David Anderson

[Business of Supply, October 20th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, this is a very interesting question. I do not have enough time to address it properly. We had a conversation today at the subcommittee about the United Nations camps in another country. One of the issues is that the really small minority ethnic groups did not feel comfortable going into the camps, because they did not feel that they would experience anything other than the discrimination they had already faced. It left them in a spot where it was hard to identify them as refugees, which then made it difficult for them to get into an immigration stream.

I think the international community needs to do a better job. In many places around the world, women and children are at particular risk, even in the camps, because they do not have the kind of protection they should have. Those are bigger issues than I can address in the next minute, but in this situation, I would say generally that the international community failed to recognize both the Syrian Christian community and the Yazidi community, in particular, and give them the kind of relief they needed.

[Business of Supply, October 20th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I think the wheels within the wheels are grinding inside the Liberals' heads today in trying to find a way out of supporting this motion. I just said that when the committee hears from refugees, they typically say they want to go home. The reality on the ground around Mosul and Mount Sinjar is that people cannot go home right now. We do not know if they will be able to or when they will be able to. Any one of us who was separated from what we consider to be our homes would just want to get back there.

These ladies need protection. They need asylum. Many of them are in camps. They are not safe in those camps. We are going to hear these stories in the next few days, and I would urge my colleagues opposite to listen carefully to them, because these people are not in safe places. It is not like they are coming from a middle-class existence somewhere in the Middle East to a middle-class existence in Canada. If we bring them here, they are going to need lots of help.

My colleague talked a little earlier about language training, employment prospects, and those kinds of things. Those are the kinds of things the Liberal government should have learned from with its last project. It should be able to deliver those things fairly quickly and effectively for this smaller group of people.

[Business of Supply, October 20th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate the people at home could not see the scramble on the other side, but it seems to be indicative of the scramble on the other side today dealing with this issue.

As my colleague from Niagara West pointed out so eloquently, the government could achieve this motion if it really wanted to. It had set a goal to have 25,000 refugees here in two months. It did not do it well, but it got them here. We know that it could do that again if it wanted to. The Liberals have claimed that this is not a hard thing for them to do. However, I do not think they are interested in pulling this off in the way it needs to be done. I think it is a bit of a demonstration of the cynicism of that first promise when they brought in 25,000 people. It was not about the refugees as much as it was about their trying to do a public relations exercise and get media attention for what they were doing. Certainly, a lot of people ended up spending time in hotels. They were sitting there without language training or job prospects. In fact, a lot of the private sponsorship opportunities that were in place were set aside because the system was jam-full with the government's program.

It is good that we are here. It is unfortunate that we are back here again talking about this issue. This is the third time I have spoken on this subject. We are all familiar with the history of conflict in the area. In 2005, an Iraqi government was appointed. I think there were great hopes for the government at that time. There certainly was hope that the government could bring the people together in the country. Rather than doing that, the Sunnis were excluded and, over time of course, that led to political disenfranchisement, and then eventually to people taking up arms.

ISIS has had a long development out of other jihadist organizations. We do not have time to go into that, but in 2011 it really began to expand and push out because of the deteriorating Iraqi security situation. In 2013, it was kicked out of al-Qaeda and became known as ISIL or ISIS or Daesh, as people have called it.

I think in 2014 the surprise was how quickly ISIS expanded its military capabilities. I do not think anyone expected it was at the level that it was. It began a quick expansion, especially in northern Iraq, and the general population was not prepared to defend the government, which left many people vulnerable to this military excursion. It was quick to capitalize on that and then to take over some of the oil production, which it used around some smuggling and those kinds of things to begin to fund its activities.

In August 2014, which is this sweep that we are talking about, it was able to move into the area around Mosul and Mount Sinjar, and the Yazidi people were directly impacted by that. We have heard a lot this afternoon about the impact on those 700,000 people who were concentrated in northern Iraq. Mount Sinjar for them is not just a place that they go to visit and to take a look at, but it really is holy ground for the Yazidi people. They have been there for a long time, dating back 6,000 years.

Obviously, it took a while for the world to react and to understand, but in June 2016, after we had been calling upon the current government for a couple of months to recognize this as a genocide, which it refused to do, the United Nations finally declared the Yazidis victims of genocide and laid out some recommendations for the international community. As we heard earlier, people in the Yazidi community thought that might make a big difference for them. However, it does not seem to have done that to this point.

Nadia Murad is a young lady who will be with us for the next few days. She is one of the heroes of that time who has been able to come forward and speak about the incredibly horrible experiences and atrocities she had to go through. She talks about how on August 3, 2014, they were living normal lives in their village and all of a sudden that was shattered when Daesh attacked the village and, over the space of 12 days, it was conquered by Daesh. Members of the Daesh gathered the men together, and the estimates are that they killed up to 700 of the men in the village and then took the women and children captive.

We have gone over the resulting consequences of that. I do not think any of us can possibly understand what it means to have the women and children of an entire ethnic group taken, with many killed or sold into slavery and used as sexual slaves. The Syrian Christians were thrown into this as well. It is incredible that people can even come out of that and then speak about the situation that they found themselves in.

More than 500,000 Yazidi people are displaced, with 100,000 of them in UNHCR camps, but many others are not in the camps because they just do not feel comfortable going there.

That ties into the government's refugee resettlement program that it ran earlier.

The government insisted it was not going to consider religious or ethnic characteristics in deciding who it was going to bring here, but instead it went to the UN. As a result of the way it was done and because of the fact that most of the smaller minorities were afraid to be in those camps, the Yazidis were neglected and were not brought here. Only nine Yazidi families have come here in the last two years.

That alone speaks to the disinterest that the Liberal government has in addressing the issue. The Liberals knew about this. We talked about this last February and in June. We pushed them on declaring this a genocide. They cannot pretend they did not know about this. They had all summer and all fall to begin doing something about it, even after the United Nations declared this a genocide. None of that has been done.

So we find ourselves with today's motion. I do not understand how this could be considered unreasonable. The deputy House leader on the other side just came forward with some more wordsmithing and splitting of words. That is the kind of thing the offices of the House leaders are supposed to do. We have a solid motion here, and we are asking the government to support it. There is nothing about this that should be a threat to it in any way.

The motion has been read a few times, but I am going to read it again. It states, “That the House...recognize that ISIS is committing genocide against the Yazidi people...”. The United Nations has declared that. We were calling it that long before it did. The government refused to recognize it and was basically forced to by the United Nations declaration.

It goes on, “...acknowledge that many Yazidi women and girls are still being held captive by ISIS as sexual slaves...”. That cannot be argued against, because everyone knows that is the case. Many of those women suffer to this day. Many women have been killed. My colleague from Niagara West gave a couple of examples. Children are being killed indiscriminately.

The motion goes on to ask that we support the recommendations found in the United Nations report on Syria. We all support that. Nobody here expressed that they would not. The motion calls on the government to take action on the recommendations found in that report. No one has spoken out against those today either.

The motion asks the government to provide asylum to Yazidi women and girls within the next four months. That is not a difficult thing for the government to do.

The motion is not a difficult thing for the government to support. If Liberal pride and arrogance will keep them from supporting a motion like this, then I do not know what it would take to get them to consider this issue as seriously as it needs to be considered. We are going to have some of these folks around in the next few days. Maybe they can talk to the Liberals and convince them of the seriousness of this issue.

This continues to go on for the folks who are living under the rule of ISIS. The good news is that ISIS has been pushed back. A fight for Mosul is going on right now.

All most of these people want is to go back to their homes. I was on the foreign affairs committee in the last Parliament, and we talked about this issue numerous times with both Syrian refugees and some of the Yazidi refugees. They told us they want to go home. They told us it is great to come to Canada, but they really want to go home. We need to see over the next few weeks that ISIL is pushed back through Mosul, pushed off Mount Sinjar, and that we can hopefully bring them back to their homes in peace.

I am concerned with the government's response to these things. We could be playing a major role in this battle around Mosul, but instead our jets are on the ground and our troops are supposedly in some sort of training regime. We could have been playing a major role in trying to get the country back for these people so they can go home.

Our immigration system has ignored these people. There is no way that anyone can say that the immigration system has treated these people fairly over the last year.

I am calling on the government to set aside its partisanship, agree that we are right, accept that the motion is valid, and move quickly. I want the government to say that it will give these girls and these women a new home, give them an opportunity to make a new life, and hopefully at some point in the future they will be able to forget most of the horrible activities that have been a part of their lives for the last two years.

[Business of Supply, October 20th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on my colleague's question. I would like the member opposite to explain what it is he objects to. The amendment says:

(c) support recommendations found in the June 15, 2016, report issued by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria entitled, “They came to destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis”; and (d) call on the government to (i) take immediate action upon all the recommendations found in sections 210, 212, and 213 of the said report, (ii) provide asylum to Yazidi women and girls within 120 days.

He seemed to indicate there was some sort of partisan or political interest in the motion and I am wondering if he can point out what that might be.

[Ethics, October 20th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians were surprised last spring when the agriculture minister appointed a failed Liberal candidate as his chief of staff; they were astonished when they learned she owned $140 million of egg quota; and, they were speechless when they heard the minister say that he sure did not see that as a conflict of interest.

Now Canadians will learn that his chief of staff will be in court next week to face allegations of perjury over the purchase of egg quota. Canadians are curious. How deep does this rot have to go before the minister will act?

[Fight Against Food Waste Act, October 4th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, before I get into Bill C-231, I will say I am surprised to hear my colleague opposite talk about food insecurity after the stunt the Liberals pulled yesterday in the way they introduced their carbon tax. If they wanted to create instability and insecurity across the country, they could not have done it any more effectively than they have.

When it comes to food production, the way Liberals have done this causes instability in rural and farming communities. It is going to cause food insecurity. They are talking about a carbon tax. We know a carbon tax will hike the cost of everything. It will hike the cost of fuel for farmers as they are trying to do their food production. It hikes the cost of fertilizer. In the production of fertilizer we use products they are planning on taxing. It hikes the cost of things like transportation, so it increases the cost of getting food to market. As the member opposite talks about instability and insecurity, they should be acknowledging that they are creating that. We are going to see greater instability in rural communities, in food production, and certainly it is not a positive advantage for farmers to have to put up with the kind of carbon tax they are suggesting in the future.

Farmers have made a huge contribution, and l am going to talk about that later, but they are the ones who are making the adjustments. They have been making adjustments for years. As was mentioned earlier in question period, farmers are paying up to $30,000 more for machinery now because of the changes to engines and emissions requirements, and they pay that cost directly. The government comes back and says it is going to slap some more taxes on them because they are not taxed enough yet. Between that and the deceptive way they dealt with the provinces yesterday, it means that their carbon tax proposal is not a recipe for any type of security or food stability in the future.

That brings us to food waste awareness day, which has been proposed by my NDP colleague on the agriculture committee. We would have preferred to have a food awareness day because certainly waste could have been part of that. Rather than an act to establish a negative campaign, we could have celebrated the great production and processing of food in this country.

Certainly the area I come from has been a food producer for this part of the world and the rest of the world for over 100 years. People came from Europe, Eastern Europe, China, and the Middle East and settled in western Canada. Most of the reason they settled there is that they wanted to be farmers. They settled on the land and they wanted to produce food. They wanted to grow beef and sell it around the world. They certainly have done that with great success.

Farming has changed over the years. I mentioned earlier about the technology that has changed, but certainly the crops have changed in our area as well. It used to be that we grew nothing but grains and durum wheat. People did not think they could grow anything else. There have been new crops that have come in, and now lentils are grown probably more than any other crop in our area. Mustard is very popular, all three kinds of mustard; the oriental, yellow, and brown are grown in our area, and it is a big area for mustard growing in the world.

Chickpeas are an item we started growing about 20 years ago, and it actually transformed agriculture in our area because for a few years chickpeas were a very profitable crop and allowed farmers to do very well for a number of years. Peas are another success in our area. Farther north, canola has probably been the biggest success story in western Canada, where it is the highest value crop that is grown in Canada. It has been a tremendous success story as well.

We know the beef in western Canada, in my area, has been a very strong contributor to our economy. We see now a couple of feedlots closing in western Canada; again, back to food insecurity. One of the reasons that the latest closure took place is that the operators were not prepared to deal with the carbon tax. They mentioned that in their discussion about why they were shutting down production.

We know that farmers and ranchers are stewards. They raise food, and they protect the environment. They have changed their practices over the years, and the food that is raised in Canada is the safest food in the world. We believe that is what we should be celebrating with the bill. Rather than talking specifically about food waste, we should be talking about food production, about the incredible ways and opportunities that farmers across this country have to be successful, and also about the food processing here. We know we have one of the best systems in Canada for food safety. We regulate for safe and healthy food, and we do that very well. Around the world, Canada is recognized as one of those producers of top-quality food.

It is a good thing we are because we export all over the world. We go to Japan, for example, which is a market that demands top-quality products, and Canadian pork there is seen as one of those products. We also see that around the rest of the world, where they recognize that Canadian products fill those niches at the top of the food chain.

The first part of the bill calls for a waste awareness day. We would have preferred to see something a bit different. Certainly, we would have been more likely to support it had we had seen a bill that celebrated our successes.

I want to talk a bit about the second part of the bill because it becomes very problematic. The bill is short and sweet, but when we get to the second page and start to see what is being called for here under a national strategy, we begin to realize that there will be a really big cost to this and that a lot of work would have to go into putting this bill into effect, without a lot of direction from the author of the bill.

First, the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food would need to have a series of meetings, not only with the provincial and territorial governments—we are talking about first ministers' meetings or meetings with officials across this country—but also then a series of meetings with agriculture and agrifood people, as well.

This is not a minor set of just two or three meetings. My colleague is calling for the minister to have major meetings across the country. We know that will cost a lot of money. The reason she would like to see that is to develop a national strategy; but, again, there are no real specifics on what that national strategy would be, other than we know that it will cost a fair amount of money.

She would also like a national public awareness campaign to be developed. Again, that comes with a cost. However, there is no indication from the member opposite of what that cost might be. I do not know if she is talking about an ad campaign or an educational program across the country, but she just talks about having a public awareness campaign of some sort that needs to be developed and implemented by the government.

Then there is a very vague paragraph here that the government should “put in place the tools needed to allow consumers to reduce food waste”. I have thought about that but I am not sure what it means to “put in place the tools needed to allow consumers to reduce food waste”. That is so vague. I do not know how much enthusiasm the government would have for this, but it could mean anything, I guess. It is so open-ended that I do not think we can support it.

Then it becomes interesting. She wants the government to begin to redo some of the great work being done already by private and charitable organizations.

Across this country we have things like food banks and charities like the Salvation Army that handle food across this country to ensure that it is still edible and is getting delivered to people so they have the opportunity to enjoy it. My colleague who spoke earlier talked about some of the food apps that are in place now. People can go online and find an app that will explain where food is available. We do not think there is any necessity for the government to begin redoing the excellent work that has already been done by these organizations. Moreover, when bill talks about facilitating the donation of edible food products to community organizations and food banks, we think people are already doing that very well.

There is a call for an environmental study on used food. I do not know how we would do that or how big that study would be, but it seems like another challenge to the government, without much direction.

Then the last one I think that really concerns me is that she wants food waste reduction targets, but it is not clear what that means. Is this mandatory? Is this voluntary? What do those targets mean? We do not know if there are going to be costs from that. How would we enforce it? Would we have little food police running around enforcing food waste regulations? I do not know. I guess with targets, we would have to examine the relationship between production, transportation, and retail, as well. I think that is a huge overreach.

In conclusion, I appreciate my colleague's good intent in this bill, but I do not think we will be able to support it. It is just too broad and complex. It is a very costly strategy to address this issue and will lead to increased costs. We believe it will increase red tape substantially. Certainly, if I am reading this accurately, there would have to be a massive administration to reach this national strategy. We believe there are better ways to address this issue.

[The Environment, October 4th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, agriculture producers are already leaders in environmental stewardship. We know that. The machinery they buy already costs tens of thousands of dollars more because of changing emissions standards. A carbon tax would only add more devastating costs to their families.

Why are the Liberals punishing agriculture when farmers have already been addressing these emissions issues for years?

[The Environment, October 4th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have declared all-out war on struggling rural families. A carbon tax will punish rural areas and farm families. This new tax will drive up the price of fuel. It will drive up the price of fertilizer. It will drive up the price of transportation for agriculture.

Why are the Liberals so determined to target rural people and agriculture with their climate taxation fixation?

[Foreign Affairs, September 26th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, it is not about the Westin. It is about the Liberals' refusal to face reality with regard to China. China is not just putting up walls here. At the same time that it was insisting on the construction of the wall at the Westin Hotel, China was locking up human rights advocates behind much deadlier walls.

Are the Liberals so naive that they think giving into every demand of this basic dictatorship will bring freedom to the Chinese people?

[Foreign Affairs, September 26th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are baffled by the construction of the so-called Westin wall at the Westin Hotel. That is what we are talking about, and the Prime Minister's willingness to bow to China's every wish.

Freedom of speech is a cherished right in Canada. The Liberals went along with blocking out Canadians who were protesting China's absolute disregard for human rights and the rule of law.

This wall was an insult to Canadians. Why did the Liberals not oppose the construction of it? Is this just another example of our Prime Minister being their puppet on a string?