Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, February 24th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for the excellent work he has done on the palliative care committee. Coming into this, I learned a great deal, and I believe the committee has done excellent work. It has laid the groundwork that we can use to deal with this.

The issue is that we would all love more time. That is what my old man said in his final days, “I thought I'd have more time”. We always think we will have more time. The Supreme Court has ruled. That is my concern. I do not want to be in a position where we either leave a vacuum or attempt to bring in the notwithstanding clause to counter the Supreme Court. It has ruled. It has given us a deadline.

I believe we can work together across party lines. I believe we can work through the summer and do this. The report the committee did on palliative care, an all-party report, is excellent. Everyone in the House should read it and the folks back home should check it out. It shows that parliamentarians can actually do some good work together. Let us learn from it.

[Business of Supply, February 24th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, as always it is a great honour to rise in the House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay. I am honoured to rise following my colleague from Vancouver East who has done so much work on health care and end-of-life issues.

I have been meeting across the country with people who are very concerned about the need for a national palliative care strategy. I just met with medical doctors, nurses, and people involved in the palliative care movement in Toronto, and there is a real deep concern following the Supreme Court decision and what it will mean for families and medical practitioners. These are very deep issues that we need to deal with. I think the concern is about a vacuum, a lack of leadership by Parliament to define these issues, that will very much put the medical community in a compromised position that it does not want to be in. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to address this.

First, I would like to thank the province of Quebec for its fair and balanced consultation process.

The government of the day held a fair consultation process with the various interested parties, and it led to a plan regarding the standards for end-of-life care everywhere in the province and a definition of the process surrounding the issue of euthanasia.

Therefore, it is possible to find a solution to this issue, and Quebec is a model.

What concerns me is that the government knew that the Carter decision was coming. The people in the end-of-life care movement knew that something was happening. I heard all the time, “What is the government going to do?”

In court, one has to mitigate one's damages. One has to be able to show the court that action is being taken. If one does not take action, the court will.

What has come out of the unanimous Carter decision is that the court, rather than defining the issue, has opened it up in a way that will probably make it much broader, probably broader than Quebec has gone, and probably much broader than Parliament would have gone. If we do not act in response, the courts will be expected to intervene again. There will be other challenges and we as a society will be put in a position of dealing with it, and who knows where we will end up in the process. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to deal with this.

The frustration is also that Parliament had a chance to act. We established in the House a commitment to a national palliative care and end-of-life strategy to work in consultation with the provinces and territories, recognizing their jurisdictions, and to work with the medical community, because there are models of good, quality palliative care out there. When Canadians know what is available, many of these fears about end of life become very different. However, the reality is that across the country there is a patchwork of services. Seventy per cent of Canadians do not have access to quality palliative care. Therefore, the other issue, the issue of assisted suicide and euthanasia, draws a lot of attention in the media.

My concern about my Conservative colleagues is that if they do not act within this year, this issue could become much broader and much more difficult for parliamentarians to respond to. We have an opportunity.

I listened to the hon. members from the Liberal Party. I agree with them: Parliament can act and should act. We have a year. We knew this was coming. We can do this. My concern with the Liberal motion is that it is focused strictly on the Supreme Court ruling and not on the larger end-of-life issues that have to be part of the package.

Harvey Max Chochinov just wrote an excellent op-ed on this. He is an expert on palliative care. He is concerned that they will define through this, through Parliament, or through the courts the right to die but not the right to have access to quality palliative care. It would be a very unjust situation if we simply respond to the court ruling, which might affect 0.2% of the population. I am not diminishing those people, but 70% of the population does not have access to quality end-of-life care.

We have an opportunity right now. The Supreme Court has ruled that this has to be dealt with.

Let us put aside the usual bickering that goes on. We have a period where we can sit down, look at how to do this in a way that is just, that works with the provinces, and realizes that with the vast majority of our population aging, the issue of palliative, home care and hospice care is vitally important.

From a jurisdictional issue and from a planning issue, it is very important as 1% of Canadians use 30% of the health care budget. Many of those in that 1% are people in their final months of life. We are spending enormous amounts of money on end-of-life care, but it is being delivered in a patchwork of services. The stress on patients is enormous, the stress on families can be traumatic and there is the stress on the medical system.

If we talk to people involved in quality palliative care, they will say that once a person is identified in a palliative program, there are no more midnight trips to the emergency ward with a loved one, trying to find a bed, not knowing what to do. It is an incredible stress on families. We have seen really good models in Brantford, Sudbury and Saskatoon. Those models can be replicated in other parts of the country.

I am very concerned that we are standing between a political vacuum on one hand and a committee motion on the other. Again, I commend my colleagues for bringing it forward, but if the motion does not address the issue of palliative care, then I have a problem. I have a problem saying that we are simply going to address the Supreme Court decision and we are walking away on the rest of it. That is problematic for Canadian society.

Some of my colleagues from other parties have said that Canadians are out on this issue. They expect us to show leadership on it. They expect us to show a level of maturity in recognizing that as parliamentarians we are entrusted with certain things. If we do not live up to that standard, the Supreme Court will act for us. I believe the Supreme Court has a fundamental role to play.

The Supreme Court has told Parliament to get its act together, to do it within the course of this year or it will be devolved either to the provinces or we will see further court challenges. Once the courts recognize that Parliament is not willing to act, I think they will start to interpret this ruling in a much broader fashion. I am not sure that is where the Canadian public wants us to go with this.

We have an opportunity right now, and it is an important opportunity, on the issue of end-of-life care. We stood in the House just five months ago, talked about palliative care and we committed to it. Since then, there has been zero action from the federal government. How does that look when the Supreme Court sees that the federal government has done nothing on this?

We have an opportunity. The federal government is mandated by Parliament to start that process with the provinces and territories to establish quality palliative care. The federal government also has a massive role to play in the delivery of health care in first nation communities, which have very little access to quality palliative care, in the military with our veterans, and in the prisons.

The federal government also has a national role to play in health care, to say that we can establish funding that the provinces can access for training. One of the big concerns that has been raised in the palliative care community is that if this moves within a year, the decisions on life and death will be handed over general practitioners who do not have the expertise in palliative and end-of-life issues. We will have to deal with very complex issues in a vacuum, without the support.

The federal government could work with the provinces and establish those norms, those standards and establish training so we could do this in a just and fair way. We could do this in a way that all Canadians would recognize, regardless of their beliefs on this issue. We all share very complicated beliefs. The quality of the lives of citizens, regardless of their station in life and as they face their final few months, has to be considered, a total value that we as Canadians and parliamentarians are willing to embrace.

[Business of Supply, February 24th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. I certainly believe that in the House we have the ability to work together on something so important.

I listened to the member read through the motion, which identifies how many people would sit and where they would sit and what they would do. I did not see the phrase “palliative care” anywhere in that motion. This motion is to deal with the fact, as it says, “...that the prohibition on physician-assisted dying violates Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms...”. That is the mandate being set up by the Liberal Party for this.

I heard my colleague talk about how we could work in an apolitical fashion: let us talk, let us make changes. He said we could amend the motion. He is not really speaking truth to power, is he? When attempts were made to work with this motion, to ensure we have a comprehensive view of end of life, the Liberals insisted that this motion was going to stay focused on assisted suicide. That is the problem, because we have to look at the full slate of issues with end-of-life health care. That is what is incumbent upon us. Harvey Max Chochinov, who is the distinguished professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, has recently stated that under the situation we are faced with now we have the right to die but not the right to quality palliative care.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague why the Liberals have been standing up in the House all day saying we can talk about palliative care if people want to bring in palliative care. However, they cut it out of the motion so that it is only focused on assisted suicide, and we are not responding to the larger issue of end-of-life care that we need.

[Business of Supply, February 24th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague, particularly her passion on the issue of palliative care. Palliative care is fundamental in this discussion.

Last spring, parliamentarians of almost all stripes stood to speak on a national palliative end-of-life strategy, saying that if an end-of-life strategy were in place, the vast majority of scenarios that were promoted in the media would become unnecessary because of the support that would be given to families and patients. However, there has not been any action since then. There has been talk, but I am concerned that the lack of action on following through on palliative care is creating a vacuum for the courts to step in.

What steps will the government take to follow through on the commitment that was made in the House to ensure that we build a strong, cross-Canada palliative care strategy, working with the provinces and respecting their jurisdictions, but ensuring people have access to the end-of-life care they need.

[Foreign Affairs, February 24th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians were concerned to read recent reports that the Pakistani consul general in Toronto participated in a fundraiser for the Liberal Party of Canada. It was also reported that he then went to Scarborough and participated in a partisan event with the Liberal candidate. We then understand that the Chinese ambassador pulled out of an event when he realized it was being put on by and for the Liberal Party of Canada.

This just shows a real lack of judgment. What does the government intend to do to ensure that foreign diplomats are not being used for domestic partisan purposes by particular parties?

[Northern Public Transit, February 24th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, northern Ontarians are tired of being treated like second-class citizens. We are tired of the ongoing attack on public transit in the north. We have seen the loss of air services, like Bearskin Airlines, and the privatization of road maintenance. Then the Liberals killed our train. When the provincial Liberals killed the train, they did it on the Thanksgiving weekend in 2012, stranding all the students who wanted to come home. The Liberal minister sneeringly told northern families that if they wanted their kids home, they should buy cars. That is not good enough.

Now they are going after the bus service. It is really unacceptable that someone who is going to Toronto for cancer treatment would have to stand outside at midnight, in -45°C weather, waiting for that bus to come down from Matheson, Kirkland Lake, and Englehart.

The Liberal and Conservative plan for northern Ontario has been the death-by-a-thousand-cuts policy. Public transit is a right. Northerners know that only New Democrats, provincial and federal, will stand up and defend them and fight for the north.

[Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, February 17th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to my hon. colleague. I am interested in the issue and what we saw with the cult of Bountiful that came across the border into Canada to escape prosecution in Utah. They set themselves up in Canada. There were all manner of allegations of abuse and of young girls as young as 12 being forced into marriage. This had gone to the courts in B.C. in 2007, I believe it was. It did not believe it had the power to go through with it, but it was tested at the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2011, which upheld Canada's polygamy laws.

We have the tools necessary to go against these cults.

We saw the same thing with Lev Tahor, where there was all manner of allegations of abuse and forced marriages of children. The Quebec police and the Ontario courts moved against them.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the one provision that concerns me, which would apply to participants in a wedding. I am concerned about this, because there may be people who are brought to a wedding who would now be complicit. If we attempt to draw the circle too wide, we are actually not going to be able to target who we need to target, which are the people running these cults. The courts have already given us the tools in Canada. The police have the tools to go after them for forced marriages, child abuse, and polygamy. Would not the criminalization of the overall community actually drive people underground?

[Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, February 17th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague.

Bountiful, the fundamentalist Mormon cult, escaped from Utah to escape prosecution and set itself up in British Columbia. There was a huge challenge that went all the way to the Supreme Court around whether Canada's polygamy laws would stand. There was a bogus argument that this was somehow a religious right, a religious freedom argument. However, the courts disagreed and upheld the anti-polygamy laws, because in these kinds of patriarchal cults, the issue of abuse is clearly paramount.

We can look at the issue of Bountiful and other fundamentalist cults. Lev Tahor is another one. It has been called the Jewish Taliban. The Quebec police moved against them, and the Ontario courts moved against them as well, so laws are already in place against these kinds of actions.

Could my hon. colleague explain whether he thinks this bill is redundant and whether it adds new powers currently unavailable to police in protecting young girls and women against this kind of abuse?

[Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, February 17th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. We have had two very high profile cases that have shown the power of our courts to go after groups that abuse young women.

The case involving the Mormon fundamentalists in Bountiful was brought all the way to the Supreme Court. Some said that they were fighting for religious freedoms, but clearly this was an abuse of young women and girls, and the courts upheld the anti-polygamy laws.

It is the same with Lev Tahor, the fundamentalist orthodox cult. The Quebec and Ontario police moved against it because they recognized that within the so-called claim of religion there was an ongoing attack against young women and girls, and there was a need to protect them.

What is in this bill that would give the police and the authorities any new powers that they do not already have in going after anyone who uses religion, or culture or whatever to abuse young women and girls in forced marriages? If the laws already exist, if they have been upheld at the Supreme Court level, what possible additions have been added to this at which Parliament needs to look?

[Ethics, February 16th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, let us look at this theme of the Nova Scotia judicial appointments. They tend to go to people who were invited to the justice minister's wedding. Joshua Arnold, the best man, was appointed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, and his wife was appointed too. Other nominees read like buddies of the minister and party donors.

Judicial appointments are supposed to go to the most eminently qualified. Why is it that at other weddings they toss the bouquet, but here they tossed around nominations to the court?