Kennedy Stewart

[Housing, December 4th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, my community is in the midst of a profound housing crisis. Rents are increasing, more people are homeless, and businesses are starting to relocate as their young employees cannot afford to buy their first homes.

The government brags about its new national housing strategy, but it is doing nothing to immediately address what is becoming an emergency situation in Burnaby. University of Toronto housing specialist Professor David Hulchanski writes today in The Globe and Mail that the Liberals' newly announced policies will help “very few, of those in housing need”.

He instead suggests we need a “real national housing strategy” that would create an “inclusive housing system, much like our health-care system” addressing:

(1) how to stimulate adequate housing production, (2) how to produce a mix of housing choice...and (3) how to assist those who cannot afford adequate housing.... It would...address remaining systemic racism in our housing system.

The government needs to start delivering real housing solutions right now, such as guaranteeing to those living in existing co-ops that they will not see increased rents next year.

[Science, December 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday at committee, I asked the science minister to explain the mysterious case of disappearing federal scientists, but I did not get a full answer. According to Statistics Canada, in 2012, during the worst year of Stephen Harper's war on science, the federal government employed 37,000 scientists and researchers. This number dropped to 35,500 when the Liberals took power, but under this minister, the Liberals employ only 34,500 researchers, 1,000 fewer than when they took office. Where did they go?

[World AIDS Day, December 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, today marks World AIDS Day. Since the virus was identified in 1984, it has proven to be one of the most destructive pandemics in history, resulting in the deaths of over 35 million people globally.

Today, we take a moment to mourn those who have been lost. While an AIDS diagnosis originally meant a death sentence, scientific research and the work of dedicated advocates, caregivers, and patients has brought a powerful message of prevention and a critical de-stigmatization of the disease.

Today, those living with HIV who have access to treatment and maintain an undetectable viral load do not transmit the virus to their sexual partners. This is a great achievement. However, it is still estimated seven Canadians are infected each day with HIV, often from the most vulnerable populations.

Today, I call on the government to expand the federal initiative on HIV/AIDS, create equal access to treatment for infected Canadians, and stop the practice of banning blood donations by men who have sex with men.

[Indian Act, November 30th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to stand in this place and speak to such an important issue. I do have to recognize the incredible work my colleagues have done on this, and will continue to do until we repeal the Indian Act and we have full justice and equality in our country, which is sadly lacking.

I would like to explain how I have come to understand the issue we are debating today. I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, in the Annapolis Valley. Through my entire early childhood years, I can never remember much discussion of my indigenous neighbours except to hear about Glooscap's legend and a few other quaint stories, important to local people at times. I really had no context, because in Nova Scotia, like all across our country, there had been great discrimination against first nations Mi’kmaq people from that area.

I remember when I was a kid, I went to a drive-in movie. The sun was just setting, and I was sitting there in the car. I remember looking over and there were kids looking across the drive-in movie fence. I asked my mom who those folks were. She said they lived on the local reserve. Until that time, I had never really realized there were indigenous people living in my community.

We had always had debates about the Acadians, whom the British had pushed off the land. In fact, the land on which my parents' house stood was on Acadian land. We could still see some of the old structure. However, we never had a conversation about the Mi’kmaq. It never really came into the conversations in our household or in our school. It was never taught, except for a few local legends, which were always capitalized on by the colonizers.

It starts to eat away at someone. As a young person, I was not quite sure how to deal with this stuff. However, it was present. I am happy to say that when I was driving along a Nova Scotia highway about six months ago, I started to notice they are naming the reserves on the highway signs. One can actually know, going down the highway, that there is a community there that was never named in the past. That is a very small step toward reconciliation and bringing equality. I am 50 years old. It has taken decades and decades for just that small thing to get done.

I remember the first time I ever said the word “genocide” about indigenous people in Canada. I was a young lecturer at Simon Fraser University, and I was teaching the administration of justice. With my colleague, Paddy Smith, a great mentor of mine, we decided the course had never had a full lecture about aboriginal rights in Canada, so we decided this would be a good time to start.

When one actually starts to research the history of the administration of justice in Canada, one realizes just one lecture, one course, or one degree is not enough, that there need to be entire institutions that look at this sad history.

I remember standing in front of a class of 200 people for the first time saying that Canadians had committed genocide. When I talked about how the Beothuk people were wiped off the face of the earth by our ancestors, it made me realize, with shame, how this whole history had been hidden. At least I can say those first-year students had some sense, somewhere to start, to ask how do we get to reconciliation.

That was probably 15 years ago. I worked on a program and did some research for the Department of Justice looking at on-reserve voting during that period as well.

The amount of damage starts to get overwhelming. Coming from Nova Scotia, where we had the original Europeans coming over, it is reported historically that there was some co-operation there. We went from this co-operation to oppression, to cultural genocide when we think about the residential schools right across the country.

My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley, earlier today was talking about South Africa coming to look at our reserve systems and saying, “This is how you do it. Let's do it back home.”

Then I come to the House of Commons where all of these decisions were made. People just like us here in the House today put act after act forward, which then went to the Senate. Perhaps it was before Canada had a legislature as well. The British are definitely to blame for this. In the House of Commons, act after act after act reinforced and made worse the terrible treatment of people who I did not even know were my neighbours when I was growing up.

We owe it to our future generations and past generations of those who suffered to do the right thing, and I do not think we are doing the right thing. What I am hearing in this debate is that some administrative inconveniences are stopping us from doing the just thing. That does not seem to balance out, especially after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, especially after we looked at all the damage that was done to our neighbours, to the people we should love as much as we love ourselves. Then we get into a debate like this with a bill that goes back and forth between the other place and here. It sounds like people are saying that the bill is an administrative inconvenience, and that seems to be holding up justice, which does not make any sense to me.

I have a constituent in my riding who is in her seventies. She has been trying for 20 years to get her status. She has hired her own lawyers and has been helped by MPs in Burnaby and elsewhere. She came to my office and said she had tried over and over again to get her status but wants to try once more. We are trying to help her get her status, not for herself but for her future generations. Her husband recently passed away. She is indigenous; he was not. She has had to hide from her culture for so long and really wants to be proud of it, and this seems to be the time to do it. Look at what she has to go through. She has to hire her own lawyers and to go to members of Parliament for help. She has to revisit what her family members went through in the past. This seems totally unnecessary, especially when her male family members do not have to do the same thing.

We can talk about dotting the i's and crossing the t's and all of that kind of stuff, but really, when we get down to people, it does not matter. This should be done right away. It seems to me that this could be done very simply despite all of the administrative inconvenience. All we are doing is amending an act that should have been repealed in the first place.

If one is looking at this from the perspective of someone who has suffered, it must be inconceivable that we are doing this. I am deeply ashamed. We can do much better. It does not make any sense to me that one day we are talking about genocide and the next day we are questioning where a clause must go.

I really hope that after we get through this debate, we can get on with the real work.

[Natural Resources, November 30th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday we learned the Liberal government appealed to the National Energy Board to fast-track Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline by cutting out the people of Burnaby and British Columbia.

This is unbelievable. This is a very unusual and troubling attack on the City of Burnaby and the Province of British Columbia's constitutional rights to do their own evaluations and deliver their own permits.

Will the Liberals respect the Constitution, withdraw their letter, and instead support the city's and province's rights to enforce their own regulations?

[Natural Resources, November 29th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, during the 2015 election, the Prime Minister promised he would protect British Columbia's coast from Kinder Morgan. Well, he broke his promise and is now working to ram this dangerous new bitumen pipeline through our beautiful province. While 18 court cases have left the fate of this pipeline in limbo, Kinder Morgan has already broken the law by setting up salmon-killing anti-spawning matting in our rivers, with plans to set up more in dozens of locations. The National Energy Board has issued stop work orders, and my inquiries indicate that the BC Oil and Gas Commission will also officially sanction the company.

Kinder Morgan has erected a Guantanamo Bay-style compound in the Burrard Inlet, complete with razor-wire fencing. The company's private security firm harasses recreational boaters on a daily basis, and I have now asked the RCMP to investigate.

While the Prime Minister and his Liberal MPs have sided with Kinder Morgan against B.C., we will not stop fighting this project until it is abandoned. We will protect our coast.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 2, November 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the government says that it is an evidence-based government that makes policy based on evidence, but basically it decided that this pipeline was going to go through no matter what, and then it fit the facts to support its case. Of course, one would perhaps expect that from an undergraduate writing their first paper, but not from a government that is supposed to run the country. The Liberals need to take in more evidence and, in fact, they need to cancel this project.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 2, November 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the member's interventions and really appreciate her support on this issue.

Of course, the threat to jobs in Burnaby or the rest of British Columbia is not covered by examinations at the National Energy Board, because the government relies on the process created by the Conservatives, which is to limit debate and stop cross-examination of companies. As a result, we really get a very pro picture of almost all projects.

The Prime Minister had said he would change the process and would send the pipeline proposal back to the drawing board. He immediately broke his promise, did not revise the process, and here we are.

Getting to the hon. member's exact point, we do have a refinery in Burnaby that I support. However, what has happened is that Kinder Morgan is pinching off supply to that refinery and it is in danger of closing. I fully support those jobs, which are good, union-paying jobs. It is a shame the government is not paying more attention to the welfare of people in British Columbia.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 2, November 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to tell the hon. member about what my constituents are saying about what I was speaking about. In fact, in 2014, 125 of them were arrested for trying to stop the pipeline. Thousands and thousands have protested against it. I polled my own riding, and 75% of those in Burnaby are against it.

They are really mad at the government, which keeps outlining in false way the benefits from this pipeline in order to spread the mistruths the company itself puts forward. I definitely listen to my constituents, and they care about this.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 2, November 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, this has been a very wide-ranging debate today on the budget bill, as it should be. I am going to add to that wide-ranging discussion of what we are faced with here in the House. I am speaking to Bill C-63, and it is the second budget implementation bill. I regret to say that I will be voting against the bill, and I hope to outline in this speech why that is the case.

In a nutshell, there are many things in this bill. It proposes to bring into effect new spending and new regulations with which I do not agree. There are many things that are not in this bill that I would like to see; for example, money for a national pharmacare program or more money for housing, which is of such critical concern in my riding of Burnaby South. However, that money is not there.

I want to bring to the attention of the House today that I am voting against this bill in part to protest and bring attention to the way the current government presents information to the public. In many cases, data are used to promote certain economic activities; the data that are used by the government are badly distorted, whether on purpose or through incompetence; or it is just plain wrong.

In the last Parliament when I would get up and talk about budgets, especially on the science portfolio, which I oversee for the NDP, I would ask for the presentation of data adjusted for inflation, for example, if they are looking at longitudinal data. I remember the Conservatives telling me that was some socialist voodoo economics, but in fact it is just a realistic way of looking at how money is spent over time.

I have not heard back from the current government, but I expect to be heckled a bit as I go through this talk today.

I would like to bring attention to the way the government throws around job-creation figures. As we did with the Conservative government in the last Parliament, we often get hyper-inflated numbers of job creation that always tie back to the budget, the spending, and those types of things. The Prime Minister's cabinet members are talking about jobs associated with their plan to ram a pipeline through British Columbia. That is of course the Kinder Morgan pipeline. If members will recall, this project was approved and the Prime Minister broke his promise to British Columbians and said that he would thoroughly review the project to see how many jobs and what would be the effect on the environment. However, he did not do that, and the Liberals are pushing it through against the wishes of the provincial government, most first nations communities, mayors and councils, and millions of British Columbians. Therefore, what I take specific issue with is the way the Liberals portray their job-creation numbers, not only in relation to the budget but in this specific case.

When the Prime Minister announced the approval of the pipeline, he said he would create 15,000 new middle-class jobs, and we see this in the budget document where we hear about all the jobs that the spending would create. However, in this case with the pipeline, the Prime Minister and his other ministers and parliamentary secretaries have said that this would create “15,000 new middle-class jobs”. This is repeated over and over. This is a lot of jobs; 15,000 jobs is a big number, and people might be tempted to overlook the environmental damage and the damage to relations with first nations that this might create, and they might support the project if, in fact, the figure of 15,000 jobs were true, but it is not. Really, the number is straight out of the mouths of the pipeline company proponents, the spin doctors, right onto the lips of the Prime Minister and of the parliamentary secretaries who defend the pipeline, and of the entire Liberal caucus in British Columbia, which is also solidly behind pushing this pipeline through our province.

The Prime Minister's ministers in cabinet repeat this number over and over again, so I feel it is important to delve into the number because it exposes the incompetence and duplicity of the current government when it comes to its economic statements. The first thing to note is that 15,000 jobs that the pipeline supposedly is going to create is just plain wrong, according to many analysts—for example, Robyn Allan, who has written extensively on this and testified both as an expert to the National Energy Board and on her own in many publications, is taking on this number firmly and convincingly.

Ms. Allan is no slouch. She is a former president and CEO of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, the vice-president of finance at Parklane Ventures Ltd., and senior economist for the B.C. Credit Union. She is an expert witness on economic and insurance-related issues right here in Ottawa. She has taught money and banking, public finance, and micro and macroeconomics in universities. She has written numerous articles and books. If we were to call a witness to talk about how many jobs a project or a budget would actually create, this is the type of person we would want to advise us.

According to Ms. Robyn Allan, this number of 15,000 jobs associated with the Kinder Morgan pipeline is six times the number of temporary construction jobs actually presented by the company in its National Energy Board application. The Prime Minister, the parliamentary secretaries, the cabinet, and the B.C. caucus are all saying that the Kinder Morgan pipeline will create 15,000 jobs during its construction. However, that is contrary to what the company presented in its documentation to the National Energy Board. Therefore, the government has inflated this number sixfold. If we extrapolate that over other parts of the budget and other parts of the claims by the government, this makes us doubt almost everything that it is putting forward.

The 15,000 jobs number comes from a fantastical calculation based on a doubling of the amount of construction time this proposed pipeline is allowed to take. The pipeline is supposed to be constructed over two years. This 15,000 job number comes from a four-year construction period. Therefore, according to Ms. Allan, “Trans Mountain's estimate of 15,000 construction workforce jobs is a scam. The more realistic figure is less than 20 per cent of that size.”

Therefore, when Canadians are here listening to this debate in the House about the Liberals and their fiscal plans, the latter are flat out telling falsehoods about what we can expect with respect to one of the biggest projects in the country. They downplay the environmental damage that just one spill from this pipeline or its construction would create in communities right across British Columbia and have artificially inflated the number of jobs that will be created.

What is also important is the second part of the Prime Minister's statement that these jobs will be middle-class jobs. These 15,000 jobs the government claims will come from this pipeline are not permanent. This is of course from documents submitted by the company to the National Energy Board, which state, “Once the proposed Expansion Project is complete, operating and maintaining...[this] Pipeline system will result in approximately 90 new operating positions”. In fact, we will never see the Prime Minister stand up and say that he has justified this pipeline because it will create 90 permanent jobs; rather, he uses the inflated number of 15,000 jobs, which is clearly wrong.

The idea that these jobs are middle class is also wrong. Kinder Morgan president Ian Anderson was here at committee and admitted that he hires temporary foreign workers, and that those are the workers who will be hired to build this pipeline. Therefore, these 15,000 are not full-time middle-class jobs, but 90 full-time jobs, and perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 temporary construction jobs filled by temporary foreign workers.

What is worse, Kinder Morgan has contracted with CLAC, which is not an official union. It is not, for example, the BC Building Trades union. Therefore, it is skirting the unions in British Columbia that would ordinarily protect workers in order to make this happen.

Once we actually start looking at the facts from the company and the National Energy Board, we see that this 15,000 job claim is wrong. We have temporary foreign workers, we have temporary jobs, and we have 90-full time jobs. That is hardly worth rupturing our entire relationship with first nations people or local communities. In fact, 45% of British Columbians oppose this pipeline, and 30% are strongly opposed and are willing to take action to stop it. Many people who have not been to British Columbia are not aware that we do not have treaties with the first nations there, and they have significant rights. We are seeing this play out right now. We have 18 court cases, many of which were filed by first nations, including one yesterday by the Squamish Nation challenging the legitimacy of the review process for the pipeline.

Therefore, I would suggest that the government go back and take a look at these numbers for real and come back with realistic numbers that we could debate more fully.