Kent Hehr

[Visitability, June 11th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to applaud the member for Tobique—Mactaquac for his visionary motion. I believe it is the first time visitability has been discussed in this honourable place, and it is an idea whose time has come. As a person who has had a disability for the last 28 years, I can say that visitability would have made a great deal of sense if it had been there 28 years ago. Now that we are discussing it here in this place, I hope that it can lead to more opportunities for people with disabilities and exceptionalities to live even fuller lives in Canada.

Visitability means three things. The first is that we need to be able to get in the door. That means a no-step entry. There have been countless times when I have wanted to get into someone's home, building, or place of business and there has been a step or some other impediment to being allowed to participate. I know it does not seem like a lot, but with visitability being at the fore, we too would be able to participate more in Canadian society.

The second thing visitability means is that we need clear passages. They have to be roughly 32 inches across for people to make it down hallways, whether they are using wheelchairs, scooters, or other mobility devices to move around the floor of a building.

The third thing is an accessible washroom. What good is a place if one has to go back home to go to the washroom?

Those three simple things would allow a person's home or business to be called “visitable”. I think these are things Canada needs, with one in seven Canadians having a disability. That is roughly 14.4% of our population. That number is only going to rise with our aging population.

This is an idea that could really have major impacts on people's lives. It would be a cost-effective way of including people with disabilities in the Canadian fabric. Designing new homes this way would be more cost-efficient than retrofitting. When planning a neighbourhood or a business community, this could be incorporated into the mix to allow people to participate and to welcome guests with wheelchairs and mobility devices. It would allow an increase in social inclusion.

It could help seniors age in place. How many times have we seen people, when they get older, having to look for another place to live, because their current place does not meet their needs?

An interesting fact for those who want to live to be 75 years old, and I would guess that most of us do, is that 50% of people over the age of 75 will have a physical disability of one kind or another. We can see how visitability, if it was built right into our homes, would not only save costs for people going forward but would allow them to age in place in the community where they have built their lives.

It could also reduce hospital stays. Twenty-eight years ago, when I had my spinal cord injury, I spent roughly seven months in the hospital. I could probably have left two months earlier, but there was simply no place to go. There was no affordable, accessible, visitable place for me, a Canadian with a disability, to go. There was no room at the inn, so to speak. This is a real need that has to be addressed in our communities. In fact, if we look at the Calgary rental market, only 1% of housing in Calgary is both accessible and affordable. This gap affects almost 90,000 people.

We need to move forward on this. I will note that this is much of the reason why we are moving forward on the national housing strategy that will allow for more people with disabilities and exceptionalities to find a place to live. I am very pleased to see that some of these solutions are already being addressed in Calgary, as we saw in the opening this weekend of Inclusio. It is a place for 45 people with disabilities who meet an income threshold and who will now be able to live in their communities with an ability to get the help they need to live a fuller, more broad, more complete life.

These are important steps forward that are met by having a visitability structure to our way of living. There are communities out there right now that are implementing this strategy. I believe there is a community in Manitoba that has completely designed their housing structures to allow for the visitability structure, to allow for people to come and share the time together in their communities, to make things go forward.

I know with our national housing strategy, how we implement concepts like visitability is going to be very important going forward. There is no doubt that the one in seven Canadians with a disability right now do not have opportunities to live in the community at the same rate as other people. I know this is one thing I am very proud of this government for moving on: the national housing strategy and how we are going to include people with disabilities and exceptionalities, ensuring that they, too, have an ability to take part.

It is not only for people with disabilities that this makes sense. There is a whole broad range of other people who would be able to find society more easy to navigate. We can see that with people who want to have a stroller, a young mother or young father moving their children throughout the community, having that going into a home simply makes sense.

If we look around the community, we can see that visitability is an idea that's time has come. I applaud the member for Tobique—Mactaquac for his visionary work on this front. Hopefully this will be brought into more places and more stations as a way to allow for more people to take part in their community.

[Elections Modernization Act, May 22nd, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member for his particularly thoughtful speech with regard to running fair elections and encouraging the democratic process. The way forward is with a reasonable financial accounting system that allows for people to contribute to election campaigns while, at the same time, not allowing money to overrule the power of the electorate through many of the things that were mentioned earlier.

A very good point the member made was that getting young people to vote is particularly important. If young people do not vote in the first election after they turn 18, they are more likely never to vote in an election again. That is tremendously important. I wonder if the member would speak to his experience of getting young people to vote and the real power of getting them to vote at the earliest opportunity in order to engage them in the electoral process.

[Business of Supply, May 8th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out for the member that our party actually reduced taxes on nine million middle-class Canadians and raised taxes on the top 1%, which is his party rejected. He referenced a Fraser Institute study. That study did not reference our Canada child benefit, which benefits nine out of 10 families. It therefore is out of date.

The member states that the carbon tax is inefficient. The vast majority of economists, even Preston Manning himself, know that if we want to do something about climate change, the most efficient means is through a carbon price. Given this evidence, why does he not accept that this is the best way to deal with emissions?

[Business of Supply, May 8th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the hon. member's comments. In particular, she stated in her speech that when the Conservatives were in power, they were worried about high competitiveness continent-wide and wanted to match up a carbon pricing scheme with the Americans, yet I note that over 67 jurisdictions around the world are now implementing carbon pricing, not even including China. Noting that the world is heading to this place, is it not imperative that we get ahead of the curve, match our economies, and that this will provide some efficiencies and some effectiveness as well as get us on track to doing our part to reduce emissions?

[Business of Supply, May 1st, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I applaud the member for her speech, and I would agree with her that the biggest challenge facing our future is climate change and its effects, not only on our population today but on our population moving forward.

Our government is moving forward on a price on carbon and investing in universities, investing in transportation, and investing in a national housing strategy, all with components of climate resiliency in them, yet the member states that we are not doing enough.

To do more, we have to have a strong economy and a strong environment. I look at the Kinder Morgan pipeline and how that will bring in approximately $15 billion a year in added revenue. We can use that to continue to invest and do more. In a sense, to do more, we have to have a strong economy and examples like that. We need to have development to ensure that we can actually have reductions in climate change and more government involvement.

[Business of Supply, April 24th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I appreciated the passion with which the hon. member spoke, yet I recognize the difficulty in speaking to this motion due to its schizophrenic nature.

I will point out a couple of glaring issues. The motion complains about gaps in the security screening process and it is worried about a backlog in scheduled hearing deportation orders, and the like. My sense of the matter is that we have an agreement in place with the United States that allows our international agreements to be met. I do not sense anyone in the House would find it wise to rip this up.

The member, in particular, was talking about border security guards and the amount of time spent asking questions of people, all those things that government services can provide. Our solution is that, yes, we recognize there is an emerging situation and we want to do this in an orderly, professional fashion. We are investing $179 million in the CBSA and other institutions that will allow this process to go smoothly. In a sense the member is looking for that. Most of his solutions appear to need government investments, which we are doing.

Am I wrong to suggest that the member in all of his rhetoric was saying this was not the solution? Do you have another means besides investing in those institutions to make the situation better?

[Business of Supply, April 24th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, when I look at the Conservative motion, it is essentially asking for things like having the Liberals move on an improved border process and having claims investigated in a reasonable fashion. I note our government's investments in this process.

Could the member comment on how the Conservative government ran its immigration program and how some of the cuts maybe led to some of these incidents arising?

[Business of Supply, April 24th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his speech, yet I found it long on rhetoric and very short on solutions. I note that he is highly concerned about some of the gaps that are emerging, the backlogs, and he calls for a reinvestment in being “properly equipped”. I think those words are code for investing in the CBSA.

I would like to ask the member if he looks at some of the issues that may be arising as having been caused by his government's cutting $400 million to the CBSA and not preparing for an immigration system that works.

Another thing is that if we look at situations like this, we see the difficulty of people throughout the world when they struggle to find places to go that have reasonable immigration systems in place. Canada is an example of that.

Does the member not think that having a compassionate system that recognizes this great difficulty is important to our nation?

[Trans Mountain Expansion Project, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, before my question I would just like to say that I stand with the people of Humboldt, the players and the coaches and the trainers.

Some of the comments I've heard tonight appear to be similar to many speeches I heard from my New Democrat friends when I was in Alberta. Those speeches are different now that they are in government. Some of the realities were posed by my good friend from Edmonton Centre, who made the speech about being reasonable. I believe he referred in his speech to running a country that sees energy and the environment as two sides of the same coin.

As well, on the opposite side, my Conservative friends did not seem to understand the Prime Minister when he said, “The Trans Mountain expansion is of vital strategic interest to Canada—it will be built” and put the full faith and credit of our government behind it.

Could he comment on seeing those two sides and how this appears to be a reasonable way forward, as he said in his speech?

[Trans Mountain Expansion Project, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, the column states:

That's why, contrary to what so many believe, [the Prime Minister] has long been committed to this pipeline. Many complained he wasn't doing enough to get it built, but TMX has been at the core of his priorities since 2016. That's when he first risked losing B.C. seats and environmentally conscious voters by approving the TMX expansion - and another pipeline, Line 3, to boot....Now he's going to lay out federal money, in partnership with the Alberta government, to backstop a Houston-based pipeline goliath, Kinder Morgan Inc. If that doesn't wave a flag in the face of pipeline opponents, including those who voted Liberal, what will?

What does the member say about that?