Mike Lake

[February 3rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, obviously the hon. member missed a lot of things that were going on in committee during his afternoon nap.

The original question that was asked that led to this late show was actually about broadband Canada and rural broadband. Broadband Internet networks bring important economic social benefits, including Telehealth, business opportunities, distance learning and everything else the world has to offer to our Canadian communities. These networks encourage economic development, spur innovation and improve the quality of life in hundreds of communities from coast to coast to coast.

Broadband Internet is increasingly a must have and our government believes that Canadians should have access to broadband wherever in Canada they may be. Access to high-speed Internet service is just as important today in terms of bringing people and communities together as the railroads and highway systems were in the past.

As I mentioned before, broadband Canada was announced in the 2009 federal budget, Canada's economic action plan, and given $225 million in funding to help close the broadband gap in Canada. By far the biggest component of this strategy is “Broadband Canada: Connecting Rural Canadians”, which targets areas of the country that are currently not served or underserved by broadband networks.

In May and July of this year, two rounds of conditionally approved projects were announced under the broadband Canada program. These 77 projects represent a Government of Canada investment of up to $110 million and will bring broadband connectivity to 220,000 households across the country.

On November 6, 2010, the Minister of Industry announced the latest round of projects conditionally approved under the program. This third round consists of 21 projects in four provinces and one territory and represents another $29.1 million federal investment to bring connectivity to an additional 30,000 households.

Through the broadband Canada program, the government has committed a total of $139 million to expansion of broadband infrastructure. This investment will provide broadband Internet access to over 250,000 households. This means that once broadband Canada and similar provincial programs are completed, fewer than 2% of all Canadian households will be without access to broadband Internet services. In a country the size of ours, that is truly an incredible achievement.

We define broadband access as a minimum download speed of 1.5 megabytes per second. With this level of service, a consumer can use multiple applications at the same time, make a voice call over the Internet, download audio files and experience video quality streaming and video conferencing.

This past summer, Industry Canada spearheaded consultations aimed at developing Canada's first ever digital economy strategy. This will be a blueprint for propelling our country forward and ensuring we are ready for the opportunities and the jobs of the future.

[January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, that is clearly and demonstrably untrue, as I pointed out in what I read earlier.

Speaking of tolerating dissent, let us talk about the Liberal position. For a new Canadian, for example, who tells an enumerator that he or she does not want to share what his or her religion is, for whatever reason that might be, the Liberal position, which we can read in the total refusal form that the enumerator has to fill out, states:

The information provided in the following sections may be used to support legal prosecution.

If a Canadian does not want to share what his or her religion is for whatever reason, this is what the enumerator has to fill out: “Description of the person who refused (e.g. age, gender, height, weight, other physical details such as facial hair, tattoos, glasses, birthmarks, distinctive clothing, etc.)”. I would say that seems like a somewhat heavy-handed approach to take for dissenters who simply do not want to tell the government what their religion is. That is the Liberal approach, not our approach.

[January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the member has asked if the government will do the right thing and the answer is absolutely yes. The government will do the right thing. The government will make changes so Canadians are not subject to fines and jail time because they do not want to tell the government how many bedrooms they have in their house or how much yard work they did last week. We think that is wrong. We made changes in instituting the new national household survey that changed this. I agree with the hon. member. The government will do the right thing and make those changes.

There is a lot to disagree with in terms of the hon. member's statement. The hon. member talked about one complaint from Richmond Hill. That is interesting. I have a letter from the member of Parliament for Richmond Hill who talks about receiving a few letters of complaint from constituents.

He says:

They are primarily concerned with the great detail of personal information they are required to fill out and therefore a potential invasion of privacy.

The hon. member talked about one person who complained. The member of Parliament for Richmond Hill, that member's Liberal colleague, goes on to say “I share this constituent's concern”.

Maybe that one complaint that the member is talking about is her own colleague's complaint. It looks like there are more in his riding. That is why he wrote the letter, but she may want to take that up with the hon. Liberal member for Richmond Hill who is concerned about the great detail of personal information his constituents are required to fill out.

In regard to the committee hearings, I may be wrong but I do not believe the hon. member is a part of the committee. I do not remember seeing her there. She has her facts wrong as well. Almost half of the witnesses who were before committee were in favour of the move the government was making. They may not have received as much coverage. Certainly Liberal members of committee did not listen too closely to what they had to say. They were not concerned with that. They moved a private member's bill to reinstitute a system of fines for people who did not want to share information regarding their religion or how many bedrooms they had in their house.

We did hear from witnesses who thought the government's move was the right move. We heard from Darrell Bricker, who is a statistician. He said that he was confident a voluntary system could gather the same quality of information.

Speaking to what the Liberals have proposed, the Liberal member for St. Paul's has proposed a system that would institute a fine of up to $500 for any Canadian who does not want to tell the government what his or her religion is.

The Conservative position, with a new national household survey, is to treat Canadians like adults. We still have the census where we require Canadians to fill out information on where they live, how many people live in the household, their gender, their marital status, those kinds of things, basic demographic information that most Canadians would acquaint with a census. We still have that mandatory census.

What was the long form, we are calling the national household survey. It asks questions like how many bedrooms in the house, how much housework someone did, how much yard work he or she did last week, how much time was spent with his or her kids, his or her religion. We are not going to threaten Canadians who do not want to answer these questions with fines and jail time.

Our positions are clearly different. The Liberal Party talks about the fact that most of the people who are unlikely to answer the survey come from vulnerable groups. We on this side of the House think it would be inappropriate for us to threaten vulnerable Canadians, such as a single mother living near the poverty line. We do not think we should tell her that if she does not answer a question—

[Industry, January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, as U.S. Steel is in breach of its production and employment undertakings, this government continues to pursue a court action against the company.

What we have talked about is studying this at the industry committee. We look forward to studying the Investment Canada Act. We look forward to working with our colleagues from all parties to find a solution.

[World Autism Awareness Day Act, December 15th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to have the opportunity to stand up today to speak to the bill regarding autism awareness. It is an excuse for me to spend 10 minutes talking about my son, Jaden, who is 15 years old and has autism.

Before I do that, though, I want to express my thanks. I could spend 10 minutes thanking people, but I will limit it to a few specific people. I will start with the Minister of Health, who declared a couple of years ago that April 2 would be recognized as World Autism Awareness Day. I also want to thank Senator Jim Munson, who has taken a non-partisan approach to this issue, looking to find agreement, and that is very rare in this place sometimes. I want to thank the minister's chief of staff, Scott Tessier, who has done a phenomenal amount of work helping me to coordinate some meetings with stakeholders and with officials so that we can come to a better understanding of autism and a better awareness on all sides.

I want to thank some of the specific people who were part of those meetings. I want to thank Suzanne Lanthier from Autism Speaks Canada. She is the executive director, and it was Autism Speaks that, with the UN, started World Autism Awareness Day three years ago.

I want to thank Laurie Mawlam from Autism Canada, Kathleen Provost from the Autism Society Canada and Marg Whelan from the Geneva Centre, who have been taking part in these meetings and all of whom work tirelessly to build awareness of autism and advocate for families across this country who are affected by this disorder.

I also want to thank some specific officials who were part of those meetings and have really expressed not only a desire to learn more but a real expertise in the area: Kim Elmslie from the Public Health Agency of Canada, Nathalie Gendron from CIHR and Karen Dodds and Gavin Brown from Health Canada.

These meetings have been fantastic. One of the things they sought to do is learn more about autism, but another thing they have been able to do is articulate some of the great things that are going on in terms of autism research right here in Canada and another priority for these communities in terms of surveillance. There are some really exciting things happening in Canada.

Others have spoken to these things, and I will spend my time from here on in, if I could, just talking about my son and using the example of our family and of Jaden to try to educate members of the House and maybe raise some more awareness of some of the challenges that families deal with.

I have one final thanks in regard to that. I want to thank my own family. My wife Debi has given up so much of her time and energy to help create a better life for our son. She gave up 12 years of a teaching career to run Jaden's program at our home and have workers coming through the house six hours a day, six days a week, over the early years of Jaden's life to help create a better circumstance for him.

I want to thank Jenae, who is now 11, his sister. When she was five years old she said something that I thought was very insightful and that a lot of kids who are siblings of people with autism can relate to. She said of her then-nine-year-old brother, “I'm his little sister, but I'm like his big sister”. She is now 11. She is just starting to babysit, and one of her first jobs consistently right now is to babysit her 15-year-old brother, which is a unique circumstance for any 11-year-old, I am sure. She has just been fantastic with him and a real blessing in our lives.

Every Sunday night I tuck the kids into bed and we have a routine with Jaden. He does not talk, but he looks at my face, he grabs my cheeks very firmly and he expresses with his eyes this absolute need to know what is happening with the week. He is obsessed with schedules. He is obsessed with travel. He has to know every day, so I go through a routine where I look him in the eyes and I say, “Today is Sunday, Jaden, and tomorrow morning I am going to hop on a plane and I'm going to fly to Ottawa, and then I'm going to be in Ottawa on Monday”, and I have to go through each day, “on Monday, on Tuesday night, on Wednesday night, on Thursday night, and then on Friday, Daddy's coming home”. At that point a smile comes across his face. He is satisfied because he knows what my schedule is. He can now go to sleep and get some rest.

Then on Friday when I get home, my family is there to pick me up and Jaden, a 15-year-old teenage boy, just has the biggest smile on his face when I get home, when I open the door. The first thing he wants to do is give me a big kiss. How many 15-year-old boys cannot wait until their dad gets home so they can give him a kiss?

That is what Jaden is like. He expresses his emotions honestly. We know exactly how he is feeling. If he is sad, he cries. If he is happy, he laughs. He cannot talk but if we ask him how he is doing, he will answer with a high five or a thumbs up to tell us that everything is good, and always with a smile on his face if they are good.

I will just tell members a bit about Jaden's past. As a young boy, he loved to play hockey. He went out on the ice and I had the chance to go out and play with him. He loved ice cream and there is a story that a lot of parents can relate to. One time we were at an Oilers game. I worked for the Edmonton Oilers. I was sitting in the seats with him and he decided he wanted some ice cream, but rather than ask me for some ice cream, he did the easiest thing. He reached over the shoulder of the little girl who was sitting in front of him and just simply grabbed the ball of ice cream off the top of her cone and stuck it in his mouth, with a big smile on his face. He was seven years old and looked like any other kid, but he saw ice cream, he wanted it, and that is how he got it, with a big smile on his face.

It gave me an opportunity to educate another parent, her father, who was quite startled by the situation but quickly understood when I explained that my son had autism, and that is what I find, time and time again with Canadians, a real understanding when I take the time to explain the situation to them.

I am already running short on time. I knew, when I was looking at what I wanted to say, that this was going to happen. I want to jump now to his teenage years and explain a bit about Jaden's teenage years. Now is he 15, but when he was 13, he went through a time of real anxiety. Can we imagine being 13 years old and not being able to talk, not being able to express ourselves? Kids with autism do not deal with abstract things very well, so with any emotions that he had and changes that he was going through, he could not articulate in any way what it was like to go through those things, so he started to experience some anxiety.

It is heartbreaking for parents. It is important, obviously, for teachers and those dealing with these kids to understand that that can be a real challenge. Now that he is 15, he has gone through that and now we are dealing with some new challenges. How do we give Jaden independence? How do we allow him to succeed? How do we find things that he can be successful at? This is another challenge that families go through.

In Jaden's case, what he is successful at is that he loves to work in the library at school. He will take all the books that come in. He loves to put things in order and he cannot wait to get to the library, to leave class. I guess that is a typical 15-year-old thing. He cannot wait to get out of class so that he can go to the library and put away books for an hour at a time. He does it probably better than any other kid would do it, because he is excited to put things in order. He loves order. He loves things that are concrete.

As we look to the future, we deal with questions that every parent of a child with autism deals with. Kids with autism do not have a shorter life span than the rest of us. They are going to live just as long as the rest of us, notwithstanding the fact that they are more prone to dangerous things that they do not understand. Every parent has to deal with the question of what will happen when we are not there for our children anymore. What happens when we move on and maybe some kids do not have the support networks that we have? They do not have siblings who can take care of them. Maybe siblings are there but cannot take care of them because they cannot cope with it. Those are questions that need to be understood as well.

When we are talking about autism awareness, it is so important. That is why this bill is so important. It is so important to us, as families, that people begin to understand, and of course for politicians to understand so that we can make the best decisions possible for the families. It is important for the larger community to understand what we go through so that when our child throws himself down in a grocery store at seven years old, looking like any other child but having a tantrum in the middle of a grocery store, it does not just look like bad parenting, that people kind of understand and recognize what is going on.

Looking at an initial diagnosis, we had some problems when Jaden was originally going through some challenges at a young age, problems with recognizing it as autism. More and more doctors today, because of the efforts of people like Laurie, Kathleen, Marg and Suzanne, are recognizing autism when they are looking at kids and some of the challenges they face.

I would conclude just by thanking all of my colleagues in this House and my constituents for taking the time to understand, my friends in the media, the House of Commons staff and security who have been so fantastic with Jaden over the years, and people who take time across this country to understand what families dealing with autism are going through.

[Potash Industry, December 10th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, there was no change in mind. There was one decision in this case. The decision was made to the net benefit of the country of Canada and only the country of Canada. Canadians expect that from this government.

[Potash Industry, December 10th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the government did rule that this proposal was not of net benefit to Canada. BHP Billiton issued a statement on November 14, announcing that it had withdrawn its application for review under the Investment Canada Act. Once an application is withdrawn, there is no opportunity for the Minister of Industry to make a final decision and thus provide reasons.

[Telecommunications, December 8th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, in this particular circumstance, I am not aware of the particular case. However, after question period I would welcome the opportunity to chat with the member about it directly.

[Census, December 7th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, when we were at the industry committee hearing on the census, we heard from several expert witnesses. One of those witnesses was Mr. Darrell Bricker, who is a statistician. He said, “it's not impossible to move to a voluntary census and generate very high quality data that would be as high a standard as anywhere in the world”.

The difference between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, in its approach to the census, is that we on this side the House believe Canadians should be treated like adults. The other side is moving a Liberal-sponsored private member's bill that would re-enshrine the threat of $500 fines for Canadians who do not want to tell the government what their religion is, how much yardwork they did last week, how much time they spend with their kids or how many bedrooms they have in their houses.

This side of the House does not believe Canadians should be threatened to get that information.

[Census, December 7th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the opportunity to address some of his concerns. I will address those concerns one by one.

The hon. member talks about the long form being scrapped, and I will correct him in that. In fact, the long form has not been scrapped. It has been transitioned to a different format that is no longer mandatory and will no longer threaten Canadians with jail time and fines simply because they do not want to answer questions such as what their religion is or how much yardwork they did last week.

In fact, one of the common misconceptions, which the Liberals have done nothing to correct, is that the short form has been scrapped, that somehow the census has been scrapped. In fact, the short form census still exists. The census that most Canadians would equate with the word census still exists in the same form that has existed for decades. All Canadians will still have to answer questions about their age, where their houses are and how many people live in their houses and marital status. Those basic questions still exist in the census.

In terms of intrusion, the hon. member says that no one complained about this. That is interesting because he obviously has not talked to his Liberal colleague from Richmond Hill, who took the time to write on behalf of his constituents. He said:

They are primarily concerned with the great deal of personal information they are required to fill out and therefore potential invasions of privacy....I share this constituents concerns...

In regard to the threat of jail or the threats being faced by those who do not want to fill out the mandatory long form census, the hon. member downplays that.

However, let us talk about the reality of new Canadians, for example, who, for whatever reason, do not want to tell the government what their religion is. There may be many reasons. I do not know what the reason would be. If people tell the enumerator that they do not want the enumerator how much yardwork they did, or what their religion is or how many bedrooms are in their house, the enumerator, in the process of his or her job, has to fill out a total refusal form.

It interesting that at the top of this total refusal form, it instructs the enumerator that, “The information provided in the following sections may be used to support a legal prosecution”. That sounds fairly threatening. Further on in the total refusal form the enumerator has to fill out, again keeping in mind that these are people who simply do not want to tell the government what their religion is or how much yardwork they did last week, the enumerator has to fill out a section which says, “Description of the person who refused (e.g. age, gender, height, weight, other physical details such as facial hair, tattoos, glasses, birthmarks, distinctive clothing, etc.)”.

That does sound threatening. It does sound a little over the top for a Canadian citizen who simply does not want to tell the government what his or her religion is or how many bedrooms are in his or her house.