Dan Harris

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague for his tireless leadership on the rail issue, his involvement in the rail caucus and everything he does to try to improve rail and rail safety in the country.

It is certainly a shock that today a country as vast as Canada still does not have a high-speed rail link. We are even having trouble speaking about a higher speed rail, which would involve getting rid of level crossings in some of the corridors. This would help to improve rail safety.

With its far-flung population centres and vast land mass, Canada is unique in its geography. As such, our railways have always been an integral part of how we connect with each other across this massive country. Railways are not just a means of transportation, they tie us together at a much deeper level, as many of the speeches today have done, in particular, the member for Timmins—James Bay's speech just a while ago.

I know a great number of members in the House, myself included, rely on VIA Rail as a means to getting to and from our constituencies. In just the one year since I was elected I have already travelled over 25,000 kilometres on our rail network.

Railways are used every single day by thousands of people and it has been this way for hundreds of years now. The benefit of railways are clear. Trains are substantially more fuel efficient than motor vehicles when it comes to moving passengers, and especially cargo, over great distances. Of course, by potentially electrifying rail lines, greenhouse gas emissions could also be reduced in the coming years.

Despite the shortcomings of safety regulations, travelling by train is still roughly five times safer than using a car. It is still the main mode of transportation for Canadian goods. With 70% of all freight in our country shipped by rail, it is literally the backbone of our economy. Every interruption to our rail network comes at great cost to our economy. Rail lines provide crucial links to our biggest trade partner, the United States, and of course also connect to our ports in Halifax, Vancouver and Churchill, to provide access to important overseas markets for Canadian companies.

In large urban centres, commuting by rail is a vital component of our public transit networks, helping to get millions of Canadians to their workplaces every single day. VIA Rail connects to our country's most vibrant cities, carrying more than four million passengers a year. It could do a lot more with more government support.

The Railway Safety Act was implemented in 1989. It sets out a regulatory framework to address, for railways under federal jurisdiction, matters of safety, security and environmental impact. Transport Canada has noted that the Canadian rail industry has changed significantly since the act was amended in 1999. Operations have become increasingly complex and traffic is growing rapidly.

The department points out that in February 2007, the minister of transport, infrastructure and communities launched a full review of the operation and efficiency of the Railway Safety Act through an independent advisory panel. According to the department, the findings indicated that although the Railway Safety Act is fundamentally sound and efforts have been made to improve rail safety, more certainly needs to be done. The advisory panel's final report, Stronger Ties - A Shared Commitment to Railway Safety, published in November 2007, included 56 recommendations for the improvement of rail safety, some of which require further legislative changes to the Railway Safety Act. Then in 2008, the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities issued its own report, which included an additional 14 recommendations.

On February 26, 2012, a VIA Rail train derailed in Burlington, Ontario, killing three VIA employees and injuring 42 passengers. We are still in the early stages of investigation but the indications would seem to suggest that speed and a lack of signals inside the train may have played a role. The crash reinforced what the NDP has long said, that although railways in Canada are relatively safe, tragic accidents can and do still occur. These preventable accidents should be avoided at all costs.

The federal government has a key role to play in the effort to make train travel safer. Federal initiatives, like Bill S-4, would go a long way toward making train travel safer for passengers and rail employees. However, other initiatives, like the NDP's call for positive train control and calls for the Conservatives to reverse their cuts to VIA Rail and transport safety programs, including rail safety, would also help to create a safer rail system.

While we applaud the eventual passage of Bill S-4, it is unacceptable that the bill and the important provisions it contains has taken so long. Now more than ever we need to see these changes realized. The NDP welcomes the bill and we see it as a step forward for Canada's rail safety. However, it is time for the Conservative government to take action and satisfy the long-standing demands from the independent experts at the Transportation Safety Board. More talk is not what we need. Action is what we want.

By the time the bill is passed, it will have been five years since the recommendations of those experts were first published. That is too long when making changes where safety is concerned. Canadians are demanding that we make the railway safer and we are more than happy to oblige.

We are happy to see the bill before the House, but it is a pity that it has not been a priority of the Conservative government, the government that likes to boast that it is the champion of the safety of Canadians. Let it try to say that to the families and victims of the derailment in Burlington, or to the families who lost their homes in St-Charles-de-Bellechasse in 2010.

The safety of Canadians is important. The bill is needed for railway workers, passengers on the trains and people who live near railway lines. It is also important to our economy, as I said before. Every disruption to the rail network potentially affects millions of dollars worth of goods and time.

The government likes to advocate for smaller government and for getting the government out of everyone's business. Large oil companies and their employees, the shippers that use the rail lines, citizens who live near the railways and passengers who travel by train would all disagree. They understand that government does have a role to play. It has a role to play as a regulator and protector to ensure the safety of all Canadians. It is a shame that it has taken the Conservative government so long to provide this measure that would ensure safety is enhanced, and it could go further.

Unfortunately, in the ideological zeal of the government, safety and well-being are often left to free market forces to decide. The government expects industry to regulate itself, but that rarely happens and so unnecessary accidents and tragedies occur.

I would like to now focus on some propositions we have made since the bill was introduced.

The first proposition from our party is that the government should not cut safety from its budget. The upcoming budget would cut money that could go toward safety. The parliamentary secretary mentioned that the amount of money spent on something should not be the measure of its effectiveness. Yet the people who enforce safety regulations and who have developed new safety systems need to be paid. They need to be remunerated for their work and it is not work that anybody can do. It takes experts to do this work. We cannot shortchange them. Nor can we cut corners in this area. When corners are cut on safety, we see the results. People who work in the transportation sector say that it jeopardizes safety. The government cannot say it defends safety on the one hand and then cut safety with the other.

We also ask that the proposed cuts of $200 million to VIA Rail be reversed. VIA Rail has challenges and it needs to implement certain systems.

The NDP would like positive train control implemented in Canada. It was done in the United States. In California there was a tragic accident in 2008 and the leaders decided that positive train control should become part of the system. There are positive benefits to implementing it. Yes, it is costly, but there are companies in Canada that contribute to this technology. Therefore, investing in this technology to improve safety would also be an investment in our economy. It would stimulate the innovators who contribute to positive train control and other technologies that make our railways safer.

We would also like to see voice recorders in locomotives. This would help to find out what happened when things went wrong. When there is an accident, it is in the interest of everyone to find out the full story of what happened so things can be improved in the future.

We must always be vigilant in working to ensure that we never take our hands off and that we are always working to ensure that life becomes safer for Canadians as they travel, going about doing their business and contributing to the economy.

[Ethics, April 27th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative scandal season hit an all-new low this week. The Minister of International Cooperation was called out when her orange juice, limos and five-star hotels caught up with her. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister did not send her back to the benches, where she could learn how to play the game right. Maybe the Prime Minister was too busy striking out on yesterday's history lesson to be the coach his team needs.

Sports fans across the country want to know: when did their government become so bush league?

[Ethics, April 27th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives play in a scandal like it is a team sport. Let us look at their 2012 season alone.

The President of the Treasury Board got off to an early start with more Muskoka money mix-ups, with the pinch runner, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, picking up the slack. Then the Minister of National Defence landed in left field in a chopper, no less. The Minister of Industry just keeps striking out.

Why has the Prime Minister not benched any of these minor league ministers?

[New Democratic Party of Canada, April 27th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Prime Minister accused the NDP of not doing enough to stop Hitler. I am sure the NDP's founding members would have found this pretty strange when they first gathered in 1961.

Last night, tens of thousands of Canadians responded with an outpouring of social media comedy. In the spirit of co-operation, I would like to offer the Prime Minister some great suggestions for next week's attacks on the NDP.

Comedian Dan Speerin led things off last night by tweeting, “Damn you NDP for not standing up to Genghis Khan.” Another person wrote, “It was really the NDP that helped organize the stampede that killed Mufasa in The Lion King.” Another person wrote, “The NDP refused to come to the aid of men when Mordor invaded Gondor. Shame.” Another person wrote, “The NDP got Fox to cancel Firefly.” Another person wrote, “The NDP cancelled Arrested Development because they oppose free enterprise banana stands.”

I hope the Conservatives take this humour in stride and do not respond with more of their humourless anger.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the member to the debate and accept, on behalf of the member for London—Fanshawe, her thanks.

It is going to have a tremendous negative impact. The crux of this motion is to call on the government to roll the age back to 65 years. There has been no empirical evidence or studies from economists to show that our system is in crisis, but of course, that has never stopped the government from putting something forward in the past.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, as a surprise, I will disagree with my colleague because it will impact people, but it will impact them negatively. It will certainly not improve the poverty situation. It is not going to mean that there will be fewer seniors who need to access food banks in order to fill their bellies. It is not going to make any improvements in terms of the affordability of prescription medication or deal with inflation over time. It will have a significant negative impact on seniors down the road.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, with regard to the language used as to what this means, I started off my speech by saying “hosed”. The member is saying “grand theft”. We could use all kinds of colourful language to describe it, but the fact is that in two years, going from age 65 to 67, Canadians are going to lose $30,000 if they rely on OAS and GIS, because the gateway to GIS is through OAS. If the age for OAS is raised from 65 to 67 years, as a consequence, Canadians will not be able to access GIS until they are 67 years old.

Yes, it certainly impacts Canadians under the age of 54. I have to say that just because people are under the age of 54 now does not mean that when they are about to retire at 65 years, after having worked at a tough labour-intensive job they are going to be any better off or somehow better able to cope with that and work for two years longer.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, my apologies. The Prime Minister will ask Canadians to work for two more years without OAS to pay for his skewed Conservative choices, including failed F-35 fighter jets, his costly prisons agenda and more corporate tax giveaways.

The budget was about choices, and the government made choices that will punish hard-working Canadians for the government's own fiscal mismanagement. An alarming report shows that the Prime Minister's Conservatives have turned their backs on Canada's most vulnerable citizens.

The report also found that the number of seniors using food banks is on the rise. Tens of thousands of the people who built our country cannot afford enough groceries, and that is simply unacceptable. In a country as wealthy as Canada, there is no excuse for letting our most vulnerable citizens go hungry. It is an issue that should have every Canadian concerned and every politician promising action and then delivering, as our proposals in the last election to actually raise OAS and GIS in order to lift every senior out of poverty would have done.

However, the government failed the grade there. It is leaving struggling families and seniors out in the cold. It refuses to raise the guaranteed income supplement enough to lift every senior out of poverty, while at the same time it is giving tax breaks to rich CEOs instead of helping families. Now it will make seniors wait an extra two years for OAS.

I have heard the talking points from the government on this issue. It is saying that it cannot sustain OAS in the long term as it is. The stated rationale is that the change puts the OAS program on a sustainable path. The Conservatives are using a temporary increase in the OAS and GIS costs as an excuse for permanently cutting back a remarkably effective and affordable program when in reality the program is actuarially sound and totally financially sustainable.

The government wants to keep telling Canadians this change will be insignificant, but we know that the lost income to Canadian seniors from this change will be very significant. It will mean a loss of roughly $30,000 to the poorest seniors over two years, and roughly $13,000 over these two years for Canadians who receive only OAS.

Unlike the CPP or private savings pillars, the OAS is a universal pension that does not depend on retirees' previous labour market participation or their participation in a registered pension or savings plan.

In the words of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives,

The basic building blocks of the public universal system are Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which make up the “anti-poverty” part of the system.

and that is what the government is cutting.

We know how important programs like the OAS and GIS are to the thousands of Canadians who depend on them on a daily basis. The guaranteed income supplement is frequently cited as a major factor in reducing the level of poverty among seniors in the recent decades.

In October 2011, there were nearly five million seniors collecting OAS and 1.7 million seniors collecting GIS. One in three Canadian seniors receives the GIS because many senior women were not part of the paid labour force earlier in their lives. The OAS and GIS are particularly important retirement instruments for them. Senior women are less likely than senior men to draw income from the CPP, private pension plans, RRSPs or employment earnings. This makes universal programs like OAS and GIS particularly important to female seniors. The median income for senior women is about two-thirds the median income for senior men.

OAS and GIS are paid from general government revenues. This is in contrast, of course, to the CPP, which is funded through equal contributions from employees and employers. Last year the government spent $27.2 billion on OAS and $7.9 billion on GIS; combined, these two programs comprise 13% of overall government expenses.

I do not think I need to delve more into how important these programs are to Canada, so I will explain to the House how it is that they are sustainable, since this is the big issue and question for the government.

Essentially, the government wants to restructure the entire Canadian retirement system because of an affordable short-run demographic change, that being the gradual retirement of the baby boomers, who began to retire in 2011. It has cited that the cost of OAS will increase from $36 billion in 2010 to $108 billion in 2030. This is true, but simply citing the base cost does not account for the growth of the Canadian economy, the rate of inflation and population growth. When examined alongside these factors, this is a modest and affordable increase in cost.

The government's latest actuarial report on indicated that OAS accounted for 2.37% of GDP last year and will rise to 3.16% in 2030. Then it will begin to fall. It will be 2.35% in 2060, below today's levels. The previous actuarial report, released in 2008, showed that this cost would actually drop below 2% by 2075, when children born now start to retire. This figure was curiously not included in the most recent actuarial report. At some point I would like to ask the Minister of Finance why that is.

The most recent report clearly indicates that the growth in cost is driven largely by the retirement of the baby boomer generation and does not describe any long-term issues of sustainability. Therefore, in the long run the current system is clearly affordable and will be a smaller share of the budget than it is today.

I would like to now go into a few of the studies that have been done in regard to this issue. A major 2009 study conducted for the Department of Finance, entitled Canada's Retirement Income Provision: An International Perspective and written by the head of the OECD pension team, Edward Whitehouse, found that Canada's pension system faced no sustainability problem. He wrote:

The analysis suggests that Canada does not face major challenges of financial sustainability with its public pension schemes.... Long-term projections show that public retirement-income provision is financially sustainable. Population ageing will naturally increase public pension spending, but the rate of growth is lower and the starting point better than many OECD countries.

In 2010, the finance committee studied Canada's retirement income system. None of the reported recommendations, not even the Conservative recommendations, even hinted that OAS or GIS were unsustainable or recommended raising the age of eligibility.

I would like to ask any member of the government why it is wilfully ignoring, to quote the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, their own ministry of finance's reports.

When compared to other countries, we actually spend very little on our public pension system. According to the OECD, total public social expenditures on old age benefits as a percentage of GDP are estimated at 4.2% in Canada. The equivalent average in OECD countries is 7%. Crisis countries, such as Italy, spend 14.1%. Canada spends one-third of what Italy does of GDP on public retirement. Austria, France and Greece spend roughly 12%. Germany, Poland and Portugal spend roughly 11%. Comparisions to the troubled eurozone are therefore not appropriate and are only being used to create fear that our time-tested Canadian programs are unsustainable. Even the United States spends more than we do on old age benefits, at 6% of GDP.

It should be noted that Canadian public pensions are not overly generous and in fact are very sustainable.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, ample notice about getting hosed does not change the fact that we are getting hosed.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to share my time with hon. member for Chambly—Borduas.

I am very happy to rise today to speak in support of this motion.

In this year's budget, the Conservative government laid out plans to raise the age at which Canadians can receive old age security from 65 to 67, claiming, and claiming yet again today, that it is not sustainable because of our aging population. However, economists flatly reject this claim. At the peak of the baby boom retirement wave, the share of GDP spent on OAS will increase by less than 1% over today's level, and then decline again.

There is a clear battle of priorities. Stephen Harper will ask Canadians to work two more years--

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the member said that it will affect many generations to come, that the government's goal is to prevent hardship, that there will be no reductions to pensions, among many other things.

I would like the member to explain, perhaps, how making people who work tough manual labour jobs work for two more years is preventing hardship. I would say that is inflicting hardship on them.

No reductions to the pension while making them work for two years longer means they will get two years less pension. How is that not a reduction or a cut? That will be a cut of $12,000 per year with close to $30,000 in actual cuts.

For many generations to come, yes, but if we look at the actuarial tables, they do reach a height at 2013, but then they actually goes down. We will have less seniors retiring after that and the cost will go down. Maybe the member could explain why the government does not take that into account.