Don Davies

[Canada Revenue Agency Act, December 5th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to stand on behalf of the New Democratic Party of Canada. All my colleagues in our caucus and I offer our support to this important bill.

Canada's New Democrats believe that we must make every possible effort to ensure that every Canadian who needs an organ or tissue transplant receives it. We know that one donor could save up to eight lives and benefit more than 75 people, yet at 18 donors per million people, Canada's current donation rate puts us in the lower third of developed countries. Therefore, I particularly welcome this bill as an attempt to try to remedy that unfortunate state of events, because allowing Canadians to register as an organ donor through their tax returns will no doubt help increase registration rates, improve consent rates and help build a donation culture in Canada.

By way of background, Canadians are currently dying on wait-lists because our organ donation rate is so unacceptably and unnecessarily low. At present, only 20% of Canadians have joined their province's organ and tissue registry. Provinces like Ontario are taking steps to make it easier by asking about organ donations on health card and driver's licence renewals, which has increased registration. However, even with everything in place, some 20% of families refuse to transplant a registered donor's organs.

In its recent study on organ donation, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health learned that of the 4,492 Canadians currently on the wait-list, 260 died waiting for an organ in 2016. In order to better meet that demand, improved coordination across provinces and territories is absolutely required.

Bill C-316, the bill before the House, allows the federal government to coordinate with provinces and territories to allow Canadians to register as organ donors through their federal tax filing. In this case, individuals would be required to consent to the sharing of their information before the agency would share that information with the provincial and territorial levels of government for the purpose of receiving information that hopefully would result in their being added to an organ donor registry.

I pause here to say that, in my view, it would be better if there was a box on everybody's tax return that taxpayers could check off to directly indicate they want to be a donor and the information would go straight to an actual organ donor registry. That is not what this bill does; however, in my opinion, it is worthy of support, because I think it will improve the situation, but I think that a more direct portal and a national registry is ultimately a better way to go.

Of course, this bill aligns with the long-standing advocacy and legislative work of New Democrat members of Parliament around organ donation. This bill is essentially a version of a previous proposal to create what I just referred to, a pan-Canadian organ donor registry, that would coordinate and promote organ donation throughout Canada. That bill had previously been introduced seven times both by Liberals and New Democrats. Judy Wasylycia-Leis, a New Democrat member of Parliament from Winnipeg, introduced a bill in 2002, 2003 and 2008. Malcolm Allen, who was a New Democratic Party member of Parliament from Welland, introduced a bill in 2009 and 2013. Unfortunately, of those five times that New Democrats have introduced bills to set up a pan-Canadian organ donation registry, neither the Conservative nor Liberal governments have ever taken up that excellent idea that would save lives.

I want to share some facts with members and any of the Canadian public who might be watching this debate.

While 90% of Canadians support organ donation in concept, less than 20% have made plans to donate. Unlike the United States, Canada does not have a centralized list of people waiting for an organ. The current Liberal government voted against a bill in 2016 that would have supported the creation of a national registry to align with the United States to help identify those wishing to donate an organ and those who need them.

That leaves us with a patchwork of provincial and territorial systems, the efficiency of which varies greatly from province to province. In the case where someone dies outside of the province where the individual is registered for organ donation, it is unlikely that the hospital would be able to identify the individual as a donor. This is one of the reasons that a centralized national registry is so much better.

Online registration is available in only five provinces: my province of British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec. Even if someone is registered as a donor, the family always has the final say. In Ontario, about one in five registered organ donors have their wishes overridden by family members, according to a 2016 report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

To put this into perspective, for every patient in Canada who does receive an organ transplant, there are two more on the wait-list. In 2016, over 4,500 people were waiting for organ transplants, 2,800 organs were transplanted and, again, 260 people died waiting for a transplant that never came.

In the past 10 years, the number of deceased organ donors has gone up, but the number of people needing a transplant has also gone up. In fact, over 1,600 Canadians are added to organ wait-lists yearly. While most Canadians consent to donate after death, it is also possible to donate organs while one is still alive. Living donors who are the age of majority and in good health can donate a kidney, part of their liver or even a lobe of their lung. About 1% of Canadians who die in hospital donate an organ, but 99% do not, which works out to about 18 per million, about half the rate in countries such as Spain, which is 34 per million, and the United States at 26 per million.

I want to talk about the presumed consent system, because that is why countries like Spain and other European countries have organ donation and transplant rates that are twice as high as Canada's. It is because they have moved to a presumed consent system, which means that every citizen is presumed to consent to be an organ donor unless they choose otherwise. Individual choice, of course, is respected, but it vastly increases the pool of people who are available for organ donation.

The truth is, as I said earlier, over 90% of Canadians agree with the concept of organ donation, but it is difficult or confusing for them to know how to do that, and so most of those wishes go unexpressed. However, if we changed our system to a presumed consent system, we would have the best of all worlds. We would still respect individual choice for those who, for a variety of reasons, do not want to donate, but we would vastly increase the number of organs and tissue available for donation and hence save the lives of so many more Canadians who are waiting for an organ transplant.

It is funny that Canada is the only developed country without national organ donation legislation such as the 1984 U.S. National Organ Transplant Act. The comments that I am making were borne out repeatedly when we studied this bill at committee, and I will read some of the comments we received from people with respect to a national database.

Dr. Norman Kneteman, professor and director, Division of Transplant Surgery at the University of Alberta said that:

...the Canadian Transplant Registry that CBS has built is in place; the computer system exists. The challenge is how we get the information into it. In Canada, all the reporting and transplant and donation in our history has been voluntary, and because of that, it's full of defects; it's not reliable. We have to get beyond that, and we need to be thinking about how we are going to fund the activity of getting the information into the database so the professionals, the researchers...have something to work with.

The Kidney Foundation of Canada backed that up. It said:

Currently, there is a lack of data concerning missed donor opportunities in Canada, which stems from inconsistency in the frequency, methods, and scope of data collection between jurisdictions. Furthermore, this data is not centrally accessible to patients on the waitlist, researchers, clinicians, administrators, or policy makers. Current Canadian approaches to measurement and reporting of potential donor identification and referral are fragmented and lack consistency, timeliness and accessibility of information.

It is rare that one can identify a policy response to a problem that is so obvious and achievable. We need a national organ donor registry in this country. We need a presumed consent system in this country. Why? It is because those two policy initiatives have been identified by all the stakeholders and all the experts. We know that it will increase organ and tissue donation in Canada and save lives. The New Democrats will continue to work towards those ends.

[Canada Revenue Agency Act, December 5th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate my hon. colleague once again on a creative initiative. He has done something that is done all too rarely in this House: He has reached across party lines, he has identified an issue of importance to Canadians and one that touches constituents of everybody in this House, and he has drafted a very practical and positive measure that is achievable. I want to congratulate him on that one more time.

I have two questions. We did hear evidence at the health committee, and I am sure the member is aware that having a presumed consent system, where all citizens are presumed to be organ or tissue donors unless they choose otherwise, results in very high rates of organ donation in other countries. I am wondering if the member thinks that is a step that this country ought to explore in the future.

Second, does the member believe that the government will co-operate with him in order to make this bill a reality so that we can get this question on Canadians' tax returns in time for the 2019 tax year?

[Business of Supply, December 4th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, Canadian workers and producers are facing mill closures and job losses that will harm communities across our country.

In the last softwood lumber dispute, nearly 400 sawmills closed in Canada and that cost us over 20,000 jobs. It disproportionally hurt rural communities.

The Liberals had a one-year grace period after the previous agreement expired, and that whole year was under President Obama. Therefore, they owe a full explanation to Canadians as to why they were not able to secure a fair deal for Canadians during that time.

It is way past time for the Liberals to come clean on why they were unable to conclude a new softwood lumber agreement, tell communities that are suffering when they can expect a deal and take the necessary steps to immediately to fix this. The truth is that they have been unable to offer that explanation.

[Business of Supply, December 4th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I wonder if my hon. colleague is really familiar with the concept of responsible government.

The Liberals are in government. They get to make the decisions. They have their hands on the levers of power. Whenever any of the government's foibles, or poor performance or errors are pointed out by the opposition, what does that member turn to? He turns to saying that if the NDP were in government, it would be different. That is a hypothetical speculation. We are here to talk about the Liberals' record.

My hon. friend has a record to defend and he owes the people of Canada an explanation on a couple of things.

Why did the government sign a new NAFTA without getting a resolution of the steel and aluminum tariffs, which are punishing so many companies in our country? Why does his government not have a new softwood lumber agreement when so many forestry communities and companies in our country are still hurting? Those are the questions he has an obligation to explain to the House and to Canadians.

He also has to explain his government's record. However, he will have a chance to do that in the next election and Canadians will have a chance to pass judgment.

[Business of Supply, December 4th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today. I am reminded of the famous words of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, when he won the election in 1980, “Welcome to the 1980s.” That is exactly what I thought when I read this opposition day motion from the federal Conservatives.

In the early 1980s, we stood on the cusp of the beginning of a neo-liberal or neo-conservative economic theory that was championed by Ronald Reagan and later by Brian Mulroney. It consisted of a certain approach to public policy and public finances, and the guts of that are present in this motion. The Conservatives want to lower taxes, eliminate regulation, encourage free trade and remove tariffs. They essentially just want to bring in the neo-liberal playbook once again.

The difference now is that we have had some 40 years of empirical evidence of what the results of that neo-liberal economic plan is, and the truth is it is not good. What we have seen in the last 40 years is a completely dangerous, in fact, a potentially fatal, rise in carbon on our globe that has caused what I think is the foundational political issue of our time, which is climate change.

In our greed to overdevelop everything very quickly, we are now risking the very environment on Earth that makes all economic activity possible: clean air, clean water and clean land. We see inequality in our country, as measured by the Gini coefficient, at historic rates now, where the share of wealth in this country is owned by an increasingly small number of people at the top, where the middle class is actually shrinking and the working class has done worse.

We see a country where the social programs and the public enterprise, the public projects that were once an important part of Canadian life and that we built in the 1950s and 1960s, slowly dismantled and starved over time. Our education system, our health care system, and our ability as government to intervene positively in the economy for the benefit of all citizens have been slowly strangled by decades of Conservatives and Liberals who pursued the same failed neo-liberal economic policy.

I want to mention for people who may be listening to this debate that one of the major themes of the Conservative motion under debate today is a complete opposition to and call for the removal of a carbon tax. I think this allows us to have a very important conversation in this House about climate change.

As I said, I believe that climate change is one of the foundational issues of our time. There are thousands of issues in politics, but sometimes there are certain issues that are so fundamental that they beg us to deal with them. I think looming disastrous climate change is one such issue.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report about three or four weeks ago that I think is profoundly alarming and very disturbing. It is something that all policy-makers in the government, in the chamber, and all across the world need to pay rapt attention to.

There have been three or four iterations over the last 25 or 30 years of the statement that in order to deal with rising carbon in our atmosphere, we have to reduce so much by so much by such and such a date. I have seen Liberal and Conservative governments blow through every one of those and fail to meet every single promise and pledge that they solemnly made internationally and here. In fact, Eddie Goldenberg, former assistant to former prime minister Jean Chrétien was so bold as to say that the Liberals had no intention of ever meeting their Kyoto targets. That is how brazen and cynical the Liberals have been on climate change. We have never met any of those targets.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the 2°C rise in temperature over pre-industrial times that Paris identified as being imperative to not exceed actually is too much.

It said that if we proceed to have global temperatures rise by an average of 2°C over pre-industrial times, we will lose 99% of the coral reefs on the planet, we will lose thousands of species to extinction, and we risk the melting of the polar ice caps. It says that the world actually needs to get to a 1.5°C degree cap, not a 2°C cap.

Where are we now? At current levels on the globe, we are on a path to hit 3°C to 5°C. We risk environmental armageddon and climate change disaster. What does it mean we have to do? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that we have to reduce by 45% our carbon emissions, as compared to 2010 levels, by 2030.

These are numbers we can all really understand, because they are stark. We can all remember 2010. Whatever Canada was producing in 2010, only eight years ago, we need to be at almost half of in terms of our national carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, and we have to meet that target within 11 years. Are we on target for that? No.

Day after day, the Conservatives are absolutely stone silent in this place and in public about whether they take climate change seriously, whether they think it is actually real, and what their plan is to deal with it, leaving Canadians completely confused and mystified about what their plan is. Do they think it is real? Do they think the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is joking? Do they think we do not face rising sea levels, massive uncontrolled forest fires, drought, food production problems and mass migration? Do they think these things are mythical? They will not say.

For their part, what do Liberals say? They say that we just have to be balanced. They say that we can triple the export of raw bitumen through the Burrard Inlet. We can increase oil sands production in northern Alberta. We can purchase a pipeline for $4.5 billion and spend another $9 billion to $12 billion building it without any problem. However, they never tell us how they are going to meet their Paris commitments.

The truth is this. We cannot expand fossil fuel infrastructure at that rate and meet our Paris climate change targets, never mind the warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Liberals themselves are ignoring the foundational problem of our times.

I want to talk about the second part of this motion, which is the Conservatives' neo-liberal fixation on cutting regulations and red tape. I do not know what they mean by red tape or regulations. Just today I asked a question in the House about medical devices in this country. Over the last couple of weeks, there has been excellent investigative reporting done by CBC and other news outlets. These are the things that go into our bodies, are implanted in our bodies. They are things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, hip replacements, surgical meshes and breast implants. These are medical devices that are implanted in Canadians every day in all our communities, and what did we find out?

Health Canada does not act when other countries recall defective devices. It continues to allow the devices to be implanted today. It approves products when they have not even been tested on human beings, when they have only been tested on cadavers and animals. As well, there is voluntary reporting. What is the result? Fourteen thousand Canadians have been injured by these devices, and 1,400 Canadians have died. Is that the kind of regulation and red tape Conservatives want to see eliminated? Are we spending too much time at Health Canada? They do not identify that.

I want to finish by talking quickly about trade. Only a foolhardy government would sign a trade agreement dealing with tariffs with the U.S. without dealing with the U.S. tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel products. There is a company in my riding, La-Z-Boy furniture, a Canadian-owned and operated company. It is costing the company $55,000 per month because of these tariffs. These Liberals were so incompetent that instead of holding firm and refusing to do so, they actually signed a deal with President Trump on tariffs and trade without dealing with the single most punishing tariff being imposed on Canadian business.

That is incompetent and the New Democrats are going to continue to stand up for good trade policies, good regulations and for fair tax policy in our country.

[Health, December 4th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians do not want better. They want safety. Health Canada is allowing high-risk medical devices to be used when they've been recalled in other countries. They are allowing implants in patients that have only been tested on cadavers and animals. They are relying on a voluntary system of reporting problems.

Insulin pumps, replacement hips, pacemakers, breast implants and other devices have caused more than 14,000 injuries and over 1,400 deaths in Canada. Instead of talking points and false assurances, what is the minister doing to fix this broken system?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 2, November 27th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I think all parliamentarians were quite shocked when the retirees and employees of Sears, after it shut down, lost significant amounts of their pensions. I know one of the deficiencies in the bill before the House, and something on which the government chose not to act, was to amend the Bankruptcy Act and other similar legislation that would ensure that workers' pensions would be protected upon bankruptcy.

Does my hon. colleague agree that workers who defer their salaries and wages and put them into company pension plans should have their money protected from creditors in the event of a bankruptcy or is she content with the status quo?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 2, November 27th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, there is almost no way for me to exaggerate the crisis in housing being experienced across this country, and particularly in the Lower Mainland. In my constituency of Vancouver Kingsway, we have renters who cannot find affordable places and a dream of home ownership by young people that has been crushed. People are leaving the communities they grew up in.

Members of the current government claim they are interested in housing, and while the Liberals say they have allocated $40 billion for housing, it is actually $20 billion because $20 billion of that is coming from the provinces. The $20 billion is tied to provincial contributions and it is over 10 years, most of which would flow after 2019.

Does my hon. colleague really understand that there is a housing crisis in this country? If that is the case, why are the Liberals putting so little money into housing, and why are Canadians having to wait so long for any of that federal money to actually flow?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 2, November 27th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I once read to the House an excerpt from a Liberal platform in 1997, I believe, where the Liberals identified the problem of Canadians who do not have access to necessary and essential medicines. They told Canadians that they were going to immediately bring in pharmacare to fix that gap. Here we are over 20 years later, and we have a Liberal government that is prepared to act, but of course prepared to act not by bringing in pharmacare but by convening a committee and having another study, which is going to be reported maybe by June.

Is my hon. colleague going to stand in the House and tell his constituents and the people of Canada that his government is going to bring in universal public, single-payer pharmacare in the next year? Will he do that, or not?

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Service Operations Legislation, November 23rd, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, my mother used to say that a Liberal is someone who sits on the fence with both ears on the ground. I am starting to see that manifest here today.

Back in 2011, Liberals opposed back-to-work legislation and here they are introducing it. The Liberal governments of Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell in British Columbia stripped teachers of their right to collectively bargain. They said, just like the Liberals here, that it was totally legal, until the Supreme Court of Canada, years later, said it was not legal. The Wynne government ordered college workers and professors back to work and, of course, we know what happened in Ontario as people passed judgment. Liberals pretend to be progressive at election time, but when they are in government, they act just like Conservatives. That is what they are doing here and workers know this.

How would it have been different if the government had instead told Canada Post that the government was not going to intervene on Canada Post's behalf, that Canada Post was going to have to sit at the table, negotiate a collective agreement with its workers and there would be no backstop by the government? What does the member think would have happened?