Malcolm Allen

[Petitions, March 25th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, the second petition is about the European Union talks on fair trade rather than free trade. The petitioners call upon the government to enact fair trade agreements with the European Union.

[Petitions, March 25th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I have two petitions to present today.

The first is on the disability tax credit for the hearing impaired. The petitioners call upon the government to enact the disability tax credit.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, March 21st, 2011]

With regard to government expenditures in the communities of Niagara, on an annual basis and broken down by department, what is the amount spent: (a) in the ridings of Welland, Niagara West—Glanbrook and Haldimand—Norfolk from 2004 up to and including the current fiscal year; (b) in the former riding of Erie—Lincoln between 1997 and 2004; (c) in the former riding of Erie between 1993 and 1997; and (d) in the ridings of Niagara Falls and St. Catharines from 1993 up to and including the current fiscal year?

[Petitions, March 21st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I also have a petition to present from residents of my riding concerning CCSVI. The petitioners are not only family members of MS sufferers but are themselves MS suffers. They are saying to the government that it is time to give them hope and to stop sending them abroad. What is happening in this country is that those MS sufferers who have the wherewithal and financial means are leaving this country to get treatment when we should have a pilot program here.

As the family member of a father who suffered from MS and eventually passed away, I saw that he had no hope when he had it.

Today, we have hope for MS sufferers across this country and we are denying them based on the fact that we will not have a pilot project. That, in my view, is discriminatory and we ought to start the project, not yesterday but last week. Let us get on with it. We know the methodologies and we know the science. Let us move forward and give those who suffer from MS in this country the ability to hope once again that i they may have a better quality of life than they endure today.

[Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-54 today. I know my hon. colleague, the member for Niagara Falls, the Minister of Justice, and I lived through a horrific period of time a number of years ago, with Paul Bernardo and the luring of who were then ostensibly children. He and I have intimate knowledge of that, living in the area at that time and knowing the consequences of the actions of that couple.

The minister knows that I was more than pleased to work with the Minister of Public Safety to ensure that one of the perpetrators, Karla Homolka, did not receive a pardon, when she came to the end of her sentence. I was extremely pleased to work with the government. I thank the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Justice for their work with me to ensure it did not happen. It was immensely important, not just for the people who live in Niagara where those heinous crimes were committed, but for all Canadians across this land who believed that justice would not be served if it happened.

When we talk about child luring for the purposes of sexual exploitation, all of us in the House agree it has to be one of the most repulsive and heinous acts committed against the most vulnerable and cherished in our society, our little ones. As the member for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour said earlier, whether we have little ones or not, we must protect them. As my mother always says to me, I am always her little one. I am not sure how that happens with my size and age, but I guess I am always her son. I have a son who is six foot five, but he is still my little guy and he always will be.

There is no greater thing in this world that we can do than protect those little ones. No matter how old they get, they are always our little ones and we want to protect them. That should be, by extension, not just for family but out across the broader community, across this province, across the country and around the world. They are the folks we cherish most. They are put in situations where they are vulnerable and we cannot allow folks, who have the wherewithal, to make decisions to go ahead and try to lure those little ones.

The New Democrats actually brought forward a bill on child luring through the act of using communications as various methods. In fact, I congratulate my good friend and colleague Dawn Black who has now moved on to British Columbia's legislature. She initially put two bills before the House to deal with this very subject.

I want to congratulate the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam who has taken them on himself to ensure that the work started by Dawn continues to go forward. That is how we feel in this party about the importance of it and how we ensure we protect our little ones.

Also, I give a great deal of thanks for our member for Windsor—Tecumseh who is our critic for justice. He gives yeoman work when it comes to debating the bills and ensuring they are crafted in such a way when they get to committee, with amendments and good questions, and calling good witnesses. It was in second reading that my friend from Windsor—Tecumseh said that part of the failings of the initial part of the bill was around the sense of what was “telecommunications”. He highlighted the point that the definition was too narrow when it came to telecommunications.

As many of us know, the art form of telecommunications moves at a horrendous speed, which makes it very difficult for us to keep up. Modern telecommunications could be yesterday's telecommunications within less than a year or even months in some cases. He has pushed for that, and I am sure he would want let the minister know that the committee has broadened the sense of what “telecommunications” is and what “communications for child luring” is. He has made it more accessible and not a narrow definition but a broad one. Therefore, we will not have folks escaping the very net we are casting to catch those who would lure our children for sexual exploitation.

All of us believe they need to be punished. I do not believe anyone would say they should not be. We need to find ways to not only to reduce what happens to our young people, but to find ways to stop it.

What do we want to see happen? I believe the bill accomplishes a fair amount, but it unfortunately leaves parts out. My friend for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour articulated issues around poverty and the things that we ought to do that might be helpful at the preventative level so we would not see young people get lured and then engaged after the fact.

Part of the aspect that is missing is this sense of how we treat those offenders. As I read through the committee transcript, there were some eminently qualified witnesses, psychiatrists and psychologists, who talked about the types of offenders who committed and perpetrated these crimes. They are not exactly as we think they might be. The witnesses explained that they fell into three different categories. It is not for me to try to explain it because they are the experts. They quantified the numbers included in there. For one category of offenders, there was great hope that with certain forms of treatment, there was the possibility that they would not reoffend, and the treatment would be successful.

Therefore, the sense is not that they should not be apprehended and punished. They should be. However, we do not want to just simply end it with that and allow them back out to reoffend. If they do reoffend, it is not simply a question of saying that because they have reoffended, we will put them back in jail to punish them again. The person who has really suffered the greatest is that child. Accordingly, if we can catch the perpetrators and find ways to get them into treatment, and experts have told us there are ways to do this in the vast majority of cases, hopefully when they get out, they will not reoffend. That would set us on a path to reducing child luring, child exploitation and child molestation. However, to send them back out to reoffend does not make any sense.

I hope the minister and the government will look at this and decide that perhaps they ought to spend a few dollars to do that.

Let me be abundantly clear that all New Democrats feel revulsion when it comes to child luring and child exploitation. All of us want to put an end to it to ensure our children are protected.

Therefore, for all of the above reasons, we will support the bill as it goes forward. We have heard that from my other colleagues in the House. Let us put an end to the exploitation of the most vulnerable citizens in our communities, our families and across our country. It is our obligation to do so and we take that obligation seriously.

I am thankful for the opportunity to speak today on behalf of this. I hope, once and for all, some day in the not too distant future, we will not have to talk about a subject like this again because we have put ourselves on the road to ensure it will not happen to our most vulnerable.

[Manufacturing Industry, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Industry might not be worried about the potential of further job losses in southern Ontario, but the people in my riding of Welland sure are.

The government likes to tell people that we are out of the recession because the banks on Bay Street are all doing well. However, the people who have lost their jobs in southern Ontario, due to job losses in the industrial sector, see it differently.

When will the industry minister take real and meaningful action to ensure our manufacturing jobs are protected?

[Shipbuilding Industry, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian shipbuilding industry was already nervous when it learned of secret talks being held with the U.K. over naval shipbuilding. Now we have learned that the government has gone to Germany and Spain for ship designs when our own navy has developed plans for replacement vessels.

We just cannot trust the Conservative government to protect Canadian industrial jobs. Will the minister commit to involving the industry in any talks with foreign governments and will he commit to keeping Canadian shipbuilding jobs in Canada?

[Automotive Industry, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, recently my riding of Welland took another devastating blow when Henniges Automotive announced it would close its Welland plant by the end of the year, leaving over 300 hard-working people in my community without well-paying jobs.

The company was taken over by a private equity firm whose only interest was to make a quick buck no matter how many people it put out of work or how many communities it destroyed. This is yet another example of how the Conservative government has deserted Canadian workers by allowing another plant to leave Ontario without a fight.

The Conservatives' attitude that it does not matter how hard people work or how profitable they make a company, the Conservatives will simply cast them off without a second thought, is wrong and shameful.

The people of Niagara have watched plant after plant close around them with no support in sight from the government. As Welland mayor Barry Sharpe said, “This is another very dark day, another major setback the city can't afford and one we didn't deserve”. He is right. That is why I and the New Democrats stand with workers in their fight for good jobs and the fair treatment they deserve in Niagara and right across the country.

[Seeds Regulation Act, February 8th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in the debate on private member's Bill C-474 put forward by the member for British Columbia Southern Interior.

The New Democratic member has done a great deal of work in this area. I have heard the term “science” bandied around by both sides of the House, from the Liberals and the Conservatives, and at committee on numerous occasions. We have talked about science. I heard it from CFIA when we had the listeriosis crisis. We talked about the science, how it had to be science based and accurate and how science is always wholesome.

I would remind my friends that science changes from time to time. Science said that the Earth was flat until someone decided that maybe it was not flat and that it might be round or spherical.

We can look at science as a wholesome subject when we are talking about transgenics and GMOs. It reminds me of my science teacher from many a year ago when I first started high school who talked about gene pools and how inside a gene pool what we really wanted to have was a great deal of material so that we could actually use it to enhance and develop better pieces from that gene pool.

What we have with GMOs are specific genes doing specific things that enable a specific company to make money. It may, in some cases, actually add to the gene pool in the sense of enabling a particular crop to be better. One need not look any further than clingstone peaches in Niagara which used to be canned in St. Davids. The canning factory left, so they do not do that anymore. That genetic material for clingstone peaches may indeed be lost in this country because we do not can them. We now get them from China, but that is a different debate.

The clingstone peach was developed because it was an easier canning peach than a regular peach that we would consume off the fresh market. How did we do that? Some might call it gene splicing but we actually did it by grafting and doing all of the other things. We see that with vinifera grapes across the peninsula. It is a similar idea.

We did not develop the clingstone peach so that we could spread one type of round-up or one type of herbicide or one type of other pesticide. We developed that gene pool to enhance the product, not so that we could simply use one type of pesticide.

It reminds me that if we are going to do science, why do we not do it in that wholesome approach that benefits two groups of individuals or people around this world? Those of us who are non-farmers are consumers because most of us eat every day. I know we might skip a meal now and again, and I would imagine in the wider public it might be said that politicians never skip a meal. The bottom line is that we do eat every day and some of us do not produce.

Then we have what my good friend from Cape Breton, a farmer who understands the needs of farmers, says, which is that we also need to help them ensure that the materials they will get, the seeds and other inputs that they need, will enhance their ability, as he quite ably pointed out, to feed the world. He is absolutely right when he says that there is a need to feed the world.

However, to actually limit that science is a fundamental issue. We are actually allowing corporate entities to decide that there will only be this amount of science to deal with rather than the whole body of science. There are many around who actually talk about that.

I will quote from a few places where they actually talk about the fact that we are losing some of the science because of the pressures that are exerted by some of these multinational corporations that are absolutely huge. If we want to talk about some of these corporations, we should talk to farmers about the price of fertilizer. Let us assume that fertilizer companies decide to change how they do that genetically, which is not beyond the realm of possibility. Farmers already believe that input is way overpriced.

What happens if they decide, because they have a somewhat semi-monopoly on that now, to change that again and change the make-up and composition of that because, as we see things evolving even further, the genetics can change?

It is interesting to read an article written by Don Lotter entitled, “The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science”. It talks about the history and rise of plant transgenics. Convincingly, he argues that it is the political and economic power, not scientific rigour, that has driven the technology's ascent, talking about basically GMOs. He shows that the hyper-liberal U.S. regulatory regime around GMOs stems not from an overwhelming weight of scientific evidence but rather from close, often revolving door ties between the industry and the U.S. administration actually going all the way back to Reagan. He says that we should take the assumption that transgenic foods have been proven to have no ill effects on human health. Far from being studied, it turns out that the question has been basically ignored.

Therefore, the regulators have basically said that it does not look like it is that bad because using us as the guinea pig or the canary in the mine takes a long time because it takes us generations to actually go through that process.

In science, normally we use lab animals. That is how science gets done. In some cases, it is rats. In some cases, it is mice. It used to be primates at one point in time but we tend to do that less. We do that simply because we can have multi-generations to look at. Science is actually done in a lab.

If we look at a study that was done with lab animals in Austria, it shows that we can find mutations in the ability of those lab animals to reproduce effectively based on GMO consumption. That is a scientist doing work in a lab.

Some will say that it was not on humans. I would remind everyone in this House that when we develop vaccines, new medicines and other new technologies we actually put them through rigorous lab testing but we do not use humans in those testings. Sometimes we do when we go to clinical trials but it is pretty tough to conduct a clinical trial over multi-generations with GMO foodstuffs with humans. It would take us approximately 140-odd years probably, which is a long time to be consuming product that may or may not be safe.

However, assuming it was safe, what have we lost in the meantime? Have we lost all of that other genetic material? There are seeds that are being captured because we are losing that ability to do those things, whether they be what are now called “heirloom tomatoes”. Heirloom tomatoes are called that simply because they were once grown but then someone decided we should have what is now called “beefsteak tomatoes”. They are those big red ones. In certain markets we can find orange striped tomatoes and green ones. We would find a multitude of things but with that genetic material under the GMO way of doing things they would all be lost because the GMO group would say that we should only have this one and should only grow that one. However, if we only have that one, we then lose all the other pieces and all the attributes of that genetic material.

Imagine us as GMO clones. I would not use me as representative. I would choose to use someone taller than me for sure, because I have always wanted to be tall. I would be happy to take my colleague from Cape Breton and say that all of the male gender should look like that member. That would be somewhat akin to ensuring that we grew the same alfalfa through GMO, or the same wheat through GMO, or all of the other things through GMO.

What we are hearing from the seed companies in this country is that that is not a direction they necessarily want to go in.

In the U.S., we have seen the regulations change on alfalfa where it has now allowed it to happen.

Those of us who are either on the agriculture committee or who happen to live in the country or who just know a bit about science know how the bees cross-pollinate. They fly from flower to flower and they do a wonderful job. The problem is that the bees do not recognize the 49th parallel so they move back and forth and sometimes beekeepers move them back and forth but at the end of the day we get cross-pollination.

What we are going to do to organic farmers in this country is drive them out of business for no other reason than we allowed something to happen that may not actually be in our best interests. We are not certain that is what farmers truly want.

Farmers want good science but we do not get good science necessarily. We get one-dimensional science. What we need is pure applied science that comes from non-regulatory bodies where they do not have a patent waiting at the end of the day so that they can make a buck. We need good science that farmers can use every day to ensure that we feed not only ourselves but the rest of the world.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 3rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I will quote a couple of things said by a witness who was before the committee talking about this bill. The witness stated:

[Bill] C-42 raises important sovereignty issues. ...the Canadian government has a duty to protect the privacy and civil rights of its citizens.

Who was that witness? Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The Privacy Commissioner has said that the government has a duty to protect the privacy of Canadians. Since this is a sovereign nation, and I know I certainly agree with that statement, does my colleague agree with it too.