Matthew Kellway

[Transportation Safety, June 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Conservative government finally agreed to the NDP's long-standing proposal to give Transport Canada the power to order vehicle recalls. It is likely too little, too late, with little hope of passing this change in the dying days of the 41st Parliament. Instead, the legacy left by the current minister will be cuts to the motor vehicle safety program and the failure to improve vehicle safety in Canada.

Would the minister at least stop the cuts to Transport Canada and ensure that it has the staff resources necessary to enforce vehicle safety?

[Petitions, June 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, a few months ago, I spoke to students in Ms. Kasserra's class at my old high school, Frontenac Secondary School in Kingston, Ontario. I spoke to the kids about the death of 1,100 garment workers under Rana Plaza when it collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The students took it upon themselves to circulate a petition that calls upon this House to remember that wherever workers are in the world, they have a right to work in healthy and safe workplaces and to return to their families every night. They also call upon this government to endorse the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

I want to thank the kids for their concern and initiative. I also thank Ms. Kasserra for inviting me into her classroom, proof again that the impact of great teachers extends well beyond their classrooms.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know what my colleague's background is or what his credentials are to pass judgment on the chemical make-up of some of the oil being transported either by rail or through pipelines, but I do know that 72 million of the barrels of oil being transported this year by rail come from Canadian sources. That is 72 million out of 162 million barrels of oil, so 90 million barrels of oil that are not of Canadian origin are being transported by rail in our country. Some of that oil comes from the Bakken oil fields, which is a highly volatile form of oil. However, I am not in a position to pass judgment on the actual chemical make-up or the challenges of transporting Bakken crude by way of our pipelines.

However, I do know that one viable alternative for dealing with this issue is dealing with our dependence on fossil fuels and limiting the amount of fossil fuels on which Canadians depend and rely. Our party has an answer to the global warming and climate change issue of which I am very proud. It comes in the form of my Bill C-619, the climate change accountability act. It would reduce the demand of Canadians for fossil fuels and reduce the need to be shipping fuel by either rail or pipeline in any direction across the country.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am aware that costs in excess of the pooled disaster relief fund would be paid out of the consolidated revenue fund.

It is worth noting the costs that flowed from Lac-Mégantic. The Quebec government has put them at well over $400 million. Other estimates are much higher. I guess it depends on how one accounts for these matters. It should also be noted that those costs were mitigated by the particular geology of that area, a layer of clay not allowing the oil to seep down causing greater environmental damage than it did.

It is in light of those costs that one can anticipate a train derailment in the context of a dense urban area. It is not to be missed that hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are being transported by rail through dense urban areas. A derailment there would have costs well in excess of those in Lac-Mégantic, and those costs would be environmental and, most tragically, human costs. There are communities of thousands of people in my city of Toronto within a stone's throw of railway tracks that are transporting thousands of barrels of oil a day in very dangerous railcars.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of Bill C-52, an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act. The bill is returning to us from committee where we heard testimony from witnesses, representatives like Safe Rail Communities in the Toronto area, who share the NDP's view that “Although it has some promising elements...Bill C-52 could go further to ensure safety and accountability”.

Opportunities were missed here, but nevertheless I stand in support of the bill in light of the need for an immediate response to rail safety issues in Canada.

As I have mentioned in the House before, the growing frequency of train derailments since the disaster in Lac-Mégantic has led to many Conservative promises to rectify shortcomings with safety inspections and rail safety compliance measures. The Conservatives have yet to honour that commitment, and the bill goes nowhere near what they need to do to honour those commitments.

With three train derailments occurring in the span of a month last year, this is a pressing issue. It is one that the government has been scrambling to catch up with and has still not caught up.

So far, these accidents have occurred in rural areas. As the critic for urban affairs, I would note that the bill would do little to alleviate the costs and the human tragedy inevitably associated with a derailment in one of our big cities, one of our dense urban communities in this country.

Starting with the Liberal government, in 1999, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have let companies self-regulate and self-inspect their equipment and railway lines. This approach is clearly not working.

The bill put forward by the minister is an effort to address some of the liability and accountability issues associated with rail safety. It proposes several necessary fixes, but it is just a start.

It appears to me that the government is in no hurry to catch up on rail safety issues. We heard the member across the aisle today talking about the need for more study, while communities across this country are anxious about dangerous goods being transported by rail quite literally through their backyards.

The bill sets out to provide some compensation for victims of derailments after the fact. It is as if the government has accepted the inevitability of train derailments in this country. We not only need stronger laws, but we need stronger enforcement of laws and regulations, and we need penalties on those who break them.

It is clear to us and to experts such as the Transportation Safety Board that the government has very serious problems in terms of oversight inspections and audits. Nevertheless, the proposed changes in the bill remain necessary, and while not fully or nearly adequate, they have the support of this side of the House.

Bill C-52 sets out to do three main things. It requires minimum insurance levels for railways transporting dangerous goods. It establishes a disaster relief fund paid for by crude oil shippers to compensate victims of derailments, provinces, and municipalities, and it gives more authority to the minister, cabinet, and railway safety inspectors.

With respect to minimum insurance levels, the bill provides for a legislated minimum insurance coverage of $25 million for railway companies transporting minimal quantities of dangerous goods, and up to a maximum of $1 billion for railways that are transporting substantial quantities of dangerous goods. Railway companies will be liable for losses, damages, costs, and expenses resulting from a railway accident involving crude oil or other designated goods, up to the level of the company's minimum liability insurance coverage.

Based on the costs of train derailments like that in Lac-Mégantic, these measures appear to be justified.

After that disaster, the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway exhausted its insurance coverage of only $25 million and went bankrupt. Yet damages paid by taxpayers with respect to that derailment have been to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The Quebec government has estimated that the total cost will be well over $400 million.

The second thing the bill sets out to do is establish a pooled disaster relief fund to be made available if the minimum insurance levels are insufficient or exceeded. While this is a step forward, there are outstanding concerns that this also may not be sufficient in the event that another major disaster, particularly in an urban area.

When it comes to disaster relief, the first responders on the scene will inevitably be firefighters and sometimes the police. For that reason, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs asked that the committee consider a mechanism to fund training, such as through a small allocation of the disaster relief fund, since the bill did not address the serious firefighter training gap that currently existed in Canada. Indeed, equipping and supporting municipal first responders to rail emergencies is of the utmost importance, yet this important aspect is not addressed by the bill and there is no ability to fund training out of this pooled fund.

When my colleague from Brossard—La Prairie followed up at committee on the recommendation from the fire chiefs to use this relief fund to pay for this training, representatives from Transport Canada admitted that the resources had not been a key focus at this point of this bill, but that those questions would come up as they “work through the ways in which we can improve the system as a set of jurisdictions and responsible authorities”.

This is evidence of the government being excessively casual on this pressing issue of public safety. It reveals a lack of urgency from the government. It is a case of the Conservatives making promises but not following up with the necessary resources to back those promises up. It was the same lack of urgency exhibited by the minister in her recent announcement that Canadians would have to wait a full 10 years for the phase out of the dangerous railcars. That is far too long.

On the issue of authority to the minister, cabinet and railway safety inspectors, the bill implements a number of changes to the Railway Safety Act that would give more authority to the minister. As my colleague from York South—Weston has pointed out in practical terms, these are not real. However, railway safety inspectors would be authorized to order a person or company to take any measure they deemed necessary to mitigate a threat to the safety or security of railway operations. Therefore, providing extra authority to railway safety inspectors is a positive and gets us back to where authority ought to lie for safety, with the government and the inspectors it hires rather than safety management systems.

The amendments would also authorize the minister to order a company that was implementing its safety management system in a manner that risked compromising railway safety to take the necessary corrective measures. However, as my colleague has pointed out, it is not clear how the minister will understand or come to know what is in those safety management systems to act on those. Clearly, the missed opportunity here is that of increasing the number of inspectors. Since 2013, Transport Canada has hired just one additional rail safety inspector even though the amount of oil by rail has more than doubled in the last two years.

While the government has a responsibility to ensure that tragedies like Lac-Mégantic never happen again, we do want to ensure that railways have enough insurance to cover all costs in the event of a disaster, and the bill would do that.

Clearly, there is more to do. One of the things that is missing from the bill is defining “fatigue science” in the Railway Safety Act. It is our worry that its absence will not ensure that fatigue management is based on science. Fatigue has been said to be one of the contributing factors for train derailments. Therefore, the fact that the Conservatives refuse to do something about this issue is quite puzzling and disturbing.

On the environmental side, we want to see the polluter pays principle applied to ensure that the total environmental and cleanup costs of rail accidents are borne by the industry and not downloaded onto the taxpayers.

The most important thing, however, is that we pass this bill before the next election to ensure we take at least a small step forward, even though that step is inadequate.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, as I noted in my previous question for the member across the aisle, this is an act that is intended to amend the Railway Safety Act. However, it focuses almost entirely on the issue of compensation, liability, and insurance, which is a very retrospective view on accidents. Part of the issue is that not only is rail safety in Canada a very pressing issue, one of great concern for the public about safety, but it is so in the context of rapidly increasing risk.

In fact, when the minister appeared in committee, she provided information about the transportation of oil by rail. The numbers are increasing at a phenomenal rate as we go through the years. The numbers she provided start at 78 million barrels of crude oil in 2013, and there is projected to be a quarter of a billion barrels of crude oil transported by rail by 2017 and going forward.

I am wondering if my colleague can tell us why he thinks the government has been so light on dealing with rail safety issues as part of this bill.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I note that the title of the bill is “an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act”. I heard the member say in his speech that there is much more to do on the issue of rail safety in Canada. This is a bill, even though we will be supporting it on this side, that is very light in the way of changes to increase rail safety in Canada. The member has acknowledged that there is much more to do. On this pressing issue of public safety for Canadians, why did the Conservatives not take advantage of this opportunity to do more now?

[Petitions, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition today to end violence against women. The signatories to the petition wish to draw the government's attention to the following facts: that women are 11 times more likely than men to be victims of sexual violence and three times more likely to be victims of criminal harassment; that indigenous women in Canada are seven times more likely to be murdered than non-indigenous women; that nearly 1,200 indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada; and that Canada has clear domestic and international obligations to address violence against women, including the United Nations' call for all countries to have a national action plan to end violence against women.

Therefore, the signatories call upon the Government of Canada to create a coordinated, comprehensive national action plan to address violence against women and to launch an independent national inquiry into the deaths and disappearances of first nations, Métis, and Inuit women.

[National Urban Workers Strategy, May 14th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is with great enthusiasm that I stand tonight in this place to speak in support of my colleague from Davenport's private member's bill, Bill C-542, an act to establish a national urban workers strategy.

The bill stands in the spirit in which it is presented to this House, as a positive, constructive response to the economic reality of largely, but not exclusively, urban Canada. I will return to the positive and constructive momentarily. The bill also stands as an indictment of not just the current federal government as a wayward and destructive and/or delusional government, but as an indictment of successive federal governments, Liberal and Conservative alike, that have lost touch with the real circumstances of the vast majority of Canadians and the real concerns and anxieties of just about every Canadian, particularly in urban Canada. These governments have governed as though urban economies, environments, and communities do not exist, much less have their own peculiarities and needs and present their own great opportunities as well. We just heard a classic example of that from the member for Edmonton Centre.

Canada needs a federal government that understands that a national agenda must also be an urban agenda; a federal government that understands that in the 21st century, nation building is also city building. Successive federal governments have done nothing to respond not only to our own urbanization but to the fact that our own urbanization is part of a global trend. The world is connected through cities, and our Canadian cities are either fully global cities or rapidly globalizing cities. The implications of this are obvious. Economically, they are the conditions that this bill seeks to address. The mapping of this global urban transformation tells a story of growing economic exclusion and precariousness. The emergence of a large population that has difficulty earning a living in urban labour markets defined by, or increasingly defined by, high-end economic activity is a hallmark of the global and globalizing city.

The recent Metcalf Foundation report about working poverty in the Toronto region put it in the starkest terms. It states that Toronto and Vancouver, Canada's two richest and most global cities, are becoming:

...giant modern-day Downton Abbeys where a well-to-do knowledge class relies on a large cadre of working poor who pour their coffee, serve their food, clean their offices, and relay their messages from one office to another.

In only one of Canada's largest cities—Quebec City—did the percentage of working poor decline, and then just marginally. In the Toronto region, the report concluded, working poverty grew by 11% between 2006 and 2012. That is significantly short of the 39% growth in Toronto's population of working poor for the first five years of the new millennium under the Liberal federal government. However, it is particularly worrying that the number of working poor is growing at all, in the context of a shrinking number of those actually working; that is, in the context of Toronto's falling employment rate.

A study done in 2013 by the United Way and McMaster supports the findings of the Metcalf Foundation and the basis of this bill. It showed that, in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, about half of all workers cannot find full-time employment with benefits and job security; 20% are in extremely precarious employment: temporary, variable hours, and no benefits; and 9% are in permanent part-time work; and so on and so forth.

The report also shows that people who work in precarious employment earn 46% less than those in secure employment; that they rarely receive employment benefits beyond a basic wage; that they are more likely to be new immigrants; that they often do not know their work schedule a week in advance; that they have limited career prospects and less job satisfaction; and that they often have to hold more than one job at a time.

It is into this context that the member for Davenport offered this private member's bill. The bill proposes to establish a task force that would consult municipal, provincial, and territorial representatives, as well as labour and industry groups and other relevant stakeholders, to develop a national strategy that would identify policy and legislative changes needed to address the issues facing Canadians in precarious employment, including but not limited to fixing employment insurance for all workers.

All successive federal governments have done is tighten the screws on people who lose their jobs and pilfer the El fund to the tune of nearly $60 billion, money that had been set aside by workers to provide income for workers when they lost their jobs.

From a high-water mark of 80% eligibility in the 1980s, eligibility for EI has fallen steadily down to about half of that on the national level. In Toronto, it is about half of that again. Only about 20% of the unemployed in Toronto are actually eligible for EI benefits.

It is about ensuring a livable pension for all. We have a public pension system in Canada that was designed around and meant to complement a private pension system in the form of a labour relations regime that would allow workers to negotiate deferred wages in the form of defined benefit pension plans and benefits. That labour relations regime has been attacked by successive federal governments and it has not kept abreast of changes to the nature of work. Therefore, we are the only country in the OECD with the number of seniors living in poverty actually on the rise. Since 1995, the percentage has tripled.

Clearly, the next federal government will need to restore the old age security eligibility to age 65 and ensure that the Canada and Quebec pension plans are more provident to ensure that seniors can retire in dignity and out of poverty. It is about addressing the lack of workplace benefits as well. As with pensions, that which is not covered by our public health care system was to be dealt with at the bargaining table under our labour relations regime. As with pensions, workers are increasingly without and all Canadians are increasingly paying out of their pocket for health care, if they have money in their pocket to do so. It is about strengthening labour standards to prevent the exploitation of workers and unpaid interns.

My colleague from Rivière-des-Mille-Îles has a private member's bill dealing with the issue of unpaid internships, so let me highlight the issue of job quality and worker protection.

Canada ranks 26th out of 28 countries on the OECD's index of employment protection. Canada ranks last amongst OECD nations in having the highest proportion of men identified as low-wage workers. Qualitatively, these kinds of assessments are confirmed domestically by the CIBC's Canadian Employment Quality Index. That index has fallen 15% since the 1990s, and 10% over the last decade. A 2013 study of labour markets in the east end of Toronto, entitled “Shadow Economies: Economic Survival Strategies of Toronto Immigrant Communities”, showed that just shy of half the respondents were paid less than minimum wage. The report went on to detail all sorts of other employment standards breaches.

At a minimum, it is time for the federal government to re-institute a minimum wage and set it higher and show leadership on this issue. My party's pledge is to re-establish a federal minimum wage at $15 an hour. There are of course other things outside the ambit of this bill that need to be done to make life more affordable for workers, indeed to even give them the opportunity to participate in the workforce. Most obvious amongst these is accessible, affordable child care. A recent City of Toronto report lays out the problem in my city very clearly. The cost of licensed child care for a single infant exceeds $20,000 per year, but there are only 65,000 spots in licensed day cares in a city with a child population of nearly six times that. There are only 25,000 subsidized spots in a city with almost 90,000 kids living below the poverty line. This is why the NDP's commitment to create nearly one million child care spaces at up to $15 a day is a critical part of the context to this bill and this discussion.

The world has changed dramatically over the last few decades, and Canada has changed along with it. The Liberal and Conservative parties have not. They have failed to recognize the importance of cities and urban economies to the fortunes of this country. However, it is clear to us, in the official opposition, that the goals we set for ourselves as a country and as Canadians will not be realized until we understand and respond to both the possibilities and vulnerabilities of our cities in this new context. I believe there is nothing inevitable about how we respond to this context.

We have choices to make and, on this side of the House, we choose to respond with an urban agenda that builds thriving urban economies with a prosperity shared more equally. We choose to put forward bills like the one before us today and we choose to support them and make life more economically secure for Canadians.

[Child Care, May 12th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, a new report reveals the devastating effect that years of Liberal and Conservative inaction have had on families in Toronto. Fewer than one in five children have access to licensed child care space. Those who do, are currently paying up to $20,000 per child, per year.

Too many families are being kept in the cycle of poverty and unemployment because of the failings of successive Liberal and Conservative governments. Why will the government not break that cycle and adopt our NDP plan for affordable child care?