Matthew Kellway

[Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, May 5th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-51 at third reading. Of course there was only ever one proper way to dispose of the bill and that was some time ago in the legislative process at second reading and as per the reasoned amendment put forward by my NDP colleague, the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, which suggested that we decline to give second reading to the bill. I was pleased this morning to second another such reasoned amendment, which was in effect to throw the bill out so that we did not discuss this and the bill never became law.

I want to take a moment to thank the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca and the member for Alfred-Pellan for leading our caucus in vigorous opposition to the bill, because the bill is unworthy of any Canadian government to lay before the House, as the Conservative government has done. Certainly it is unworthy of any opposition support, as the Liberals have done. It is so because what is rotten about the bill lies at its very heart, with the bill's premise that it is only by way of sacrificing the rights and freedoms of Canadians that we are able to make Canadians safe.

I have listened carefully to Conservatives and Liberals trying to rationalize this premise. They cannot. They compensate with hyperbole, with an extremism in their language, all of their own. Liberals, the self-proclaimed party of the charter are the Conservatives' allies in this. They are afraid of what the Conservatives might do to them if they disagree. They have turned on the charter and have agreed to support a bill in which our rights would not be rights anymore, because if we considered them so, goes the logic of the bill and of the Conservatives and Liberals who support it, we could not and would not be safe here in Canada.

This is what it has come to, their consent to a bill that would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service new radically altered authorities. CSIS was originally charged with a broad mandate but limited power, certainly, no so-called kinetic powers, no powers to disrupt, arrest or, in the terms used by Forcese and Roach, “to do things to people in the physical world”. This is not only no longer the case, but through the bill CSIS would be provided with such kinetic powers with little constraint, restricted only from committing bodily harm, obstructing justice and violating a person's sexual integrity.

The provisions of Bill C-51 would provide CSIS with the authority to take measures both at home and abroad to disrupt threats when it has “reasonable grounds” to believe that “there is a threat to the security of Canada”. Activities to disrupt threats are not to contravene a right or freedom guaranteed under the charter, unless authorized by a warrant under the act. Here, the bill turns the idea of judicial warrants on its head. In the normal course, judicial warrants are designed to ensure the preservation or integrity of charter rights, specifically to protect against unreasonable searches and seizure. The special warrant system laid out in Bill C-51 would pre-authorize the violation of absolute rights such as, for example, the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

This represents a departure from our constitutional tradition in Canada and the role of the judiciary in that tradition. Section 1 of the Charter allows rights to be violated where such violation is considered “reasonable” in a free and democratic society, but only when prescribed by law, which usually means specified by statute, which is something determined, democratically, here in the House. It depends in turn on some rigorous, legal justification. This tradition does not permit a judge to make a new exception to a charter right, but the bill would, or at least it seeks to.

Let me heap a few complications on top of this situation. First, the bill does not provide for any oversight of CSIS' own determinations of whether or not it ought to, or needs to, seek a special warrant. The bill leaves such decisions to CSIS absent any check or scrutiny of those decisions.

It is only in the instance that something goes wrong or when its activities morph into criminal investigations led by the RCMP that such decisions may come under some scrutiny, potentially, it is worth noting, threatening the prosecution of the case. It is worth noting, too, that where warrants are brought forward by CSIS, seeking pre-authorization by the court of the violation of a charter right, such considerations are to be dealt with in secret.

Forcese and Roach illustrate the problem by way of their comparison of the open and public discussion in the British Parliament of the validity of exclusion orders for British citizens who have joined ISIS or ISIL. Whatever one might think of those exclusion orders, the fact of parliamentary debate stands in stark contrast to the provisions of this bill, which would have such discussions take place with only a judge and the government side present, and in the absence of any person or representative body to argue against the charter breach.

Perhaps a system of special advocates and advocacy will emerge or be adopted by the courts, to be seen. We are left most certainly, inevitably under this bill with the decisions of the judiciary to deny or permit violations of the absolute rights of Canadians being made in secret and being kept secret, far from the scrutiny of anybody.

Another problem is the matters before the judiciary, under this special warrants system, are not restricted to matters of terrorism. It is a far broader scope of matters and conduct that fall subject to this system. Terrorism is only one such form of activity that falls under broadly defined security concerns of the bill; so does interference with critical infrastructure, and so does interference with the capability of the government in relation to, for example, the economic or financial stability of Canada.

This broad language, potentially at least, brings first nations most obviously but also any civil society group making territorial claims in response to development projects, such as mining or other extractive activities, into the ambit of this bill and subject to the special disruptive activities of CSIS and special warrants process of the courts.

This broad language again, potentially at least, brings any civil society group, environmental groups for example, that Conservative ministers have been known to refer to as eco-terrorists, engaged in civil disobedience activities investigations with respect to energy infrastructure, for example, into the ambit of this bill and subject to the special disruptive activities of CSIS and special warrant processes of the courts.

None of this, none of what I have said today, is to deny the very real threat of terrorism to the safety and security of Canadians. How can we? From 9/11 onwards at least, we have recognized the threat, our vulnerability and the need to respond to protect ourselves.

Whatever that hate is that moves ISIL to do what it does, we cannot but acknowledge that it has inspired some Canadians to leave here and join them, and it has inspired at least a couple of Canadians to turn that hate on their own here at home. We cannot forget Corporal Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. We cannot forget October 22, when all of us in this place wondered, for at least a moment, if that was to be our last moment.

The impossibility of supporting Bill C-51 was captured most simply and elegantly by the Leader of the Opposition when he said that we cannot protect our freedoms by sacrificing our freedoms.

Our challenge is not to forsake who we are and what we believe in when we are afraid, when we are tested. Our challenge is to ensure that Canadians are safe and secure in a Canada that protects their rights and freedoms. That vision of Canada is the New Democrats' vision of Canada. It is different from the Conservative vision represented by Bill C-51. It is different from the Liberals' vision represented by their fear of not supporting Bill C-51 and by their fear of Conservatives.

It is the only vision offered here today in this House that is consistent with the long, proud history of this country, and the only vision that will ensure that we have a long, proud future.

[Petitions, May 5th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the third petition is with respect to a peace tax legislation. The petitioners note that the Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and religion. The signatories to the petition call on the House to establish a peace tax by passing into law a bill such as the conscientious objection tax.

[Petitions, May 5th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is with respect to the issue of climate change, noting that the economic costs of climate change to Canada range between $21 billion and $43 billion. The petitioners call on the House to allocate scarce resources to programs that help Canadians adapt to climate change.

[Petitions, May 5th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to present three petitions to the House. The first petition calls for a national public transit strategy noting that Canada is the only OECD country that does not have such a strategy and it calls upon the House to provide a permanent investment plan to support public transit in Canada.

[Petitions, May 4th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I too have a petition to present with respect to Bill C-51. The signatories to the petition all agree that terrorism is a real threat that needs to be confronted. However, they wish to draw the attention of the House to the fact that the bill is dangerous, vague, and ineffective, and that it would threaten our rights and freedoms by giving CSIS sweeping new surveillance powers without proper oversight. They ask the House to stop this attack on our civil liberties by joining with the NDP caucus to vote down Bill C-51.

[Rail Transportation, May 4th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Transport announced that Canadians would have to wait 10 more years for the full phase-out of unsafe rail tank cars.

The announcement was an admission of the enormous risks we face, but it was also a response that is far too casual in the face of those risks. We cannot afford more derailments like Gogama and Lac-Mégantic.

Do the Conservatives really think it is acceptable to wait 10 years to protect our communities?

[Canada Post, April 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, mayors and councillors across this country are furious with the government's imposition of community mailboxes in the neighbourhoods they represent. Hamilton is taking Canada Post to court over the unilateral seizure of municipal property. In cities like Ottawa and Toronto, councillors are demanding to know how Canada Post can possibly fit superboxes into dense urban neighbourhoods without destroying green space, without causing traffic problems, without making the streets less safe for kids.

Why are the Conservatives forging ahead with a plan that is going to fail our cities?

[The Budget, April 23rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the issue of the funding formula for public transit in this budget is a very curious one in light of the government's proclamations that it respects the jurisdictions of other levels of government.

The government is imposing, through the public transit funding, when that funding finally comes through in three years, a funding mechanism that will require that cities engage in private-public partnerships to build their public transit.

It ought to be left to cities, and the citizens of those cities, to determine the best way to build the transit they require. The government ought not to be imposing on cities a funding mechanism. Councillors and mayors of many cities who I talk to are struggling under the mandatory PPP screen that already exists for infrastructure. It imposes enormous administrative burdens on cities for which the federal government does not pay. It delays money getting out so the infrastructure can actually be built.

It is similar to the same disrespect the government has for other funding obligations it imposes on cities across the country. It has decided in its wisdom to amend the regulations to waste water treatment. The implications of that are $18 billion of required capital expenditures that will have to be borne by municipalities across the country.

These are not insignificant amounts. They are enormous amounts of money that the government has imposed on municipalities with absolutely no support. Metro Vancouver will have to pay $1.5 billion in order to implement these new regulations. For Halifax, it is almost $1 billion; Cape Breton, $423 million; Montreal, Quebec, over $1 billion; and so on and so forth.

For smaller communities, these become incredibly onerous per capita charges. For the town of Burgeo, Newfoundland, whose member is sitting directly in front of me, the per capita cost is somewhere between $24,000 and $27,000 to implement these waste water treatment regulations, with absolutely no support from the federal government for those municipalities.

[The Budget, April 23rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP understands the need of all cities right across the country, big and small, for federal transit funding.

The NDP recognizes the critical place that cities hold in the economy of our country. It recognizes that public transit is critical infrastructure from an environmental, economic and social perspective to the 80% of Canadians who live in urban communities.

It is our intention to ensure that the federal government does its share to ensure that cities across the country get the funding required to build public transit to serve the people of those cities and to serve the economies of those cities.

Most certainly, we will be increasing transit funding over what the current government proposes to do when we form government.

[The Budget, April 23rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the MP for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise, today, to speak to the Conservative government's latest, and last, budget. It is not a budget without some provisions worthy of support, but it is a budget for the few, not for the many, and the few for whom the budget would make a difference are, by and large, the wealthier few.

The income-splitting provision, for example, would cost $3 billion in lost revenues to the federal government. Singles would be excluded; single-parent families, accounting for one in five Canadian families, would obviously also be excluded from the program; families with partners in the same tax bracket, accounting for another 30% of Canadian families, also would be excluded. In fact, nine of ten Canadian households would receive nothing at all from this program.

The increased limit under the tax-free savings account would also heavily favour higher-income earners. While the immediate cost impact of revenues would be significantly less than the income-splitting provision, the longer-term impact would be significantly greater. At maturity, the cost to the federal government is estimated to be upwards of $15 billion annually. This is not a sustainable way to budget.

These two measures, alone, would continue the long-standing trend in this country of undoing the progressivity of our tax system. Even prior to these measures, our tax system was the fourth least effective among OECD countries in reducing income inequality, with only Israel, the United States, and Chile, having less progressive tax systems. A progressive tax system is but one of the many buttresses against income inequality that successive federal governments have dismantled over almost 30 years. It would leave us with a country not quite as advertized, not as generous as most Canadians would like it to be and think it ought to be, with a level of income inequality by which Canadians are both surprised and disheartened.

The figures are, in fact, quite shocking. The wealthiest 20% of Canadians own 70% of the country's total wealth. The poorest 20% own less than 1%. In fact, the bottom 50% own just 6% of the country's total wealth. The gap is growing, thanks to budgets like this one. In fact, income inequality has become the hallmark of Canadian cities. In some Canadian cities, this is owed, in part, to stubborn, persistent levels of unemployment, but the problem also exists in booming urban economies with low unemployment rates. It is really about the changing labour markets in Canada's global and globalizing cities.

A study released just this month by the Metcalf Foundation, focusing on the working poor in the Toronto region, also looked at nine of Canada's ten larger cities, including Calgary and Edmonton, cities booming with the extraction economy, until recently at least. In only one city, Quebec City, did the percentage of working poor actually decline, and then just marginally. Toronto and Vancouver, Canada's two richest and most globalized cities, are becoming, in the words of the report:

...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.

With tongue in cheek, I will share the report's good news. The good news is that the population of working poor in Toronto grew by only 11% between 2006 and 2012, which is a far cry from the 39% growth in Toronto's population of working poor for the first five years of this new millennium under a Liberal federal government.

However, while the growth rate has moderated, 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 a falling employment rate in Toronto.

It is getting increasingly difficult to make ends meet in Canada's richest city. While workers fall behind, costs continue to rise. While the percentage of working poor has increased by 11% in Toronto, child care costs have gone up by about 30%, rent by about 15%, and the cost of public transit by about a third.

A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives sets the living wage in Toronto for a two-parent family of four at $18.50 per hour, with full-time work weeks for both parents—no money left over for TFSAs there, no return on the tax form for a split income. That is just paying the basics and getting by.

In Toronto we are seeing the suburbanization of working poverty in cities that are having the highest growth rates of working poverty, such as Markham, with a 27% increase, and Ajax, with a 25% increase. People are moving out of Toronto to escape high housing costs but are moving to places farther from employment centres and public transit. This is Canada's richest city, and there is nothing in the budget that acknowledges this as a reality. After 10 years, the current government still does not understand cities. It does not understand that, with 80% of Canadians living in cities, a federal budget must address the realities of urban life in Canada.

This year there will be $3 billion given back to the wealthier few in the form of income splitting and nothing to address the pressing need for public transit. In fact, there will be more than $6 billion given back in income-splitting tax returns before a single new federal penny gets invested in public transit. Even then, in the third year out, the Conservative government proposes that we start up the gentlest of inclines to meaningful dollars, dollars caught up in the red tape and bureaucracy of their mandatory P3 scheme.

However, on the issue of housing, there is not even a recognition of need. Long-term operating agreements that provide housing subsidies to more than 600,000 households in Canada will continue to expire. In Toronto, where 45% of renters cannot afford the homes they live in, there has been virtually no growth in new purpose-built rental housing since 2006. In Toronto, while 90,000 households, which is about 200,000 or so people, sit on a waiting list for affordable housing, only 260 new units opened up in 2013. There is nothing in this budget to remedy or ameliorate this situation.

If this budget were worthy of being called an economic action plan, it would surely address the set of economic circumstances at the heart of my riding in Beaches—East York, where a Target store has shut down leaving nearly 200 workers without jobs. The history of that site tells a story about the neglect of urban economies by not just the current government but by successive federal governments over a long period of time. The Target store started its life out as a Ford auto plant. Its workers were the highest paid factory workers in the British empire. A prosperous east end of Toronto was built on jobs like that. However, over time we have seen those kinds of jobs slip away. The auto plant gave way to high-end, unionized retail, an Eaton's store, then to a Zellers store, but still with a unionized staff, and finally to a Target store, a foreign-owned, non-union discount retailer that has now picked up stakes, leaving an enormous hole in the centre of this community, a community where over a third live below the poverty line, with an unemployment rate that is double Toronto's, and with an expansive shadow economy as people desperately seek survival jobs in Canada's richest city.

The finance minister promised every assistance to those who lost their jobs in the Target chain. However, he could not write a budget that would make a meaningful difference to circumstances like these. He could not write a budget that even hinted at some hope for change. This is a government for the very few, for the wealthier few. It writes budgets, as it always has, for its own electoral constituency and leaves the rest of Canada out. What is most troubling is that it is a government that is blind to urban Canada, to the communities in which 80% of Canadians live. It fails to see and address the challenges of Canadian cities, and it fails to see and harness the great potential of Canadian cities and the people who live in them. It fails as a government, and this document fails as an economic action plan for Canada.