Mike Sullivan

[Persons with Disabilities, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to finish my remarks.

As members will recall, the member for Brant's motion asks the government to endorse the recommendations of a panel that recommended changes in the way the government deals with private sector employers and recommended that these private sector employers be encouraged to change the way they hire persons with disabilities.

In his motion, he suggested that we look at government initiatives. That is one of the areas where, in fact, the government has failed persons with disabilities.

Persons with disabilities have depended on the fact that the government ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in March 2010. That ratification required the government to actually do things to make persons with disabilities have easier lives, better lives, and more employable lives. At the end of two years, the government was to have given the UN a report card on just what it had done in providing these additional supports to persons with disabilities.

March 2012 came and went. March 2013 came and went. We are now approaching March 2014, and there has been no report card. That speaks volumes about the government's real commitment to persons with disabilities.

In addition, in the last budget, the Conservative government made it much more difficult for agencies that deal with persons with disabilities by granting them access to employment and by employing them directly. Some of those agencies are now going to fold. They are now going to close, losing the employment of hundreds of persons with disabilities at the same time. These agencies actually directly employ these people, and now they are being forced to close.

The government claims that the money is still there, but these agencies now have to compete with universities, with hospitals, and with agencies that have huge and deep pockets and the ability to prepare the applications for funding in a much more systematic way than the smaller agencies can. As a result, those agencies are losing their funding, and persons with disabilities are actually losing their jobs.

That is something the government needs to pay attention to. The current government has not paid attention to persons with disabilities in the way it should have. That is but one of the examples.

There are also other examples. The government has heard testimony from persons with disabilities who have said that the income support structures and the disability support structures that exist in this country are not conducive to their working. The EI system cannot deal with disabilities that are not continuous. The health benefits system, in all of the provinces, fails persons with disabilities, and the federal government has not stepped up to the plate to fix that system.

While we applaud and encourage this particular panel's report, and we encourage the government to endorse it, there is so much more the government should and can be doing to support persons with disabilities being employed.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and ask my colleague some questions on this file.

The minister suggested that 25% of those being vouched for had something wrong about them, when in fact the Neufeld report does not say that anywhere. In fact, the Neufeld report suggests widening the use of the voter information card as a valid piece of address information, yet the government has ignored that part of the report and is now suggesting the elimination of the use of the voter registration card.

The whole notion of vouching allows 120,000 people to vote who otherwise might not be able to vote, and the government would like to remove that. However, this report did not ever recommend it. Could the member comment on that, please?

[Canada Post, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, I hosted two well-attended town hall meetings on Canada Post's ill-conceived plan to end door-to-door mail delivery. It is obvious that the Conservative government and Canada Post's well-paid executives do not understand the enormous negative consequences of their plan for a large number of vulnerable Canadians.

A woman who attended one of my meetings shared a compelling personal story. Her 28-year-old daughter is severely autistic and is unable to communicate verbally. For this young woman, door-to-door mail delivery really is a lifeline. She not only interacts with her letter carrier on a daily basis, an important part of her day, but she receives, through the mail, twice-a-month therapy resources for her condition. Unfortunately, neither this woman nor her family have the ability to hire someone to collect these necessary resources from the community mailbox.

This is just one example of what would be lost with the end of a service that Canadians like this young woman and her family rely upon.

By allowing Canada Post to go ahead with its decision, the Conservative government is turning its back on these Canadians.

[Adjournment Proceedings, January 28th, 2014]

Once again, Mr. Speaker, the member has failed to answer the fundamental question, which is this. How is it that the CPIC data, which apparently included her medical information, was then shared with the U.S. authorities?

If, as the member says, medical information is not shared, then there should be a fetter. There should be some kind of way of restricting what information is in fact shared with the U.S. However, as she later said, U.S. agents have complete and unfettered access to the information in the database and, therefore, it would appear that is how the medical information got shared with the U.S. agents.

The question still remains. What will the government do to ensure that this does not happen again, that medical information, which may be placed in this database for whatever reason the local police service decides to put the medical information in, should never be shared with U.S. authorities or with any other foreign body or agency?

[Adjournment Proceedings, January 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, last December the issues of confidentiality of private health information being shared by Canadian authorities with the U.S. border service was raised by me and my colleague, the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca.

The incident that causes me and others such great concern over the security of our private health information stemmed from the treatment that Ellen Richardson, a paraplegic and a constituent of mine, received on her way through the United States to take a Caribbean vacation with the March of Dimes.

She was stopped at the U.S. border by a security agent who questioned her about a hospitalization episode that she had experienced in 2012 for depression. As a result, she was denied entrance into the U.S. for her mental illness episode, and unfortunately lost her cruise. The U.S. authority had detailed information about her hospitalization.

Last December 2, we asked the minister to explain to the House how a U.S. border agent would know about a Canadian's private medical history. The answer we got was less than satisfactory. It was simply that the government was committed to ensuring the privacy of Canadian health files and that health information was a provincial responsibility.

However, that did not explain how Mrs. Richardson's private health information got into the hands of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. I followed up on December 3 with a more direct question: What was the government going to do to ensure that the private medical records of Canadians would be protected?

The answer I received from the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness was less than helpful, but it was revealing. He said, “I can tell the member that we have the Canadian Police Information Centre, but his question should be addressed to the U.S. authority.”

The Canadian Police Information Centre is a database maintained by the RCMP, a federal agency that collects data shared by police forces across Canada. It has data on wanted persons by legal authorities, people accused of crimes, people under criminal surveillance, people on probation or parole, missing persons, wandering persons registered under the wandering persons registry, and stolen property. It is a database that is shared, apparently without any fetter, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

When the minister said “we have the Canadian Police Information Centre, but his question should be addressed to the U.S. authority”, he is essentially telling us that Mrs. Richardson's information was in CPIC and that we should question the U.S. policy that led to refusing Mrs. Richardson transit through the U.S. to her cruise.

However, he misses the point. Mrs. Richardson is not a person who has a criminal record. She is not wanted by the police or under surveillance, and she is not on probation or parole. Her medical information is there due to a 9-1-1 call involving her hospitalization episode, which is hardly a criminal activity. This is not information that needed to be shared with anybody, let alone the U.S.

Again, what is the government doing about protecting the private medical information of Canadians? The RCMP is a federal agency. It is responsible for the Canadian Police Information Centre. It controls what is held in it and what can or ought to be released to non-Canadian agencies. Clearly, non-criminal information and private health information of Canadian citizens ought not to be shared.

The government claims to respect the privacy of the medical records of Canadians, so what steps will it take to ensure this is done with respect to the Canadian Police Information Centre?

[Business of Supply, January 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity, brief though it will be, to enter into the debate on the future of postal services in Canada. That is really what is going on here. The government is clearly not about serving Canadians. It is about making profits for itself. That is what Canada Post has been doing for the past 10 or 11 years and longer. It has been making profits that the government has not invested back into Canada Post in ways that would have created the conditions to allow Canada Post to expand its services, not retract them. It might have been able to put back home delivery in places that do not have it now, which are very few, and only those homes that have been built since 1980 or 1988, whenever it was that the Mulroney government, another Conservative government, began the slide away from a post office that delivered to people's homes.

York South—Weston, my riding, is home to a greater percentage of persons with disabilities and seniors than most of the rest of Toronto, and that is because the housing is cheap. However, 99% of my riding is presently served by door-to-door delivery. We are saying to 99% of my constituents, and I would imagine to 99% of the constituents of many Conservatives in urban ridings, that they should just go whistle. They will not have door-to-door delivery in a few more years when Canada Post stops it.

Canada Post is going to have to come up with a whole lot of cash to be able to buy the land required to put super mailboxes in dense urban areas. It will probably require billions of dollars to put in 106,000 super mailboxes across Canada, most of them in dense urban areas which do not have the space.

The parliamentary secretary talked about not knowing how much it is going to cost for Canada Post to expand into other services. He does not even know how much it is going to cost for Canada Post to do what it has said it is going to do.

What the Mulroney government introduced in 1980 was only to be for new developments. That was the promise made at that time. Thus, people could in fact make decisions about where to live based on where door-to-door delivery existed. People did and have made those decisions. Now Canada Post has decided that promise is gone and it is not going to bother with it anymore.

Canada Post, and the government here today, has misled the public on just how much of its business it is actually changing. It suggests it is only one-third of Canadians. It is 99% of the people in my riding. It is 99% of the people in most urban centres who now receive door-to-door delivery, and except for those in apartment buildings who already have door-to-door delivery, the rest will now lose it. In fact, it will be better to be in an apartment building than a house in terms of door-to-door delivery.

These super mailboxes are a scourge of many urban municipalities. In the last five years, CBC found and counted 4,800 incidents of theft and other vandalism at these super mailboxes. They are out in the open, unprotected. The mailbox at people's front doors is protected by the homeowner. The super mailboxes are a scourge of litter and are not maintained.

For seniors, disabled persons, or even an able-bodied Canadian trying to get to a super mailbox in the winter, it can be challenging. Canada Post does not maintain the area around them; they rely on the municipality to do that. Municipalities believe it is Canada Post's responsibility, so nobody does it.

The fundamental issue that nobody seems to be talking about is what the Minister of Finance is doing to protect his plan to balance his budget by the next election. That is what is really going on here.

The Minister of Finance, quietly, at about the same time that Canada Post made the announcement that they were getting out of the door-to-door service, told Canada Post that he was going to give them papal dispensation on their pension plan deficit, that it was not going to have to pay back $1 billion a year for the next two years. Who is going to have to pay it back if Canada Post does not have the money, which it will not? It will be the treasury. The Minister of Finance will have to come up with $2 billion over the next couple of years. “Oops, there goes my balanced budget”. The government is not going to let that happen. The government will give it more time to pay it off, and they will not have to pay it off in the next couple of years.

These deficits are strange and created only by the fact that we have very low interest rates right now. Most corporations and pension plans in Canada are facing these same structural deficits. However, only Canada Post is being offered a $2 billion gift over the next couple of years by not having to pay it back. The CEOs of many other corporations in Canada would love to have that papal dispensation apply to them. They would love to have the ability to walk away for a couple of years from their deficits. However, it is Canada Post.

There is a strategic reason for it. It is because it will interfere with the finance minister's plan to balance the books. Nobody from that side in any authority is talking to the press or to us about what was really going on in the secret backroom negotiations between Canada Post and the federal government. However, something must have taken place to cause that to happen on almost the same day as the announcement. Canadians are not stupid. They believe there were discussions between the government and Canada Post long before the announcements were made, and I would suspect those discussions included the Canada Post pension plan deficit.

This is not an ongoing deficit; it is a wind-up deficit. If Canada Post were to go bankrupt tomorrow and stop operating, then it would have to come up with money to fund its pension plan. It would have to come out of the treasury. That is the way it works. Canada Post is not likely to go belly up tomorrow. On an ongoing basis, its pension plan is actually in really good shape, but on a wind-up basis, there is a deficit.

I, too, will be holding town hall meetings for the citizens of my riding, 99% of whom will lose their door-to-door delivery very shortly, to give their feedback to the government. I will be collecting names on petitions from individuals who show up on Friday night at the senior centre in Weston, or Saturday morning at the York Civic Centre, to talk with us and the NDP critic, the member for Trinity—Spadina, about what they think of the government's plan to eliminate door-to-door delivery, particularly in the dense urban area of Toronto.

[Respect for Communities Act, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, at the very core of this issue is the issue of addiction. There are probably several dozen, if not more, members of this very chamber who suffer from addiction problems to tobacco and, because they know it is unhealthy and they know it is something they should not be doing, they wish they could stop it, but they cannot because it is that powerful a force. The same is true of heroin, but on a much larger and more dangerous scale.

It is on a larger scale in the sense that an individual is more consumed by it than an individual is consumed by tobacco, although having to leave the chamber every couple of hours to go and have a smoke is perhaps being consumed by it. The point is that it is an addiction, and this is but one way to reduce the harm caused to individuals by an addiction. We have done it with tobacco. We have safe tobacco places all over Canada—called “the out of doors” generally. Yet we cannot seem to come to grips with another addiction.

[Respect for Communities Act, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the point of places like InSite is that, regardless of whether the purchase of heroin is legal, it will be consumed by some individuals because there is a thriving trade in drugs that we do not accept, and none of us like it, but it is there. Just as there is a trade in marijuana and a trade in crack cocaine, there is a trade in heroin, and the problem with the trade in heroin is that with it come some very unacceptable consequences of disease and death and the exposure of small children to very dangerous things. That is the type of thing that InSite is attempting to prevent, and that is the kind of thing for which these places need to exist.

[Respect for Communities Act, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to rise to speak to this bill, an act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, or the respect for communities act.

As man advances in civilization...the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.

Who said that? It was Charles Darwin. That was a long time ago, but it is more necessary today than ever. There are some opposite who might not agree with what Mr. Darwin had to say.

Bill C-2 is, we believe, another example of knee-jerk, mean-spirited, ill-informed, anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-taxpayer, anti-health, Conservative fundraising propaganda disguised as legislation. We, as parliamentarians, are sent here to make the tough choices. We are sent here to make decisions on behalf of all Canadians to advance our civilization forward, not backward. It is really easy to foment alarm and outrage among Canadians who are not generally exposed to the darker side of humanity. This is the choice made by the Conservatives.

The right choice is to explain to those who might be susceptible to such fomentation that the better path is to create safe places for the darker side that most of us do not see. The explanation that the Conservatives should give would include the science and evidence that providing a safe place for persons who are addicted to drugs, requiring needles, is ultimately making the rest of Canadians safer. It is a win-win. It will not generate a lot of reactionary donations, but it is the right thing to do.

However, that is not how the Conservatives work. They work through fear, intimidation and keeping their constituents in the dark about the truth as much as possible. Eliminating data such as the long-form census, repressing and firing scientists whose findings may not agree with their point of view and deliberately spreading the falsehood that suggests that denying licences to places such as InSite will make communities safer, are not just the wrong choices; they are chosen for the wrong reasons.

Canadians expect their government to protect them from harm. This bill would do the opposite, but it is just part of a long line of Conservative actions that make our Canada more harmful to more Canadians. Conservatives got rid of ways for the police to keep track of where guns were. That action will cause harm to many Canadians, including those in my riding of York South—Weston.

Conservatives cut budgets for the department responsible for meat inspections. This action caused many Canadians to get ill from eating meat. Some died. Are we or our communities safer?

Conservatives have continued the Liberal practice of permitting the railways themselves to manage their own safety. Clearly, that is not keeping Canadians safe either. The three massive explosions and fires last year, one of which claimed 47 lives and destroyed a Quebec city, are all the evidence Canadians need that the Conservative safety system is not working. Except for a bit of tinkering around the edges, no concrete actions have been taken. Indeed, the present government has consistently ignored the findings of the Transportation Safety Board, and Canadians are no safer as a result.

Of course, the Conservatives' signature piece of legislation making us less safe was the evisceration of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Now, the impact on human health, which is what we are talking about here, is ignored by environmental assessments. Only a small handful of projects are subject to assessment.

How are we less harmed by this regime? Add to all of this the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which removed environmental protection from over 99% of Canada's waterways, including the Humber River, which flows right on the edge of my riding, and we should all worry.

The present legislation is designed to prevent, not assist, the creation of harm reduction regimes in cities in this country. I will explain exactly how it would prevent it.

The new application for a safe injection site must include “scientific evidence demonstrating that there is a medical benefit”. Is this to be new scientific evidence? There is a lot of scientific evidence already out there.

It also requires a letter of opinion from provincial and territorial ministers responsible for health and public safety, municipal councils, local heads of police and higher ranked public health officials. If a government is already asking that this be put in place, why do we then need that same government to get its own people to say more about what they are asking for? It is just another piece of bureaucracy that the government is putting into place.

Information is required about infectious diseases and overdoses related to the use of illicit substances. Again, that information is publicly available and is well documented. For an applicant to have to re-demonstrate it is yet another example of the red tape the Conservative government wants to create to prevent these sites going forward.

A description of available drug treatment services is required. Of course the government has cut back on those drug treatment services, but apparently the applicant only needs to describe what is available.

A description of the potential impact of the site on public safety is required. Again, all we have heard from all the experts is that these sites actually increase public safety.

A description of all procedures and measures, including steps to minimize diversion of controlled substances, is required, as well as relevant trends and more information on drug-related loitering, drug dealing and crime rates in the area where the site is located at the time of the application.

Also required is a report of consultations with a broad range of groups in the municipality, including copies of all submissions received and steps that will be taken to address relevant concerns.

These hoops that applicants must go through are designed to prevent rather than permit the formation of safe injection sites to deal with what is an ever-growing public health problem in this country, with which we need to come to grips.

As a result of those kinds of denials and whether they go through all these hoops and the department says yes, the minister is going to say yes or no, as ultimately the minister gets to decide anyway. As a result of that, more addicts will contract contagious diseases and more addicts will die. The needles will be reused and left in parks and other public places. The crime rates related to drug use will increase. Fewer addicts will be exposed to the help they need to beat their addictions. The diseases they contract will be treated in provincially run health centres and hospitals at taxpayer expense. We must remember there is only one taxpayer. This is a federal problem not a provincial problem because it is going to be federal money that is spent. The increase in disease will make Canada and Canadians less safe. More Canadians will be harmed. It is yet another part of the Conservative plan to move Canada backward.

Apparently no Conservatives are prepared to speak to this legislation, but the questions they sometimes ask speak to the misconception that somehow the victims of these addictions are at fault for their addictions and that any consumption of illicit substances is to be treated with contempt and disgust. The views expressed by those questioners are often at odds with their constituents, who view these individuals as victims needing help, and sometimes among members themselves.

We have in Toronto a mayor who has admitted to smoking crack cocaine, to driving while drunk and to associating with persons known by police to be at least unsavoury if not criminal. The outward position of the Conservative Party is that all these actions should be condemned, and yet some in that party who are friends of the mayor have expressed the wish that he get help, which is the appropriate response. This brings me back to my initial statement from Mr. Darwin that as man advances in civilization, not retreats, the simplest reason—that is where we use our minds to think—“would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him”.

The very fact that the Minister of Industry has stated that it is not his job to look after his neighbour's child is an example of the very attitude that prevails on that side of this chamber. Although he has since suggested perhaps that was the wrong thing to say, it is an example of the knee-jerk reaction that goes on in that party, the knee-jerk reaction that creates the kind of sense that we should not be looking after our neighbours and we should not be looking after our neighbours' children. We in this party believe it is part of our job to look after our neighbours, to look after our neighbours' children, and in so doing we will all be the better for it.

[Petitions, January 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition on behalf of residents of the greater Toronto area.

The petitioners wish to draw the attention of the Minister of Health and the House of Commons to the fact that the federal government needs a national strategy for dementia and the care of persons afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease or other dementia-related diseases.

The petitioners call upon the Minister of Health and the House of Commons to pass Bill C-356, an act respecting a national strategy for dementia.