Kennedy Stewart

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, of course the political history of Canada is overcoming the evils of upper chambers. The provinces have done it. I referenced Robert Baldwin earlier. It was all about making sure people have control. These changes we are proposing, to abolish the Senate, would permanently do that.

We also need to move on with other reforms, such as proportional representation, ensuring we have full expenditure transparency in the House, and making sure our independent officers of the legislature are firmly protected and funded.

There are a lot of other things we can do right now that should also be addressed. It is our job to make sure we leave democracy in Canada better than we found it, and abolishing the Senate will do that.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about institutional change. We should make sure we divorce personalities from institutions. Therefore, it may be that the senators who were elected through this kind of rag-tag system the Conservatives have put together have been appointed by the Prime Minister, but there is no guarantee that will happen with other prime ministers. They are unable to make proposals that will permanently change these institutions for the better, and that is why we have to get rid of it.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise to support the motion brought forward by the very able member for Toronto—Danforth.

The motion is worth reading, if not savouring:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government of Canada, in consultation with the provinces and territories, should take immediate steps towards abolishing the unelected and unaccountable Senate of Canada.

We are talking about abolishing the Senate. This is music to my ears. We should take these steps toward making Canada a better democracy. I am very proud to be a member of a party that is pushing for such a long overdue reform. I really hope we get support from all sides of the House for the motion.

I am of view that when we talk about issues like this, we have to step back and take somewhat of a romantic view of the times we are in. Rather than focusing on the day-to-day details of the activity of life, it is important to think of this issue in the context of the historical period in which we are living.

It is important to not think about how the debate and discussion we are having here is going to be reflected in the newspapers, but how we are going to look back on this period 100 years from now. That is how we have to look at this. It is a major structural change being proposed, not for the first time in Canada. We have gone through many structural changes in the development of our democracy. We have to look at how Canadians will view our efforts today and over the coming months and how future generations of Canadians will view this.

To help with this task of contextualizing the debates read, I often like to read political biographies. I know that is probably a little boring for some, but I think it is extremely important to put this into context. I have just finished a wonderful biography written by Professor Michael Cross of Dalhousie University, who spent 10 years researching and writing about Robert Baldwin, one of the fathers of responsible government in Canada, along with his father and LaFontaine. This is the famous Baldwin-LaFontaine team that brought us responsible government.

I would advise all members to take a look at this book as we go through this debate about whether we should abolish the Senate.

A lot of people would ask why they should read a biography of Robert Baldwin, the man who brought municipal reform to Canada, the man who brought responsible government. Because it is important to see how dedicated he was to transforming Canadian democracy and to improving democracy in Canada. His triumph of responsible government means our government is more responsible to the people than to the monarchy.

If we look back at Robert Baldwin's time in the mid-1800s to the 21st century, if people from the 22nd century look back to where we are now, I think they may see people who have as much passion as Robert Baldwin, putting forward proposals such as the one today.

I will be sharing my time, Mr. Speaker.

The reforms of responsible government were achieved in a uniquely Canadian way, without revolution. That shows the value of the House, that it allows for debate and that it is where these debates should take place and that it is the institution that should make the decisions for Canada.

We need to abolish the Senate because it is proving to be shackle around the neck of Canadian democracy. Even the mighty Conservative Party, with its Reform roots, has fallen victim to its power to undermine public control of politics in our country.

The Prime Minister and his predecessors from the Reform Party and the Alliance Party have all promised to reform the Senate. Indeed, the Prime Minister described the Senate as a relic of the 19th century, a relic of the Baldwin era. In 2004 he that he would not name appointed people to the Senate.

However, I fear the Senate has the better of him and his party, to where their real passion for reform of this institution has been beaten down to where what we now have put before us, through the Senate, is a watered down bill. Surprisingly and astoundingly members on the other side of the House are defending the Senate, calling it a valuable institution. If I had heard that 10 years ago, I would have thought I was dreaming.

After tabling several bills for Senate reform that all have gone nowhere—and I have to say mainly due to lack of effort—the Prime Minister has now appointed 58 senators.

If the originators of this western Reform movement—then Alliance and then eventually merged with the Progressive Conservatives—had stood up on the podiums during those times and said they promised to defend the Senate when they got a majority government, people would have walked out of the halls and torn up their membership. I really do find it astounding that this is really the debate going on here.

As outlined earlier by my colleagues and the newspapers and electronic media, the behaviours of senators Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin show why the Senate is no longer relevant and really needs to be abolished. This is an institution whose members within did work that was important to the country, perhaps at one point. Really, this has fallen off the agenda and they are really not doing us proud. It is becoming a joke institution, and that is too bad.

The reforms that are put forward by the Conservatives really are weak and limpid and they will not accomplish what they are after.

The Senate costs Canadians $92 million each year, and even more important, the Senate blocks legislation passed by the House of Commons. This is the elected House. This is where legislation should originate, and the Senate now and for a long time has been blocking important legislation that Canadians want.

It is not really based on any sense of sober second thought, as was the past romantic view of this institution. It is really partisan politics at play here.

Some senators try to practise this view, and in fact I have great respect for Senator Dallaire. I think he has served this country well. Perhaps he would have been the type of senator who would have upheld ethical values. I do not think many of them are doing that now, and I do not think there is any way to curb that, other than by abolishing the Senate.

We are faced with many failed attempts at legislation from that side of the House, of course, but now there is a Supreme Court reference, which will give its legal opinion on the constitutional limits as they apply to limiting the terms of senators, electing senators and eliminating the requirement for senators to have residence in the province they represent; and of course what we are proposing here is abolishing the Senate.

While I look forward to the decision of the Supreme Court—I get some more Friday night reading—I cannot help but think this is a delaying tactic by the Conservatives. They have had years to look at this issue but only now are getting around to it when senators are caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The Conservative are putting forward these motions, vigorously defending the Senate, unimaginably today, and then hoping this will fade off the public agenda and everything will go ahead as normal.

They are hoping that these scandals will blow over and be forgotten before the decision is delivered, but I cannot help but think that these current indiscretions will only be replaced by new indiscretions as we move forward. As the Duffy and Wallin debacle perhaps fades a bit from public memory, there will be new ones, because the Senate is really unaccountable. They do not really have any incentive to spend taxpayers' money wisely.

That is not all senators. There are some people there with fantastic reputations, but I do worry that others will continue to cast aspersions.

This is a time for vision. Again, going back to Baldwin and responsible government in Canada once being a dream, it was achieved through sheer political will, and although there are difficulties in abolishing the Senate, we should not be put off by those.

The same stands for women gaining the vote or first nations gaining the vote, the bill of rights in Canada or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These are all major institutional shifts that were necessary and took significant political will to make them happen. We want to add one more to that list and that is abolition of the Senate.

[Parliamentary Budget Officer, March 1st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, those attacks from members on the other side are pretty rich considering they get their ethical advice from Tom Flanagan.

We know the Conservatives' next attack on Kevin Page is coming from the Senate. The deputy leader of the government in the Senate claims that Page is “overstepping his mandate”, all because the PBO has the audacity to ask government departments for information on their spending plans. They are not just defending their Senate entitlements now, they are using the Senate to shut down an independent fiscal watchdog.

Will the Conservatives stop dismantling fiscal accountability and end their attack on the PBO?

[Canadian Human Rights Act, February 27th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure tonight to rise and show my very strong support for Bill C-279, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity and gender expression). I will speak to the amendments as well as the general bill in my speech tonight and the shorter form as it is often called, “the gender identity bill”.

It seems very apt to be speaking to the bill this evening, on the very day that tens of thousands of people across Canada are joining together to reduce bullying. We have had the famous Pink Shirt Day today, when people from all communities across Canada are joining hands and saying that this is something we must reduce, that it is something that is taking a terrible toll on our neighbourhoods and in our communities where we live and we have to do something to stop that.

With this bill, we are talking about making the world a better place by taking steps to protect those whom others abuse. The bill has been a long time coming but it is well worth supporting, especially with the amendments have proposed.

I am disappointed that some members on the other side are opposing the bill, as stated tonight, and I think we will hear it in other speeches. Their statements somewhat misrepresent the views of a number of members within the Conservative caucus, including the Minister of Finance who voted to support the bill at second reading. Where their arguments are often being masked in technical details, I think there are deeper and more disturbing reasons for not supporting the bill that underlie their objections. Again, I do not think this represents a good number of the Conservative caucus who have supported it at second reading and in the past as well.

The bill has been introduced and championed by the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, whom I have the great pleasure of sitting beside in the House of Commons. Even though the member is newly elected, like me a rookie, the bill has shown that he is one of the smartest and most ethical MPs in this place. I have enormous respect for his work on it and also as our very able public safety critic. I am very honoured to support his heroic efforts to support the trans community and those within the LGBTQ community.

Besides sitting beside the champion of the bill, I have another strong connection with the bill other than my absolute belief that it is relevant and just in that earlier versions were championed by my predecessor in Burnaby—Douglas, Mr. Bill Siksay. It is really an honour to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Siksay. Through his efforts on this issue and many others, he is seen as a champion in Burnaby and the national and international LGBTQ community.

Bill Siksay first introduced the ideas contained in the bill in 2005, then again in 2006 and again in 2008. Members in the House may remember that predecessors to the bill passed through the last minority Parliament on February 11, 2011. Again, the bill has a long history. For eight years it has been winding through the House in various forms, having passed once and I hope pass again as it has passed second reading.

In 2011 the bill had the full support of the NDP as well as some level of support from all other parties. Unfortunately, the bill in the last Parliament died in the Senate without being considered once the election was called.

This hopefully amended Bill C-279 contains some simple and very just measures. As my colleagues have mentioned, it would add the term “gender identity” to the Canadian Human Rights Act, section 2 as prohibited grounds for discrimination. It would also amend the Criminal Code to include gender identity as a distinguishing characteristic protected under section 318 and as an aggravating circumstance to be taken into consideration under section 718.2 at the time of sentencing. This would mean that it would count as a hate crime, or consideration when prosecuting hate crimes.

Members again should remember that the bill passed second reading on June 6, 2012, with the unanimous consent of the NDP and support from Liberal, Bloc, Green and 15 Conservative MPs. I remind members who make speeches tonight that there is sizable support for it from a good portion of the Conservative caucus, including many frontbenchers.

I would like to thank those who supported the bill at second reading. It sends the right message to Canadians that the House of Commons takes care to ensure that justice extends to all Canadians. It is a good symbol and shows that we in the House of Commons care about this community and all communities in Canada and will make sure they are treated fairly.

These, of course, are in no way special rights. They are equal rights and they are ensuring that rights are being extended to all Canadians by enshrining the idea of gender identity in the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Bill C-279 provides remedy to transsexual and transgender Canadians who do not currently enjoy specific protections in federal law or specific protection against hate crimes.

Passing the bill into law would be an important step forward for Canadians expressing themselves as transgendered. Trans people have regularly been shown that they are denied things that we all take for granted, such as adequate access to health care and housing, the ability to obtain or change identification documents, access to washrooms and other gender stations, as well as very fundamental rights such as the ability to exercise the right to vote and to acquire and maintain meaningful employment.

I would also remind members that Canada is a signatory to the UN declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity, and to meet our obligations it is necessary to add gender identity to our own Canadian Human Rights Act. Not only has this bill been winding its way through the House of Commons for a long time, but we also have an obligation not only to our citizens but to an international obligation to make sure we go forward with this measure.

The bill has had broad support from many across Canada. We have had emails, texts and twitters. I know people are following on CPAC and here in the House tonight, as well as many of our brothers and sisters in labour unions such as the CLC, CUPE, CUPW, CAW, CAUT and the British Columbia Teachers' Federation. It also has broad support from student groups across the country, including UVic Pride, UBC, York University, SFU and universities right across Canada.

We need to do this in the spirit of the anti-bullying pink shirt day that we are seeing here in Canada. Wearing a pink shirt is a good thing. It shows that Canadians care. However, this is an opportunity to actually do something concrete, to change the laws of our country to make sure that people who are facing discrimination are no longer discriminated against, or if they are, that they have remedy within our legal system, whether it is the Canadian Human Rights Act or the Criminal Code, in order to make sure that they obtain justice and are able to pursue their lives as they see fit.

What we need to take into account also is how the trans community is suffering under the current circumstances. Worldwide since 1970, 717 trans people have been reported as murdered. However, this of course is a severe undercount, because many countries do not collect adequate statistics in this area, nor do they correctly record violence against the trans community.

Finally, as we are here on pink shirt anti-bullying day, we should follow what Egale Canada says: that 90% of trans-identified students reported being bullied on a daily or weekly basis.

I am proud to stand up here today to support the amendments and the bill and to make sure this bullying and this injustice stop and the trans community is given proper remedies to fight back against this discrimination.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, February 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, in all these matters the key word is “reasonableness”. The state has to be reasonable. It is a democracy. We are elected to make the laws for Canada under guidance of the charter and our Constitution, as well as Supreme Court rulings, treaties and other things, but it is for us, as we sit here, to think how an average Canadian would think about these particular laws. Is this too intrusive? Is this getting the information we need?

I feel that on the other side of the House, members have not been reasonable in many cases. They have been pursuing an ideological line that is inconsistent. The two sides of their party are battling. The social Conservatives would like to intrude in all aspects of life, and then the libertarians would like the state to be non-existent. This causes them a lot of trouble on the other side of the House. Again, it is up to us to be vigilant to make sure we are reasonable in the laws we propose in this place.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, February 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from LaSalle—Émard for her question and for her very good work on the industry committee and as our industry critic. She is doing fine work, and it is a pleasure to work with her.

In terms of balance, I do not think the Conservatives have this right. In fact, I worry about the base premise they use to design policy in this area at all. For example, many members on that side of the House find the Charter of Rights and Freedoms an inconvenience. If they had their way, they would probably abolish it if they had a chance. That way they would be able to pursue these lines of inquiry. They would intrude into people's privacy in the name of crime and punishment. I think that is a mistake. We have to be vigilant to make sure they are not allowed to do that.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, February 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand today to address Bill C-55, An Act to amend the Criminal Code. I want to talk a bit about the specifics of the bill and the NDP's thoughts on this bill and then move to what is the bigger question, which is the balance between protecting the privacy of citizens and collecting the information we need to make proper policy decisions. Again, I will go through the specifics and then move to the bigger question. Although New Democrats support this bill in general and think it should go to committee for more scrutiny, the government has perhaps an unbalanced or inconsistent approach to these issues that is worth discussing.

Bill C-55 concerns safeguards in relation to authorization to intercept private communications without prior judicial authorization, basically wiretapping, or the state intercepting private communications. This bill requires the federal government and provincial Attorneys General to report interceptions of private communications, requires that the person who had his or her private communications intercepted be notified and narrows the class of people who can make such interceptions. They seem to be reasonable measures that would all be considered by any other country or government around the world that has to undertake these kinds of measures.

These measures seem reasonable to New Democrats, and we will be supporting this bill at least at second reading. We will see what kinds of shenanigans the committee members get up to, but we will make sure the committee has enough time to go through them.

I will be splitting my time with the member for Pierrefonds—Dollard.

Wiretapping is really what this bill is all about. Though we are calling it intercepted communications, we are really talking about wiretapping. Wiretapping has quite a long and sometimes dark history in Canada, and its proper use deserves our full and careful attention. In fact, the creation of our current Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, has its origins in this whole issue. As agents of the state, police and RCMP, in this case, illegally collected information on citizens during the 1970s. There was such an outcry, mainly from Quebec, that a number of task forces looked into it. They said the RCMP had too much centralized power, so we needed a separate security service, and that is why CSIS was established.

The problem in this case was that the RCMP overstepped its bounds and collected hundreds of hours of illegal wiretaps from Quebec citizens. Some were worthy, but others were to collect information about people at the whim of state agents, in this case the police. Records also show that this practice had been going on for quite some time, as well as outside the boundaries of Quebec. After quite an uproar across the country, CSIS was created. We have been wrestling with these issues and will always wrestle with where the boundaries lie between privacy and collecting necessary information. We need to take care that these past injustices, the misuse and maladministration of justice, do not happen again and that wiretapping only be used in legitimate circumstances and that the practice be as transparent as possible.

Returning to the text of Bill C-55, let me be clear that this bill is simply an updated version of previous Conservative-initiated wiretapping laws that the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional. This is not a new initiative and, in fact, we are just cleaning up a bit of a mess. Due to this mess, the courts have established new parameters for the protection of privacy, and we need to ensure that this legislation meets these new requirements. We need to make sure the committee gets this right and that it is given ample time to ensure it gets it right this time.

New Democrats want to make sure the committee gets the time, especially when the government is crafting the post-committee version of this bill, because the Conservative record shows that Conservatives are prone to make mistakes in this area.

I want to talk about the whole idea of balancing the need to collect information from citizens to make policy, whether it is security, economic assessments or policy decisions in other areas, and the citizen's need for privacy and the right to protect private communications.

The government really needs to make sure it gets the balance right. We saw before that Bill C-30 was judged too intrusive. It went too far in terms of prying into the private lives of citizens. However, I want to talk about the other side, too, where the Conservatives have erred in terms of perhaps not being clear on what information is important to collect or what they are willing to do in terms of making proper policy decisions.

There are certain members of the Conservative Party, the libertarian wing, such as the member for Nepean—Carleton, who would say that the state has no business, at all, in the lives of citizens. We know that, in its pure form, cannot be true; otherwise that would be anarchy.

What we need to do is make sure we strike the right balance. I am afraid the Conservatives have got it wrong on a number of occasions. For example, the Conservatives have used the excuse of privacy to abolish the long form census. The effects of this action will be felt throughout Canada for years to come. Using the kind of smokescreen of protecting citizens' privacy, we have abolished a tool that has been in use not just in Canada but in almost all countries around the world to inform policy decisions.

Without the long form census, we still have the short form census, which is still mandatory; however it contains very little information. The long form census, which goes to a smaller proportion of the population, collects very valuable information. For example, being somebody who used to work in city planning, I know that cities need these things to plan properly: where to put a new school or what languages should be highlighted in that school. That information comes from the long form census.

Businesses looking to target a particular neighbourhood, wondering if the business will do well there or not, will not be able to target markets with any accuracy without this information. Without the long form census, policy makers will have to fly blind in many areas without these valuable statistics.

We are going to be feeling the ripple effects of not having the long form census for many years to come. Many community members felt very strongly about this, and in fact the head of Statistics Canada felt so strongly that he resigned when the long form census was abolished.

This is what I mean by balance. The Conservatives are keen to wiretap people and to really open that up and not have it be transparent. However, on the other side, Conservatives are not willing to allow the state to collect the information it needs to make proper planning decisions.

Some of my colleagues in this House have raised the spectre of the Conservatives abolishing other surveys with mandatory requirements. We have had the long form census abolished, and the reason given on the other side was that it had a mandatory reporting requirement.

For example, we have the labour force survey, which is mandatory. We have business surveys and agricultural surveys, which are also mandatory. My question for the Conservatives would be where they fall on these issues. Will the government use the name of privacy in vain in order to abolish these critical surveys, or will it cave in to its radical libertarian wing?

It is not just an imbalance between protecting privacy and the state gaining information it needs to make policy; it is also that it is a very inconsistent application. There is no single rule that the government is using in terms of making its policy decisions.

If we abolished the labour force survey, we would probably be kicked out of the OECD. This would not allow us to calculate our unemployment rate, and we would not be able to accurately report to international organizations with any accuracy.

Maybe when the Conservatives are asking questions when I finish my speech, we could have a bit of a debate about where they see the balance between protecting privacy and collecting proper information.

[Petitions, February 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition is to stop the expansion of oil supertanker traffic through B.C. coastal waters.

[Petitions, February 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the next petition implores that we bring in a national housing strategy.