Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, in my many years here, I have seen some incredible displays of ridiculous behaviour in terms of pretending that we have a party that understands the economy and then it comes in with a solution that is ridiculous. Then, it huffs and puffs that nobody is taking them seriously.

We are talking about 6,000 to 7,000 job losses at Bombardier. Its solution is that the little island airport in Toronto is going to somehow fix that and that we are wasting our time in Parliament talking about that notion of a solution.

I remember the last government and how much it ridiculed the notion of public transit when we were trying to get subway cars down from Thunder Bay, from the Bombardier plant, where we have hundreds of jobs. Public transit across the country is seen as a great wish, but, of course, it goes against the fundamental ideology of the privatized oil lobby that is known as the Conservative Party and we are wasting time in this House talking about the little island airport as somehow being an economic solution.

Thank God, the Conservatives do not control the economy anymore. For all the folks back home, I want to say that they pay these people a lot of money, and their solutions are always about wedges; their solutions are always about trying to find some ridiculous point that we waste time on in this House.

If that party were serious about supporting Bombardier, it would have come with something that was a little more coherent, and perhaps something that supported public transit. I know it is very hard for them to say those words, but it is something that would cause most Canadians to say, “Well, that was not a bad discussion. That was not a bad way to spend an afternoon in Parliament.” That is as opposed to this ridiculous motion, which is another of many ridiculous motions that we have been subjected to by that party.

[Indigenous Affairs, February 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for the answer, but a nation-to-nation relationship needs a commitment by the leadership to meet. Ever since the government of Paul Martin, everyone in Ontario has received an annual 6% increase in health transfer payments, and first nations got nothing like that. What they do have are the highest rheumatic fever rates in the world, hep C, a suicide pandemic, and children with parasitic bacterial infections.

I am asking the government, what commitment will it make to close that gap in the coming budget for health care and why will it not meet with the leadership now and commit to ending this discrimination once and for all?

[Indigenous Affairs, February 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, we lost another young person in Moose Factory this week. That brings the number to over 600 young people who have killed themselves or tried to kill themselves in the northern part of my riding since 2009, and requests for suicide and depression counselling are regularly turned down by government. This week Mushkegowuk Nishnawbe Aski Nation declared a state of emergency. It needs action now.

I am asking the government, will it meet with the leaders Jonathan Solomon, Isadore Day, and Alvin Fiddler, and commit to a comprehensive plan to end this systemic discrimination?

[Canada's Contribution to the Effort to Combat ISIL, February 24th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I was raised by my grandmother. She never got over the horrors of what happened in her neighbourhood when every young man on her street was killed. While I grew up, she said, “Charlie, never fall for politicians who send young boys to be killed”. That is the issue here. We have to be honest with Canadians. We are sending them into a combat mission. We cannot say anything else because we are sending young men and women into harm's way and I hear my grandmother's voice every time.

I hear the jingoism that sometimes runs around the House. We have a responsibility to be truthful. We have a responsibility to have a long-term plan. We have a responsibility to come to Parliament with a clear plan of getting in, getting out, and building a long-term sense of stability and peace in that region.

[Canada's Contribution to the Effort to Combat ISIL, February 24th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, the issue of collective security and our role on the international stage is a fundamental question for Parliament. I would take exception that ISIS came to our shores, as the former prime minister claimed, and attacked us. I was here when that gunman came. That was a man suffering from severe mental illness, who tried to get himself arrested in a McDonald's with a stick. To claim that this was a foreign force that landed on our shores and attacked our nation diminishes the tragedy of what happened and the loss of such a powerful young man as Corporal Cirillo.

It also means that we cannot jump every time someone with a gun stands up and is crazy. That is not collective security. That is using these tragedies as an excuse to further other aims. I believe that Canada as a nation is bigger than that and we will only be bigger than that if we do not give into that kind of misrepresentation.

[Canada's Contribution to the Effort to Combat ISIL, February 24th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, the issue of how we make the Mike Pearson vision in the 21st century is what we really need to be looking at. Part of that is having a long-term vision. We cannot do it by misrepresenting an extension of a combat mission. That is why we are there, first and foremost. We are not there under a UN mandate. That is first.

There is a huge role Canada can play, but given our recent track record and lack of ability to actually look beyond the short-term goals, we are leaving ourselves in a situation for a long-term war without having the credibility that we are going to be going in there afterward as a nation builder. Nobody is going to believe it.

This is a good discussion, but we need to be honest about the parameters of how we are engaging there.

[Canada's Contribution to the Effort to Combat ISIL, February 24th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, as always it is a great honour to stand in this House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay. I never take this honour and the task that they have given me to do lightly. I also say that there is no role that we as parliamentarians can take that is more important than the decisions that have to be made in putting men and women of our armed forces into harm's way in a foreign theatre.

Since I have been here, I have been through many of these debates and many of these motions. Over my time here, I have been fed a heavy diet of jingoism and rah-rah and two-dimensional claims that, if we look back, in the light of day did not stand up. Whenever we have these debates, we need to think about what it is that we are being called upon to do.

I would like to say that what concerns me here is that we have, once again, a reactive policy about a region that is the most explosive in the world. This has been the unfortunate response over the last dozen or so years of not having a proactive, clear direction. It has put our soldiers in harm's way and it has added to the destabilization of an already crisis-ridden region.

Nobody is arguing against the monstrosity of the group called ISIL. We do not need to compare the torture-porn stories of what that awful group has done. What we need to do is say what is the best way that we as a nation with a proud military history, but also a proud nation-building legacy, can do in this fight.

What really disturbs me about the present Liberal government is that it is not being truthful to Canadians. The Liberals talk about pulling the planes out, but now, as the minister said today in the House, the fight will be won on the ground, the targets will be found on the ground. This is an expansion of a combat mission. It is important if we are going to have a combat mission to say it is a combat mission. That is the first part of being honest with Canadian people. Once they have identified what that mission is, then they can start to talk about the parameters of the mission and the goals of the mission. However, to be completely vague and misrepresent what our soldiers would be doing on the ground is to do a disservice to this House and it will lead to long-term consequences.

I remember back in 2006, when we had the first debates on the mission into Kandahar. What drove the Paul Martin government at that time was pressure from the United States for having made the wise decision not to go into Desert Storm, which was widely supported by the Conservative caucus, the Alliance Party, and the wild acclaim about how we had to go and save civilization by getting ourselves involved in this illegal war in Iraq.

We commend the previous government for not going in there. It was that wrong-headed invasion that created so much of the instability and horrific death levels and created the grounds that we see for groups like ISIS today. As a result of having offended the Bush administration at the time, the previous Liberal government was under pressure to show that we could be good allies. That was the sense, and we heard that to be playing with the big boys we had to do our part so we voted in this House to send our soldiers into Kandahar without a clear understanding of what was on the ground in Kandahar. Our soldiers went into the toughest parts of that firefight.

We in this House had all kinds of language that this was nation building, but we did not even know what was happening on the ground. We had no forward-looking vision. The New Democratic Party at the time asked what the targets were in terms of the goals to show that we had actually succeeded there. We asked another important question at the time: Who are our allies on the ground? We asked where our allies were, because we went into Kandahar alone. At that time, I remember even lines like, “Oh, it's about putting boots on the ground.” They threw the Neville Chamberlain thing around, “Oh the NDP are being like the 21st century Neville Chamberlain”. The job of Parliament should have been to ask where our allies were, going into Kandahar.

We now see this today. Major General David Fraser, who commanded the military's alliance into the mission in 2006, has said that the west made a serious mistake in going in to fight the Taliban.

I was very surprised at his statements. He said that we did not learn the wrong-headed lessons of Iraq. This was the general charged by Canada to go in there. This is not to denigrate in any way our efforts to fight what was a brutal and awful regime, or the incredible work that our men and women did under really difficult conditions and made us all very proud.

However, this Parliament failed those soldiers because we did not have a sense of the clear objectives, to have the major general tell us today that we did not do what we were supposed to have done and now we have more instability.

Let us fast-forward to Libya and the vote we had in the House on the bombing mission in Libya. At the time we supported it. We were going to stand as a House united, because there was such deep concern about what was happening on the ground in Libya in terms of potential killing and atrocities by the Gadhafi regime. Nobody in the west had any real clue what was really happening on the ground in Libya, so we thought, “Well, we will bomb them. Then things will be okay.”

Then we turned our attention away. The mission was over. Mission accomplished. Now we have a completely destabilized situation in Libya, which is very close to the southern belly of our European allies. We completely failed.

We cannot go and bomb another country without a plan on the ground. What is it going to look like in the long term? This is where I plead with my Liberal colleagues for the incredible vision that was set forward in the 20th century with Mike Pearson, that Canada was going to play a role, that we were going to be the nation builder. We were not just going to be the little brother who went along with the gang. Canada established a reputation that was very unique at the time.

Unfortunately, I feel we have been failing in this mission. It is like we have developed this attention deficit disorder on international affairs. An issue will come up for a little bit, we think we have dealt with it, we will bomb them, we will send in the planes, and then we will move on.

Now we have an extremely destabilized situation in Libya. Then when the ISIS onslaught happened in Mosul and the horrific slaughter started, we went there. We sent members from each party to northern Iraq to find out what role Canada should play. At that time, the allies on the ground in Iraq said they did not need Canada in a bombing mission. They needed Canada to help with the humanitarian crisis they were dealing with. That was what they asked for.

We went in. We started the bombing mission in Iraq, without any clear idea, again, of who our allies were on the ground. Then we extended it to Syria, where we have even less knowledge.

The present Prime Minister said we were going to pull the planes. I think that was a wise move. Now, we are going to be expanding the mission in Iraq.

In the last Parliament when we were debating this, I asked my hon. colleagues in the Conservative government at the time what the plan was. A simple question, what is the plan? What are our objectives? Who are our allies on the ground? They shouted to me and said that they were going to kill bad guys. That is not a foreign policy. There is no shortage of bad guys over there. My question was, “Who are the good guys?”

Let us look at our allies. We could say we have Saudi Arabia. Those are our allies. Saudi Arabia, which is completely destabilized in the region, in terms of creating a conflict, the Sunni-Shiite proxy wars in Yemen, in northern Iraq. Canada is sending billions of dollars in military aid to Saudi Arabia that is already being used on the ground. Our weapons are being used in the Yemeni war, on both sides. The Saudi human rights record is horrific. The Saudis have also caused untold economic damage to Canada, trying to beat us in this oil war they declared. Those are our allies on the ground.

Now we are getting ourselves into a Sunni-Shiite conflict in Iraq where we have no clue of what the outcome will be.

Let us look at our friends, the Kurds in Turkey. Turkey is a NATO ally. I refer to The Guardian, November 18, 2015, that talked about the key groups on the ground who could fight ISIS: the PKK, the Kurdish Democratic Union. They are the ones that could take ISIS out. It says:

In the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year now. They’ve simply refused to make use of it. In fact, as the world watched leaders making statements of implacable resolve at the G20 summit in Antalaya, these same leaders are hobnobbing with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man whose tacit political, economic, and even military support contributed to Isis’s ability to perpetrate the atrocities in Paris, not to mention an endless stream of atrocities inside the Middle East.

Canadians deserve better than the mishmash of excuses we are getting from the government. We are sending our men and women to war and we have to do better. We owe it to them.

[Health, February 22nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, government documents submitted to the Human Rights Tribunal show that Health Canada routinely denies everything from motorized wheelchairs to specialized prescription drugs for indigenous children. I refer the minister to evidence tab 420 from the hearings, which relates to a four-year-old child who suffered severe anoxic brain injury and required a specialized medical bed so she could go home to her family. Health Canada wrote in response “absolutely not” and refused to pay.

What directives has the minister given to her staff to end this malignant culture, so the culture of “absolutely no” for children finally becomes one of “absolutely yes”?

[Indigenous Affairs, February 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am absolutely appalled. We are talking about whether Canada is in compliance with a human rights tribunal ruling that has gone around the world for systemic discrimination against children. However, what I am hearing from that member makes it sound as if these children are getting a better deal than ordinary white Canadians, that they are getting access to services that other kids would not get, and that maybe there is more to do.

Yes, there is more to do. If the member read the internal documents, they routinely deny emergency medical treatments. If the Liberals look at the documents, there is a 100% refusal rate at level 3. Is there more to do? Yes, there is more to do.

It is about being in compliance with the legally binding rules. I did not hear one word about whether the member's government will meet the obligations that have been laid down by the human rights tribunal to stop this systemic discrimination against these children that is endemic within Health Canada. It is a legally binding ruling.

I would have liked to have heard, “Yes, we will respect that ruling, and yes, we will make sure that discrimination stops”, but I did not hear any of that. I heard more pointed talk and blather.

[Indigenous Affairs, February 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, at the outset, congratulations for being in the chair. I invite you to come to my town of Cobalt any time you want.

We are here tonight to follow up on the question that I raised with the Minister of Health, that on the day it was found that Canada had systemically discriminated against indigenous children for years, Health Canada denied a youngster medically necessary orthodontic surgery at the third stage of appeal.

I am very pleased that the minister, because of the pressure that we raised in the House, is now looking at that case again. I find it shocking that it takes pressure in the House of Commons to deal with children who cases are being denied.

In this child's case, in 2008, she suffered an ocular tumour and was going to lose her eye. She needed special drops. The medical professionals gave her a prescription for the drops, and the bureaucrats at Health Canada said, “Absolutely not”, she could get by with Visine. The family has had to get by on samples from the medical specialists so this child does not lose her eye.

Recently, her orthodontic crisis came to a head, with two pediatric orthodontic specialists stating that if nothing were done, she would lose all her teeth and need special surgery. This was a severe and functionally handicapping malocclusion. She was denied at the first stage. She went to the second stage of appeal and was denied there too. She went to the third stage of appeal and again denied.

What is really disturbing is to have read the criteria, because the government said that she did not meet them. The criteria for the government to accept a case is for that person to have a severe overbite with evident soft tissue injury, two-third overlap with impingement of the palate. I am not a dentist. I do not know what that means, but I know that her orthodontic surgeon said that she had a severe overbite with evidence of two-third deep overbite impingement that would lead to a loss of her teeth. If she is not eligible under the criteria, then who is?

Evidently no one is. I am looking at over 534 cases of children that were brought before Health Canada, and 80% were rejected in the first round. The few that went to the second round had a 99% rejection rate. On the third round, 100% of these children were denied by the bureaucrats at Health Canada. That is what systemic discrimination against these children looks like.

I refer members to the working document of the Officials Working Group, May 20, 2009, on Jordan's principle dispute resolution. It states that when a child has special needs, for example, for a wheelchair, Health Canada will not give an indigenous child a motorized wheelchair, but that the child has to get by with an adult push wheelchair. If the child does not fit that chair, it actually says that they will have to put in some pillows. If they need a special lift because they cannot move or if they need a special wheelchair or a special tracking device, they do not get all three. They can pick one. That is it. This is what systemic discrimination by the government against children has meant.

It is all very well for the kind words we are hearing from the government, but we need to know whether the systemic discrimination is going to end and if Canada will become compliant with the Human Rights Tribunal.

I want to hear, first, will the Liberals immediately stand up in this House and say they will not appeal against Cindy Blackstock?

Second, will they prove to this child and to the country that they are willing to implement the Human Rights Tribunal?

Third, how are we going to deal with the 500, the 1,000-plus children, and all the other children who are being systematically denied day after day by the government?