if there is a flight between Toronto and Atlanta, Delta Airlines and Air Canada could decide to merge their operations and offer a single route instead of two separate ones. That means that when a customer books a plane ticket, either Air Canada or Delta Airlines will get the contract.

When airlines merge their operations, even if it is just for one particular route, the competition commissioner must determine whether so doing will reduce the competition on the market and he must also ensure that this will not drive up prices for consumers.

Under this bill, the minister would have the final say as to whether this sort of action is in the public interest or not. I would therefore like to know how the Liberals define the notion of public interest when airlines want to merge routes.

[Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Act, October 26th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I want to tell my colleague that, in actual fact, I am sure that Bill S-6 had many flaws. It is rare that members recognize that sort of thing in the House, but I mentioned that at the very start. I recognized that it was flawed.

I was not part of cabinet at the time, so I cannot say why that decision was made. As I said, one of the problems I see with Bill C-17 is that some progress is being lost with regard to the devolution of power to the Government of Yukon. I think it is up to the Government of Yukon to make sure that all parties in the territory are satisfied with industry-related decisions.

I understand that the government could have consulted more but, at the same time, the federal government holds discussions with its counterpart, the territorial government.

[Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Act, October 26th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, of course indigenous people are stewards of their lands. My wife works for the Inuit. My mother worked for the Inuit. My father works for the Mi’kmaq. I know quite a bit about indigenous people, and I respect them a lot. My name is an Inuit name, but I cannot say my own name in this House. I understand what the member means. That is why we need to continue with the devolution of as much power as possible to the territories, as the Nunavummiut are requesting right now. It is their choice to make on an ongoing basis. I think Bill S-6, under the Conservative government, was positive in that way.

[Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Act, October 26th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I totally understand the member's reasoning. However, as the NDP member said, we are talking about Yukon, so I think that we should proceed, and that that is a good thing.

I would now like to talk about centralization. A carbon tax was imposed on the provinces without consulting them. As for health transfers, the government imposed conditions that the provinces opposed but were bullied into accepting. This brings me to the central theme of my speech: devolution.

In the 1980s, under Mulroney, and again under the Harper government, we began a positive process of political devolution that focused much more on Yukon than Nunavut or the Northwest Territories. This bill, Bill C-17, not in its entirety but certainly some of its clauses, works against the very devolution that I believe to be good for the people of Yukon. Why? Because it will eliminate the federal minister's ability to transfer ministerial powers, duties, and functions to a territorial government.

I was very proud to learn about this legislation in 1995. I thought it was fantastic that a Conservative government had introduced it. It is a truly Conservative measure because we support decentralization. As is the case with Britain's Conservatives who ceded power to Scotland, which now has a quasi autonomous parliament, western Conservatives support decentralization. We ceded very important powers to the Yukon government over time.

It actually started with a Liberal government. With the advent of responsible government in the Yukon in 1978, political parties were formed for the first time. Under Mulroney in the 1980s and 1990s, there were transfers of very important federal powers. In 1992, at the end of the Mulroney era, the first nations and the government entered into an agreement. Under the Martin government, Yukon was given all the powers that other provinces had, except over criminal prosecutions.

In Yukon, mining is the main industry. Therefore, it is very important for the people and their government to make their own decisions about environmental assessments and the projects they will accept.

For me, the problem with the Liberals' Bill C-17 is this desire to roll back the powers we delegated to the Yukon government to approve or deny proposed mining and resource development projects. This bill is a definite step backwards in terms of devolution.

This is what the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie was just referring to when he said that one government takes one step forward and the next takes one step back. I think that if there is one thing that successive governments should not go back on, it is this type of important policy on territorial devolution. Yukon was one of the territories that benefited the most. In spite of its flaws, Bill S-6, which was passed in 2015, did a lot for devolution.

In short, it is a shame. That is pretty much all I wanted to say today. In closing, I would like to add that my colleague takes the prize for hardest-working MP. He is a very brave and courageous man, because taking the plane every week as he does must be gruelling.