David McGuinty

[Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act, November 18th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to my colleague's comments. As a former peace officer, I know he swore an oath which transcends his time as a peace officer to his time now, as an MP in the House, to uphold the rule of law. Therefore, I want to ask him a couple of questions about the rule of law and a couple of questions around what we heard from expert testimony from CSIS and the RCMP itself.

The deputy commissioner of CSIS came to committee and said that there was a large resource question problem, and that is the financing, the capacity to do the job that CSIS is being asked to do is compromised.

The experts from CSIS and the RCMP combined also testified that although the government brought in the Combating Terrorism Act in 2013, which amended the Criminal Code, 80 Canadians had gone abroad and had participated in terrorist activities on foreign soil, and not a single Canadian of those 80 had been prosecuted.

When the member talks about upholding the rule of law, when he talks about ensuring we come to Ottawa to give our security forces and agencies the powers and the resources they need, why is the government fixated on getting additional powers when the front-line practitioners in our intelligence services and agencies are telling us it is not so much power as it is money and resources to do the job?

[Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act, November 18th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, my question for my colleague relates to the good work done by my colleague from Vancouver Quadra and her private member's bill.

This is a wonderful opportunity for the government to join the ranks of most industrialized countries and our Five Eyes partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The government can pick up the import of the bill that my colleague from Vancouver Quadra is bringing forward and insert it into this bill or bring it forward as another legislative instrument. The government could thus set up an all-party parliamentary committee to oversee the work of CSIS.

This is the case with Capitol Hill in the United States, with Westminster in the U.K., and with all of our Five Eyes partners. Why is the government not taking advantage of the wonderful work in the member's bill to join the ranks of our partners and get this right?

[Railway Safety Act, November 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to wish everyone a good evening.

The bill introduced by my colleague from Winnipeg South Centre is part of a piecemeal approach, the Conservatives' typical approach to rail safety over the past year or so. That is unfortunate. The Liberal Party believes that these measures should be part of a more comprehensive bill introduced by the transport minister.

For the past several years, Transport Canada's Rail Safety Directorate has been underfunded. It does not have enough staff and the employees it does have do not have enough training. The department has been led by a revolving door of Conservative ministers, with five ministers in just eight years.

According to the 2013 fall report of the Auditor General, Transport Canada needs about 20 inspectors to audit each of the federal railway companies every three years. Right now, the department has only 10 inspectors who are qualified to conduct these audits.

Part of the problem is that we have a capacity problem inside the department at Transport Canada. We know that with the current workforce, the department has conducted very few audits, only 26% of the audits that Transport Canada said was needed to keep rail safe in Canada. At this pace, it will take many years before the department audits all key components of safety management systems, the regulations and the key safety systems they are under.

VIA Rail, for example, carrying 4.5 million passengers a year, has not been audited in the three year period audited by the Auditor General, and likely not since then. For five years, carrying 4.5 million passengers a year, our passenger train system under VIA Rail has not been audited by Transport Canada's qualified inspectors.

As I said in my question for the member presenting the private member's bill, it is important for Canadians to understand that governments make choices. It is important to get the big things right. Transportation safety and rail safety are one of those big things.

The government in its choices, as it has a mandate to do, has spent more money each and every year it has been in power on advertizing than it has on rail safety. This year, it is spending $42 million on economic action plan advertizing and new ads launched today, announcing the government's new income splitting plan, measures that have not even been passed through the House of Commons.

While it spends $42 million on advertizing, it is spending $38 million on rail safety, this in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy and a 1,600% increase in the transportation of oil by rail in the last three years.

When we built our country, and Canadians know this, we built it around our railway. Many towns, cities and municipalities were built up and around the railway because it was our lifeline. It was our support system.

We have a lot of transportation of dangerous goods now through our municipalities, which is a high risk, as we have learned tragically through the Lac-Mégantic incident.

The government says that it will be phasing out the DOT-111 cars in a three year period, and I commend it for that aspiration. However, when we bring to committee representatives from the largest manufacturer of these cars in Canada, they tell us that is impossible. Not only is it impossible to phase them out, but they cannot retrofit the rolling stock they have and they do not know what to do with the rolling stock coming from the United States.

Furthermore, the government announces that it will inform our municipalities after the fact, that it will tell them a month after a train has rolled through their jurisdiction what the trains were carrying.

The Liberal Party has been arguing for months, trying to convince the government to come to its senses and ensure that municipalities are given advance notice so their fire departments, most of which in rural Canadian setting are volunteer, know what exactly they might have to deal with if there is an accident or a tragedy.

With respect to labelling requirements, the government said that it brought in new labelling requirements to deal with the type of oil coming from the Bakken oil reserves in North Dakota and southern Saskatchewan. It said that it was all fine, that there were no problems, until The Globe and Mail broke several stories saying that was not happening.

The government admitted it, had to climb down, and did the right thing by saying it was going to strengthen the labelling requirement and the inspection of that labelling requirement to make sure we know exactly what we are dealing with.

There is one thing more troubling for a lot of Canadians right now and it is one of the things being learned in committee. As one member of the committee, there is something that is beginning to deeply concern me, and that is the proximity of relationship between the regulated industry, the rail industry, and the regulator, Transport Canada. I am deeply disturbed by what I see in terms of the coziness of that relationship. I think this safety management system that is the meeting point between the regulated industry and the regulator is an important mechanism. It is an efficient mechanism, but as Ronald Reagan might have said in the past, “You trust, but you verify”. To verify, one needs the capacity to be able to do so.

This proximity of relationship was demonstrated recently in two statements made by Canadian Pacific, CPR, one by its chief operating officer, Keith Creel, in a speech in Toronto, where, if I can paraphrase, he essentially said he wanted government to stay out of the rail business altogether, that it was going to impede efficiency. Then a week earlier, CPR's chief executive officer, Hunter Harrison, was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying that regulators “overreacted” to the Lac-Mégantic catastrophe, going on to blame it on one person's behaviour, which is unfortunately reminiscent of a lot of the debate around the Walkerton crisis, when another Conservative government weakened our capacity to inspect our water systems. That Conservative government's defence was to blame it on one sole water plant operator. Unfortunately for that government, Justice O'Connor's report on Walkerton demonstrated that government's cabinet was in part responsible.

We have to be careful here. There is a role and purpose for government in the 21st century in dealing with rail and transportation safety. The bill goes some distance in giving some powers and that is why Liberals are supporting the bill being sent to committee, so it can be explored in more detail and see how it connects with all the other measures, this grab bag of measures that has been brought forward since Lac-Mégantic by the government in piecemeal fashion.

However, we have to be very careful here. If all the pipelines that are contemplated are built in this country in the next several years and are fully operational going south, going east, going west, here is the challenge. With the expansion of the oil sands, by 2024 we are going to have an additional one million barrels of oil a day, which cannot be transported through pipelines, even with all the pipelines that we are planning to build being built.

Where is that oil going to go? It is not going on trucks because it is not economic, as we are told by the trucking associations. It is going to go on rail, longer trains, more cars, higher volumes. CPR is calling for higher speeds. We are going to have to be very judicious. There are a lot of risks inherent. Of course, there is money to be made and there is shareholder value to be created. We are not speaking against industry. We are saying that there is a role and purpose for government to step in.

I will close with this. I asked the minister several times to give us details about how many inspectors are on staff. When I got the answer from the minister, I sent it to the Auditor General. This is what I heard back in writing:

...we cannot provide any level of assurance on the information recently provided by Transport Canada officials. The Department does not specify how many qualified inspectors it currently has available to conduct audits.

It is a deeply disturbing comment from the Auditor General of Canada. We have a long way to go to get this right.

[Railway Safety Act, November 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the member for her bill. The bill purports to give additional powers to the minister and to inspectors for an important issue like grade level railway crossings. We had a terrible accident recently here in my home town of Ottawa where a double-decker bus, unfortunately, collided with a train which led to the deaths of several Ottawa citizens and injuries to others.

The problem I am having with the notion of empowering the government and the minister further is that the real gap here, the lacuna, the problem that all parties have identified is not power. It is inspectors; it is capacity. It is actually being able to ensure that the standards we have in place are being enforced and audited. I will come back to this during my speech shortly.

Are we not better off to fight for additional resources, given for example that this year we are spending more money on economic action plan advertising of $42 million, than we are on rail safety?

[Transport, October 30th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the problem is that the facts do not support what the minister is saying.

The chronology is clear. Documents show that Transport Canada was well aware of the ignition switch issue with GM vehicles in June 2013. That is eight months earlier than the date the minister gave when she was asked when Transport Canada knew about this.

In light of these facts, again, will the minister explain why she deliberately misled the House?

[Transport, October 30th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, in May of this year the Minister of Transport told Parliament that Transport Canada was “not aware of an ignition switch issue” prior to receiving notice from GM in February 2014.

It turns out this was not true.

We now know that her department was fully aware of these problems in June 2013, eight months before the minister said she was told about the problem.

Did the minister mislead the House and Canadians on this very serious issue? If she did not, how could she possibly not have known?

[Motor Vehicle Safety Act, October 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be here tonight to debate this important private member's bill.

I want to remind the House that the bill was introduced in the House in 2010 by former Liberal member Siobhan Coady from St. John's South—Mount Pearl. Since then two colleagues from the NDP have picked it up and reintroduced it, for which I commend them.

This is an extremely important issue. There is not a member in the House who has not been touched in their respective communities by someone who has been the subject of an accident or a death as a result of colliding with a large vehicle. This happens regularly in our urban and suburban settings. It happens along our roadways and highways.

Just recently in Ottawa a senior executive from the Ottawa Hospital, who was riding in a cancer ride over a weekend, was tragically killed on a roadway by a large truck, while her husband and daughter waited for her at the end of the race.

This has been going on now for several years. It is important for us to understand there is an urgency to act. The member from the NDP who is proposing the bill is right, that this is about bringing in a new standard for new or imported vehicles in Canada going forward.

It is a prospective measure and a positive one. It is not asking for the complete retrofitting of the existing fleet, although if I were in the trucking business and I was seeing these kinds of accidents and tragedies happening, I might consider doing so. It costs about $750 to retrofit a large truck of those that would be caught by this bill.

I listened carefully to both speeches, the one by the NDP member who is proposing the bill and the one by parliamentary secretary who is opposing the bill, and I am quite shocked by the government's position.

The parliamentary secretary rose to say that there was insufficient evidence for mandatory installation of side guards for new or imported vehicles, citing exhaustive studies, I assume from Transport Canada. However, we have not seen any of those studies. They have not been forthcoming.

The committee is exactly the place for the parliamentary secretary to be bringing the internal analysis performed by the Department of Transport so it can be examined in the light of day and examined in contrast to other reports and other evidence that has been brought forward. For example, for Canadians who are watching, listening or reading, there are two very important reports that have spoken to this issue.

The first is the 2010 National Research Council report which called for mandatory side guards on heavy trucks. The idea, the National Research Council said, was to keep cyclists, pedestrians and scooters from being dragged underneath a large vehicle, a large truck should there be a collision.

Then, yet again, an even more exhaustive study and analysis was performed by Ontario's Chief Coroner's Office in 2012, just two short years ago. It was an exhaustive investigation into the deaths of cyclists. It also recommended mandatory side guards on heavy trucks, arguing that there was ample evidence that this would in fact save lives. It would also prevent injury or lessen the severity of injury.

Finally, there was a third report on pedestrian deaths, which also recommended side guards. Unfortunately in 2013, a blanket disavowal or a blanket rejection of these three reports was provided by Transport Canada, which said that side guards had not been proven to have safety benefits.

As I said in French, qui dit vrai, who tells the truth here? Who actually has the analysis that ought to swing our vote intentions one way or the other. This is why it is important to get this bill to committee. It is important to hear from the experts that have looked at this in great detail, the National Research Council, Ontario's Chief Coroner and, according to the parliamentary secretary, Transport Canada, which has performed its own analysis. Let us get it out.

Let us have it out in committee and find out what in fact is happening. The parliamentary secretary talked about new technologies. I would like to hear more about those new technologies. Which ones? How would they not be complementary to the installation of mandatory side guards?

What are these new advanced technologies purporting to do? Are they able to read the presence of pedestrians, cyclists, or people on scooters or motorcycles? Let us hear about that. Let us find out how we can enhance safety for all Canadians.

The parliamentary secretary also relied on a technical argument in saying that this is not the place to amend an act because there are regulatory powers vested in the provinces and the provinces can go it alone and do their own thing. That is not unusual, coming from the Conservative government. There is always a reluctance to take national leadership on some issues. Here is one of them. It does not want to take national leadership here.

I do not know why the Conservatives would want to have a different set of standards around the country. If the provinces go it alone, why would Canadian cyclists be subject to one set of standards in Quebec and another set of standards in Alberta? I do not get that. I am not sure why the government does not want to take a leadership role in making sure that we have a national standard to protect our citizens from coast to coast to coast.

It was also interesting to hear from the parliamentary secretary with respect to this question of insufficient evidence for the installation of mandatory side guards. Again going back to the details, that is not at all what was said by the National Research Council, the government's own chief research council. I am not sure why the government is not relying on the excellent work of the NRC and the scientists there. They have made some very conclusive remarks about vulnerable road users. Data from the European Union in areas where mandatory installation of side guards was made mandatory shows that the number of deaths and serious injuries caused by heavy vehicles to vulnerable road users has been reduced.

The document goes on to say that side guards alone would not eliminate serious injuries, but they are a huge contributing factor in making our roadways safer. They would not necessarily prevent incidents; they would simply minimize the risk that the folks who are involved would be dragged under the wheels of the vehicles.

There really is an opportunity here for us to move forward. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the Conservative government does not want to take this to committee to hear the expertise and have a balanced, reasonable discussion.

One of the areas of corollary benefit is the environment. Regardless of the safety issues, it is estimated that industry-wide use of these kinds of side guards could result in a total savings of over 400 million litres of fuel every year in Canada. That is a total reduction of 1.1 million tonnes annually of CO₂. One would think that a government that will never meet its target by 2020 and does not even pretend to do so now would want to grab this idea on that basis alone.

The human suffering, the human injury, the toll, and the tragedies that have unfolded from coast to coast to coast on this front warrant examining this idea in great detail. We owe it to our constituents because we have all been touched by a tragedy or an injury in our communities. Therefore, we strongly support having this bill go to committee so that we can analyze it in greater depth.

[Questions on the Order Paper, October 9th, 2014]

With regard to government funding, for each fiscal year since 2007-2008 inclusive: (a) what are the details of all grants, contributions, and loans to any organization, body, or group in the province of Saskatchewan, providing for each (i) the name of the recipient, (ii) the location of the recipient, indicating the municipality and the federal electoral district, (iii) the date, (iv) the amount, (v) the department or agency providing it, (vi) the program under which the grant, contribution, or loan was made, (vii) the nature or purpose; and (b) for each grant, contribution and loan identified in (a), was a press release issued to announce it and, if so, what is the (i) date, (ii) headline, (iii) file number of the press release?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, September 15th, 2014]

With regard to the National Capital Commission (NCC): (a) what were the costs and details of expenditures related to the relocation of the NCC's Capital Infocentre, located at 90 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, to the World Exchange Plaza, located at 45 O'Connor Street, Ottawa, Ontario, in 2011; and (b) what are the costs and details of expenditures, or the anticipated costs and details of expenditures, related to the anticipated relocation of the Infocentre from the World Exchange Plaza to its former location at 90 Wellington Street?

[Questions on the Order Paper, September 15th, 2014]

With regard to the telephone survey of nearly 3,000 Canadians conducted by the Reid Group regarding prostitution and delivered to the Department of Justice on February 10, 2014: (a) why is the Department refusing to disclose the information it contains; (b) did the Minister of Justice take the findings of this survey into account in the drafting of the new bill; (c) why did the Minister of Justice not see fit to publish the survey results; and (d) what organizations inside or outside government have received a copy of the survey results?