Mike Sullivan

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, October 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of ironies in the government's approach to environmental issues. One of them is that this river used to be protected by the Navigable Waters Protection Act, and that was removed by the government.

We have put forward private members' bills, and I believe the member has as well, to re-protect these waters.

Would the member like to comment on the apparent contradiction by the government?

[Service Canada, October 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the EI program for parents of critically ill children is a very valuable one, but only if it is working and paying people during their time of need. Sadly, it did not for Amanda Oram.

Cole Oram was born prematurely. He and his mom spent the next six months in the neonatal intensive care unit. She had to go into debt because she could not get EI to pay what she was owed. She spent exhausting hours trying to get through to Service Canada, waiting on hold, getting misdirected, having to resubmit applications and having hospital documentation wrongly rejected.

Service Canada's unreachability and bungling caused Amanda to spend countless hours away from her newborn son.

A Mount Sinai Hospital study shows that the presence of parents of preemies improves weight gain, breastfeeding, and decreases infection.

Sadly, Cole died. Amanda does not want others to suffer the same nightmare. She will never get back those hours she lost with her son.

Service Canada is under-resourced and poorly managed. This government should be ashamed enough to act now to fix this.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, October 7th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to my colleague's dissertation. I wonder if he could answer a very simple question. Will he and his colleagues in the Liberal Party be supporting the NDP's amendment to the motion?

[Petitions, October 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the other petition calls on the government to order Canada Post to restore home delivery.

[Petitions, October 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions.

The first petition calls on the government to implement a national strategy for dementia and the health care of persons afflicted with Alzheimer's or other dementia-related diseases.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I believe the member is right that there is a certain disconnect between what goes on here and the Canadian public and that the Canadian public becomes less likely to be supportive of the political system in general when they see and hear the results or the actual discourse here. Sometimes it is not discourse; it is shouting. Sometimes it is not Parliament; it is an attack in one direction followed by an attack back.

We need to return to a system where we are asking clear and simple questions in the hope that we will get clear and simple answers from the government, and we need a Speaker to be able to help us get there.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would love to take a holistic approach to all the Standing Orders of the House, including such things as the ability of governments to introduce omnibus bills and such things as closure and time allocation. However, we are dealing with a specific issue and are dealing with it in a specific way, with a specific motion, and that is the matter for debate today.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Wellington—Halton Hills for the support he is obviously going to show for this motion. I appreciate that.

I agree with him that we should be debating the substance of this motion, not using it for partisan purposes. The ability of a minister to respond is of utmost importance to Canadians.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, there they are. Generally speaking, we are as respectful as we can be in terms of heckling.

Another lack of respect is the use by previous governments and the current government of omnibus bills, which allow them to gleefully shout out in their speeches and otherwise, “You voted against it”. These were measures that we would have supported, had they not been part of an omnibus bill that had the destruction of the environment at its core. For that reason, we could not have voted for them.

Then we have time allocation and closure. The Conservative government has now moved time allocation and closure more than any Westminster style government in the world. Why? It is because the government insists on limiting debate. Debate is fundamental to a parliamentary democracy, and the word “Parliament” has at its core the word “speaking”, yet the government time and time again wants to limit debate.

One of the places where we can get at some of the central questions that Canadians are telling us concern them about the country is in question period. Question period is only 45 minutes a day. It is actually not very long. It is one of the few times that everybody shows up for work.

We have a situation in which question period has become part of the irrelevant Parliament that I think some members of the government would prefer it to be. If they make it as irrelevant as they can, people will start losing interest in democracy entirely. Once they have lost interest in democracy entirely, fighting elections will be much easier for some parties in this august place.

We have a government House leader who said today in the House that the Leader of the Opposition would prefer to make question period a one-way street, but question period is a one-way street now. Opposition members ask the government questions. That is what it is all about. It is not a period of time when the government gets to ask members of Parliament generally or members of another party questions that they would like to ask. That is not what question period is. I gave the House leader more intelligence than that. To suggest that question period should be a two-way street is a little bit telling.

He also suggested that we want the rule changes to keep us from facing any tough questions. Again, we are not here to face tough questions; we are here to deal tough questions. We hope that those tough questions will be answered with straightforward, clear, and transparent government answers.

The government and the ministers opposite are responsible to the people of Canada for the spending of their money and for the administration of this country. We have 45 minutes a day to ask the government how it is doing with that. The government, time and again, does not want to tell us.

People talk about how some members duck questions and some ministers obfuscate, but what happened last week made it very clear that question period has become quite broken. That is one of the reasons that we have put forward this motion: to try to repair the question period that we all know and love.

It is why we all come back here every afternoon. This is the one place where we get to hold the government's feet to the fire, as it were, to make sure that the government is telling us the truth and that the truth is out.

Last week, of course, we had the spectacle of a question being asked that dealt with war. One of the most serious things that ever happens involving the Canadian government is whether we are at war with another country, or with Islamic terrorists, if that is what is going on. However, to determine that a very serious question about whether the country is at war is to be answered by a non-minister, in non-parliamentary language, with a non-sequitur, totally unrelated, is very telling of the Conservative government's attitude toward reasonable questions being met with complete non sequiturs.

We are asking the Parliament assembled here to agree with us that this should change. We are not suggesting that ministers would not be able to fog their way around an answer in such a way that one would not really know if one received an answer. However, we did get some pretty clear answers today on whether there is going to be a vote. We could not get that last week, but we got some answers today.

We did not get any answers on what is going on at the moment in Iraq. We had the Prime Minister saying in New York that we have boots on the ground in Iraq now, but we had his minister saying that there are not actually boots on the ground in a combat role. Anyway, we did finally get an answer. We tried to ask that same question last week and got nonsense instead of an answer. That is why we are asking for this change in the Standing Orders.

As the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification said, individual members must hold their own heads up and take their responsibilities seriously. If there were a consequence for not taking one's responsibilities seriously, a consequence from the Speaker of this place, who is our leader, as it were, then that consequence might cause how the government behaves in question period to change, which is what we are looking for.

We are not looking to create a nonsensical series of points of order about specific answers following every question period. It is very clear that we are looking to prevent what happened last week from happening ever again. Last week was the lowest one could go.

Members opposite suggested that if we do not like an answer, we can always turn to adjournment proceedings. Well, I was the recipient of ad hominem attacks by the member for Essex during adjournment proceedings that had nothing to do with the question I was asking. If those adjournment proceedings are to be as contaminated as question period has become, then we must look for answers, as the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification said, from our own core values.

Our core values include that we are not going to behave like children. There are frequently children in the gallery watching question period. For us to behave as if we are in some kind of high school classroom is beyond the pale. It is something I will not tolerate, and I remind my colleagues about that every week.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this very important issue.

We are having this debate because we think that there has been a loss of respect for the institution of Parliament. It has shown itself in a number of ways, and not just in the attitude toward question period, a situation that came to a head last week.

When I was elected to this august place, I was told by my leader, Jack Layton, that our party was to change the way Ottawa did things. We were not to heckle. We were to refrain from being part of the childish screaming that goes on in this place.

The French word chahut is the equivalent of “heckling”.

The heckling has continued. Unfortunately, people watching on television do not know who it is coming from. It is largely coming from members to my left and members across the way—