Matthew Kellway

[Access to Information Act, May 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand today in the House in support of an act to amend the Access to Information Act, Bill C-567.

There is a critical issue at play here, and that is the transparency of government. Many have spoken through many years in simple and profound terms about the centrality of this characteristic, transparency, in a good, and importantly, democratic government. The concept is simple enough. Absent the ability of citizens and elected representatives to see into the workings of government to access information concerning the decisions and decision-making processes of government, government is free from scrutiny.

Access to information is a precondition for the kind of government we want, one that is accountable to the opposition and to the electorate. Importantly, we are talking about a continuous state of accountability, and by extension, constant access to the information necessary to ensure that condition.

We all agree, in words if not in deeds, in principle if not in practice, that accountability should not rise and recede with the electoral cycle. No one professes the least satisfaction with a system that would allow government to disappear and operate behind a curtain between opportunities to throw it out.

One can find a long and interesting history of this bill and the principles of transparency and accountability that motivate it. A good place to start is 2005. With the Access to Information Act nearly two decades old, then information commissioner John Reid put forward a package of legislative reform for consideration. My colleague, the member for Winnipeg Centre, put forward that package in the form of private member's legislation in 2006, 2008, and again in 2011. While it never passed, it is not as though there was not support outside of this House for greater access to information.

In February 2009, then federal information commissioner Robert Marleau released his 12 recommendations for strengthening the Access to Information Act. The House access, privacy, and ethics committee issued a report in June of that year endorsing some of those recommendations. In 2010, there was a call from information and privacy commissioners across this country for more open government.

There are calls for reform of the act. I remember not long after being elected that a constituent, who was at one time a journalist and an editor for more than one national newspaper chain, came to my office for a chat. At the time, I was the critic for military procurement, and the government's plan to purchase F-35s was a hot topic. In that context, we were talking about access to information.

“As a general rule”, he advised, “if you want to know what's happening in Canada, cross the border into the United States and ask from there. Government is far more open there”. I confess that I was shocked by that, but my experience has proven this to be true.

More importantly, greater authorities have done ample analysis on this issue to support the contention that here at home, we find ourselves in very sad shape on this important measure of democratic government. For example, an international report comparing Canada to four other parliamentary democracies, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, put Canada in last place on access to information. That report graded us an “F”, for fail, in fact.

In 2011, a joint project by the Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy and the Madrid-based Access Info Europe ranked Canada in 51st place against measures of access to information.

In 2013, Canada's information and privacy commissioners and ombudspersons passed a resolution on modernizing access and privacy laws for the 21st century that included recommendations to improve access to information. Just last November, Suzanne Legault, our federal Information Commission, tabled her annual report to Parliament, which highlighted weaknesses in the information system that need to be urgently addressed.

According to the Information Commissioner:

All together, these circumstances tell me in no uncertain terms that the integrity of the federal access to information program is at serious risk....

It is imperative that the problems in the system be fixed promptly and substantively.

Here we are today with a substantive and obviously prompt response to problems in the system.

Now, this is not the full package of reforms to the act the member for Winnipeg Centre previously tabled in this House. Instead, Bill C-567 is, in his terms, “a modest effort and seeks to address only those aspects of reform on which there is a stated and documented consensus”.

The bill, therefore, contains six key clauses.

The first would give the Information Commissioner of Canada the power to make orders to compel the release of information that in his or her view should be released.

The second would expand the coverage of the act to all crown corporations, officers of Parliament, foundations, and organizations that spend taxpayers' money or perform public functions.

The third would subject the exclusion of cabinet confidences to the review of the Information Commissioner of Canada.

The fourth would require public officials to create and retain documents and records necessary to document their actions or decisions.

The fifth would provide for a general public interest override for all exemptions so that the public interest would be put ahead of the secrecy of the government.

The sixth and final part would ensure that all exemptions from the disclosure of government information would be justified only on the basis of harm or injury that would result from the disclosure and not on blanket exemption rules.

Let me applaud my colleague for Winnipeg Centre for being such a consistent, indeed stubborn, advocate for greater openness and transparency, not just over time, but importantly, within this House. Over time, there have been just a handful who have led this cause from a seat in this place. There are others who have called for reform of the act and for greater openness and transparency, but rarely from inside this place. The former selves of the Conservative government are one such example.

In fact, the substance of the bill, the six simple points set out above, as the member for Winnipeg Centre happily acknowledges, is lifted straight from the 2006 electoral platform of the current Conservative government. Throwing back the curtains and shining a light into the dark recesses of government was once a good idea, they thought. In fact, they raised the principles of openness and transparency and accountability into an ideology unto itself. Fair enough, but now, having listened to this debate and having read the speeches from across the aisle, we find, again, that they left the white horse they rode in on tied up outside.

We have a government justifying keeping those curtains shut tight and the light out, justifying governing hidden from the gaze and scrutiny of those whose lives and country they govern. “How can we be open and honest all at the same time?”, they ask, in opposition to the bill and in opposition to their former selves.

It is a government obsessed with ensuring its own privacy but equally obsessed with knowing the business of Canadians. The Conservatives' objection to governing in the light of day comes coincident with news, further evidence, I should say, that they have virtually no regard for the privacy of Canadians, it just being revealed that the current government has made 1.2 million requests for private information from telecommunications companies. So egregious is this level of warrantless snooping into the phone and Internet records of Canadians that we, the NDP, are dedicating the rest of the day in the House to a motion calling on the government to take better care to safeguard the privacy of Canadians and to put an end to indiscriminate requests and the disclosure of the personal information of Canadians.

There is an opportunity here today for reconciliation, for the government to reconcile its current self with its former self, for the government to reconcile what it proposed in opposition with what it does in government, to reconcile its brand with its product and its ideology with its practice, to reconcile its obsessive grip on its own privacy with its disregard for the privacy of Canadians. I urge it to support Bill C-567.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, April 28th, 2014]

With regard to government procurement of garments and textiles since fiscal year 2010-2011: (a) what percentage of these garments and textiles were manufactured, in whole or in part, outside of Canada; (b) of the procured textiles and garments manufactured, in whole or in part, outside of Canada (i) in what countries are these goods manufactured, (ii) what is the total value of these goods, broken down by country of manufacture, (iii) is the name and address of each factory where these goods are made documented; (c) what is the exact nature or purpose of any garments or textiles that are procured by the government and its agencies which are manufactured, in whole or in part, in Bangladesh; (d) what is the name and address of each factory in Bangladesh that produces garments or textiles, in whole or in part, that are procured by the government; (e) what portion of all garments and textiles manufactured in whole or in part in Bangladesh and procured by the government is contracted or sub-contracted by companies that are signatories to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh; and (f) what portion of all garments and textiles manufactured in whole or in part in Bangladesh and procured by the government is contracted or sub-contracted by companies that are signatories to the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety?

[Petitions, April 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to participate in the presentation of thousands of petitions, signed by Canadians from coast to coast to coast. It is the Council of Canadians' Democracy 24/7 petition. In part, it calls upon the Government of Canada to launch a public inquiry to find and bring to justice the person or persons responsible for accessing the Conservative Party of Canada CIMS database for the purpose of perpetrating election fraud in the 41st general election, and calls upon the government to table electoral reform legislation that will protect voters from being victimized by election fraud again.

[Petitions, April 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition calls on the Government of Canada to implement a Canada-wide strategy on local food and to require the Department of Public Works to develop a policy for purchasing locally grown food for all federal institutions.

[Petitions, April 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to present two complementary petitions. They are both broadly about the preservation of agricultural lands for agricultural purposes.

The first calls on the Government of Canada to rescind all plans for an airport and non-agricultural uses on the federal lands in the Durham Region.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, let me respond first to the issue of the omnibus bill.

It is the fifth time the Conservatives have tried to evade scrutiny of their so-called economic agenda, which I think betrays a fundamentally anti-democratic, authoritarian streak in the government. In fact, I think it betrays cowardice by placing something as profoundly important to Canadians as FATCA on page 99 of a 350-page bill, rather than having that debate out in the open in this House for all Canadians to hear and for us to participate in.

With respect to youth, let me take it back to Toronto, where we have an extraordinarily high 18% youth unemployment rate in Toronto. That is profoundly troubling. This is a government bill that offers no hope for youth in Toronto or across the country. The cancellation of the hiring credit for small business in this bill is a betrayal of youth in this country, and it is only going to make it increasingly difficult for them to find work and hope in today's economy.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, indeed I focused on the city of Toronto as my case in point. It is where I am from, it is where my riding is, and it is what I know best.

However, much of what I spoke about with respect to the city of Toronto is true of cities across this country. In fact, the folks at what used to be called the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto who did the study mapping out income polarization spatially across the city of Toronto have done similar studies in other cities across the country.

What they are finding is that universally the predominant social fact that characterizes global and globalizing cities in Canada and around the world is this issue of income polarization. What it is doing is leaving in large communities in neighbourhoods with infrastructure deficits. Those include transit deficits, housing deficits, and food deserts. That is true.

What we find too is that the response of the government to that trend in our cities was to extract $5.8 billion out of the infrastructure fund for cities across this country in this budget.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to speak to Bill C-31, a budget implementation act. As always seems to be the case, the government, using its majority for purposes that are less than democratic, has limited debate on this bill. For the fifth time, the Conservative government has done its best to evade parliamentary scrutiny of what it puts forward as an economic agenda through time allocation.

I am lucky enough to get my thoughts on the floor today just before debate closes. My thoughts on this bill are not kind ones, and of course, the conduct of the government and its approach to the business of the House does not incline any of us to be particularly charitable. Some have described the budget and Bill C-31 as substantially irrelevant documents. That is not so. Parts therein are quite stunning. I am not sure whether they are stunning in their audacity or stunning in their timidity, but they are stunning nevertheless.

What Canadian could have imagined the surrender of sovereignty and betrayal of citizenship that is bound up in the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, FATCA, as it is known, buried deep among 500 clauses in over 350 pages? As I just found out from my colleague from Timmins—James Bay, it is on page 99 of a 350-page document.

What characterizes this bill as a whole is incoherence. One might argue that it is the nature of omnibus bills. They are certainly fundamentally undemocratic beasts, but I think there is something else going on in addition.

This bill betrays a government bereft of any understanding of this country in its complicated entirety in this century, much less in this year, 2014. It is eight years into power, and the government still does not see the urban fact of this country, the fact that over 80% of Canadians live in urban communities, from downtowns to suburbs and the places in between. It still governs like this is not true of Canada.

It does not understand the relationship of Canada's cities to the rural and resource economies that surround them and the opportunities that flow from that relationship. It still governs as if these are separate and unrelated economies, separate and unrelated environments, separate and unrelated societies. It still governs, in fact, as though urban economies, environments, and communities do not exist, much less have their own peculiarities and needs and present their own great opportunities for this country.

It has not grasped the relationship between our cities and the rest of the world to the global economy. It still governs as though the federal government is our only interface between Canada and the global economy, failing to grasp that what defines the global economy is a network of urban economies, a network into which our cities from coast to coast to coast are connected, and increasingly so.

This is a budget and a budget implementation act that contains no plan for Canada, through its cities, to succeed in a global economy.

Let me talk about what my city of Toronto needs to succeed, at a minimum. Toronto grows by 100,000 people every year. We add to the population of that city—and by “city”, I am speaking about the city region, not the municipality per se—a city the size of Calgary or Ottawa every decade. According to the Conference Board of Canada, an economic growth rate of 2.5% annually is required just to keep up with that pace of population growth, and that growth rate must also be distributed evenly, but it is not. Says the Toronto Region Board of Trade:

The 21st century city-region economy is creating a new kind of urban social structure. It consists on one side of well paid highly qualified professional and technical workers, and on the other, an increasingly precarious and growing proportion of low-wage service-oriented workers.

Recent studies by the United Way and McMaster University, the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity, the Martin Prosperity Institute, and the Metcalf Foundation, all of which I have referenced in the House before, point to the growth of precarious employment in Toronto's labour market and confirm the emergence of this polarized labour market and consequent social structure in Toronto.

Even closer to my home and to my riding of Beaches—East York, a recent study entitled “Shadow Economies: Economic Survival Strategies of Immigrant Communities in Toronto” captured the extent of the shadow economy. Half of the respondents in that survey reported getting paid less than minimum wage. Over one-third of respondents did not get vacation pay, statutory holiday pay, or paid holidays of any kind.

We are witnessing a city once admired for its mixed-income neighbourhoods dividing into a city of low-income neighbourhoods and high-income neighbourhoods. In 1970, two-thirds of Toronto's cities were middle-income neighbourhoods. As of 2005, 29% were middle income. Extrapolating that trend out to 2025, it is the story of a sharply polarizing city where less than 10% of Toronto's neighbourhoods will be middle income just over a decade from now.

Long before we get there—in fact, now—we now have a critical housing challenge that needs to be addressed. In those low-income neighbourhoods where the shadow economies thrive, such as some in my riding:

Inadequate housing and the risk of homelessness are almost universal among families with children living in high-rise rental apartments....

says a March 2014 study by Paradis, Wilson, and Logan for the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto.

Almost 90 percent face major housing problems that may place them at risk of homelessness. ... One family in three is facing severe or critical risk of homelessness.

says the study.

According to the Toronto Region Board of Trade:

The state of good repair bill for the city's housing units is $750 million and growing by $100 million a year. Meanwhile, the city's accumulated state of good repair backlog in 2012 was $1.7 billion.

There is an enormous challenge here that the government is shrinking from, or is blind to, as it continues down the path of extricating the federal government from affordable housing in this country.

The same holds true of public transit. I asked the minister of infrastructure just yesterday why the government is refusing to invest in public transit. The answer, and I quote from Hansard, was that “our government respects the jurisdiction of provinces, and transit is under provincial jurisdiction”. That is the response of the government to the key economic challenge of Canada's global cities: it is not our responsibility.

Study after study points to the economic costs of underinvestment in transit in Toronto and the consequent stifling gridlock. The Toronto Region Board of Trade says:

...overstretched transportation networks are the most serious barrier to economic growth in the Toronto region, costing our regional economy $6 billion per year.

The C.D. Howe Institute pegs the current economic costs at closer to $11 billion.

Either way, the economic costs of underinvestment in transit are enormous. They compromise the competitive position of Toronto, and they are expected to go up. They are a stinging indictment of the government's blindness to the needs of cities and to the opportunity to grow our urban economies, an opportunity waiting there for a government alive to the urban fact of this country and the reality of a global and increasingly globalizing economy.

It is very simple: the success of our cities is vital to our national interest. Canada needs a national agenda that is alive to our urban reality, to how cities work, to their needs, their vulnerabilities, and their potential. Getting our cities right opens up the possibility that what we hope for—for ourselves, for our families, and for Canada—can be made real.

The only thing that is clear about Bill C-31 is that the government does not get that.

[Blood Supply, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it was not that long ago that tainted blood from a paid donor source infected 30,000 Canadians with HIV and hepatitis C. Thousands died and $5 billion was paid out in compensation. We spent tens of millions on the Krever commission to find out what went so wrong and how to make it right.

Justice Krever set out five basic principles for the governance of the blood supply in Canada, the first two of which were that blood is a public resource, and that donors of blood and plasma should not be paid for their donations. Yet in Ontario for-profit plasma clinics are on the verge of going into the business of buying and selling blood plasma.

The Minister of Health has the power to stop this before it starts. She is being urged to do so by many, including victims and survivors.

To Kat Lanteigne, Mike McCarthy, and so many others who have stuck around to finish this fight, to ensure that there shall be no more victims of tainted blood in Canada, I give my thanks and everlasting respect.

[Petitions, April 7th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, with for-profit blood plasma clinics on the verge of opening in Ontario, I present the following petition signed by Canadians from across the country urging the House to put in place legislation that would prohibit new, for-profit blood clinics.

The petition states that blood plasma is not a commodity that should be bought and sold, and it reminds us of Canada's tainted blood scandal, of the 30,000 Canadians infected with HIV and hepatitis C from tainted blood, and of the thousands who died from those infections.