Mike Sullivan

[Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act, June 16th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I respect the fact that nobody in the House wants anyone to use cluster munitions. What we are opposed to is the suggestion that we are not doing everything in our power, including refusing to have an interoperability agreement with a country that uses them. That is the step we are willing to take that the Conservatives are not.

[Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act, June 16th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am not shocked and dismayed, because the Conservatives behave this way almost all the time.

The first thing I want to say is, is this really the single, most important thing that is facing Canada right now? The government decides that issues of trade with Panama, with Honduras, with Colombia are the most important thing and therefore we need to limit debate so we cannot talk about it any longer.

The Conservatives have done the same thing with the bill. They have decided that we are not going to talk about this anymore. They are done talking. In fact, members opposite are done talking completely. They have decided that their constituents' voices have now been heard by the bill, and that all of the members opposite, all of their constituents, how many of them voted for them, are now in possession of the complete truth, the facts, and everything else about the bill and there is no need to express their views. There is no need for those members opposite to express the wishes of their constituents, because the bill does that for them. Therefore they do not need to talk about what their constituents might be saying to them. I think their constituents might be saying a lot. They certainly are to me.

Canada is a peaceful country. It always has been. When war happens and sometimes in faraway places, Canada responds to war efforts by other countries that require our assistance, World War I, World War II, Korea. We have been, regrettably, in Afghanistan. There were a number of Canadians soldiers who did not come back alive. In each of those circumstances, with the possible exception of Afghanistan, we were doing something for the greater good.

We are now suggesting, through kind of a sideways glance and loophole in a bill, that it is okay to kill and maim children, women, and other civilians who have no part in a war, that it is okay by our inaction on the bill, to build weapons and to use them, not by Canada, but by our allies, in theatres of war. Canadians can join in this war, Canadian soldiers can be part, wherever this war takes place. Our allies cannot expect Canada to tell them we are not going unless they stop using these particular weapons.

That is what we on this side of the House want to have happen. That is what we on this side of the House believe that my constituents want Canada to stand for. We want Canada to stand for the creation of a peaceful planet, not one where women and children have to fear that bombs will drop on them from the sky, and tiny bombs at that, bombs that are not designed as a weapon of war, but as a weapon of destruction of civilians.

The U.S. has become really good with their little drones that can go out and pick off an individual who happens to be a leader in another country. Maybe that is where weapons of war are going, to the individual hit, but this cluster munition is not a weapon of war. It is a weapon of destroying as many lives as it can. We might as well say that biological weapons are okay or chemical weapons are okay, as long as it is somebody else using them. As long as we are just beside them and somebody else is using them, then it is okay to use them. We will participate. We will join in with allies who use these things.

I do not think my constituents want me to take that position. I do not believe that this side of the House can support a bill that allows that to take place. It does not do everything, including refusing to stand alongside a country, even if we agree with the fight, if they intend to use these, if they have not signed this treaty.

We have, over the past century probably, discovered ways to kill people that we did not know of before, and we have used them in war. We are a pretty sophisticated species, we human beings. We have decided to put rules around war that limit the destruction to those involved in the war. Killing soldiers is okay. Killing children is not.

I am not going to get into a philosophical debate about whether war is good, bad, or indifferent, but we have developed a number of treaties and conventions over the past century or so that limit damage to civilians secondary to the cause of the war itself. There is a whole great long list of them.

There is the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zone Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that is designed to prevent one side from developing ways of stopping nuclear weapons from raining down on them, the Arms Trade Treaty that Canada refused to sign, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which is the one we are talking about now.

There is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the International Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Mine Ban Treaty, otherwise known as the Ottawa treaty, because Canada had a lot to do with developing that treaty and actually hosted the convention. We saw land mines as being such a cruel and unusual form of conducting a war that we wanted the rest of the world to agree that land mines should be banned.

There is the Missile Technology Control Regime, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Outer Space Treaty, the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, the Seabed Arms Control Treaty. There are about 15 more that have to do with nuclear weapons, which have been used on this planet, much to the shame of some of the scientists who discovered what they had developed.

We on this side of the House believe, as I think many in the rest of the world do, that if there are wars, we should limit the damage by those wars. Most wars nowadays are over oil, but most wars are over somebody's decision about where a boundary should be, as is going on currently in the Ukraine, where one country has decided to quietly feed a bunch of weapons to another group of people who want to take a piece of that country and move the boundary. War should not include the kinds of weapons that destroy lives without regard for the fact of whether a person is wearing a uniform or not. We on this side of the House believe that those kinds of weapons do not belong in anything that Canada does with its soldiers, period, end of story.

There is a personal message from my side of the House. My wife's cousin, who is a medical professional in Edmonton, has had first-hand experience with the effects of these munitions in third world countries. His job is to build prosthetics. He has spent several years of his life on the other side of the planet teaching doctors and others how to build prosthetics for children and how to keep growing those prosthetics as the children grow. It is a very sad, awful thing to have to do, but that is the effect of weapons like this. The effect is that children grow up without limbs and children need prosthetics in countries that do not have a lot of money to begin with. Are we sending prosthetics to these countries? No. Are we accepting refugees from these countries? Sometimes, but it is very difficult to get a straight answer out of the current minister on how many.

In general, we are glad that the Conservatives have actually agreed to ratify this treaty, but we hope that they would agree with us to remove the giant loopholes that we could drive a tank through and agree that our job should be to limit, not be a party to, the use of these weapons.

[Social Development, June 13th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives are turning their backs on disabled Canadians across the country and gutting services that people rely on. Thousands of Canadians who have been denied disability benefits are still waiting for a hearing. As of last April, there were 1,000 fewer referees who were hearing appeals. The tribunal now has a backlog of 10,000 cases, and only managed to hear 348 appeals last year.

It is a great example of the Conservatives breaking something that did not need fixing. Why did the Conservatives create a tribunal that was designed to fail?

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, June 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yes, this is yet another bill that is likely to find its way to the Supreme Court at some point and be ruled ineffective and that it is not possible to have this bill, particularly the FATCA portion of it. That is something we face, apparently, almost on a daily basis. The government brings forward laws that are in violation of Canada's charter and Constitution and, in fact, of other laws that the government supposedly wants to uphold, like privacy laws.

We just cannot continue this way. We cannot be bringing forward laws that are not in compliance with the other laws of this country.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, June 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it would not protect Canadians' personal, private information. That is part of what we are talking about here.

I am sure there are many Canadians out there who do not understand what U.S. indicia are. I do not think it is defined anywhere in the budget document to explain exactly what U.S. indicia are.

The whole point of my comments was that there are a number of problems between this government and the U.S. government regarding tax compliance. FATCA makes it worse. FATCA would actually distribute a whole lot of information to the U.S. that the U.S. is not entitled to have.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, June 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, in this particular situation the individual in question's parents have renounced their American citizenship. They no longer have to file U.S. taxes. However, the U.S. government refuses to accept their son's renunciation, so they have to do it on his behalf because he is mentally disabled. The U.S. government has decided that he does not know what he is doing and therefore it will not accept it, so his parents must still file taxes on his behalf and pay U.S. taxes because our tax treaty with the U.S. does not cover the disability tax credit. Therefore, receiving the disability tax credit is of no benefit to this individual because he has to pay the money back to the U.S.

In addition, he was never in the United States in his life. He was born in Canada. His parents happen to be Canadian citizens as well but were born in the United States. The U.S. government has decided that these children are now captured by FATCA, so this individual would have his personal tax information, personal banking information, and the contents of his bank accounts reported to the U.S. for the purpose of its tax compliance, not ours.

That is a horrible example of what would happen as a result of this bill. It is a horrible example of the way the government has negotiated deals with the U.S. First it was the softwood lumber deal; it has not managed to update the tax treaty; and now it has this FATCA deal that would allow the U.S. government access to tonnes more personal information on about a million Canadians, some of whom were born here and have never lived in the U.S., but the U.S. government considers them U.S. citizens. U.S. persons, I think is its terminology. Therefore, the Conservatives opposite do not understand all the implications. Perhaps they think it is a big joke, but it is not a joke to that individual or his parents who are trying to comply with the law and who have discovered just how expensive that is, in addition to the thousands of dollars they have to pay to accountants to figure out the U.S. tax obligations.

In addition, there were a number of promises made in two budgets, both 2013 and 2014, that we have still not seen.

Seniors in my riding who do not have Internet access are still paying $2.26 a month, and in some cases $3.39 a month, in order to pay their bill by getting a bill in the mail. As I recall, there was considerable hoopla by the current government about how it would end that practice. It has not ended. It is not in this budget. It was not in the previous budget. It was in the budget statement, but it is not in this budget implementation bill. My riding is made up of individuals who do not have a lot of money in the first place. They do not have enough money in many cases to be able to afford the Internet, so they have to get their bill in the mail. They get their bill in the mail and have to spend an extra $2.26. I say 26¢ because that is how much tax is paid on that extra bill that those individuals get for wanting to get their bill in the mail. The government has done nothing about that.

In addition, the former minister of finance suggested in the 2013 budget that the government would be implementing legislation that would ensure that, if it were spending federal infrastructure money on infrastructure in this country, apprenticeships would be part of that spend. That has not happened. One of the most difficult things we have not been able to sort out is that we have a skills shortage in this country, according to the minister opposite who deals with this kind of thing, yet we cannot train people because we cannot get apprenticeships for them. We cannot get apprenticeships because we are spending money and having to hire temporary foreign workers. It is a crazy system. The former finance minister got it and he suggested the solution, but nothing has been done.

[Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1, June 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-31. It is under time allocation, so not many members of my party will be able to speak to it.

This huge omnibus bill which, according to the member for Palliser, is very easy to read, does call into question some person's ability to have basic math skills, because math skills are some of what is necessary to actually follow the money. Some of the money that is announced in this budget bill and in government's budgets is money that is old money. It was here before.

I will be splitting my time, Mr. Speaker, with the member for Beauport—Limoilou.

Like the current Ontario Conservative leader, math is not the Conservatives' strong suit.

One of the things about the bill is something called FATCA, which is a U.S. legislation that we are now imposing on Canadians. That U.S. legislation applies to Canadian citizens, according to the government, who happen to be considered American citizens by the U.S. government.

The legislation before us would require Canadian banks to disclose personal, private information to the U.S. government through the Canada Revenue Agency at some unknown cost. Again, being math challenged, the Conservatives have not figured out just how much this will cost us. The banks estimate it would have cost them $100 million per bank to implement FATCA and now it is being passed on to the CRA. The CRA will then have to cost that out and it will be taxpayers ultimately paying that cost. However, that is not the worst part of this.

This legislation would give the American government, through our own government, the personal, private information of Canadian citizens. We are now discovering that this has happened through the CPIC database with personal medical information being shared with the U.S. government to stop people at the border, to prevent them travelling. Do we really want to help another government to tax Canadian citizens, people born here who have never been to the United States in their lives?

Maybe the members opposite do not understand what the U.S. government has decided. It has decided that some individuals who were born in Canada and have never lived in the United States are now U.S. citizens. Those people are U.S. citizens because their parents happen to be U.S. citizens. Therefore, it is the parents of children who cause the children to be deemed to be dual citizens by the U.S. and therefore caught by FATCA. They are dual in Canada, but they are U.S. citizens under the U.S. law.

Let me tell members about a woman in Calgary whose son is caught in this dilemma. He is disabled and he has filed his U.S. taxes. His mother filed them for him. It cost his mother thousands of dollars because our government has not negotiated a tax treaty with the U.S. that allows the individuals in Canada to be treated the same under the law in Canada as they are in the U.S.

If the members opposite would stop shouting, I could actually explain this to you, Mr. Speaker.

Those individuals who have disability tax credits in Canada are not allowed that exemption in the U.S., so they have to pay taxes in the U.S., thousands of dollars of taxes. He cannot renounce his citizenship because the U.S. government will not let him.

There is laughter across the way because they do not understand this situation. The individual is mentally challenged and the U.S. government will not allow him to withdraw his U.S. citizenship—

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives rejected our very thoughtful proposal to create a national housing strategy. Most of the individuals in the city of Toronto who live in the big towers are close to being homeless.

Five billion dollars would be almost all of the money required to make sure that every family in this country was housed appropriately.

That is the kind of thing that the New Democratic Party would look at doing if we had $5 billion left over at the end of the day.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the income inequality gap will not be closed by this Conservative action in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it is making it even worse. It is taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich. That is something the Liberals and Conservatives have been doing for the last 30 years. We need to stop this merry-go-round of taxing poor people so that rich people can get richer. That is the exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

That is just what I am doing, Mr. Speaker. I do think about the bigger picture. The bigger picture clearly is that people who are at the low end of the economic spectrum would expect that the government would take the $5 billion and share it on a more equitable basis than just giving it to the most wealthy in this country. The most wealthy in this country do not need that $5 billion, and that $5 billion will come out of the pockets of the people who are all across the spectrum, including the poorest in this country. It is absolutely unforgivable that we take money from the pockets of the poor and give it to the rich. That is the opposite of what we should be doing.