Andrew Cash

[Internships, February 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday in Toronto, a group of students made their voices heard around the issue of unpaid internships, and I would like to applaud their engagement and courage. Their intervention underlines a disturbing reality for many young people across the country.

These days, the chips are stacked against them. They graduate with record student debt, only to find that those jobs that a generation ago were entry level positions are now unpaid internships; unpaid. Today, we are asking young people to work for free. There are many excellent internship programs out there, but due to a lack of clear rules in some parts of the country and a lack of enforcement in other parts of the country, large and very profitable corporations at times exploit young people's desperation for jobs and do not pay them anything.

It is why I am proud to stand with my NDP colleagues here in the House of Commons and the NDP provincial member for Davenport, Jonah Schein, to call on the federal government and governments across the country to tighten and enforce the rules for unpaid internships. Making a young person work for free is not fair and it is oftentimes illegal.

[The Budget, February 25th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I was listening closely to my colleague, and there is not a word in here about the issues of gridlock in the GTA. That is something I think the member should be very exercised about, considering that the people he represents have to sit in traffic for hours in a day. I have not heard a single thing from the member, nor in fact any GTA members from the government side, on this crucial point. I wonder if he ever mentioned to the Minister of Finance that the GTA is losing about $6 billion annually because of lost productivity caused by gridlock in his home constituency.

[The Budget, February 12th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives have finally kept a budget promise. They promised they would do nothing, and their budget delivered nothing. For people facing record household debt, there was nothing to make life more affordable; for veterans, nothing to keep support offices open; for young people, nothing to deal with the youth unemployment crisis.

We were happy to see they finally agreed to act on pay-to-pay fees. This was long overdue. However, the budget only talks about banks. What about other companies, like telecom companies that are already forcing seniors and others to pay to get their bills in the mail?

Yesterday's budget was about an election in 2015, not what Canadians need today.

The NDP knows it can do better. New Democrats know that Canadians work hard and they deserve a fair deal, a fair break. Canadians know they can trust the NDP to fight for middle-class families, to fight for young people, to fight for veterans, to fight for seniors and for all Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

[Citizenship and Immigration, February 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we do not need a lecture on citizenship from a government that welcomed with open arms a convicted felon by the name of Conrad Black.

This is the same government that nearly doubled processing time for citizenship applications, and family reunification delays get longer and longer. Now it wants to concentrate more power in the hands of the minister, giving unilateral power over citizenship.

Will the minister agree to actually bring real reform to Canada's citizenship laws, not just more power for himself? Will he work with us to fix Canada's citizenship laws?

[Citizenship and Immigration, February 6th, 2014]

The fact is, Mr. Speaker, that the Conservatives have failed to deal with the long and rising processing times and the massive delays in reuniting families. That is the real problem. What the minister says is, “Just give me more power and trust me”, but that is not going to cut it.

Why will the minister not drop the rhetoric, work with us, listen to immigrant families, and make some meaningful, some real changes to Canada's Citizenship Act?

[Business of Supply, February 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague's eloquent speech gave us a bit of a history lesson on what CSEC is supposed to be about and the ways in which it is supposed to go about its operations, and yet we hear revelations quite to the contrary.

I want to read a quote from Ron Deibert, who heads the world-renowned Citizen Lab, the research program at U of T's Munk centre. He says that, whatever CSEC calls it, the tracking of those passengers at Canadian airports was nothing less than “indiscriminate collection and analysis of Canadians' communications data”. He says that he could not imagine any circumstances that would have convinced a judge to authorize it.

We are debating a motion that would require Parliament to give greater oversight to this body, and actions that have been revealed recently suggest that we desperately need it.

Given the evidence and the questions that are coming up, does my colleague not think that is cause for grave concern and greater oversight?

[Business of Supply, December 9th, 2013]

When they agree with us.

[Petitions, December 9th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I have several petitions, but as time is tight I will limit it to one. Since we are debating pensions and the expansion of the Canada pension plan, this petition is from young workers in my riding who are calling on the government to enact a national urban worker strategy, which would, among other things, increase the pension and make it accessible for young people to imagine one day having a stable pension when they retire.

[Business of Supply, December 9th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it used to be that one could leave school, get a job, work at the same company for one's entire working career, and retire with a workplace pension. Of course, the situation today is not that way at all, particularly for young people, and particularly for young people in big cities, where the cost of living and the cost of housing are so incredibly expensive.

Young people do not generally think about their pensions when they are young. That is why we are debating this today, because if we do not get this right today, we are relegating an entire generation of Canadian young people to a life of poverty in their senior years.

I would like my hon. colleague to spend a bit of time talking particularly about the importance of this for young people today.

[Petitions, December 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is on a nuclear fuel processing facility in my riding, which has been there for 50 years. In its operating licence, it was to have performed a very thorough public information program so that the residents would know that it was there. It has not really done that job, and consequently, most people never knew it was there. The signatories of this petition call on the government to ensure that the regulations and the licence are fully enforced.