Andrew Cash

[Petitions, December 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions that I would like to present today.

Many seniors in my riding who get their paper bills in the mail were very upset by the fact that companies are now charging extra money for that. They were happy to hear in the throne speech that the government has realized that his is a serious problem. These residents have signed a petition calling on the government to act.

We look forward to the regulations that will see this take place.

[Petitions, December 4th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present petitions from Toronto residents opposed to the reversal of Line 9 to ship raw bitumen through our city by a 40-year-old pipeline that was originally built for light crude oil.

Instead of trying to address the significant environmental and health concerns raised by the signatories and the NDP, the Conservative government has shut out the public from the consultation process, demolished environmental assessments, and wiped out protections for our lakes and rivers.

The government is determined to ram Line 9 through Toronto no matter what the cost to our city, environment and the future health of our communities, and we completely reject this approach.

[Family Reunification, December 4th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, Canadian immigrant families have to wait up to eight and a half years to be reunited with loved ones. That pretty much sums up the Conservative commitment to family values.

Blinded as the Conservatives are by an ideology that reduces people to line items on a budget, it is surprising that they cannot even see the economic argument in ensuring that families reunite quickly with their grandparents and parents. With the cost of child care and housing so prohibitive, something they are not doing anything about, it is often grandparents who provide child care while parents are working.

The cornerstone of Canada's commitment to newcomers should be bringing families together, not making immigrant families wait years and years to be reunited with loved ones. Surely we can all agree that families belong together. That is a value we all share as Canadians, do we not? However, it has become clear that the Conservatives do not seem to understand the importance of all of this. Heck, a Conservative minister even referred to parents recently as “a burden”.

Canadians deserve better. Newcomer families deserve better. They will get that from New Democrats, who will always fight to make sure that family reunification is an essential priority in Canada's immigration system.

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, November 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, as usual it is a deep honour to rise in the House on behalf of the constituents in my riding of Davenport in the great city of Toronto on a piece of legislation that strikes to the heart of families right across the country.

As many of my colleagues have already said here today, witnessing the profound courage and commitment of both the Parsons and Todd families through this incredibly difficult chapter in their lives has been something that I think all Canadians have noticed and learned from.

I think when Canadians are faced with something of this magnitude that touches all of us in the way that this does, they rightly expect that we here park some of our partisan instincts and deal with the situation at hand.

One of the ways a majority Parliament can sometimes work is when members on the opposite side and the opposition present bills that really do connect with an important issue right across the country and that pretty much everyone here in this place agrees with. Sure enough, from time to time, the government adopts those ideas. I think it is fair to say that while we work toward being on that side of the aisle and having that party on this side of the aisle, in the meantime, we find ways once in a while to advance issues that we can all agree on, and I think this was one of those issues.

My colleague for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour tabled a piece of legislation in which we sought all-party unanimous consent, but we did not get it. That is one thing, but to have the government come back with a very similar bill is something altogether different. We can support that, but as usual with the Conservative government, it cannot resist its inclination to play politics with every issue. Every issue for the current government becomes a wedge issue and an opportunity to fundraise and hector the opposition.

We saw this with Bill C-30, the widely discredited online spying bill that the government presented. The minister in charge of it at the time badgered the opposition, and in fact, all Canadians who happened to disagree with his perspective and the wide breadth of the bill by saying that if one did not support Bill C-30, one stood with the child pornographers, which was an absolutely outrageous comment and effectively killed the bill.

The government also eventually declared that Bill C-30 was not going to come back. There were too many questions, not the least of which were the outrageous comments from the lead minister. There were also too many questions around privacy and civil liberties. We need to be clear that the foundation of a liberal democracy is the protection of civil liberties.

We see that in the bill we could have just dealt with the cyberbullying. I am sure members opposite on the government side would probably prefer to do that too. Canadians watching this would also be wondering why we do not just do that. The issues of cyberbullying are complex and critical, and they are happening right now as I speak.

This issue is far too important, too pressing, and too complex, quite frankly, to dump it into a boilerplate piece of legislation that contains all sorts of other issues. Maybe the government can explain to Canadians the link between cyberbullying and the inclusion in this law of a two-year sentence for the theft of cable television. That is in the bill.

We are trying to get to the nub of an issue that is affecting many of our young people and many of our families, and for some families it is affecting them in the most tragic of ways.

I am trying to contain my sense of outrage that we even have to discuss pulling this part of the bill out and having it as a stand-alone piece and voting on it immediately. However, the government did have that opportunity when my colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour presented his cyberbullying bill in the first place.

When faced with such pressing issues around protecting our young people, it is tempting to consider lowering the bar in our pursuit of protecting people's privacy and protecting civil liberties. It is tempting to do that. I think that one of the reasons the government has thrown in all these other things that it would like to do is that, again, it is trying to play politics with this issue.

However, it is not just the opposition that has serious concerns about some of the other issues that are in the bill. The Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Madam Cavoukian, also has serious concerns about this, as she did with Bill C-30. It is the same with Canada's Privacy Commissioner, who had raised serious concerns about Bill C-30 and is going to carefully look at this bill as well.

I would sum up by saying that sometimes it is better for all of us that we park the partisanship in this place and deal with a pressing issue that affects Canadians and some of our more vulnerable young people from coast to coast to coast. By separating this part out of Bill C-13, we would be doing that. We would also be signalling to Canadians that we do take this seriously and that we want to act quickly to protect the young people of this country.

[Business of Supply, November 26th, 2013]

My apologies, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Braley made donations to the Conservative Party and to the Prime Minister, among others, totalling $86,500, prior to his appointment. I would like to thank the government members for allowing me the opportunity to repeat that fact, and to repeat it in a clearer way. That is the qualification for Senator Braley's appointment to the Senate.

Some members, especially Liberal members, seem confused as to why we would dare to suggest that, with the gravy train the Liberals rode for so long and that the Conservatives, mirroring the Liberals, are currently enjoying, we would want to see the end of that institution. If one's qualification is that one becomes a name on a ballot as a sacrificial lamb in a Toronto Centre by-election in 2008 or has $85,000 to spare, surely we can set the bar higher than that. I think Canadians understand that the bar should be set higher, which is why the motion is so important today. It is why Canadians are so concerned about this.

The Prime Minister and members of the government like to try to slough off the questions on this. They say that they have been clear and have already told everybody the truth. They say that they have already said these things so many times. Why are Canadians bothering them with all these details? It is the details that are important. It is the details that consume Canadians' lives. It is the price of food. It is the price of rent. It is the cost of gas. It is the cost of a Metropass in Toronto. These are the details of people's lives that people are consumed with and concerned about. These are the kinds of things the government should be concerned about.

We asked months ago why the government was letting companies charge seniors an extra $2 just to get their bills in the mail. At the time, the Minister of Finance went on about a self-regulating code of conduct, as if that is some kind of comfort to seniors who are barely scraping by in expensive cities right across the country.

We want to see a government that is focused on the real needs of Canadians, on the ways that will help them live in cities that are very expensive. That includes young people who are today graduating from university. In my province of Ontario, the average student debt at the end of a four-year undergrad is $37,000. Then they are going out into a job market where they cannot find permanent jobs. Their options are serial short-term contracts, part-time work, and increasingly, unpaid internships. Now there are some excellent internship programs out there that are run well, with proper oversight, but currently, young workers are simply asked to work for free in jobs that were once entry level positions.

We have not seen the government budge on that issue. We have not seen any action on this issue from the government, but it has spent a lot of time on spin and has congratulated and rewarded its supporters handsomely.

Donald Plett, Conservative Party president, is in the Senate too. These are the same senators who, after the House passed Jack Layton's climate change bill, a historic bill, and one we all would have been proud of, including some members on the government side, killed that bill. We are laggards in the international community when it comes to climate change. We are laggards when it comes to democracy here if we are letting an unelected Senate, filled with folks who bought their way in, failed candidates, and party presidents, both Liberal and Conservative, make those decisions.

Some Liberal members and Conservative members whose close friends sit in the Senate try to make this personal, and they say to the NDP, “So-and-so is a good senator; why are you picking on him?” We are not picking on individual people. We are talking about an institution. We are talking about democracy. We are talking about how we do this. We are talking about how we bring the issues of our constituents into Parliament and how we work on those problems together and come out with solutions that help Canadians.

That is why we are here. That is what we are here for. We are not here to protect parliamentarians. We are not here to protect senators who are taking advantage of the public largesse. We are not here to provide cover for them, but we also do not expect the Prime Minister—who, by the way, ran on a platform of accountability and transparency—to duck and weave and to cut and run. We do not expect that. Canadians do not expect that, especially when we have so many important issues to deal with.

In my riding, right across Toronto and right across the country there are thousands upon thousands of immigrants, for example, who have been waiting years to sponsor their parents and their grandparents. They have been waiting years for that. They need answers to these questions. They come into my office, and no doubt they come into the offices of many of my colleagues, and they are wondering why the government is not processing these applications in a timely fashion. Right now it has put an actual moratorium on applications, and when it lifts the moratorium, it will only be accepting 5,000 new applicants.

This is the kind of thing on which we need to put our focus. We need the Prime Minister to stand up in this House and take the responsibility that this motion underlines he must take. We need him to do that, because we need the government to become focused on the very pressing needs of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

[Business of Supply, November 26th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to be here debating in this House on behalf of the members of my community in Davenport in the great city of Toronto. I think it is fair to say that they have talked constantly over the last several weeks about the big scandals, because there are several going on, and then, of course, there is another large one going on in Toronto. Somehow the two conflate in the public's mind, because these scandals go to the heart of the political leadership of this country, what leadership is about, the purpose of it, and how we elevate the discourse in this country to a place that all of us here could be proud of.

I think that one of the deeply troubling bits of collateral damage from all these scandals is the public's disintegrating trust in our political culture. Of course, that plays beautifully into the neo-conservative ideology of the government, which is about shrinking government, telling Canadians that government is the problem, and telling Canadians that politicians are corrupt. My goodness, maybe that might actually have happened once in a while. It is what we are talking about today in this motion.

I just want to read part of the motion into the record for those who might be watching in their homes. It is:

...that the House condemn the deeply disappointing actions of the Prime Minister's Office in devising, organizing and participating in an arrangement that the RCMP believes violated sections 119, 121 and 122 of the Criminal Code of Canada, and remind the Prime Minister—

This is what we are doing here today.

I think Canadians watching this debate are shaking their heads and wondering why we have to spend this time, and it is not just the time. I will remind the hon. member in the corner, who seems to have forgotten, that it has been this party, the official opposition under this leader, that has constantly and doggedly pushed this issue so that we are actually at the point where we are debating motions like this.

However, let me carry on:

—of his own Guide for Ministers and Ministers of State, which—

By the way, we have had to remind the Prime Minister and ministers and ministers of state of this guide many times since I was first elected here in 2011.

—states on page 28 that “Ministers and Ministers of State are personally responsible for the conduct and operation of their offices and the exempt staff in their employ,”—

The point of the guide for ministers and ministers of state is that it assumes that ministers and ministers of state are held to a higher standard, an exemplary standard. That standard telegraphs to the rest in this place and to Canadians across the country that ministers and ministers of state, including the Prime Minister and the government, take their responsibilities and roles with the utmost seriousness and endeavour to execute these roles in a manner that is beyond reproach.

Let me finish reading this excerpt from the motion:

—and the House call upon the Prime Minister to explain in detail to Canadians, under oath, what Nigel Wright or any other member of his staff or any other Conservative told him at any time about any aspect of any possible arrangement pertaining to Mike Duffy, what he did about it, and when.

The leader of the official opposition has been doggedly determined to get answers from the Prime Minister for several weeks now. It is amazing to ponder that the Prime Minister cannot answer these simple questions, but they are not just simple. They are essential questions.

They go to the core of how this place works. They go to the core of the public's trust in government. I can tell the House that this trust has been shaken very deeply. I am in my riding of Davenport constantly, and I hear very little else about politics these days other than the scandal.

We can all agree that this puts a pall over all of us. It is incumbent on everyone here that we endeavour to get to the bottom of these issues. Obfuscation is not helping us in this pursuit, especially because we have so many other pressing issues.

We can talk about some of the Senate appointees and the role of the Senate. Our position in the NDP and the official opposition is clear. It has been clear for 40 years. We feel that the Senate has long outlived its usefulness and should be abolished. It is important to remember that other jurisdictions in Canada once had senates. The province where I come from, Ontario, once had a Senate. We no longer have a senate, and democracy still lives in Ontario. I believe that it will thrive here, notwithstanding a few people's hurt feelings over the ending of the Senate.

We have really important issues to deal with, issues the Prime Minister is not speaking to, as well as the fact that he is not speaking to the scandal before us. We need to get to the bottom of this, hear from the Prime Minister, and hear a clear explanation about what happened. We are past the point where we are prepared to hear little dribbles and nuggets of half-truths. We need the full truth, in part because we have so much to do.

We have the issue of climate change. We still have not got to the bottom of where the heck that $3.1 billion went from the last budget, which seems to have disappeared. That is on top of the $50 million to build a gazebo for the minister during the G20 summit, where the Auditor General said proper accounting was not pursued. We are still waiting for the paperwork on that. We are still waiting to find that $3.1 billion. How does anyone lose $3.1 billion?

The Conservative government likes to spin that it is fiscally prudent. It has posted the largest deficit in Canadian history. It cannot find $3.1 billion. It is trying to sell this canard to Canadians that it is somehow a prudent fiscal manager.

If we take a look at the Government of Manitoba, which has posted serial balanced budgets over four majority mandates, we see what fiscal prudence is all about and why Canadians can be assured that an NDP government would manage the economy in the most fiscally prudent way.

That said, the Conservative government has piled scandal upon scandal. I have already mentioned the $50-million gazebo. There was the robocall scandal. The biggest scandal is how the government has been asleep at the switch on job creation. It talks about the jobs it has created, but it never ever talks about what kinds of jobs they are.

I am in my riding all the time knocking on doors and hearing from people. People cannot live, raise a family, and pay rent in a city like Toronto with a minimum wage job. That is why so many people are working multiple jobs. We wonder how it was that voter turnout, for example in the by-election last night, was as low as it was in many of these by-elections.

People are working all hours. They are working split shifts. They are working multiple jobs, multiple part-time jobs. In Toronto right now, almost 50% of workers cannot find stable, full-time jobs. I thought that is why we came here. I thought we came here to try to make lives better. I thought we came here to try to make changes that would affect the most people. Instead, we have a government consumed with protecting their chosen few, some of them residing in the Senate.

It is worth reminding Canadians who might be listening today who some of those senators are and what their job qualifications are. In fact, since I mentioned the by-elections last night, it is worth noting that the last by-election in Toronto Centre, for example, was in March 2008. Do members know who came in fourth in that by-election in March 2008? It was the Conservative candidate. His name is Don Meredith. Guess where Don Meredith sits today? He sits in the Senate. My goodness, it is kind of cheap to get into the Senate. All one needs is 2,939 votes, which is what Mr. Meredith had in the 2008 Toronto Centre by-election. The list goes on.

Actually, one can spend a lot of money to get into the Senate. David Braley made donations to the Conservative Party and Stephen Harper, among others, totalling $86,000—

[Petitions, November 20th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the government is expecting the people of Toronto to say “yes” to the line 9 pipeline, notwithstanding difficulties with the company in terms of its environmental record, notwithstanding the difficulty that people have had in intervening in the process, and not withstanding the fact that the government has stripped environmental protection for new pipeline development.

The people who signed this petition cannot say “yes” to that.

[Respect for Communities Act, November 18th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, in many different ways we see this kind of narrowing of focus, expanse, and breadth by the government of the definition of who we are as Canadians. Are we a compassionate country? Do we care for one another? Do we try to find the most balanced way to move forward on complex issues? Time and time again the government has shown that it is not interested in that definition of Canada and who we are as Canadians. It is trying to narrowcast that. In truth, there are times when the government is trying to appeal to some of the worst in us, to the fear in us, as opposed to showing Canadians where we can go as a country and a community.

[Respect for Communities Act, November 18th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the government does not like science or science-based facts much. However, let us talk about Dr. Evan Wood, a renowned scientist, who works for the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He points out that one of the important aspects of a safe injection site is that, given that each HIV infection costs an average of approximately $500,000 in medical costs, InSite has contributed to a 90% reduction in new HIV cases caused by intravenous drug use in British Columbia. That is why the B.C. government has been such a strong supporter of the program.

That underlines some of the very important reasons we need to take this seriously. We need a complex and comprehensive conversation. It has already happened. Those debates and those studies have already taken place. We have the stats that show the great success of this facility.

[Respect for Communities Act, November 18th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, there have been at least 30 scientific studies on the one safe injection site we have right now. There is a boatload of data that speaks to improved markers around public safety, the transmission of HIV-AIDS. The data is in on this, so the member might want to take a look at the data. I think he would be convinced of the rightness of this.

I would also encourage the member to speak to his colleagues about developing more rigorous public participation around some of the significant infrastructure projects that we have in Canada right now. That would be a solution.