Jamie Nicholls

[Grain Transport, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we would certainly agree that the time to act is now. There is no time to wait.

In terms of the member's proposals, I would forward them to our excellent expert on these matters, our agriculture critic, the member for Welland.

We also asked for many changes to the Fair Rail Freight Service Act. I could outline those again, but anyone could find them in my statements in the May 29, 2013 Hansard.

Certainly, we have to act now. I think everyone in this chamber tonight could agree that this is an urgent situation. Our farmers are great contributors to our economy. We have to step up to the plate to help them, one way or another.

[Grain Transport, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is good to hear from the member that there are solutions out there. I would urge farmers who are going through this difficulty to look at the cash advance program that exists for them.

Certainly, I know that a lot of farmers in western Canada are going to have cash flow problems, so they are going to need the government to step up and tell them that this program exists. If the farmers do not know about it, we also have to ask the question as to why. Has the government reduced its service-giving capacity in this way? Has it reduced points of service for farmers? Why do they not know about it?

It is also heartening to hear that the member at least understands what farmers are going through and how banks have to understand that as well.

[Grain Transport, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it appears that I have the bedtime story slot in tonight's emergency debate, so I will get right to it.

There is a grain farmer out in Hanley, Saskatchewan, tonight who cannot get to sleep. Let us call this farmer Ryan. He is tossing and turning in his bed because he is worried that he is not going to get his commodity to market. He is not the only one. There are farmers all over Rosedale who are worrying tonight.

It has been a cold winter—colder than Mars, some say. All Canadians know that cold winters mean big heating bills, so Ryan is worried about the bottom line. He is not only worried about getting his crop to market; he is also worried about the bottom line. He is worried about the heating bill and all the bills he has to pay. He is worried about his credit cards.

Ryan and his wife and family have been on that land for several generations now, so they know that land. They invested their money this year to expand their grain drying capacity. They put the money in, and they expected and hoped that the system would function so they could get their product out and export it and get their money.

Ryan is in bed tonight. He knows that his three kids are growing up. They are getting older, and soon he will have to send them to the city to go to school, which will be more cost.

He is adding it all up in his head tonight, and he is thinking about all of these figures and the money going out and not coming in because he cannot move his product, because of the backlog. This backlog could turn a bumper year into a bust year for Ryan.

Members from the other side know that guys like Ryan are the backbone of the Prairies. They work to the advantage of Canada and they feed us. Ryan knows where the problems of the backlog started. He is the expert in all of this, not any of us in this room. It is Ryan who has been working the land from year to year and from generation to generation. His family knows.

To begin with, one of the problems is the monopoly of the railways and their willing partners in government to protect this monopoly and its privileges. That is part of the problem. About 30 years of deregulations have led to this logistical mess. No, we are not going to solve it in the next 24 or 48 hours, because it is the product of 30 years of deregulation.

Ryan has heard 30 years of promises. He has listened to his dad grumble about different governments, the Liberals, Reform, Alliance, and Conservatives. He has even heard his grandfathers grumble about the CCF. No one here has their hands clean. We are all responsible for taking care of Ryan and his family, and other families like his.

Ryan's MP in the 1990s was not even a farmer. He was a lawyer. When he sat in this place, he did not represent farmers' interests. He helped CN to privatize and was beaten in the 1997 election as a consequence. Ryan's dad hoped that the Reform Party of Canada would improve things. It is part of the reason that Ryan, when he got to voting age, voted Conservative. However, he now knows that these Conservatives are the same as the Liberals were 20 or 30 years ago. He sees his member sit behind the Prime Minister and he realizes that she is more of a banker than a farmer. Otherwise, she would do something for him. He knows that his member is a good person, but he is disappointed in her.

Ryan believed that the government was going to take care of this problem with the Fair Rail Freight Service Act that was passed last year, but he now knows that it will not, because on TV tonight he heard Norm Hall, the president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, say that the Fair Rail Freight Service Act passed by the Conservative government was not working and should be amended. That is what we said. That is what I said in this chamber, back in May. Ryan turned off the TV and he rubbed his forehead, which is what any Canadian would do when he realizes that he is hearing another broken promise.

I doubt that Ryan will be voting Conservative next time. Norm Hall has suggestions for amending this problem and solving it. He said that the incentives for grain companies and railways to voluntarily negotiate shipping service agreements have not worked and that we need to put responsibility on the railroads. If there is inaction, there need to be penalties. The government needs to penalize the railway companies when they are not responding to the incentives that the government has put forward.

A review of the legislation of the Fair Rail Freight Service Act is up for 2015. Another member in the House, from the government party, suggested that we move up the review to this year, perhaps, to see what the problems were. We said back in May that there were problems, and those suggestions fell on deaf ears.

It is good to hear that government members tonight are saying maybe we should move up this review process earlier than 2015. When CN privatized in 1995 through the Liberal government's CN Commercialization Act, it had clause 16 that stated more or less that the railway and other transportation works in Canada of CN and all corporations associated, any corporation that evolves out of CN, are declared to be “works for the general advantage of Canada”.

Grain farmers like Ryan work for the general advantage of Canada as well, and it is time government stepped up to the plate for guys like him and not just for the shareholders of CN and CP. The government could provide low-interest cash advances so that farmers can meet their obligations to their financial institutions, because they are worrying. They have loans that are coming due that have to be paid. Their crops are not getting out, so they do not have the money to pay them to meet their obligations.

The government could also ask or work with the financial institutions to extend the terms of the loans of these farmers, to help them out, to give them a hand up, and to help them out in this crisis they are facing.

There are things the government could do and should do for western farmers. We are certainly hoping that the government is thinking about farmers like Ryan tonight, farmers in Saskatchewan, in Manitoba, in Alberta, and all over the country, who are tossing and turning because they cannot move their product to market.

We hear a lot from the governing party about the fact that they are speaking for real western Canadian families, but we know that they have to make that distinction between real western Canadian families and fake western Canadian families, because we know that in their caucus previously they have had members who say they live in Saskatchewan when they actually live in Toronto.

Throughout this emergency debate, I find it very rich and disappointing to hear criticism from the Conservative government that we do not actually understand the needs of western farmers because we do not live there, when they actually have members in their caucus who did not actually live on the Prairies but pretended that they did. We should not be pointing fingers.

The other thing that bothered me tonight about the governing party is that it blames the backlog on unions. That is just preposterous. Any western Canadian farmer knows that the backlog was not created by the teamsters. They know that, so it is ridiculous to divide workers and farmers in this country when we know that we have to work together to solve these problems. Western farmers do not want to hear us having these divisive little fights about unions and farmers. They want to see us work together to solve these problems.

I have not heard a lot of solutions. I did try to help the government on May 29. I spoke on the Fair Rail Freight Service Act, and I put forward the things that the Western Canadian Shippers' Coalition wanted in terms of service agreements. What I was given in terms of an answer was that the government could not actually implement these because they would be a nuisance to the railway companies and it had to be somewhat fair.

Now we are seeing the effects of not including the Western Canadian Shippers' Coalition's suggestions in that legislation. Farming organizations are saying we have to put those amendments in. The legislation is already passed. I have heard government members saying, yes, maybe we do have to amend this, maybe we do have to review it earlier. If we had done that back in May, maybe we would have avoided these problems.

I am not saying the Wheat Board was God's greatest gift to western farmers, but when we make a radical change and we eliminate something, we have to actually plan what the out-rolling of production will be after that body is eliminated. We always talk about how the government is incrementalist, but when it came to eliminating the single desk, it was not incrementalist at all. It made a radical move, it did not plan properly, and it did not listen to western farmers and their suggestions on the problems that would come out of it.

During the Keystone Agricultural Producers convention in Winnipeg in January 2012, farmers talked about all these problems. These were farmers from the Prairies getting together and talking about what the problems of eliminating the single desk would be. They talked about it. I am sure the government heard them. I do not know if it listened properly. However, it did not take into account those suggestions when it came to drafting its legislation, and here we are with a crisis.

We have to find solutions for these farmers, for guys like Ryan, who cannot sleep tonight.

[Grain Transport, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, Norm Hall, the president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, has come out and said that the legislation passed last year by the Conservative government, the Fair Rail Freight Service Act, does not work. Basically, what he is saying is that the incentives for grain companies and railways to voluntarily negotiate shipping service agreements have not worked.

Is the government willing to amend this legislation, as we suggested last year, to improve it so that we can take the first step to eliminate these kinds of bottlenecks in the production chain?

[Grain Transport, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned that when we were in government in 1995, the Liberal government privatized CN via the CN Commercialization Act. Section 16 of that act stipulates that “The railway and other transportation works in Canada of CN, of every subsidiary...are hereby declared to be works for the general advantage of Canada”.

Seeing that health of our grain farmers on the Prairies is also to the advantage of Canada, would this member support or agree to compelling CN to act through the CN Commercialization Act the Liberals enacted in 1995, through section 16?

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, this legislation would take away spending limits on fundraising activities. We know this type of activity often includes negative messaging, political messaging, particularly from the Conservative Party. We also know that this kind of messaging actually turns off voters.

I would like to quote from a Conference Board of Canada report on voter turnout, which concluded by saying that “...without fundamental changes in the way in which politics is conducted in Canada, these are goals that could well remain out of reach for some time”.

Would my hon. colleague conclude like me that this legislation would only serve to suppress the youth vote rather than result in a larger youth voter turnout?

[Respect for Communities Act, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, InSite created an opportunity for researchers to look at this, so there are statistics. Dr. Tyndall and a group of other researchers, in 2005, did a study over a one-year period and produced a report in 2006. They found that there were 273 overdoses at InSite and none of them resulted in a fatality. Over that year, 2,171 referrals were made for InSite users to addiction counselling or other support services. InSite created the ability for researchers to monitor and to benchmark the program to see if it was working. They found that it was successful. By having sites like these we can work with this community to learn how to conquer addiction and help people move on with their lives without drugs.

[Respect for Communities Act, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, that is the hope of all Canadians, that people who are addicted to hard drugs such as heroin or crack cocaine should seek help to kick their habit and become responsible contributing members of society. All Canadians hope for that.

We are saying that places like InSite offer the opportunity for them to do that. They are public points of contact, supervised and official. We can actually gather those statistics through working with that community. This is opposed to having unsupervised drug places in society; no one will be able to monitor whether anyone is getting better or kicking their habit. By having places like InSite, we have the opportunity to work with that community to see if we can help them.

In all cases, our hope would be that these people would want to quit using drugs. That is everyone's hope. The reality is that there are so many steps to get to that point and that addiction is a complex issue. Speaking to addicts and seeing their struggles, hardships, and the complexities of their lives, it is not just a one-shot solution, where we build a centre and they will be cured. It does not work that way because drug addiction is a complex issue; it is not a simple issue. However, we have to start working on a multifaceted approach. Places like InSite are a good start. It is not a be-all and end-all solution.

[Respect for Communities Act, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, today we find ourselves debating Bill C-2, a bill that has been given a pet name by the Conservative government that really does not speak to what the bill is about.

I would like to start off with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. who once said:

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I would like to ask each member in this House a question. How many people in this House have actually met and spoken with drug addicts? How many people have been witness to neighbourhoods affected by drug addiction and poverty? How many people would prefer to steer away from these areas? These are pertinent questions to put to the House today.

I remember vividly when I was living on the west coast. I would take weekend visits to Vancouver to visit friends in the Strathcona neighbourhood. I remember walking down streets like Hastings and Cordova during the winter of 1995 and seeing people huddled on doorsteps, people who might have been dead. The rate of overdoses that winter was horrible. One could walk the streets and literally see people dying on the streets. It was devastating.

In the media at the time, figures such as drug enforcement staff sergeant Jack Dop could see the problems that were hitting the streets in Vancouver. They were saying that we had to do something about it. They could see how this scourge was affecting the community, because it was not controlled. It was uncontrolled.

I should point out that at the time, in 1995, the Chrétien regime had instituted cutbacks and a reorganization of Transport Canada that affected the coast guard and ports. It might have been a coincidence that shipments of heroin from Asia increased at our ports during that time of reorganization and cutbacks. It might have been a coincidence, or it might have been related. That is for the House to decide.

This is a complex issue. We know that drugs exist in our communities, that people use drugs. As responsible legislators, we have to respond to this problem in a responsible manner.

I asked before if anyone in this House has known a drug addict. I asked that question because I have known a drug addict. I knew a guy named Johnny. He stayed with us in Victoria for a couple of months. He was a tree planter. He was a very hard worker, and he was a recovering heroin addict. He had been clean for four or five months, and he had been planting trees in the interior of British Columbia. He worked hard. He was a funny guy and a nice guy. He could play a mean guitar and cook a great meal. We had lots of laughs with Johnny. He was a nice guy, a human being.

Now at the time I met John in 1994, we were living in a poor neighbourhood. It was the North Park neighbourhood in Victoria. It was a pretty rough-and-tumble, poor neighbourhood. It attracted all types of people: students, artists, and coincidentally, drug addicts.

I know that John eventually went back to using, and I lost track of him. He got swallowed up by drugs. He ended up back on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. I do not know what happened to him. I do wonder if during that winter of 1995 John was one of those people on the doorsteps who had overdosed and died because there was pure heroin and there was no one there to take care of them.

This is a human story. This was a good guy with a bad habit. There are a lot of good people out there who have bad habits, and they need our help. They need us to stand up for them. That is why we need places like InSite.

Ten years later, when I was doing my graduate studies at UBC, I worked with communities in the Downtown Eastside, primarily in the child care community. I talked to people in that community. They said that their fear was needles in parks and needles found in child care centres. InSite was responding to things like that. InSite was keeping these neighbourhoods safe, because it was centralizing the problem, and it was controlled.

This legislation would promote unsupervised drug consumption sites. They do exist. There are flophouses in communities. They pass under the radar because they are not official. They are drug dens. They could be anywhere in our communities and could pop up anywhere.

InSite creates a centre that is legitimate, controlled, and visible in the community, rather than unsupervised drug consumption sites, which I would contend the government is promoting by trying to make it more difficult for supervised ones to open.

“Keep heroin out of our backyards” is the slogan of Conservative national campaign manager Jenni Byrne. She thinks it is pretty clever. I do not think it is clever. I think it is irresponsible policy on the part of the government to make it more difficult for supervised injection sites to open.

I do not think the bill would eradicate heroin from people's backyards. If we do not have supervised drug sites, we would have unsupervised ones, which I think could be more chaotic, dangerous and have greater criminal elements attached to them. Since they are not controlled or supervised, those criminal elements could flourish.

We need a responsible way to frame these afflicted communities and to help them.

The current government often talks about safe streets and communities. I think InSite contributes to safe streets and communities. As I said, maybe my friend John was one of those who overdosed. If he had been able to go to InSite, then maybe when he had a reaction the people supervising him could have seen that and contacted medical authorities to help him out.

In terms of needles in parks and schoolyards, at least when people are injecting on those sites the needles are taken care of. They are not discarded next to a swing set at a child care centre or in a public park. It is controlled. It is supervised. That is the whole idea around it.

When something like InSite is created, it is a community coming together to say they have to find a solution to this problem. We have addicts in our communities and they need help. They need medical help. They might need psychological help. They might need clean works. A place like InSite provides that. It is a step in a community's deciding to better its environment, not worsen it.

I think this policy is playing a lot on people's fears. They are people who have never met drug addicts and are afraid to talk with people with these problems. As a society we all have to work together to solve these problems. We have to talk to drug addicts. We have to work with them. We have to create points of contact with these people. Otherwise, it goes under the radar and we end up with unsupervised flophouses and drug dens. The criminal element is allowed to flourish because we do not want to deal with it.

By creating places like InSite, we have a point of contact where we start to deal with these problems and with complex questions like the hon. member from the interior of British Columbia asked about. It was a good and pertinent question. However, if we back up and move away from places like InSite, I do not think we are going to ask those important questions complex questions about drug addiction and drug importation in this country.

Through InSite, we can start to discuss these questions. This legislation has offered a chance to debate this issue, and I look forward to questions from my colleagues on the other side concerning this. I do not think we can put on blinders and say that hard drug use in our society is going to go away if we do not do anything about it. Nobody wants a flophouse or a drug den or a crack house next to their house. If you ask anybody in Canada, they would not want that.

InSite creates a community point of contact where these people can get help, be supervised, and where they can be kept healthy. It is a good positive step in the right direction. There is always room for improvement, but we have to start somewhere.

[Northwest Territories Devolution Act, December 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I feel it is critical that we start listening to first nations, both in the south and in the north. They know their land the best. They know the resources. They know what technology is lacking.

For example, snowmobiles are not sophisticated enough to meet the needs in the Arctic. They would have to be imported from Finland to work in that region. They are, however, built by Bombardier.

Finland has a northern policy that includes those living in the far north. We need to do the same, and we can start by listening to the first nations people who live in those territories.