Libby Davies

[Health, September 29th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss for Canadian seniors. It affects thousands of people.

The government agency in charge of evaluating drug costs is recommending a drug that costs seniors a staggering $1,500 a month instead of a drug which costs only $7 a month. Experts say these drugs are virtually identical.

Why is the government choosing to drain seniors' pocketbooks?

[War Resisters, September 29th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, decorated Iraq war veteran Rodney Watson has lived in limbo for two years in sanctuary at an East Vancouver church with his wife Natasha and young son Jordan, both Canadian citizens.

I have come to know Rodney and know him to be strong in his conviction for peace and justice, and brave in his commitment to go up against an illegal war. It has been a tough two years, and the strong support from the war resisters support campaign has been enormously important.

If Rodney were to return to the U.S., he would likely be charged, which would make his return to Canada inadmissible, tearing him apart from his family.

As many as 40 other war resisters like Rodney are currently fighting to stay in Canada. This Parliament has passed two motions in support of war resisters, yet the government is still trying to deport them.

I encourage Canadians to write to the immigration minister and their MPs about Rodney and all war resisters to support the call for their permanent residence in Canada.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I congratulate the member for Parkdale—High Park on her realistic assessment of the state of the Canadian economy. She put forth realistic and achievable goals of what is required to create jobs.

She pointed out that investing in infrastructure has five times the impact and benefit than corporate tax cuts have. One of those infrastructure issues is housing. What better way is there to meet a social need and provide high quality, good paying jobs than to use Canadian lumber to build houses? There is a growing crisis in many cities, that being the lack of affordable housing?

I ask the member to expand on the need for housing as a job stimulant and how that is good for society overall.

[Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, September 29th, 2011]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-296, An Act to amend the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act and the Textile Labelling Act (animal fur or skin).

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to introduce this bill. This bill would amend the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act and the Textile Labelling Act (animal fur or skin). I would like to thank the member for Parkdale—High Park for seconding the bill.

This bill was originally introduced by my colleague, Bill Siksay, the former member for Burnaby—Douglas. He did much work on this issue. I am delighted to introduce the bill and follow up on the work that he has been doing.

The bill would prohibit the import and sale of products made in whole or in part of dog or cat fur. It would also require all animal skins to be labelled with full disclosure of fur fibres on labels. Many Canadians are very concerned about the use of cat and dog fur and strongly support a ban on its use in imports.

If we pass this bill, we would be joining Australia, Switzerland, the United States and the European Union in banning products that contain dog and cat skins and furs. As well, the labelling requirements would change. Under the current act, products can simply be labelled fur “fibre” no matter what quantity is involved. This bill would amend that to make sure there is explicit and clear labelling.

In presenting this bill, I want to note the incredible work of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals. I know there are many Canadians who support this legislation.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Canada Pension Plan, September 29th, 2011]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-295, An Act to amend the Canada Pension Plan (designation of survivor).

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to reintroduce this bill. This bill deals with a very important issue which was brought to my attention by a constituent, Thea Beil, who tragically died from a very rare form of cancer. In the process of tying up her affairs, she realized that after all the years she paid into the Canada pension plan she would not be allowed to designate a beneficiary because she had no surviving spouse or common law partner. She felt this was a very discriminatory element of the Canada pension plan.

I have brought this issue forward to the House. I have written to the minister to point out this discriminatory aspect of the Canada pension plan. Ms. Beil, who has now unfortunately passed away, paid into the Canada pension plan for over 25 years and had no opportunity to designate a beneficiary.

In this day and age, this kind of discrimination should not be allowed to exist. I know that provincial plans, for example, the B.C. superannuation plan, have provisions whereby a person can designate a beneficiary if the person has no spouse or partner. There should be the same sort of fairness at the federal level.

I introduce this bill in the name of Thea Beil who, before she tragically died, worked and contributed much to this country but was not able to designate a beneficiary for her Canada pension plan benefits.

I hope members of the House will support this bill to end this discrimination.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Safe Streets and Communities Act, September 27th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I think we all have great sympathy for people who have gone through that experience, but one of the problems that comes from the Conservatives with this debate is the implication that somehow there are not any laws in existence, that somehow we are creating laws and that without this there is mayhem.

The fact is that we already have a very tough Criminal Code. We have a judicial system that allows discretion for judges to take into account individual situations. One of the problems with these bills is that they remove that discretion, so in actual fact we are making the system less responsive and less effective.

[Safe Streets and Communities Act, September 27th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Vancouver Centre for her observations, which I believe are entirely correct.

I think there is an attitude from the government that if it makes people invisible by stuffing them into overcrowded facilities, somehow invisibility means that it has dealt with the problem. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Many alarming reports show us that the situation and conditions in terms of safety, health, and lack of rehabilitation in a prison system have a cumulative effect, so when these bills are passed and we just blindly increase the prison population without knowing the impacts, we are actually creating a worse problem than we had in the beginning.

[Safe Streets and Communities Act, September 27th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I can only say that, to me, it is up to the people of Winnipeg to determine what they see as the solutions to the very difficult questions they are facing in their community. In Vancouver East, when we were dealing with very difficult drug overdoses, it was the local community, including the police, the board of trade, businesses, and health professionals, that determined that a safe facility for people to go to was actually part of the solution.

No one has ever suggested that such a solution be imposed anywhere else. It is up to the residents of his community to determine what those solutions are. Things that are grown locally and that come from the local experiences are the things that work best.

[Safe Streets and Communities Act, September 27th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, there is possibly one thing we agree on, and that is the Conservatives have branded and wrapped themselves in a cloak of crime and punishment. As a result, they are blind to the evidence, the costs and the fact that we have the lowest crime rate since 1973.

The Conservatives are blind to building safe and healthy communities. They are blind to the horrendous experience of the U.S. in its war on drugs regime, which now is slowly repealed, including the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing, as my colleague from Winnipeg Centre just pointed out, because of its catastrophic failure on people and society overall. The Conservatives are blind to the evidence in Canada and to the real impact these bills would have on the lives of people and communities overall.

Added to that, the Conservative members are blind to parliamentary democracy. With this bill and the steady stream of other bills that we have seen, they are only interested in manipulating people, creating fear and division and creating a them and us scenario. I believe, from the bottom of my heart, the omnibus bill before us today is offensive. It is politically motivated and would have enormous negative impacts.

I was involved in some of these bills previously, particularly the drug crime bill, which I will go into.

Listening to the debate, I find it astounding to hear how the Conservatives are completely divorced from the reality of what is going on. They cannot recognize that we have the lowest crime rate since 1973. They cannot comprehend or deal with the fact that federal and provincial prisons are skyrocketing and prisoners are double and even triple bunking, resulting, in part, from bills like the Truth in Sentencing Act, which was passed in the last Parliament.

I wish the Conservatives had the courage to bring forward a truth in prison costs bill because maybe then we would have a better handle on what is really going on here.

The fact is these nine bills have no relevancy together. They have been politically put together in one bill to ram them through the House in 100 days.

That defies the reality of the 2010-11 annual report that just came out from the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. It shows us that almost three-quarters, or 72%, of all cases handled by federal prosecutors last year involved drug cases, about 58,000 cases. Of those cases, only about 2% were complex, meaning that the vast majority of them were actually straightforward in terms of the impact of some of these bills and the kind of law enforcement approach that the Conservative government has taken.

The Conservatives also hid the real costs of this bill and all the bills in the package from Canadians during the election. We know that the real costs will be billions of dollars both in terms of the provincial cost in prisons and the federal costs.

I have heard so many times that the Conservatives are trying to bring in the bill on mandatory minimum sentencing for drug crimes as a bill that will be tough on organized crime and big traffickers. We heard the Minister of Justice say that again today, as he has so many times.

The reality is that mandatory minimums do not deter organized crime. Instead, they almost exclusively affect small dealers, street level traffickers and non-violent offenders, while leaving the door wide open for organized crime to step in and fill the void created by the sweeps at the lower end. Even the Canadian Justice Department, in its report of 2002, concluded that mandatory minimum sentences were the least effective in relation to drug offences.

The Minister of Justice has never been able to offer a shred of evidence that mandatory minimums are a deterrence, that they work. He was grilled on this in committee the last time the bill went through the House. This is now the third time we have had the bill before us. The minister could not offer any evidence that mandatory minimums were effective or that they would deal with our complex drug issues. All the evidence is to the contrary. The evidence indicates that the bill would have many harmful effects, including increasing the prison population and changing Canada's drug strategy from a four pillar approach that includes enforcement, prevention, treatment and harm reduction.

We know the Conservatives changed that strategy in 2007. Again, they are totally focused on the proposition that somehow a new bill, a new offence, a stiffer penalty, a mandatory minimum would deal with some of these complex issues.

I have a letter that has three pages of organizations and individual experts who have all studied this legislation, particularly, as it applies to mandatory minimums. They all have come to the same conclusion. There is no evidence that the legislation is warranted and would actually assist our society overall.

I would point out, again, more evidence. The auditor general, when she audited drug enforcement a few years ago when we had a special committee on the non-medical use of drugs, produced a very significant report that called for an increased emphasis on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. What became clear was something like 73% of federal funds were being spent on enforcement, 14% on treatment, 7% on research, 2.6% on prevention and 2.6% on harm reduction.

Even the auditor general, from a very neutral, independent standpoint, came to the conclusion that the so-called drug strategy was not working, that it was not effective and that it could not be shown to be transparent or actually assisting in terms of drug issues in local communities.

The drug bill, in particular, which the Conservatives tried to get through the Senate and through the House, is taking Canada in a completely wrong direction. It is a direction that is very expensive, it will have no effect on drug use itself and it will only increase the prison population, creating a new set of overpopulation that with it will come health and safety concerns and problems that then will manifest themselves within the prison system. Anybody who does not understand that, as I said at the beginning, is simply fooling themselves and is blind to the reality and the evidence that is now before us.

The Conservative government changed the drug strategy in 2007. As result, we have now been down this path similar to the U.S. experience. The Americans have begun to understand that even the most right-wing conservatives, as quoted by my colleague, in the U.S. recognize the massive failure of the course of incarcerating people, of relying on an enforcement approach and mandatory minimums. Surely, Canada has lessons to learn from this.

I want to say this loud and clear, and I am very glad that all my colleagues are speaking out on the bill. We feel the bill is offensive in the way it puts together nine significant bills that should be dealt with individually. In particular, there is no evidence that the drug bill will work. On the contrary, all the evidence indicates that it will be harmful and costly. It is the wrong direction for our country to take.

[Safe Streets and Communities Act, September 27th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the problem is that the Conservatives are trying to leave an impression that somehow there is no enforcement or no legislation.

The debate here is about mandatory minimums and whether they work. Is the member aware that in the United States, where we have seen the history of mandatory minimums, many of those laws are now being repealed because they have been such a massive failure?