David McGuinty

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Chair, has the minister read the recent survey of aviation inspectors who work for Transport Canada?

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Chair, there are exactly 100 trained and qualified today?

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Chair, there are 100 qualified systems auditors today?

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

How many, Mr. Chair?

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Chair, I am not asking the minister in general. I am asking her specifically, and here is why.

I asked the department, when it came to committee, to give us information. It says it has 142 full-time equivalents assigned to rail safety oversight. We sent this answer to the Auditor General of Canada, and here is what the Auditor General of Canada wrote back to me a week ago:

...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.

I ask once again. Exactly how many qualified inspectors does Transport Canada have to conduct audits?

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Chair, that is actually quite astonishing. I guess the minister did not understand my question, because the Auditor General of Canada says in the Auditor General's audit, which was performed some six or seven months ago, that Transport Canada says it requires 20 system auditors to audit each railway SMS, for example, once every three years.

How many qualified system auditors are on staff presently? In his report, the Auditor General says there are 10 when the department says it needs 20, minimum.

[Business of Supply, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Chair, I will be splitting my time with the member for Wascana this evening in this first round.

I will begin by asking the minister exactly how many qualified inspectors there are at Transport Canada to conduct safety management system audits.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, May 6th, 2014]

With regard to the value and condition of real property held by the government and with respect to any and all built structures, including but not limited to, offices, military bases, armouries, laboratories, canals, depots, residences, garages, communication towers, storage facilities, lighthouses, bridges, hospitals, wharves, weather stations, warehouses, data centres, prisons, border crossings, etc., what are, for each department listed in Schedule I of the Financial Administration Act, and for Parks Canada, Revenue Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and Canada Border Services Agency, the following: (a) the number and current value of all built structures; (b) the number and percentage of the facilities referenced in (a), with building condition reports conducted in the past five years; (c) the number of building condition reports and the number of facilities they reference, by Treasury Board category (good, fair, poor, critical, unknown); (d) the list of, and addresses for, all facilities in “poor” or “critical” condition; (e) the annual departmental expenditures for real property repair and maintenance for fiscal years 2010-2011, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013; (f) the annual budgets for real property repair and maintenance for fiscal years 2013-2014, 2014-2015 and 2015-2016; and (g) estimates of costs to bring all facilities/built structures in each department’s inventory, to “good” condition within 5 years?

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, everybody knows that the jig is up. Canadians know what is going on. They are really not stupid. They follow this. They are aware of the kinds of tactics being used by the Prime Minister and his front bench.

They know that things are being pounded together. They know that they are being jammed through the House. They know that we are not being given ample and reasonable opportunity to debate parts of the bill that ought to be seen in different committees. They know that parliamentarians, as a result, are not able to do the job they were sent here to do, which is to try to improve things for Canadians and improve the country.

These are the kinds of tactics that were developed in Ontario in a previous regime. They are unfortunate.

The Canadian people are catching on quickly, and I think they are going to speak loudly in 2015.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, seven minutes is an appropriate amount of time. I am reminded of my contracts professor at law school who once said that it is very important to remember, unlike my colleagues on the Conservative side, that verbosity is no substitute for content.

I am going to focus on two themes today, which I think are important for citizens right across the country. The first one is infrastructure. We know that we have to invest in the next generation of infrastructure, that we are standing on the shoulders of previous generations who invested heavily in our water and waste water systems, our road systems, and our bridges. We know we are going to be dealing with even more challenges on the infrastructure front because of the realities of adapting to climate change. That is something that the government still refuses to address.

On the infrastructure side, we know that the minister regularly talks about large sums of money being available. However, here are the facts. As of April 1, there is an 87% decrease between last year and this year in terms of the build Canada fund and the amount of money available for the entire country. The government is not denying that. It is exactly $210 million for the entire country this fiscal year. We are not talking about gas tax. We are not talking about HST rebates. We are talking about the build Canada fund. For example, when it comes to my hometown, the City of Ottawa would hope to receive $65 million from the Government of Canada to help improve our water and waste water systems, so we can protect our incredible Ottawa River, the source of our surface drinking water. It would like to be able to invest in the system before the 2017 anniversary of the country, to be able to actually strengthen that infrastructure.

We know that by not investing in that infrastructure now we are compromising jobs. We are compromising giving rise to new technologies and processes for the global market that we ought to be able to do very well in. At the same time, by not investing in infrastructure, we are compromising the support for our middle-class families, who would benefit not only from the infrastructure investments, but the economic spinoffs that follow.

When the government says otherwise, we are hard pressed to believe it. Here is a letter dated yesterday, on Canada-Nova Scotia Infrastructure Secretariat letterhead. Let me quote from it. These are the opening two paragraphs. It says:

You are no doubt aware that the federal government announced on March 28, 2014 that the New Building Canada Fund...is “open for business”. Nova Scotia, like all other Provinces and Territories, was surprised by this announcement.

It goes on to say:

The Province has not signed an Agreement with the federal government for the NBCF and no details have been released to us on the application process.

It lends credence to the notion that it is a shell game; it is a card trick on the infrastructure side.

We know in the last instance of the infrastructure investments made by the government that it forced every municipality in the country to put up a total of 9,000 vanity billboards. Canadians recognize them because it infuriates them. Then it stuck the bill to the municipalities where the billboards were actually mounted. In the case of my home city of Ottawa, former mayor Larry O'Brien confirmed, in writing, that $50,000 was spent by the City of Ottawa in putting up the vanity billboards for the government in different infrastructure settings across the region.

The second issue I want to raise is the transportation safety issue. We have seen in the budget a cut to road safety investments, marine safety investments, airline safety investments, and a marginal increase in rail safety of about a million dollars. This is a very important issue for Canadians in the wake of Lac-Mégantic. If we look at the real numbers on rail safety, we know that the government is spending more money on economic action plan advertising, $42 million this year alone, than it is spending on rail safety in the entire country.

This is at a time when the Auditor General has told us that only 26% of the planned audits for rail safety were performed; that Via Rail has not been audited in three years, when it is carrying four million passengers a year; and that only nine inspectors are in place, when we need 20.

We are seeing massive increases in diluted bitumen being transported by rail. We are going to have one million barrels of excess oil that cannot go in pipelines in the next decade, but the government finds the money for the vanity advertising and the “24 Seven” show, which is a joke. It is a show of the Prime Minister at work, paid for with taxpayer dollars.

I look forward to coming back to these themes and others when my time comes for my next speaking opportunity, but I did want to get these two issues, infrastructure and transportation safety, on the record and juxtapose both against some of the foolish spending by the Conservative government.