House of Commons photo

Crucial Fact

  • His favourite word was rail.

Last in Parliament October 2015, as NDP MP for York South—Weston (Ontario)

Lost his last election, in 2015, with 30% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Business of Supply May 7th, 2014

Mr. Chair, can the member tell us how many of those rail cars are carrying explosive crude oil, like the type contributing to the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic?

Business of Supply May 7th, 2014

Mr. Chair, the minister would then agree that it is not to protect the profitability of certain companies, not to work with lobbyists or issue press releases to protect the government, but to protect Canadians?

Can the minister tell us how many unsafe DOT-111 rail cars are used in Canada for transporting dangerous goods?

Business of Supply May 7th, 2014

Mr. Chair, I wish the minister a happy birthday. I did not want to be left out.

Would the minister agree that her primary responsibility is to ensure that Canadians using or affected by the transportation system are kept as safe as possible?

Multiple Sclerosis May 7th, 2014

Mr. Speaker, this is the third year that I rise to speak about multiple sclerosis. I do so in the hope of a cure, as my family is among the thousands in Canada directly affected by MS. My brother Chris has suffered from this disease for years, and it is getting worse.

There is research ongoing to find a cure, funded in part by the Ministry of Health and the MS Society. My brother, who is 60, is not confident that a cure will be found in his lifetime. He and others are upset with how the investigation into CCSVI, a possible therapy, is going. There are issues of co-operation with other researchers in the United States. One can understand their frustration as this disease progresses.

What are the things we can do to help MS victims and their families while a cure is being found? We can make it easier for people with MS and other episodic disabilities to keep working. We can improve income support, such as employment insurance, for people with MS who are unable to work or who can only work intermittently.

I hope all members of this House would support these initiatives for which families with MS are asking.

Homelessness May 6th, 2014

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to talk about the motion by the member for Edmonton East, which is essentially to pick a place and a point in time in order to define homelessness. Unfortunately, if that is truly the definition of homelessness, it will not actually capture those who are in housing need. That is the nature of what I hope to talk a bit about tonight.

I appreciate his interest in moving the motion. I appreciate any time the government opposite wants to rely on statistical analysis or actual real figures and data. That is a good thing. As we have found over the past, that is not something that is usually in the government tool box.

It is difficult to try to be so prescribed and so rigid with the solution. The solution, for example, suggests that the counts only be done in January in order to avoid people who may be outdoors in the summertime. It then limits the ability of municipalities and others to actually measure the true ebb and flow of homelessness.

It also suggests that there be a very rigid definition of homelessness. In fact, different cities have different meanings, different resources, and that difference needs to be reflected somehow.

Finally, the suggestion is that this is a way of allowing various governments, municipal, provincial, and federal, mostly municipal, to allocate scarce resources where they are needed most. We are always appreciative of allocating scarce resources where they are needed most, but one has to turn back and look at the root causes of homelessness and the overarching problems to determine that, in fact, we are spending scarce resources in, perhaps, the wrong way by limiting our scope to just those who are actually on the street on any given day.

In Toronto, the most recent statistics that I can find suggest that as of the end of 2013, there were 5,218 individuals who were on the street, who were homeless. There were 3,970 additional individuals living in city-administered shelters. That is amplified by the fact that there are 95,000 public housing units in the city of Toronto. Of course, under the Liberal government of Paul Martin, we stopped building public housing in the city of Toronto and many other places when the federal government got out of the business of building and administering public housing, giving it back to the cities to do, which the cities cannot afford to do.

That abandonment of the housing issue has caused there to be an ever-increasing number of people on waiting lists for public housing in the city of Toronto. As of the end of last year, there were 87,000 families waiting to get into public housing, to get into affordable housing. There are only 94,000 units. Some of those wait-lists are 11 years long.

In a family of four looking to find suitable accommodation, the children will have grown up and left before they find that accommodation. They will be living in a tiny bachelor or one-bedroom apartment for their entire youth. That kind of problem is missed in the discussion on this motion.

The Homeless Hub, which is a research organization in the city of Toronto, supported by hospitals and others, has done several groundbreaking studies on homelessness. I would like to read their definition of what they used for one of their studies. Their study was on health and housing in transition. This was to determine whether or not being in substandard housing actually has an effect on the health of the individuals, and whether or not we are actually spending a whole lot more health care dollars because in Canada we have, and are proud of, our single-payer universal health care system.

When we misguidedly spend that money after causing the illness or the disability to take place as a result of not spending money on housing, we can often spend a whole lot more money in the health care world than we should have in the housing world.

It has been suggested many times by many studies that by not spending money on proper, efficient, affordable and reliable housing, we end up driving our health care costs up. The federal government has said that it is not its problem; it is the provinces' problem. What we are suggesting to the federal government is that if it invested in the housing stock in the first place, that would then avoid the health care costs down the road and the province would not need as much health care dollars and perhaps it would be willing to give some back to the federal government.

Homelessness has been defined as living in a shelter, on the street or in other places not intended for human habitation. People who are couch surfing, or staying temporarily with family or friends, people who are vulnerably housed, so the next level up I guess, if they had their own place but at some point in the past year have either been homeless or have moved at least twice are also considered homeless.

The results of the study showed that these two populations were interchangeable, that they were all homeless to some measure and the division between them was false. The people it identified as vulnerably housed were not just at risk of homelessness, but in the past 2 years they had spent almost as much time homeless, at just under five months per year, as the homeless group did at 6.5 months per year. Therefore, instead of two distinct groups this is one large severely disadvantaged group that transitions between the two housing states.

Therefore, if the limitation of defining homelessness is those who on a particular day happen to be on a street corner or living on a street grate, my hon. colleague from Edmonton East misses a huge and growing number of individuals who, for whatever reason, on that particular day are not necessarily on the street. Therefore, we run the risk of limiting our scarce resources into a population that is much smaller than would be defined by another definition of what is homelessness perhaps even the day that it is sampled.

This study on the issue of health and housing discovered that people who did not have a healthy place to live were not healthy. They had chronic health conditions, such as arthritis, hepatitis B, asthma, high blood pressure and mental health issues. More than half of them reported a past diagnosis of mental health problems and 61% had a traumatic brain injury at some point in their lives. The top reported mental health issues were depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. When they do not have a good place to eat, they also do not get enough food, they do not get quality food and they do not have a diet that is nutritious.

They also have barriers to getting the health care they need. They report having unmet health care needs, so if something gets worse, because they are unable to find or acquire health care, it then results in more costs to the health care system down the road. They are reported as not having a health card, having to wait too long for an appointment and not knowing where to go.

Of these people who are reporting as homeless or vulnerably housed, 55% have been hospitalized or have been to the emergency department at least once in the past year. Imagine if everyone in this room were to say that over half of us had been to an emergency department in the past year, the costs of our medical system would skyrocket astronomically. Individuals who are poorly housed are also a much greater cost to our health care system. I think there is a chicken and egg thing here. We are treating the health care problem, but we are not dealing with the root cause, which is the substandard housing.

I want to refer to another study because it dealt with individuals in my riding of York South—Weston. Probably the number two reason for people coming to my office is because of problems with housing. Toronto is a difficult place to live if people do not have a lot of money. These individuals who do not have a lot of money are substandardly housed and are coming to me for help, although I cannot provide a lot of help.

What the study discovered was that 90% of individuals who live in the apartment block style of housing, which half of Toronto's renters live in—and more than half of my riding is in rental accommodations—are at risk of being homeless, and 33% are at critical risk. In other words, one thing can happen to them and they will then be homeless. Those individuals need to be part of whatever analysis we do.

I appreciate the efforts of my friend, the member for Edmonton East, but I think we need to be a little wider in scope in determining just what we are sorting and what we are sampling in terms of the nature of homelessness.

Petitions May 2nd, 2014

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions on the same issue signed by constituents in my riding.

The petitioners call upon the federal government to reverse the decision by Canada Post to end home postal delivery and raise its rates and to reject the plan for reduced services.

First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act May 2nd, 2014

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite has suggested that this bill in fact gives control of education to the first nations, but I would like to read from the bill, which states:

Subject to the regulations, the council of a First Nation is to offer English or French as the language of instruction and may, in addition, offer a First Nation language as a language of instruction.

The community of Six Nations actually runs schools in Mohawk and Cayuga, not in English, so it would appear that its decision to do this would be made illegal by this bill and the first nations would not be in control of its own education. Would he like to confirm or deny whether that is the truth?

Rail Transportation May 1st, 2014

Mr. Speaker, while I do recognize that the minister has in fact acted, my question was not about whether or not the minister has acted in reaction to events, but whether or not the system as it exists is not broken. I still maintain my conclusion that the system as it exists, where in fact we have to wait until 47 people die before we take action, is a system that Canadians cannot trust.

As we discovered again yesterday, another incident involving the DOT-111s took place in Lynchburg, Virginia, where a river was on fire with oil from the DOT-111 cars that crashed in a city in the U.S. It is only a matter of time before it happens again in Canada.

Three years is too long. If these cars must be used, they must be slowed down to a speed that is appropriate for the safety of those vehicles, and 40 miles an hour is way too fast. We learned today that in parts of Manitoba, trains go at five miles an hour in reaction to the safety concerns of the communities they go through.

The system is not working. It needs to be fixed.

Rail Transportation May 1st, 2014

Mr. Speaker, in my question of Friday, April 4, 2014, I noted that the decision to run trains with only one operator was made not by the minister but by the rail companies themselves, and their decision was merely rubber-stamped by the minister. Of course, we know the result: 47 dead in Lac-Mégantic and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

My suggestion to the minister was that the system was broken and needed fixing. The answer I got was that a protective direction was issued. The system remains the same, but a new regulation is in place prohibiting railroads from doing what they did before Lac-Mégantic.

A closer examination of the system reveals other flaws, which leads us to believe that the railway safety system itself is in need of a fix. The system now is to avoid regulation and day-to-day inspections and instead allow each railroad to develop its own safety management system, which is then audited for compliance by Transport Canada.

The Auditor General, in a scathing report this year, noted that Transport Canada failed to conduct 74% of the planned audits of safety management systems. Whether that was due to budget cuts or staffing issues is unclear. What is clear is that the system is not working.

The CBC uncovered evidence that railroads are failing to report hundreds of derailments. They uncovered 1,800 over the last few years and another hundred this past year. No charges have been laid for this deception. A system that brags about how few derailments there are while hiding the truth from the public and the legislators is broken and needs fixing.

The Lac-Mégantic derailment involved railcars that were mislabelled as having contents less volatile than what was actually being transported. In fact, the labels were changed when the load crossed the border. No charges have been laid for this deception. The fact that a railroad can get away with that with impunity means the system is broken and needs fixing.

In 1989, DOT-111 railcars were involved in a collision and fire in Cherry Valley, Illinois. One of the conclusions of the investigation of that accident was that the DOT-111 cars were not safe for the transportation of dangerous goods. Twenty-five years later, the federal government has acted, in part. It removed 5,000 cars at the end of May, but the remainder, some 65,000 or so, will continue to be used for three years. A system that identifies a problem but takes 28 years to take action is clearly broken and needs to be fixed.

The Transportation Safety Board testified that DOT-111 cars are subject to rupture, leading to environmental spills and possible fires, at speeds as low as 20 miles an hour. However, the government will continue to allow these cars to be run at 50 miles an hour or 40 miles an hour in built-up areas for the next three years. How is it that cars that are subject to rupture and fire can still run at such high speed? Again, the system permits it. It is broken and needs to be fixed.

The Transportation Safety Board has reported on many derailments over the past few years. In cases stretching back at least 10 years, the TSB has recommended that Canada implement a form of electronic fail-safe, commonly called positive train control. The U.S. is moving forward with such a system. This government has ignored this recommendation each and every time. If there were recommendations involving aircraft safety, they would be implemented, but not for railways. A system in which the government can ignore safety recommendations of the duly appointed investigators is broken and needs to be fixed.

In conclusion, Canadians need to trust that federally regulated railroads are being run past their homes, schools, and daycares in a safe manner. Recent events and disclosures suggest that the public question their ability to trust the safety of the system.

The government is responsible. The government needs to act to fix the system and restore public trust.

First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act May 1st, 2014

Mr. Speaker, the bill itself purports to give native groups the right to control their own education and yet it says, and I will read it aloud:

Subject to the regulations, the council of a First Nation is to offer English or French as the language of instruction and may, in addition, offer a First Nation language as a language of instruction.

My question for the member is this, would this then limit the ability of a first nation to offer native language as the only language of instruction for young children as a way of immersing them in their culture and language, as they do in several first nation schools around the country? This would therefore become illegal by this legislation.