David Graham

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 2, October 31st, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mount Royal.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to two aspects of budget implementation act, 2016, No. 2. This bill makes significant amendments to the Canada Disability Savings Act and the old age security program.

At first glance, these two programs seem to be different. However, they have the same goal, namely to ensure that the most vulnerable Canadians enjoy a good quality of life and live with the dignity they deserve.

First of all, I would like to remind the House that the Canada Disability Savings Act governs how the grants and bonds provided by the government are paid into registered disability savings plans, or RDSPs.

RDSPs were created in 2008 in order to help people with disabilities and their families save in order to provide long-term financial security. Canadian residents who are entitled to the disability tax credit can open an RDSP until the end of the year in which the recipient turns 59. Parents or guardians can open an RDSP on behalf of a minor. There is no annual contribution limit, but the lifetime limit is $200,000.

The gains accumulated are tax-free until withdrawn from the RDSP. The government contributes to the RDSPs of eligible recipients by providing grants or bonds, or both, up to a maximum amount.

The bill being debated today would amend the Canada Disability Savings Act. These changes are required because the act refers to the Canada child tax benefit. As all members know, that benefit was replaced by the new Canada child benefit last June. Every year, the amount of the grant or bond that the recipient is entitled to is calculated on the basis of adjusted family income.

With regard to RDSP benefits for youth under the age of 18, this adjusted income, the amount used to determine the government's contribution in the form of a grant or bond, was also used by the government to calculate the amount of the Canada child tax benefit. Since that benefit no longer exists, we need to amend the provisions of the Canada Disability Savings Act that mention that benefit. We also need to amend the provisions that mention “phase-out income”.

As members know, the amount of the bonds decrease for those with higher incomes. The threshold at which the bonds start to decrease is called the “phase-out income”. It is important to understand this concept because the formula used to calculate the phase-out income includes the Canada child tax benefit.

As a result, the following three consequential amendments will be made to the Canada Disability Savings Act. First, the references to the Canada child tax benefit in five provisions of the Canada Disability Savings Act will be replaced by references to the new Canada child benefit. Second, the definition of “phase-out income” will be changed to include the Canada child benefit income threshold in the formula. Third, the definition of “child tax benefit” in the definitions section of the Canada Disability Savings Act will be removed since it will no longer be necessary.

Thanks to these amendments, the income thresholds for eligibility for the Canada child benefit and the Canada disability savings bond will be harmonized. The increase in the income threshold will produce a slight increase in total payments made for the bond in the RDSP of persons with disabilities. Persons with disabilities are not the only group that needs additional government assistance. The income security of our country’s seniors is another government priority.

That is why we will be formulating provisions to help Canada’s seniors enjoy a good quality of life. Seniors are important members of our society, who contribute actively to the well-being of their families and of our community, as well as to the growth of our economy. We have one of the lowest rates of senior poverty in the world.

In 2013-14, the most recent year for which data were collected, the Government of Canada paid Canadians over $79 billion under the Canada pension plan and old age security. These programs have contributed greatly to reducing the low-income rate for seniors over the last 30 years. However there still remains a great deal of work to do.

In 2014, the most recent year for which data were collected, 3.9% of the country’s seniors were living below the low-income cut-off established by Statistics Canada, representing some 200,000 people. Nearly 80% of these low-income seniors, or the vast majority, are single, and most of them are women.

That is why we have also increased by $947 per year the amount paid as the guaranteed income supplement to low-income single seniors. This measure will support the most vulnerable seniors who depend almost exclusively on their old age security pension and guaranteed income supplement, and who are thus at risk of experiencing financial difficulties.

Similarly, this measure will improve the financial security of some 900,000 seniors all across Canada, and we estimate that it will help lift nearly 13,000 of the most vulnerable seniors in Canada out of poverty.

We already support senior couples, in cases where the two members of the couple are receiving the guaranteed income supplement, have high living expenses, and are at high risk of poverty due to the necessity of living apart, for example, when one of the spouses is forced to live in a nursing home.

In some senior couples, one partner receives the guaranteed income supplement and the other the spousal allowance, but they have to live apart for reasons beyond their control, such as one of them needing long-term care. We are in the process of amending the Old Age Security Act to ensure that such couples receive higher benefits based on each individual's income.

I would like to point out that the allowance is paid to people 60 to 64 years of age with low income whose spouse or common-law partner receives the guaranteed income supplement.

Our government also reversed the decision to increase the age of eligibility for old age security from 65 to 67, which should come into effect in 2023. That change will give low-income seniors up to $17,000 per year. With these key measures, we will provide essential support to the most vulnerable Canadians.

The Government of Canada cares about seniors. Canadians work tirelessly their whole lives. We should all have a chance to live into old age without worrying about making ends meet. That is why our minister was given a mandate to improve income security for low-income seniors. These measures are how we are keeping that promise.

We promised to help more Canadians escape poverty. To me it is unimaginable that in a country like Canada there are still people who are unable to meet their basic needs. This is unacceptable and we are doing something tangible to correct this situation.

I believe we all agree that no one should grow old in poverty or isolation. I cannot emphasize enough how important this issue is to our government.

I would also like to take a moment to discuss the Canada pension plan, another important pillar in our retirement income system. Retirement income security has to start with solid and stable public retirement plans such as the Canada pension plan.

We are also working with the provinces and territories to strengthen the plan. Earlier in October, we introduced a bill to amend the plan in order to help middle-class Canadians achieve their goal of living a dignified life in retirement with guaranteed income security.

We are making a considerable investment in the well-being of seniors. Canadians who work hard contribute to our society throughout their lives and our government believes that every Canadian deserves to grow old with respect and dignity.

Laurentides-Labelle has more of an aging population than most other ridings. The 2011 census found that the average age in the riding was 49.5. I look forward to the results of the 2016 census, but I would be surprised if the average age had not risen considerably.

Seniors' issues are crucial; we must improve their quality of life without delay. We can always do more, but I think we are on the right track with this bill and with this budget. Canada has always been a leader when it comes to delivering services to seniors. Our retirement income system is considered one of the best in the world.

I strongly urge my colleagues to help make sure it stays that way by supporting this bill.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 2, October 31st, 2016]

Madam Speaker, in his speech the member referred to his experience in the banking sector and the strength of our rules and regulations over the last while. Could the member tell us a little about the impacts of weaker regulatory structures in other countries throughout the financial crisis in the last decade?

[Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act, October 28th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I just want to congratulate my colleague on the excellent work he did on this bill and on the support he has received in the House.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 2, October 28th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I have a quick question.

I always like hearing what the member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques has to say. We often hear the official opposition oppose things, and we know that the member rarely opposes the same things.

In the interest of finding common ground, can the member tell us what he likes about this bill?

[National Seal Products Day Act, October 27th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise today to defend Senate Bill S-208, an act respecting national seal products day.

The issues and the industry have been well explained by the many speakers we have heard, so I will not repeat what they have said. I agree with them. Their speeches were very good.

I seconded this bill sponsored by my friend, colleague, and mentor, the member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame. When he asked me if I would do it, there was no hesitation on my part, for while the seal population in the Laurentians is decidedly low, it is an important issue close to my heart, one I have been passionate about going all the way back to high school. There is a back story to this that members probably will not hear very often.

I grew up in a political but not partisan family, political in the sense of getting involved in the community, in issues, in nation building in our own little corner of the nation. For reasons of opportunity not germane to this debate, I attended high school at a boarding school in Massachusetts. I received the maximum financial assistance from the school available to foreign students. There, at an institution founded in the latter half of the 19th century, called Northfield Mount Hermon School, I met students from dozens of countries, and as a teenager learned how to swear in many languages. Never did I swear so loudly as I did after the school invited a guest speaker on an issue that to that point I knew nothing about and had not even heard of. Therefore, when Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society spoke to the entire assembled student body about the need to destroy the sealing industry in Canada, and how he had sunk two ships through his activities, more than the Canadian navy itself had sunk since the Second World War, he said at the time, I twigged to its being a fundamental injustice.

As a 15-year old from rather far inland in rural Quebec, I did not yet know what the seal hunt was. Google did not yet exist, websites were often turned off at the end of the business day, Wikipedia was five years away, people still used the gopher protocol and had RFC 742, or finger, profiles, and so information had to be gleaned in more traditional ways. However, my instinct in listening to this energetic and very well-received speech, according to my fellow students, was that it did not add up. The seal hunt no doubt was an important part of Canadian culture in a part of my country I knew nothing about. It felt like an attack not only on a people or an industry but on my country. I took it as an attack on Canada itself.

I was never shy in school to identify myself as Canadian. Of over 1,100 students from around 75 countries, there were never more than about a dozen of us from here. Most of my classmates referred to me by the nickname they gave me, “Canada'”, and I can say that upon returning to Canada, it was a bit of a disappointment to lose that nickname, though in a similar way, in the years I lived in Ontario, I was just as proud to identify myself as a Quebecker, which I consider to be an integral part of my identity and who I am.

At NMH, we were early adopters of technology. Jonas Reed Klein had graduated in the class of 1993, two years before my arrival. A very promising technologist, he went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that autumn, but was tragically killed in an unusual small plane crash in November of that year, the plane being knocked out of the sky in a collision with a skydiver. I never met Jonas, but my brother Jonah, who attended NMH before me, did know him, and one of my most important mentors in technology, my classmate Seth Schoen, who is now at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, met him, learned from him, and passed on a lot of that knowledge and his passion. As a result of Jonas' very promising career, and strong and, by all accounts, contagious interest in technology, his family set up a memorial fund at my school to promote the use of and education about technology. Had that series of events not happened, I would not be standing in the House today.

The technology fund created two things: one was the technology package needed to create a campus club called GEECS, a recursive acronym for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which had a 386 running Slackware Linux on a 1.2 kernel, where I got my first Linux experience, which directly resulted in my first career as a technology journalist and news editor at linux.com, under the mentorship of Robin Miller, known in the technology world simply as Roblimo, and made me probably one of the few people ever to use Lynx, the text-mode web browser, professionally. The other was a system years ahead of its time called SWIS, the School-Wide Information System, based on the first-class collaboration suite. By the end of my ninth grade in 1995, every student in the school had an email address, which we could use on the Mac LC 475s and Mac LC 520s in the Cutler computer lab. Somewhere between a BBS and a social network, the system allowed students and faculty to interact electronically with message groups on arbitrary topics in what was then a very novel way.

One of these groups was on food. Frequently, vegan advocates would argue for veganism, something they are well known to do. Their argument, which was not unfair, was that people should not eat meat without knowing where it came from, that it was not justifiable to eat meat if one was not part of the process of how that meat ended up on one's plate. Being lifelong homesteaders, my parents Joe and Sheila—any nearby Australians may want to take note of their names—were among the runners-up for Mother Earth News' Homesteaders of the Year back in 2012, so I knew a thing or two about where meat came from.

My whole life, we have raised our own meat, vegetables, eggs, and so forth. Today, in our multi-generational household, we produce around 80% of the food we eat, when we are not here in Ottawa, of course.

My argument, therefore, back to these vegan activists was always, “Here's my connection to meat”, and then I would go into detail, “Here's how to raise a chicken. Here's how to slaughter a chicken. Here's how to clean a chicken. Here's how to store a chicken and here's how to prepare a chicken.” Of course, this put the vegan activists in a really awkward spot. The general consensus and response from them on the SWIS message board was, “Nobody should eat meat, except David.”

There is the trouble. When a vegan, an activist, or someone who is against the seal hunt but will happily go eat a hamburger tells me, or you, Madam Speaker, or any of our colleagues here, or our families, or our fellow citizens, what we can and cannot eat, what we can and cannot produce, and what we should or should not do, they are making assumptions about who we are, what our experiences are, and what our realities are.

In my years since, it has been important to me to learn about other people's experiences and realities, to become that much more worldly, and among many other things, to understand what the seal hunt actually is, beyond my baseline high school instincts. I would invite others to do the same.

When people all over the world tell our communities, who for over millennia have become very much part of the ecosystem in our coastal regions, where managing the seal population does not only serve to feed a population directly but also ensures fish stocks can survive the voracious appetites of our fellow predators, that this particular hunt is wrong and must result in a social and economic stigma that has nothing to do with reality, I believe it is important that we use our technology to post on our worldwide information-sharing systems what our reality actually is.

The stigma has made it so that buying seal meat in a grocery store, or through a fishmonger, which should be possible, is not possible. I believe it is incumbent on people like us, parliamentarians, in our position of protecting the interests of our society and of our future, to respond in kind, to say, no, we do not accept that social and economic stigma based on no facts whatsoever but only on a perception and on a quick political whim, where there is no real need to worry about the realities over there in Canada. No, we do not buy the argument that sinking warships in the Canadian navy as a protest against the livelihoods of our people is productive, fair, or justified. We will not put up with these attacks on a Canadian way of life, which goes back far longer than Canada as we know it.

It is very important for us to pass Bill S-208 and make May 20 national seal products day to make a statement that we defend our people and their way of life, that we defend the livelihood of our people, that we will celebrate our culture, and that we want to see our products succeed.

The bill does not make a holiday. It makes a statement. It is a statement I am proud to make, proud to shout from the rooftops, and one I hope my colleagues will be proud to make as well.

[Canada Pension Plan, October 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened to my colleague’s speech and I would like to know if he has supported the CPP program from the beginning. Does he want us to plan for the future or does he think that we should manage our own retirement, each of us on his or her own?

[Canada Pension Plan, October 24th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question. The member referred to housing as a very good source of investment for retirement, and he is not wrong. However, in Quebec, homes are owned by about 60% of the population, so 40% do not have that asset. To cash out on that asset, they have to cash out of the house, which means that they are either remortgaging it or selling it so that they then have nowhere to live but have a wonderful pile of money. TFSAs and RRSPs can only be contributed to if people have extra money to do so.

My question for the member is pretty simple. Does he believe the government has a role in helping people who do not have the money to invest themselves?

[Canada Pension Plan, October 24th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, to be fair, you had not mentioned it either.

I think there is an opportunity for businesses to plan ahead. This would not even start for three more years and would not be at full scale until 2025. Businesses have an opportunity to prepare for this change. It is not a huge change, from that side of things.

The important thing is that we are planning for the future so that our seniors, later, are able to take care of themselves, like our ancestors, if we can call them that, planned for us today. I think it is very important that we do this work and do not slow down or slack off on it.

[Canada Pension Plan, October 24th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, this measure will definitely help people in the future by providing them with more money. It is an extremely important program for everyone's long-term future. I mentioned the figures in my speech. It is a significant increase, and that is not the only thing we could do.

[Canada Pension Plan, October 24th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there is no doubt that the seniors in my riding have a lot of concerns. I do not come from a wealthy riding. Even though Mont-Tremblant is located in the middle of my riding, there are 42 other towns that have less money, so everyone is concerned about improving the situation of seniors.

This will be the third program we improve, after making changes to two programs. If we had managed to get everything done, we could just walk out of here. However, there is still a lot of work to do, and I am not afraid to work to build a better future for our seniors.