House of Commons photoLost his last election, in 2011, with 33% of the vote.
Child Care January 30th, 2007
Mr. Speaker, real leadership is not just decisiveness. Most of all, it is direction, and to know a direction, one has to really believe in it, truly believe in it.
The Conservative child care plan, in every way, can only be understood as child care for those who do not believe in child care. It does not work. It cannot work. Why does this government not tell Canadians what it really believes?
Child Care January 30th, 2007
Mr. Speaker, I thank all members. Last night was a very special night and I can only wish one for everyone some day in their own way.
Persons with Disabilities December 13th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, it is hard for students with disabilities. It is hard for them to qualify for college or university. It is hard for their families who are often low income because one parent has had to stay home to offer the extra care. We, as a government, put in $550 million over five years to help them, money that was locked in, guaranteed. If we were the government today, it would be in the pockets of these students.
Instead, Canada's new government, new, ungenerous, small, pinched government, has done what it takes pride in doing, delivering cuts. These kids have fought hard to get their chance. Why?
Marriage December 6th, 2006
No, Mr. Speaker, I do not believe it can be done that way.
People have used this phrase before and I think it is quite right: a right is a right. Why should there be some category of people who are not allowed that same right?
The member described the depth of feeling that Canadians have for marriage, for that commitment of a person to another. Why should that not be allowed for a similar depth of feeling that a man and a man or a woman and a woman may have for each other as well?
Marriage December 6th, 2006
Just as I said in my speech, Mr. Speaker, which was the way I understand marriage, it is that marriage is between two people: a man and a woman; a man and a man; a woman and a woman. That is what I said in my speech. That is what I say in answer to the hon. member.
Marriage December 6th, 2006
Perhaps, Mr. Speaker, but I am not entirely sure that is something that needs to generate a personal response. We need to find it in our own life's experiences and life's learnings, whatever. Additional information, as the hon. member is suggesting, that comes from some place is always something that can add to the rest of one's own understandings and experience.
Basically, the answer for any of us is already inside us. It is inside you, Mr. Speaker, and it is inside me.
Marriage December 6th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I cannot say that I know what the nature of the question is that is being asked about other groups in the future. I do not know what other groups in the future mean.
What I mean and what I intended to say here is that I understand marriage as something that involves a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, two people who love each other and who want to commit to each other privately and publicly.
Marriage December 6th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, this is a difficult matter for many Canadians and many parliamentarians.
When one is a regular citizen, one has a right not to have a public opinion, to remain quiet, to say “I do not know”, to be unsure enough to decide even not to make up one's own mind, let alone influence others. As a member of Parliament, I lose that right. I have to stand and be counted because a decision must be made, yes or no, and the public has the right to know what I decide so they can decide about me.
I bring no special expertise to the issue of same sex marriage. I went to church as a child. I loved hymns and, at times, the feeling of church, the quiet and community of it, the getting dressed up, the family together and the niceness of it. I did not read the Bible except to memorize a few parts for Sunday school. I found the 10 commandments interesting for what was included and what was not. I thought the name “The Golden Rule” pushed a little hard and yet I am not sure I have heard 11 such simple, non-pushy words, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, that offer a better personal or societal path to life.
Not many years ago, I decided to read the Bible from beginning to end. The experience only confirmed what I had vaguely felt for most of my life, that the Bible offered the best thinking and understandings of a time, a place and people. It reflected how people explained to themselves the world, how the world worked, how people should behave and what would happen if they did not. Much of the wisdom of the Bible has held up in different times and places for different people, but to me no wisdom is timeless. Each is challenged by a new time. Some pieces of wisdom last, some do not.
In thinking about same sex marriage, I have only the experiences of my own life to go on. I am not sure when I first heard the playground words kids used for homosexuals. It was certainly many years before I knew what they meant. The words were intended to punish, to hurt. They said, “You are weak”, “You are not a man”.
By the time I knew better what they meant, I do not think I ever believed that anyone I knew really was one. There were rumours and whispers intended to put down somebody someone wanted to put down. Somebody somewhere surely must be one, I knew, but nobody in my world. I have since come to know that kids I knew very well, kids in my own class, were gay or lesbian.
I have thought how impossibly hard it must have been for them. As teenagers, all of us had to struggle so hard to figure out what was going on in our own bodies and minds, having strange things begin to happen to us, which surely were not normal and must make us bad. What would the other kids think if they knew? What would our parents think? There must be something wrong with me, darkly, dirtily wrong, and we were the lucky ones, the ones who never had to confront the possibility that we were going in the unthinkably wrong direction. We had only to find a way to do acceptably what was acceptable.
What must it have been like for the others? How often must they have thought themselves hideous and unspeakable?
In more recent decades, I have seen what this exclusion has done to people. I have seen them forced to twist and contort themselves to hide and pretend just to get the chance to do the things they wanted to do in life, having about them one big fact that to others completely defines them.
I think now about the untold lives this has directed and shaped and the untold lives it has destroyed. This is so far from being right, it is outrageous.
I grew up knowing that marriage was something that involved a man and a women. Kids eventually seemed to be a part of marriage because that is how life worked, but they did not have to be, as many very good marriages did not produce kids. I thought marriage was something that people did when they loved one another so much that they could not stop themselves from committing to each other privately, and then in a public ceremony, vowing that they wanted to be with each other forever.
I never thought of marriage as something that could involve a man and a man or a woman and a woman. I never thought about a man and a man or a woman and a woman loving each other in a marriage way. I have thought about this question more in recent years. How do I feel? Like most people I think, not entirely comfortable.
Life is hard, even when we live on the majority side of things, of race, language, culture, religion, sexuality. Our biggest challenge as human beings is to get along, to learn about each other, to accept differences, to give the same chance to others to live their lives as we would like them to give to us and to allow others to share fully and completely in the world.
It is also hard to have to think again in a different way about something we had always experienced differently, like marriage. I think the great majority of Canadians on either side of the same sex marriage debate are not 100% sure or comfortable. That is important to know. In the midst of this often heated debate, it is hard not to be swayed, usually in the reverse direction, by the words and tone of the advocates who scream their certainty, who tell the rest of us that we must surely be stupid or at least depraved if we are not as certain as they are.
It is okay to be 60-40 or 70-30 on this. As the debate more and more attempts to polarize us, it is important to know that on one side of the question or the other, most of us have more in common than it seems. It is important to know because it will help us immensely to get along again, as we must, when all this is done.
All these decades later, with the vote ahead of me, where am I? For me, man and woman, man and man or woman and woman, marriage is for two people who love each other, who want to be with each other and who privately and publicly commit to each other. I support same sex marriage and I will vote against the government's motion.
Health December 4th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, the CMA has contradicted that. Cutting is not a vision. Cutting to do what? What Canada? So small, so pinched, so ungenerous and so divisive.
The MrMinister of Health and finance did the same in Ontario. They cut the money, cut the services, kept the rhetoric and hoped they would get to the next election before anyone could figure it out.
The Canadian Medical Association said it clearly, “No new money, no real guarantee”. When will the government listen to the CMA?
Health December 4th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, the strategy of the government is clear. Whether it be on the environment, child care, foreign affairs, women, aboriginal peoples, literacy or health care, it is to set new targets, set them really low and then hit them decisively and call that leadership. That is not leadership.
On health care, it is to offer a wait times guarantee but provide no new money for it so the provinces must pick it up and other critical services are cut. This is a service reduction guarantee.
When will the government provide this essential new money to reduce--